The 9/11 commission report was released yesterday after 20 months' work, including interviews with more than a thousand people and study of 2 million documents.

It was useful in the doing -- an extensive, dispassionate examination of what happened, carried out by a bipartisan body. Initially opposed by President George W. Bush and slow-rolled by some government bodies, the work of the commission has played an important role. It has contributed greatly to the catharsis and healing that continues in the wake of that September day, almost three years ago now.

The commission's work and the 567-page report that resulted cast unprecedented light on the government national security elements that were supposed to prevent such an attack.

The panel chronicled, in testimony before it and in the report, a situation of deep institutional failure, particularly in coordination among the intelligence agencies. The report identifies specific missed opportunities, points at which some part of the federal government could have taken action that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

It was useful that the commission looked at the approach to the terrorist threat by the Clinton administration as well as the Bush administration, and not just to prevent its conclusions from becoming one more political football in this year's election campaign. The roots of the 9/11 attack go deep into the role of the United States in the world, predating both the Bush II and Clinton administrations.

New information continues to emerge. Evidence of contact but not collaboration between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's Iraq revives the question of why America went to war there. It appears, for example, that Iran, not Iraq, was helpful to the al-Qaida terrorists prior to Sept. 11.

The recommendation of the commission that will attract the most attention is that the federal government now add a new, sub-Cabinet-level intelligence czar. The reason is that the commission identified a fatal lack of coordination in collecting and analyzing intelligence among the elements of the U.S. government concerned with such matters before 9/11.

Although having such a new official in place might increase exposure and accountability in the future, we wonder if adding one more level on top of an already large, multipartite bureaucracy is the way to deal with the problem.

The other good question to ask is exactly what is the responsibility of the president -- Mr. Clinton or Mr. Bush -- to insist that the different pieces of the U.S. government cooperate with each other in finding and smoking out such threats as the al-Qaida attack, which took much planning and involved many players. Will it serve any purpose to put one more Cabinet official between the president's desk -- where the buck stops -- and the responsible agencies?

The other government body that the commission makes clear was profoundly asleep was the Congress. Both Senate and House oversight of America's intelligence agencies prior to Sept. 11 was sporadic, fragmented and inattentive. Who knows what regular, sharp questioning of the intelligence leadership would have produced if the Congress had done so?

Whether structural reforms are needed, or whether it is basically a question of making sure that the institutions already in place function conscientiously will be questions that the American people and their elected leaders will need to study in coming months. The commission's report is the document that will be the basis for that discussion and subsequent action. Its members have rendered the country a major service in the work they have done.