This WashingtonPost.com news report is truly disheartening:
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.”
One would like to think that the enormity of the tragedy that occurred on 9/11 would sober people up enough that they’d be as honest as possible about any screw ups that might have occurred so that we could fix the problems that allowed the screw up to happen in the first place, but it seems like there’s nothing so tragic that someone won’t try to cover their asses instead of telling the truth. It’s bad enough that they lied about it, but they continued to lie about it for two more years:
“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.”
Nope, but it appears to be business as usual. Time to vote these bastards out of office.
Via AMERICABlog.
Au contraire. One would think that folks would be least likely to confess to personal failings during such a huge, enormous tragedy.