AMERICA faces a terrorist attack even worse than those of September 11 and must act immediately to mend its broken defences, the head of the US 9/11 commission declared last night.

“We do not have the luxury of time. We must prepare and we must act,” Thomas Kean said, as his commission published a damning indictment of Washington’s failure over many years to grasp the gravity of the threat posed by Islamic terrorism.

“Every expert with whom we spoke told us an attack of even greater magnitude is now possible and even probable,” he said. “Put simply, the United States is faced with one of the greatest security challenges in our long history.”

The 567-page report, the most definitive account to date of the events leading up to the deadliest act of terrorism in America, catalogued the basic intelligence blunders and ineffective leadership that allowed 19 hijackers to attack an unprepared and unsuspecting nation.

The US authorities were hopelessly outwitted, the commission said. The plotters were armed with only small knives, box cutters and cans of Mace and pepper spray, and left a trail of clues.

But they were able successfully to strike at the financial and military symbols of the strongest nation on earth, killing 3,000, because no one was looking for them and the authorities had their guard down.

“The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise,” concluded the ten-man bipartisan commission. “Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them. What we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the US Government from 1998 to 2001 disturbed or even delayed the progress of the al-Qaeda plot.”

It added: “Across the Government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and management. The most important failure was one of imagination. We do not believe leaders understood the gravity of the threat.”

The commission spread blame across the Administrations of Bill Clinton and President Bush. Terrorism was not the overriding national security priority of either the Clinton or pre-9/11 Bush White House, it said. Congress, US intelligence and law enforcement agencies were also culpable.

Mr Kean, a former Republican Governor of New Jersey, pleaded with Mr Bush and John Kerry, his Democratic challenger, not to use the report as a political football. Mr Bush welcomed the commission’s findings and promised: “Where the Government needs to act we will.” Mr Kerry vowed that if elected “I will not wait a single day more. I will lead.”

The report said that after Mr Bush was briefed by the CIA on August 6, 2001, that al-Qaeda was determined to strike in the US, he held no follow-up discussions with senior advisers on the issue or pursued it with George Tenet, the CIA Director.

The finding is likely to fuel charges that Mr Bush was inattentive to the threat. At the time, one US intelligence re-port gave warning of “something very, very, very big”. Mr Tenet said that during the summer of 2001, “the system was blinking red”.

Mr Tenet had tried to ring alarm bells about al-Qaeda in 1998, telling senior officials: “We are at war.” But the warning failed to mobilise the intelligence community, prompting the panel to recommend the creation of a new Cabinet-level director of intelligence.

The commission broadly endorsed Mr Bush’s War on Terror, concluding that the US must go on the offensive to root out terrorist sanctuaries. But its conclusions also contradicted some of the neoconservative tenets that underpin Mr Bush’s agressive foreign policy. It said that there had been links between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, but they never developed into a “collaborative relationship”.

The panel urged the President to develop a “comprehensive coalition strategy” against Islamic terrorism. In a swipe at the detention of War on Terror detainees at Guantanamo Bay, the panel said that a stand against terrorism with allies should include a “common coalition approach” on the treatment of terrorists.

Mr Bush said he would study the recommendations before deciding whether to implement them. The report listed nine operational failures, any of which could have disrupted the plot. They included failing to place two hijackers who were known terrorists in the terrorism watchlist.

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