- August 2, 2006; Page 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.
The wreckage of the World Trade Center after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
