YESTERDAY the bookshops and newsstands of Washington had been cleaned out of the 9/11 commission report. But you could see the copies all over town: under people’s arms at road crossings, on the front seats of cars, and on bar counters and restaurant tables from Georgetown to Capitol Hill.

With good reason. This 567-page report of the countdown to the day of disaster reads like a thriller. It opens with a compelling account of the hijacking of four planes by the nineteen al-Qaeda terrorists, including the fullest report yet given of how passengers on United Airlines 93 forced the flight to crash in Pennsylvania, and the airless chaos of the evacuation of the twin towers that caused many people to die unnecessarily.

Then, in cinematic flashback, it reconstructs the 20 months that the hijackers spent in the US planning the mission. It shows that they made one mistake after another, and American agents half-noticed but were still weeks behind on the trail by the date of attack.

Forget the clutch of accounts this year by journalists and administration officials who have tried to give the inside story of the war on terrorism from their vantage point. The commission’s report is also the most intimate and most succinct narrative that has been written of the US attempt to fight terrorism since 1996.

It stitches together intelligence reports with its own private interrogation of President Bush, President Clinton and their senior officials, and delivers a wry commentary on them with the best virtues of hindsight.

This is not a portrait of America the hyperpower, for all the popular railing at this caricature, echoed yesterday in the polls on anti-Americanism in Arab countries. This shows the superpower frustrated repeatedly by supposed allies — Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates. It is also hampered by the checks and curbs that its own federalism and democratic principles impose, such as the tension between Congress and the White House, the proliferation of different agencies and the devolved structure of the FBI.

There is one weakness in the report, and it is not trivial. The commission does a poor job of fulfilling its own brief: coming to a judgment about who was to blame. That is, no doubt, the price of extracting consensus from a panel of five Republicans and five Democrats.

The summary, the final conclusions, and the overall tone are more generous to the Bush Administration than many others might be, having read the same evidence. The commission appears to forgive the Bush team for being slow off the mark because of the time-consuming nature of the transition from the previous Administration. But the details of the narrative, gripping in themselves, also argue against that indulgence.

The Lewinsky factor A tenth of the report is devoted to showing that the Clinton Administration was extremely alert to the threat of al-Qaeda after Osama bin Laden moved to Afghanistan in 1996, and drew up active plans to strike at him after the 1998 bombs on US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

But when, in retaliation, the US struck bin Laden camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan which a CIA agent said was making nerve gas, “much public commentary turned immediate to scalding criticism”, the report says, particularly when no evidence was found of nerve gas. Many suggested that the President resorted to military action to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal, similar to the plot of the film Wag the Dog.

“The failure of the strikes, the Wag the Dog slur, the intense partisanship of the period, and the nature of the (Sudanese factor) evidence likely had a cumulative effect on future decisions about the use of force against bin Laden,” the commission argues.

Clinton’s efforts then focused on trying to overthrow the Taleban who were protecting bin Laden. But he was hampered by the need to do so without telling Pakistan, which was the fundamentalist regime’s prime supporter.

Did Bush drop the baton? In December 2000, Bush met Clinton for a two-hour, one-on-one discussion of national security and foreign policy. Clinton told the commission he recalled saying to Bush: “I think you will find that by far your biggest threat is (Osama) bin Laden and the al-Qaeda”.

Clinton also says that he told Bush: “One of the great regrets of my presidency is that I didn’t get him (bin Laden) for you, because I tried to.”

Bush’s version of this meeting, the commission notes drily, is rather different. Bush said he felt sure Clinton had mentioned terrorism, but did not remember much being said on al-Qaeda, and felt that North Korea and the Israeli-Palestinian peace process were given more weight.

The hijackers’ mistakes The ambition of the al-Qaeda plan is astounding, particularly the length of preparation within the US.

Those who were intending to pilot hijacked aircraft underwent flight training from scratch at US flight schools, beginning with a private pilot’s licence on a single-engined tiny plane, in early 2000. For some, this began with basic English-language training. Two of the original team, who were poor students and had no experience of life in the West, failed both English and flying tests. It seems astonishing that more did not do so.

The fifteen hijackers who were not pilots, mainly uneducated Saudis, found out the details of their mission when they arrived in the US four months before the attack, but still kept quiet, even though one had a German girlfriend he was e-mailing daily. The commission notes that although they were called “muscle”, they were all between 5ft 5in and 5ft 7in tall.

Missing the trail

US agents lost the trail of two suspects, and failed to recognise the significance of Zacarias Moussaoui, the “20th hijacker” now on trial.

Alarms “blinking red” George Tenet, Director of the CIA, and other senior officials knew the signs of an imminent huge attack were unprecedented. But although Bush received a briefing on August 6, 2001, entitled Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US, the 36th presidential briefing item on al-Qaeda that year, the commission found no evidence after that date that he discussed the threat with his advisers.

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