The general trump-it-all insult that the antiwar crowd aims at the pro-war crowd these days is a neat little portmanteau term that manages to impute, at once, cowardice, ignorance, selfishness, bloodlust (as long as the blood spills from others' veins) and hypocrisy: "chicken hawk."

Now to the Report itself. We hope that the table of contents will enable you to find your way round it easily. For those of you who have to read it quickly there is a final Summary of Conclusions which brings together the main conclusions in (I hope) a coherent way. But I emphasise that these conclusions should be read in the context of the sections to which they relate. They should be treated as signposts not substitutes for reading the earlier sections.

While there is much material which we have not been able to include, we have prepared a Report which is published in full, including an unprecedented amount of intelligence material. There are no asterisks.

We believe that these accounts are creditable and impressive stories. We hope that they will give readers a glimpse of just a fraction of the work intelligence does in trying to make the world a safer place.

By now, almost everyone knows that the CIA is a mess. Almost everyone knows that what it needs is a top-to-bottom overhaul.

Almost everyone is wrong.

(Editor's note: The authors intend this article to provoke a broad discussion of the role of intelligence in a constitutional republic during an era of accelerating change and terrible new dangers.)

Over the past decade, commission upon commission has urged reform of the loose confederation that is the US Intelligence Community. Opposed by implacable champions of the status quo, precious few of these commissions have provoked meaningful change.

This is a paper about decisions that must be made now. The problems we face are immediate and compelling. If we cannot identify effective responses to these challenges now, the shape of the future will evolve in ever more dangerous and unknown directions.

How can we improve the nation's spy agencies?

By concentrating on the basics and building the capabilities we need to defeat today's threats.

Commissions often have the opposite of their intended effect -- they stall reforms rather than facilitate them.

Creating czars, rearranging organizations, and assigning new authorities are all tempting. Alas, all these proposals may seem reasonable, but none of them address the most important problem facing US intelligence.

... we can expect another round of proposals to reorganize US intelligence agencies ... They deserve serious consideration and, in some cases, prompt action.

There is, however, at least one really bad idea: reviving the old standby suggestion of creating a director of National Intelligence. On the surface the approach may look logical, but the reality in Washington would be a far different scenario.

The CIA screwed up. That's the ho-hum summation of the Senate Intelligence Committee's 512-page report, released with fanfare after a 12-month inquiry.

The report uncorks a geyser of detail about the agency's failures but keeps the two most important questions of the day bottled up: Did the CIA's mistakes, especially about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, stem from political pressures? And what can be done to improve the agency's handling of warnings and threats now?

As for the second question, how to repair the CIA after the nation's biggest intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, both the Republican chairman Pat Roberts and ranking Democrat John Rockefeller cleared their throats forthrightly.