[Sosfbay-discuss] 9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon

[Tian Harter]

9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon
Allegations Brought to Inspectors General

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 2, 2006; A03


Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11
panel concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of
how it reacted to the 2001 terrorist attacks may have
been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the
commission and the public rather than a reflection of
the fog of events on that day, according to sources
involved in the debate.

Suspicion of wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member
commission, in a secret meeting at the end of its
tenure in summer 2004, debated referring the matter to
the Justice Department for criminal investigation,
according to several commission sources. Staff members
and some commissioners thought that e-mails and other
evidence provided enough probable cause to believe
that military and aviation officials violated the law
by making false statements to Congress and to the
commission, hoping to hide the bungled response to the
hijackings, these sources said.

In the end, the panel agreed to a compromise, turning
over the allegations to the inspectors general for the
Defense and Transportation departments, who can make
criminal referrals if they believe they are warranted,
officials said.

"We to this day don't know why NORAD [the North
American Aerospace Command] told us what they told
us," said Thomas H. Kean, the former New Jersey
Republican governor who led the commission. "It was
just so far from the truth. . . . It's one of those
loose ends that never got tied."

Although the commission's landmark report made it
clear that the Defense Department's early versions of
events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the
revelation that it considered criminal referrals
reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by
the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension
between it and the Bush administration.

A Pentagon spokesman said yesterday that the inspector
general's office will soon release a report addressing
whether testimony delivered to the commission was
"knowingly false." A separate report, delivered
secretly to Congress in May 2005, blamed inaccuracies
in part on problems with the way the Defense
Department kept its records, according to a summary
released yesterday.

A spokesman for the Transportation Department's
inspector general's office said its investigation is
complete and that a final report is being drafted.
Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation
Administration, said she could not comment on the
inspector general's inquiry.

In an article scheduled to be on newsstands today,
Vanity Fair magazine reports aspects of the commission
debate -- though it does not mention the possible
criminal referrals -- and publishes lengthy excerpts
from military audiotapes recorded on Sept. 11. ABC
News aired excerpts last night.

For more than two years after the attacks, officials
with NORAD and the FAA provided inaccurate information
about the response to the hijackings in testimony and
media appearances. Authorities suggested that U.S. air
defenses had reacted quickly, that jets had been
scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and
that fighters were prepared to shoot down United
Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later,
audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and
other evidence showed clearly that the military never
had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights and at
one point chased a phantom aircraft -- American
Airlines Flight 11 -- long after it had crashed into
the World Trade Center.

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold and Col. Alan Scott told the
commission that NORAD had begun tracking United 93 at
9:16 a.m., but the commission determined that the
airliner was not hijacked until 12 minutes later. The
military was not aware of the flight until after it
had crashed in Pennsylvania.

These and other discrepancies did not become clear
until the commission, forced to use subpoenas,
obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials
said. The agencies' reluctance to release the tapes --
along with e-mails, erroneous public statements and
other evidence -- led some of the panel's staff
members and commissioners to believe that authorities
sought to mislead the commission and the public about
what happened on Sept. 11.

"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the
way it was described," John Farmer, a former New
Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into
events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The
tapes told a radically different story from what had
been told to us and the public for two years. . . .
This is not spin. This is not true."

Arnold, who could not be reached for comment
yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not
have all the information unearthed by the panel when
he testified earlier. Other military officials also
denied any intent to mislead the panel.

John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and
former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that
he believed the panel may have been lied to but that
he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to
support a criminal referral.

"My view of that was that whether it was willful or
just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don't know,"
Lehman said. "But in the order of magnitude of things,
going after bureaucrats because they misled the
commission didn't seem to make sense to me."

-- 
Tian
http://tian.greens.org
I went camping over the weekend. Looking at the stars,
I got to thinking that reading words about them probably hits
the eye with way more light then they actually send us.