Give Up Blog

Thursday, August 03, 2006

Where was the president on 9/11

Vanity Fair has an interesting article based on tapes from NORAD which record the response of the military to the crisis of 9/11.

While it is clear they were institutionally incapable of dealing with such a novel threat (and they tried their best), what is not clear is where the leadership of our country was during this debacle. In fact, I found most interesting the proof that our leadership not only was out of contact, but subsequently made up stories to make it sound like they were more involved than they actually were.

In his bunker under the White House, Vice President Cheney was not notified about United 93 until 10:02—only one minute before the airliner impacted the ground. Yet it was with dark bravado that the vice president and others in the Bush administration would later recount sober deliberations about the prospect of shooting down United 93. "Very, very tough decision, and the president understood the magnitude of that decision," Bush's then chief of staff, Andrew Card, told ABC News.

Cheney echoed, "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before." And it wasn't on 9/11, either.

Wow, they totally just imagine they're heroes of 9/11, rather than just as mystified by the attack as everyone else (except the passengers of flight 93). Cheney finds out about the flight being hijacked one minute before it crashed, but in his mind he was there, keeping things together in "decider" mode and subsequently lies about his role in the events of that morning.

Do their lies ever end?

3 Comments:

Anonymous said...

There is a fascinating timeline on the United 93 events at NPR. It’s pretty clear that NEADS (the group the Vanity Fair article focuses on) had bad information and/or its head up its ass pretty much the whole time. They found out from the FAA that it had crashed. It was also the FAA who first considered the unpalatable possibilities.

9:49 Thirteen minutes after getting the question from Cleveland Center about military help, Command Center suggested that someone at headquarters should decide whether to request military assistance:

FAA Headquarters: They're pulling Jeff away to go talk about United 93.

Command Center: Uh, do we want to think about, uh, scrambling aircraft?

FAA Headquarters: Uh, God, I don't know.

Command Center: Uh, that's a decision somebody's gonna have to make probably in the next 10 minutes.

Maybe no one told Cheney that the flight had crashed, and he had to stew in decider-mode overdrive for a while. Not too good for his heart, I would imagine.

Full NPR Timeline

-JE

12:25 PM, August 03, 2006

Rev. Dr. said...

They did have their heads up their asses, but at the same time I can't blame them for their reaction. This plan was really out of left field, and the comment that so many real-life things had never occurred during an exercise was telling. They simply had never been trained for a multi-plane suicide hijacking scenario. They couldn't help having their heads up their asses.

I don't buy that Cheney ever had to decide on whether or not to shoot down flight 93 because there was never an instance in which there were planes trailing it according to any account. It was in his imagination that there ever was an instance when he was called on to make a decision. Within a minute of him hearing about the flight it was down, and they knew it was out of the air within minutes.

Basically, the only flights that he could have been put in position to decide were all the suspected hijackings that didn't turn out to be real. By the time he heard about 93 the entire attack was over, every plane hijacked was destroyed. He decided nothing.

4:32 PM, August 03, 2006

Anonymous said...

I was just being facetious about no one telling him the United 93 crisis was over. I agree there nothing for him to decide, but I’m still willing to bet he had a few eye-widening, coronary artery-constricting moments of panic.

Cheney probably only really panics when he thinks he’ll have to do something that holds no promise of enriching himself or his political benefactors. This was surely one of those times.

-JE

9:04 PM, August 03, 2006