User Comments

1. 

   5/31/09

   satijournal

   Shortly after the second World Trade Center tower was hit, I burst in on Rice (then the president's national security adviser) and Cheney in the vice president's office and remember glimpsing horror on his face.
   That's the true sign of a coward. It's no wonder he got five deferments to stay out of Vietnam. And in the mean time, our Commander-In-Chief sat in a children's classroom reading The Pet Goat.
   
   Cheney's admission that 9/11 caused him to reassess the threats to the nation only underscores how, for months, top officials had ignored warnings from the CIA and the NSC staff that urgent action was needed to preempt a major al-Qaeda attack.
   Yeah, they totally f*cked up. All the warning signs were there: the attack of the U.S.S. Cole, the bombing of the embassy in Kenya, the memo that Bin Laden was determined to attack inside the U.S. They just didn't take the threat seriously. Bush had just come off a month long vacation.
   
   I believe this zeal stemmed in part from concerns about the 2004 presidential election. Many in the White House feared that their inaction prior to the attacks would be publicly detailed before the next vote -- which is why they resisted the 9/11 commission -- and that a second attack would eliminate any chance of a second Bush term. So they decided to leave no doubt that they had done everything imaginable.
   Yep, everything is political for these bastards.
   
   Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book, "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks
   ... and there we have the real reason for waterboarding: to establish a connection between 9/11 and Iraq.

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   1. 

      6/01/09

      Agit8r

      I'm suprised that Mr. Cheney is able to show emotions... I'm more inclined to believe this report of his steely nerves
      
      www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/05/cheneys-bunker-mentality
      
      "But Vice President Cheney did, in fact, issue orders for military fighters to shoot down commercial jets on the morning of September 11. He told the 9/11 Commission, and has repeatedly told others, that he was authorized by the President in advance to give these orders. Evidence of this prior authorization is unsubstantiated and contradictory"
2. 

   5/31/09

   cooper

   reactive policy never makes for good government, but in this case they used the reaction for an intent which was not reactive but planned.

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