Recent revelations by members of the 9-11 Commission (quoted in the Washington Post, 2 August 2006) have far reaching implications.

They confirm that the Pentagon was involved in criminal wrongdoing by deliberately distorting and/or withholding information concerning the September 2001 attacks:

"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." (WP, 2 August 2006)

These revelations uphold what has been documented regarding 9-11 in several carefully researched studies, which the mainstream media continues to identify as "conspiracy theories".

It would appear that the 9-11 "Conspiracy Theorists" have at last been vindicated. The information now released and yet to come is that the Pentagon was involved in acts of cover-up at the highest levels of the military hierarchy.

"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." (Ibid)

If this were known to the 9-11 Commission, why was it withheld?

More generally, why was the contradictory evidence presented by the Pentagon, the White House and the CIA taken at face value. Why did the 9-11 Commission uphold the lies and falsehoods in its "authoritative" report?

Damage control

The Commission was not misled. The Commission deliberately and consciously distorted the facts regarding 9-11. A large part of the 9-11 narrative as presented in its report is fabricated.

The Pentagon's top brass (including senior NORAD officials) were involved in acts of perjury with a view to misleading public opinion. If the Commission doubted the veracity of the information presented, why did it replicate the lies and falsehoods in its report?

These recent revelations have all the appearances of "damage control": they consist in admitting that the Pentagon withheld information, without questioning the broader findings of the 9-11 Commission Report:

"I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described," John Farmer, a former New Jersey attorney general who led the staff inquiry into events on Sept. 11, said in a recent interview. "The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years. . . . This is not spin. This is not true." (Ibid).

Arnold, who could not be reached for comment yesterday, told the commission in 2004 that he did not have all the information unearthed by the panel when he testified earlier. Other military officials also denied any intent to mislead the panel.

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." (Ibid).

The integrity of the 9-11 commission members remains unscathed. The broader issue of sheer fabrication, presenting al Qaeda as the architect of the WTC attacks is not mentioned. Neither is the issue of Operation Able Danger, the Pentagon's secret operation, which consisted essentially in fabricating terrorist cells ahead of 9-11:

"Atta," according to the Kean report, was the �tactical leader of the 9/11 plot.� He was the pilot who on that dreadful morning flew the first plane, American Airlines 11, into the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York. It was Atta�s face, on television and in newspapers across the world, that became the symbol of Islamic terrorism. And it was Atta�s name -- not the names of any of the 18 other hijackers allegedly lead by Atta on that day -- that was cited by international security researchers. Atta was, as the Kean report stresses, �the tactical commander of the operation in the United States.� According to both the Bush administration and the official 9/11 Commission report, he was working on the orders of Osama Bin Laden who, from remote Afghanistan, controlled the entire operation.

Now, almost exactly four years after 9/11, the facts appear to have been turned upside down. We now learn that Atta was also connected to a top secret operation of the Pentagon�s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in the US. According to Army reserve Lieutenant-Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a top secret Pentagon project code-named Able Danger had identified Atta and three other 9/11 hijackers as members of an al-Qaida cell more than a year before the attacks.

Able Danger was an 18-month highly classified operation tasked, according to Shaffer, with �developing targeting information for al-Qaida on a global scale,� and used data-mining techniques to look for �patterns, associations, and linkages.� He said he himself had first encountered the names of the four hijackers in mid-2000." (See Daniele Ganser's study on Operation Able Danger

� Copyright Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, 2006

Michel Chossudovsky's most recent book, which reviews in detail the events of 9-11 is entitled: America�s "War on Terrorism", Global Research, 2005. To order Chossudovsky's book America's "War on Terrorism", click here.