September 33rd [View All]

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Tom Engelhardt on the many thousands all over the world who have suffered, since 9/11, thanks to the Bush administration.

September 13, 2004

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Put another way, the President froze initially; he and his advisors then thought only about what to say; they then panicked and headed or were directed away from the nation's capital, not even making a "live" statement to a traumatized nation. His safety, in other words, was made paramount over anything else at the very moment when hundreds of people in New York City were making the safety of others paramount over theirs. By any other name, this would be called, if nothing else, institutional cowardice.

In the meantime, Vice President Cheney in Washington, as James Mann reported in the Atlantic Magazine, had panicked in quite a different but interconnected way, flipping into behavior from a long-practiced "Armageddon Plan" meant for nuclear war that functionally imagined the nation's leadership beheaded. He promptly took over the government and was evidently himself most responsible for diverting the President away from Washington. (Who needed young George when everything was in Dick Cheney's hands?)

According to reporter Scott Paltrow in the Wall Street Journal, Cheney told the President or his advisors that there was "a specific threat that Air Force One itself had been targeted by terrorists. Mr. Cheney emphasized that the threat included a reference to what he called the secret code word for the presidential jet, ‘Angel.'" This threat, Cheney later claimed, came to him from a Secret Service Agent or still later, from some unnamed "uniformed military person" who has never turned up again or been identified. The 9/11 Commission Report states (on p. 39) that "he Vice President recalled urging the President not to return to Washington" and then (on p. 325) that this was due to "a misunderstood communication in the hectic White House Situation Room that morning." Similarly, the Vice President claims he had a telephone conversation with the President in which he received George Bush's personal directive to order the shooting down of hijacked planes (an order, his aide Scooter Libby says, he acted on decisively, "in about the time it takes a batter to decide to swing"). Of this conversation, too, there is no record. The 9/11 Commission Report says only, "Among the sources that reflect other important events of that morning , there is no documentary evidence for this call, but the relevant sources are incomplete." (Even the Vice President's wife "did not note a call between the President and Vice President" and she seems to have been noting just about everything.)

Finally, we have on p. 43 of the Commission Report, a remarkable exchange between the Vice President, already in his Armageddon bunker – "the shelter," the Commission Report calls it -- and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in which the Vice President claims to have ordered the shooting down of hijacked aircraft and "it's my understanding they've already taken a couple of aircraft out." It's hard not to read pride into these statements. As we know, the Vice President would from then on remain largely embunkered in one fashion or another for months to come, hunkered down for and geared up for acts of war.

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http://www.motherjones.com/news/dailymojo/2004/09/09_410.html