Reading the article, one can't help but sympathize with the men and women who found themselves at the center of the shitstorm, trying to catch up to the situation with what little tools they had. Most acquitted themselves well, including the two officers in charge of NORAD's northeastern sector.
Naturally, when their higher-ups went before the 9/11 Commission, they lied anyway.
One other fact that caught my attention: Our Vice President is a deeply troubled man. Yes, Dick Cheney was misleading when he implied he gave the order to shoot down any further hijacked airliners.
It's like something out of a Tom Wolfe novel. Cheney slyly trying to make himself sound like an important world leader giving Momentuous Orders with a heavy heart. There's no reason to lie there, but he went ahead and did so anyway, in a way that conveniently makes him seem like some statesman down in the bunker, when what he was really probably doing was hoping the estate tax wouldn't eat up too much of his Halliburton stock. What a douche.Cheney echoed, "The significance of saying to a pilot that you are authorized to shoot down a plane full of Americans is, a, you know, it's an order that had never been given before." And it wasn't on 9/11, either.
President Bush would finally grant commanders the authority to give that order at 10:18, which—though no one knew it at the time—was 15 minutes after the attack was over.
In other stupid news, members of the House of Representatives will once again be able to eat french fries. The deep-fried potatoes had previously been called freedom fries, in order to punish the French for failing to join us in the totally not-insane-at-all invasion of Iraq.
France lost approximately $37 in trade and tourism dollars, as well as royalties on the fries.
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