THANK GOD CHENEY’S ORDERS WERE IGNORED by military command. From Raw Story:

Most striking of all is the revelation that an order by Vice President Dick Cheney was ignored by the military, which saw his order to shoot down aircraft as outside the chain of command. Instead of acknowledging the order to shoot down civilian aircraft and carrying it out, NORAD ordered fighters to confirm aircraft tail numbers first and report back for further instructions.

Cheney’s order was given at “about 10:15″ a.m., according to the former VP’s memoirs, but the 9/11 Commission Report shows United flight 93 going down at 10:06 a.m. Had the military followed Cheney’s order, civilian aircraft scrambling to get out of the sky could have been shot down, exponentially amplifying the day’s tragedy.

Far from sending fighters to chase after the hijacked aircraft, as Bush administration officials have repeatedly said they did, the new audio tapes paint a picture of bedlam and unpreparedness.

The situation was so chaotic, military officials received the exact location of one of the aircraft that hit the World Trade Center towers just nine minutes before impact. It even took a military official calling the FAA some 30 minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 went off course before the nation’s defense apparatus began scrambling. Moments later the jet is said to have slammed into the Pentagon.

Despite these latest disclosures, the vast majority of materials gathered during the investigation of 9/11 remains a secret, even over the wishes of the 9/11 commissioners. Among that information is a 30-page summary of the commission’s interview with President George W. Bush and Vice President Cheney; black box data; minutes from a secret, high-level “continuity of government” meeting; and information on America’s overseas intelligence-gathering on al Qaeda.

Withheld from the audio released by Rutgers was a high-level meeting held by top administration officials, where they discussed continuity of government measures to be implemented if the president were to be killed or a mass casualty event were to occur. In Cheney’s memoir, he claims to have ordered a staffer to hang up on that meeting when a technical glitch caused a degradation in audio quality. Instead of going directly there to participate in discussions about how to sustain the government, Cheney decided to watch television news.

HERE’S ONE SEGMENT FROM THE TAPES: NY Times: The 9/11 Tapes: The Story in the Air

10:32 AM0 minute, 41 seconds

Mission Crew Commander (M.C.C.) gives the fighter pilots permission to shoot down civilian planes, an order relayed from Vice President Dick Cheney.

Voice One

You need to read this, Region Commander has declared that we can shoot down tracks if they are not responding to our, uh, directions.

MCC Position

O.K, I’ll pass that to weapons.

Voice One

O.K.

MCC Position

The Region Com, the Region Commander has declared that we can shoot down aircraft that do not respond to our direction. Copy that?

Weapons

Copy that sir.

MCC Position

So if you’re trying to divert somebody and he won’t divert

Fox

D.O. is saying no.

MCC Position

No? It came over the chat. Foxy, you got a conflict on that? You got a conflict on that direction?

Fox

Right now, no, but keep checking.

MCC Position

O.K.

Voice One

Hey

MCC Position

O.K.

Voice One

You read that from the vice president, right? The vice president has cleared —

MCC Position

Vice president has cleared us to intercept tracks.

Voice One

Of interest.

MCC Position

…And shoot them down if they do not respond, per CONR CC (Norad Continental U.S. Command Center).

IN CASE YOU WEREN’T AWARE, Dick Cheney is on record as lying to the 9-11 Commission:

NY Times: Newly Published Audio Provides Real-Time View of 9/11 Attacks

In its 2004 report, the commission praised front-line aviation officials. But it then thoroughly dismantled the accounts of senior government officials, who in the weeks after Sept. 11, and for more than a year afterward, assured the public that fighter pilots had been in hot pursuit of the suicidal hijackers. During these chases, according to accounts from Vice President Dick Cheney, the F.A.A. and the Defense Department, the pilots were described as ready to carry out a wrenching order from President George W. Bush to shoot down airliners.

The commission discovered that little of that was true: of the four flights, military commanders had nine minutes’ notice on one before it flew into the World Trade Center, and did not learn the other three had been hijacked until after they had crashed. Military commanders, given an order outside the chain of command to shoot down hijacked airliners, did not pass it along to the fighter pilots, but instructed them instead to identify the tail numbers of any suspected rogue planes. That turned out to be a prudent call because by then, there were no longer hijackers in the air for them to shoot.

The newly published multimedia document spells out precisely how the recordings contradicted the accounts of the senior officials.

[...] The other still-secret recording is of a high-level conference call that began at 9:28 and grew, over the course of the morning, to include senior figures like Mr. Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers.

AND WHERE WAS BUSH, the President of the United States, during all of this?

You have to wonder where was Bush, what with Cheney taking control and issuing shoot down orders on civilian aircraft (that the military determined was outside the chain of command) — was Bush STILL sitting in a Florida school room, reading My Pet Goat throughout all of this? If he’d left the school by this time, why no involvement from the POTUS — at all?