The U.S. Defense Department may have deliberately misled the panel which investigated the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in 2001 in an attempt to cover up the bungled response to the hijackings, The Washington Post reported on Wednesday.

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, said the newspaper, quoting several commission sources.

Staff members at a number of military and aviation departments thought that e-mails and other evidence provided enough probable causes to believe that officials violated the law by making false statements to Congress and to the commission, hoping to hide the major security failures surrounding hijackings, the 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.

Although the commission's final report, released in July 2004, made it clear that the Defense Department's early versions of events on the day of the attacks were inaccurate, the revelation that it considered criminal referrals reveals how skeptically those reports were viewed by the panel and provides a glimpse of the tension between it and the Bush administration, the Post reported.

For more than two years after the attacks, officials with the North American Aerospace Command (NORAD) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) provided inaccurate information about the response to the hijackings in testimony and media appearances, the report said.

Authorities suggested that the U.S. Air Force had reacted quickly, that jets had been scrambled in response to the last two hijackings and that fighters were prepared to shoot down United Airlines Flight 93 if it threatened Washington.

In fact, the commission reported a year later, audiotapes from NORAD's Northeast headquarters and other evidence showed clearly that the military never had any of the hijacked airliners in its sights, or at one point chased a phantom aircraft - American Airlines Flight 1 - long after it had crashed into the World Trade Center.

These and other discrepancies did not become clear until the commission, forced to use subpoenas, obtained audiotapes from the FAA and NORAD, officials were quoted as saying.

Source: Xinhua