The New York Times’ Maureen Daud writes today:
In a documentary soon to appear on Showtime, ” The World According to Dick Cheney,” [Cheney said] ” I got on the telephone with the president, who was in Florida, and told him not to be at one location where we could both be taken out.” Mr. Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynn left on a helicopter for a secure undisclosed location, leaving Washington in a bleak, scared silence, with no one reassuring the nation in those first terrifying hours.
” I gave the instructions that we’d authorize our pilots to take it out,” he says, referring to the jet headed to Washington that crashed in a Pennsylvania field. He adds: ” After I’d given the order, it was pretty quiet. Everybody had heard it, and it was obviously a significant moment.”
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When they testified together before the 9/11 Commission, W. and Mr. Cheney kept up a pretense that in a previous call, the president had authorized the vice president to give a shoot-down order if needed. But the commission found ” no documentary evidence for this call.”
Answer: Cheney won’t be prosecuted. Why? Because he merely represents a much larger sociopathic war criminal – the United States of America (of which you and I are citizen). For an explanation see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-0BPMwgKNA .
sadly Randy, i know you are correct. We The People are the war criminals. The US is not a dictatorship where The Bad Guy sends his Dogs of War off to kill and maim, we all vote to send the Dogs of War off to kill and maim. I see that in this nation, we have built up this war machine that must constantly be fed. The blood of millions of souls is on all our hands.
Sociopathic Liar? I was at the University of Wisconsin during the exact same period in which Dick Cheney claims that there was a “mime troupe” on campus which donned white sheets, covered with blood and carried pig entrails in protest. This never happened. First of all, as a child of a theatrical family, I can state to a certainty that mimes do not use props and costumes. Secondly, as a person who loves the theatrical arts, I surely would have attended performances of any mimes on campus. Thirdly, as an active anti-war protester at the time, I knew of every action on campus in protest of the Viet Nam War and Cheney’s claim that he saw such a protest is completely untrue. I, a pacifist, placed flowers in the barrels of National Guard guns in the hands of children close to my own age with a smile. Things were not more violent than that until the Sterling Hall bombing on August 24, 1970 destroyed our confidence in our own capacity for peace (I personally met 3 of the 4 Sterling Hall bombers before and after the bombing upon the release of one from prison and they did not want to cause the death of anyone. One physics researcher, Robert Fassnacht, died in the blast that early morning of August 24, 1970. That was a huge blow to the peace movement. I do not believe Dick Cheney for this additional reason: the Sterling Hall bombing was the critical event in the anti-war movement. That should have influenced him, not, as he claims, an imaginary “mime” troupe, which did not exist. Dick Cheney is a frightening prevaricator.
Anyone who watched Dick Cheney’s special on “The World According to Dick Cheney” can see that he is a very sick,sick, man. Ive never heard such ridiculous excuses for the things he did to promote the war through George Bush. Admittedly Bush’s inability to grasp reality and logically distinguish fact from fiction played a part.
But Bush was just a patsy for Cheney. Lies and more lies, should lead to the prosecution of both Cheney and Bush as his enabler. Although I really dont think Bush knew what the hell he was doing.
If Nuremberg was the example for the world to follow in prosecuting war criminals, then, where are those principles today and who writes the arrest orders? Helloooo…wake up please.