Editorial: ‘Finest hour’ gets darker

Saturday, Aug. 12, 2006 | 7:29 a.m.

While there is no shortage of ludicrous 9/11 conspiracy theories, here is one that appears to have merit: Government officials knowingly misled the 9/11 Commission.

That is an allegation made by some commissioners and staffers of the top panel to investigate the terrorist strikes. They believed evidence they had gathered showed probable cause that federal military and aviation officials illegally made false statements to the panel and Congress, with the intent of masking the government's poor response to the attacks, The Washington Post reported last week.

The 10-member panel even debated in secret about whether to contact the Justice Department about conducting a criminal investigation, panel sources told the Post. Ultimately the commission passed the matter to the inspectors general for the Defense and Transportation departments, leaving them to consider criminal referrals. The departments are expected to release reports soon about whether their officials lied.

The allegations are appalling. Commission Chairman Thomas Kean said he still wonders how officials at the North American Aerospace Defense Command, or NORAD, could flat-out lie to the panel. "It was just so far from the truth," he told the Post.

NORAD, as well as the Federal Aviation Administration, for two years stuck to a false story that military jets were immediately scrambled in reaction to the last two hijackings, and that pilots were prepared to shoot down United Flight 93. But evidence obtained with panel subpoenas proved that false. Military jets, for instance, embarrassingly were trying to locate American Airlines Flight 11 well after it crashed into the World Trade Center.

The Post quoted a Republican member of the bipartisan panel, John F. Lehman, as saying he didn't think there was adequate evidence to pursue a criminal case against the bureaucrats who "misled" the commission. But John Farmer, a panel staff leader, made an important distinction. The military's story was "a whole different order of magnitude than spin. It simply wasn't true," he told Vanity Fair magazine, which obtained audio tapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters for a story that explored an apparent Pentagon cover-up.

President Bush has long sought to portray his administration's response to 9/11 as among its finest hours. But the lying that apparently followed casts a dark shadow on that response and marks another deplorable example of the secrecy that has defined Bush's presidency. Lawmakers should demand a full accounting of who is responsible for the lies told to the commission and the public.