The United States was well-prepared for conventional war but had no mechanisms in place to warn against a surprise terrorist attack and no unified intelligence structure before September 11th, 2001, the commission investigating the attacks said today.
A staff report issued at the start of another day of hearings on the terror attacks said the US had developed defences against surprise military strikes after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 but never applied them to potential terrorist threats.
"With the important exception of attacks with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons, the methods developed for decades to warn of surprise attacks were not applied to the problem of warning against terrorist attacks," the report said.
CIA Director George Tenet came under tough questioning with Republican commissioner John Lehman calling the staff report a "damning evaluation of a system that is broken."
But Mr Tenet said the report was wrong to state he had no strategic plan to manage the war on terrorism or to integrate and share data across the intelligence community.
However, Mr Tenet did acknowledge that his and other agencies failed to devise an effective defence against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda operatives in 2001.
"We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike the homeland. We never translated this knowledge into an effective defense of the country," Mr Tenet said. "No matter how hard we worked, or how desperately we tried, it was not enough. The victims and the families of 9/11 deserved better."
The bipartisan commission, which is due to report to the nation in July at the height of the presidential campaign, has issued a series of highly critical reports on what it sees as a succession of failures leading up to the attack.
The latest staff report said there were many reports on bin Laden and his growing al Qaeda network during the 1990s, but no comprehensive estimate of the organisation was ever done by the intelligence agencies,