"On Sept. 11, 2001, 19 men armed with knives, boxcutters, mace and pepper spray penetrated the defenses of the most powerful nation of the world. They inflicted unbearable trauma on our people and at the same time, they turned the international order upside down," Thomas Kean, co-chairman of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, said in releasing the report to the public.

"On that September day, we were unprepared. We did not grasp the magnitude of the threat that had been gathering over a considerable amount of time," he added. "This was a failure of policy, management, capability and, above all, a failure of imagination … the United States government was simply not active enough in combating the terrorist threat before 9/11."


But not one president — George W. Bush or Bill Clinton — was blamed for his actions or lack thereof more than another.

"They, like the rest of us, did not understand the gravity of the threat ... they did not think that 3,000 people could be killed in an hour's time," panel co-chairman Lee Hamilton said. "All of us had signals ... we simply did not put them together to understand that terrorism was the predominant national security threat to the United States."

Kean said there was only one mention of terrorism during the 2000 elections and added that the seriousness of the threat wasn't realized because intelligence information didn't reach the uppermost echelons of government.

"I can tell you that the two presidents of the United States were not well served by those agencies and they did not, in my opinion, have the information they needed to make the decisions they needed to make," he said.
 

But Bush knew... get real, get over it.

~Rick