This is not a good time for the relatives of Sept. 11 victims – their private hurt made part of a nonstop public theater of grief.

And this special anniversary – because it’s divisible by five? – wasn’t made any easier for some by all the new books that will be published just in time, including “Without Precedent” by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton.

“I guess it’s a sort of catharsis for them,” says Mindy Kleinberg of East Brunswick, N.J., whose husband Alan died that day. “A justification for what the commission didn’t do. If the commission had done its job, this book wouldn’t have been necessary.”

The commission – the 9/11 Commission, headed by Kean, a former New Jersey governor counted among the most reasonable of Republicans; and Hamilton, a longtime Democratic congressman from Indiana who spent enough time hobnobbing with generals and diplomats so that he truly understands how the system works.

They issued a report that blamed no one, and everyone. Found the worst failure a “failure of imagination.” And promised, when it was released in 2004, that nothing had been withheld.

Except that now we read the book and, well, there are problems, including the one with the Federal Aviation Administration and NORAD, our air defense. Seems as if some folks in high positions, some with stars on their shoulders, lied – oh, scratch that, didn’t tell the truth – under oath about why a country with what we all thought was the greatest military in the world couldn’t catch up with four hijacked airplanes.

The commission’s staff, Kean and Hamilton admit now, believed that what our generals were saying “bordered on willful concealment.”

Well, not to worry, the issue of whether some of the nation’s highest military officers lied under oath has been referred to the defense department’s inspector general, and there it shall lie buried.

The point, of course, is that all this was suspected years ago when the FAA and the U.S. Air Force couldn’t get their stories straight and blamed failures on radar pointed at Russia instead of internally.

“We knew someone was lying,” says Lorie Van Auken, also of East Brunswick.

In effect, the military took the fall for the FAA. The uniforms fell on their ceremonial swords for the political hacks. The FAA lost the planes that became guided missiles and didn’t alert the Air Force until it was too late to do anything.

Why was truth covered up? Kean and Hamilton don’t answer. But the evidence is strong that the story was cooked up at a higher level to make political appointees – all of whom should have been fired, if not tried for negligence – look better.

Kleinberg and Van Auken are among the “Jersey Girls,” the widows from that state and New York who lobbied for the creation of the commission, supported it when it needed funding and more time, but then became disillusioned when the commission opted for good feelings among its members rather than a good investigation.

“We knew, once we got a commission of politicians, that it wouldn’t really search for the truth,” Kleinberg says.

Not the real truth. But the possible truth. The political truth.

Best exemplified, perhaps, by its handling of the alleged telephone conversations between President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. There is no evidence that such a call, from Bush, ever occurred, but it’s important to the administration’s version of the story that it did.

Well, did it or didn’t it? As the book explains, the commission reports that the administration says it did but there is no evidence it did. Other examples: Was Condoleezza Rice or Richard Clarke telling the truth? The CIA or the FBI – particularly about the open presence of some hijackers here in the United States?

Here’s what Kean and Hamilton say: “Our task was to provide those facts for the reader, not to make that judgment for them.” And, “Once again, the reader is capable of making a judgment about who he or she feels performed well, and who could have done better.”

What? A commission of 10 political heavy hitters, a staff of scores, $12 million – and we have a panel that runs from conclusions, but leaves it all to us to figure it out. Wait a minute, I’ll go call my staff – you go get yours.

“That’s why the commission shouldn’t have had politicians on it,” Kleinberg says. “Experts, yes, academics. But not politicians.”

But, hey, what’s the point of complaining? The commission’s gone. Royalties are what’s important now.