Did the Pentagon Lie To 9/11 Commission?

It looks like the 9/11 commission was highly suspicious of the response and information that the Pentagon provided after the 9/11 attacks. Instead of making a big scene and dropping a bombshell so-to-speak, the commission ‘compromised’ and deferred to the justice department so that it could pursue criminal investigations.

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.

9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon

As we are all well aware, criminal charges were never made and it looks like interest in pursuing ‘justice’ wasn’t a top priority for the Department of Justice.

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.”

Liberals have been shouting the Bush Administration for some time now. In fact, the hatred for our administration is so strong that Republicans had to concoct rhetoric in order to deal with the anger. “BDS” short for Bush Derangement Syndrome is all that the GOP die-hards could come up with to combat the allegations of impropriety and lawlessness that best characterizes President Bush and his administration of bandits.

The article I’ve been citing, and the link above is from the Washington Post. The following excerpt reads like a conspiracy theory, but maybe “truth” was being hidden from Americans. Could an actual conspiracy to cover up what really happened on September 11th be the ‘reality’ rather than the ‘myth’ spread by propaganda artists?

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.”

The Republican response is consistent with what we’ve seen throughout President Bush’s administration. They hesitate to turn on President Bush out of some misguided idea that their loyalty and allegiance should be to the President and ‘representative’ of the Republican party.

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.”

As the truth comes out, maybe Republicans and Democrats can agree to reveal the truth for the sake of all Americans rather than cover up the corruption and scandal that both parties are apparently colluding on. As long as Democrats keep ‘compromising’ and allowing Republicans to lead, they are just as guilty as Republicans that are complicit in any alleged crimes taking place.

Fred Soto is an Attorney and Entrepreneur from the Silicon Valley.
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