Fwd: Pentagon's Version of 9/11 Far from Truth, Panel Found

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Pentagon's Version of 9/11 Far from

Truth, Panel Found

 

 

 

Published on Wednesday, August 2, 2006 by the Denver Post

Pentagon's Version of 9/11 Far from Truth, Panel Found

Some commission members wanted Justice Dept. probe

by Dan Eggen

 

 

WASHINGTON - Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel

concluded that the Pentagon's initial story of how it reacted to the 9/11

terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to mislead the

commission and the public, 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, said

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, the

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 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 Sept. 11 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 Tuesday that the inspector general's office would

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 Tuesday.

 

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.

 

© 2006 Denver Post