Washington ? Contrite senior defense officials offered apologies and suggested procurement reforms to a Senate committee Tuesday after a new report said the Pentagon violated federal procedures in pursuing a $23.5 billion contract to lease aerial refueling tankers from Chicago-based Boeing Co.

The report by the Pentagon’s inspector general could lead to “the complete restructuring in the way the department accomplishes acquisition for all of its goods and services,” Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England told a skeptical Armed Services Committee.

The report adds names and detail to facts about the controversial tanker lease, which Congress abandoned last year and which has led to the convictions of two Boeing executives, one of them a former top Air Force official.

But some Democratic senators complained that parts of the report were heavily blacked out, especially when it cited e-mails and statements by top White House officials, who helped push the tanker deal past other administration and Pentagon skeptics in May 2003.

“Critical gaps in this report have placed a cloud over it, indeed, over the inspector general’s office,” Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the committee’s ranking Democrat, told Pentagon Inspector General Joseph Schmitz. “In my view the report fails to discuss critical issues, omits critical material, and redacts key portions of the report in a manner that raises serious questions.”

Schmitz said he blacked out 45 references to the Bush administration in his report under an agreement with White House lawyers. His investigators spoke with 88 individuals, he said, but did not interview “White House officials, members of Congress, or officials of the Boeing Co., because the objective of the review” was focused on the Pentagon.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan said that Schmitz’s staff had access to administration communications, but that they were blacked out in the final report because Schmitz does not have jurisdiction over the White House.

“They only have jurisdiction over their particular agency,” McClellan said. “We worked to help facilitate the investigation by the inspector general, but this is a jurisdictional matter.”

Also notably absent from the report were comments from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, who until last month was deputy defense secretary. Both were interviewed by Pentagon investigators, Schmitz said, but their accounts of the tanker negotiations from 2002 until 2004, when the deal was halted, were not deemed noteworthy.

Schmitz told Sen. John Warner, R-Va., the committee chairman, “Generally speaking, we interviewed them and we did not find anything relevant to report to tell the story about the 767,” the model number of the Boeing plane in the tanker deal.

“You found nothing in your interviews with the secretary of defense and the deputy secretary of defense that was relevant to this report?” Warner asked in a surprised tone.

Schmitz said he would review the interview transcripts of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, who now is president of the World Bank.

Senators also expressed alarm that Schmitz and his staff did not interview Edward Aldridge, who was serving as under secretary of defense for acquisitions in May 2003, when the tanker deal won administration approval, and whose role was criticized in the report.

Schmitz replied that Aldridge, now a board member of the Lockheed Martin Corp., did not respond to phone messages or certified letters sent by his staff.

Aldridge also did not respond to a phone message left Tuesday by the Chicago Tribune at Lockheed Martin headquarters.