9/11 & Willful Deception By the Pentagon

Conspiracy freaks who believe that the Defense Department covered up what really happened at the Pentagon on the morning of September 11, 2001, got a huge boost on Wednesday when the Washington Post revealed that the 9/11 Commission concluded it was deliberately misled.

Said the Post:

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. . . .

"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."

Kean was referring to why no jet fighters were scambled to intercept the hijacked jetliner that slammed into the Pentagon following the twin hits on the World Trade Centers.

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.

Is this just an incredibly egregious example of the Cover Your Ass culture that pervades the Pentagon or does the cover up run deeper?