Cheney, a law unto himself
If, that is, he usurped presidential prerogatives from W., as various stories suggest he did. We now have further evidence of this, on the day of 9/11, where it appears he gave orders to shoot down the hijacked airplane. One version is recounted here, by Maureen Dowd, in the NYTimes:
[Cheney] no longer feigns deference to W., whom he now disdains for favoring Condi over him in the second term, and for not pardoning “Cheney’s Cheney,” Scooter Libby.
“I had a job to do,” he said.
Continuing: “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.” Cheney kept W. flying aimlessly in the air on 9/11 while he and Lynne 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 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.”
