Pentagon lied to 9-11 Commission

I want you to go on over to the Washington Post and read an article entitled "9/11 Panel Suspected Deception by Pentagon". If you haven't registered yet with the Post, I assure you that this article is worth it. What bothers me, though, is that it was published on page A03. I don't understand why it wasn't front page news and above the fold at that. Please take a look:

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."

Now do you think anything is really going to be done about this? Ha! Look at how the article ends:

John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member and former Navy secretary, said in a recent interview that he believed the panel may have been lied to but that he did not believe the evidence was sufficient to support a criminal referral.

"My view of that was that whether it was willful or just the fog of stupid bureaucracy, I don't know," Lehman said. "But in the order of magnitude of things, going after bureaucrats because they misled the commission didn't seem to make sense to me."

How in the name of all that's holy can lying to the commission not be a criminal offense? This is a cover-up. And why, while we're on the subject, did the Bush administration stall for as long as it did on having the commission in the first place if it were not either complicit or negligent? You'd think someone who really wanted to keep us safe would want to know exactly what happened. But Bush is not really interested in security. He's interested in political advantage. And that, from his point of view, is what 9-11 is all about.