Agency Says Military Did Not Lie To 9/11 Panel

Agency Says Military Did Not Lie to 9/11 Panel

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/05/wa...=1&oref=slogin

By PHILIP SHENON and JIM DWYER

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 — The Defense Department’s watchdog agency said Friday that it had no evidence that senior Pentagon commanders intentionally provided false testimony to the Sept. 11 commission about the military’s actions on the morning of the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The agency, the Pentagon’s office of inspector general, said the Defense Department’s initial inaccurate accounts could be attributed largely to poor record-keeping.

The Pentagon initially suggested that the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the military’s domestic air-defense operation, had reacted quickly to reports of the hijackings and had been prepared to intercept and possibly shoot down one of the hijacked planes.

The Sept. 11 commission, which uncovered the inconsistencies in the Pentagon’s account, made a formal request in July 2004 for the inspector general to investigate why senior military officials who testified to the commission had made so many inaccurate statements.

In testimony in 2003 and in other statements to the commission, Pentagon officials made several statements that were proved false, including ones that Norad had closely tracked United Flight 93 and was prepared to shoot down the plane if it had approached Washington. Later investigations determined that the Defense Department was not aware of Flight 93 until after the plane had crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

In a report dated May 27, 2005, but not released until Friday, the inspector general’s office found that “the inaccuracies, in part, resulted because of inadequate forensic capabilities,” including poor log-keeping at the military air traffic control centers.

A spokesman for the inspector general’s office, William P. Goehring, said that the question of whether military commanders intentionally withheld the truth from the commission would be addressed in a separate report that is still in preparation.

But Mr. Goehring suggested that the second report would exonerate the commanders. “We haven’t found any information to indicate that testimony was knowingly false,” he said.

The report, initially classified secret, was released Friday under a freedom-of-information request by The New York Times. Before it was made public, the equivalent of several pages of the report were blacked out on national security grounds.

The report said commanders had found it difficult to create an accurate timeline of the events of Sept. 11 because of the lack of a well-coordinated system in logging information about air-defense operations.

On Sept. 11, the report said, air-defense watch centers used handwritten logs that were not always reliable. After Sept. 11, it said, commanders failed to press hard enough to be certain that an accurate timeline was produced for the Sept. 11 commission and other investigations.

Newly disclosed audiotapes provided to the commission by Norad demonstrated widespread confusion within the military on the morning of the attacks, with many air-defense commanders uncertain whether the reports of the hijackings were part of an unannounced military exercise.

So... they didn't lie, eh?

What's General Myers doing then when the BRAVE Cynthia McKinney questions him on the wargames?

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Cynthia McKinney: The question was, we had four wargames going on, on September 11th, and the question that I tried to pose before the Secretary had to go to lunch was whether or not the activities of the four wargames going on, on September 11th, actually impaired our ability to respond to the attacks.

General Myers: The answer to the question is no.

Remember, only ONE Wargame was mentioned in the 9/11 Report, and it only received a footnote in the back of the book.

For General Myers to say that the wargames didn't impair our ability to respond, even though it's now being reported that there was "widespread confusion" because the air-defense commanders were "uncertain whether the reports of the hijackings were part of an unannounced military exercise", shows that he is, in fact, LYING.