http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2009/06/dick-cheney-only-had-to-delay-things.html

CIA director Leon Panetta told the New Yorker:

When you read behind it, it’s almost as if he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.

News commentator Ed Schultz said today that Cheney is wishing for a terrorist attack on the U.S.

What should we make of all this?

Well, everyone knows that Cheney is ruthless:

• Cheney is the guy who pushed for torture, pressured the Justice Department lawyers to write memos saying torture was legal, and made the pitch to Congress justifying torture. The former director of the CIA accused Cheney of overseeing American torture policies

Cheney is also the guy who:

• Helped found the Project for a New American Century, which called for a new American empire well before 9/11, and lamented that, without a "catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor", transformation of America into an empire would be very slow.

• In the 70's -- Cheney was instrumental in generating fake intelligence exaggerating the Soviet threat in order to undermine coexistence between the U.S. and Soviet Union, which conveniently justified huge amounts of cold war spending. See also this article.
• 30 years later, Cheney was largely responsible for generating fake intelligence about Iraq in order to justify the war. And, according to former British Defense Secretary, Cheney has called the shots in the failed Iraq war.

• According to former high-level intelligence officer Melvin Goodman, Cheney orchestrated phony intelligence for the Congress in order to get an endorsement for covert arms shipments to anti-government forces in Angola?

• Cheney has been perhaps the leading advocate for strengthening the powers of the White House to the point of monarchy for at least 20 years?

• Cheney was involved in debates concerning illegal wiretaps 30 years ago?
• Cheney was probably responsible for outing CIA agent Valerie Plame.

• Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says that the military ran an "Executive Assassination Ring" throughout the Bush years which reported directly to Cheney.

• Hersh also says that Cheney is the main guy helping to fund groups which the U.S. claims are terrorists (see confirming articles here and here)

Blast from the Past

Okay, Cheney is a bad apple. But that's not all.

Remember that Cheney falsely claimed that there was a link between 9/11 and Iraq, but has recently admitted there was never any evidence to back up such a claim.

Remember also that the torture program which Cheney created was specifically aimed at producing false confessions in an attempt to link Iraq and 9/11.

A well-known writer said of Dick Cheney:

For his entire career, he sought untrammeled power. The Bush presidency and 9/11 finally gave it to him . . . .

Indeed, as I've previously written:

The Afghanistan war was planned before 9/11.

The decision to launch the Iraq war was made before 9/11.

The Patriot Act was written before 9/11.

The government's spying on Americans began before 9/11 (confirmed here and here).

The neocons who now run the U.S. government lamented, before 9/11, that they could not institute their plans for global domination without a "new Pearl Harbor".

So Cheney had a lot of motivation to "accidentally" let 9/11 happen.

Cheney also knew 9/11 was going to happen. The government knew that terrorists could use planes as weapons -- and had even run its own drills of planes being used as weapons against the World Trade Center and other U.S. high-profile buildings, using REAL airplanes -- all before 9/11. Indeed, the government heard the 9/11 plans from the hijackers' own mouths before 9/11.

Indeed, Cheney was in charge of all counter-terrorism exercises, activities and responses on 9/11 (see this Department of State announcement; this CNN article; and this essay). So he was in a perfect position to "accidentally" let it happen.

He Only Had to Wait a Couple of Seconds

Before you say "that's a crazy conspiracy theory", please note that Cheney would have only had to delay normal military response a couple of seconds to let the 9/11 attacks succeed.

Specifically, the Secretary of Transportation testified to the 9/11 Commission:

"During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President … the plane is 50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out….and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!?"

(this testimony is confirmed here and here. See also this comment by the retired high-level CIA analyst mentioned above).

A retired 27-year CIA analyst who prepared and presented Presidential Daily Briefs and served as a high-level analyst for several presidents stated that the Pentagon is a heavily-defended building, with defensive weapons on the roof. This matches a Pentagon employee’s statement that she was told "you are now standing in one of the most secure building in all of the United States".

And a former air traffic controller, who knows the flight corridor which the two planes which hit the Twin Towers flew "like the back of my hand", and who handled two actual hijackings, says that that planes can be tracked on radar even when their transponders are turned off, and that Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon tracked three of the four flights from the point of their hijacking to hitting their targets (also, listen to this interview).

Moreover, this diagram shows that the hijacked planes flew over numerous military bases on 9/11 before crashing. See also this essay regarding the stand down of the military; and see this war game proposal created before 9/11 revolving around Bin Laden and including "live-fly exercises" involving real planes, later confirmed by this official Department of Defense website. And remember that, according to CBS news, radar shows Flight 77 did a downward spiral, turning almost a complete circle and dropping the last 7,000 feet in two-and-a-half minutes.

All Cheney had to do was delay normal defensive procedures a couple of seconds to let the plane slam into the Pentagon. It was obvious by that time that the 9/11 attacks were not random instances of "pilot error". Cheney - in charge of counter-terrorism on 9/11 - simply had to watch the plane approach from many miles away and yell at everyone that “the orders still stand” to let the attacks succeed.

By just delaying for a few seconds, Cheney's long-dreamed Iraq and Afghanistan wars, imperial ambitions as described by the Project for a New American Century, and increase of powers domestically would all be justified.

Given Cheney's masterminding of a program torture to produce false information about 9/11, fake intelligence regarding wmds to justify the Iraq war, centralization of power in the executive branch, assassinations and other hanky panky, and the rest of Cheney's biography, do you really think he couldn't delay things a couple of seconds to reach all of this goals?

Postscript: The 9/11 Commissioners themselves now doubt the "official" 9/11 story:

• The Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission (John Farmer) - who led the 9/11 staff's inquiry - said "At some level of the government, at some point in time...there was an agreement not to tell the truth about what happened". He also said "I was shocked at how different the truth was from the way it was described .... The tapes told a radically different story from what had been told to us and the public for two years.... This is not spin. This is not true."

• The Commission's co-chairs said that the CIA (and likely the White House) "obstructed our investigation"

• Indeed, they said that the 9/11 Commissioners knew that military officials misrepresented the facts to the Commission, and the Commission considered recommending criminal charges for such false statements (free subscription required)

• 9/11 Commissioner Bob Kerrey said that "There are ample reasons to suspect that there may be some alternative to what we outlined in our version . . . We didn't have access . . . ."

• 9/11 Commissioner Timothy Roemer said "We were extremely frustrated with the false statements we were getting"

• 9/11 Commissioner Max Cleland resigned from the Commission, stating: "It is a national scandal"; "This investigation is now compromised"; and "One of these days we will have to get the full story because the 9-11 issue is so important to America. But this White House wants to cover it up"