I feel like I’m watching a ping pong game being played over this giant monster, about to raise its head and knock over the entire ping pong table.
On Wednesday, the WaPo broke the news (a mere two years old now) that the 9/11 Commission strongly suspected that Pentagon officials lied about their actions on 9/11.
Some staff members and commissioners of the Sept. 11 panel concludedthat the Pentagon’s initial story of how it reacted to the 2001terrorist attacks may have been part of a deliberate effort to misleadthe commission and the public rather than a reflection of the fog ofevents on that day, according to sources involved in the debate.
Suspicionof wrongdoing ran so deep that the 10-member commission, in a secretmeeting at the end of its tenure in summer 2004, debated referring thematter to the Justice Department for criminal investigation, accordingto several commission sources. Staff members and some commissionersthought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable causeto believe that military and aviation officials violated the law bymaking false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping tohide the bungled response to the hijackings, these sources said.
Perhaps that scoop was tied to the imminent publication of a much more extensive Vanity Fair article, based on the tapes from NORAD. Perhaps both scoops are tied to the imminent publication of a book by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton, which will describe the discrepancy.
The tapes, the author of the Vanity Fair article, Michael Bronner, says, make NORAD look pretty good.