Pentagon's version of 9/11 far from truth, panel found

Some commission members wanted Justice Dept. probe
By Dan Eggen
The Washington Post



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.



Anyone else stoked to see the new 9/11 movie... i can't wait for it... I just hope it's a popular as flight 93... just hope they don't have to take down their website as well because of how much the truth hurts...

Saw the great show/pannel on cspan and thought I had to come back to all my ignorant friends who magically appeared to the site once it was sold and who kicked out everyone who thought differently... glad to see things haven't changed...:thumbsup: have a nice day

Gumby..... i read and listened to the Norad tapes.

I think they were too dumb to do anything............they couldnt find a plane if it rammed them in the ass

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Originally Posted by Bong30

Gumby..... i read and listened to the Norad tapes.

I think they were too dumb to do anything............they couldnt find a plane if it rammed them in the ass

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haha thats so very very true

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Originally Posted by dopesmoker

haha thats so very very true

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Did you see those guys in Norad (witch is gone now by the way) They sounded like total morons... non perfessional, stupid asses. They couldnt find them.......... period. They couldnt scramble fighters cause they were to dumb. Nothing sinister.... just dumb people at the control. listen to the tapes

"During the time that the airplane was coming in to the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President, "The plane is 50 miles out." "The plane is 30 miles out."

And when it got down to "the plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the Vice President, "Do the orders still stand?"

"And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?"

Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta's testimony to the 9/11 Commission, May 23, 2003

How could Cheney know exactly what was heading for Washington and give clear orders for its path to remain clear, while the very people mandated to defend the skies of America scrambled desperately to make sense of the chaos and get fighters in the positions they needed to be?