june 20th's frontline episode, appropriately titled the dark side, revealed that at some point on 9/11 dick cheney thought 6 airliners had been hijacked and—on his orders—2 of them shot down by military jets.
anybody watching tv that day knew better.
cheney's one of those know-it-alls who like to show off knowledge. a couple months before 9/11 he publicly predicted that gasoline prices—rising since wannabe king george announced his candidacy 2 years earlier—would soon fall. he was right, of course. he'd been watching the futures market.
11 years before that he said "war's closer than ever. saddam hussein is starting to feel the effects of the sanctions." up to that point in late summer of 1990, almost everybody thought the sanctions were meant to pressure saddam to leave kuwait without our having to go to war. cheney gave away the real intent: to soften up iraq for war. but nobody picked up on it.
because of those revelations, when cheney's old friend and fellow showoff bob novak unveiled valerie plame wilson's CIA identity, it seemed likely cheney was involved in the leak. on the other hand, don rumsfeld couldn't be ruled out as a suspect: he has a marked tendency to try to prove he knows more than anybody else.
on the surface, it might seem surprising that all those know-it-alls get along so well, but there are enough differences to make them complementary allies rather than rivals.
i'll leave that to anyone who wants to analyze it and go back to my starting point, namely, it's strange cheney could've been so wrong on 9/11 with the truth so widely known.
in a way, it's kind of endearing but also disconcerting: when such a powerful man has bad info, he could make a big mistake. that may be what happened in the plame leak, tho we don't yet know if any of her contacts got hurt.
cheney's bad info was his understanding of the law on handling classified info, specifically the "need-to-know" provision, which he violated when he told scooter libby about wilson's wife, something libby had no legitimate need to know.
13 hours ago
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