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.”
***
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.”