CHENEY & THE CHAIN OF COMMAND

In theory, the chain of command of the military starts with the President and then goes to the Secretary of Defense and from there it can go in several different but subordinate directions. Even FOX NEWS gets this right. The Weekly Standard recently ran a piece about Cheney written by one of Cheney's "reliable sources," Stephen F. Hayes. You may recall that Cheney recommended Hayes' work on the connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda:

QUESTION: When I was in Iraq, some of the soldiers said they believed they were fighting because of the Sept. 11 attacks and because they thought Saddam Hussein had ties to al Qaida. You've repeatedly cited such links. . . . I wanted to ask you what you'd say to those soldiers, and were those soldiers misled at all?
VICE PRESIDENT CHENEY: . . . . With respect to . . . the general relationship. . . . One place you ought to go look is an article that Stephen Hayes did in the Weekly Standard . . . That goes through and lays out in some detail, based on an assessment that was done by the Department of Defense and forwarded to the Senate Intelligence Committee some weeks ago. That's your best source of information. I can give you a few quick for instances, one the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.

Source: Transcript of interview with Vice President Dick Cheney, Rocky Mountain News (1/9/2004).

In what in retrospect seems to be a foreshadowing of how much power Cheney had in the Bush Administration, Hayes reports that on 9-11, Cheney broke the chain of command by directly ordering the military to shoot down suspect American commercial planes:

Within minutes, Cheney was told that an unidentified aircraft was 80 miles outside of Washington. "We were all dividing 80 by 500 miles an hour to see what the windows were," Scooter Libby would later say. A military aide asked Cheney for Authorization to take out the aircraft.

Cheney gave it without hesitating.

The military aide seemed surprised that the answer came so quickly. He asked Again, and Cheney once again gave the authorization.

The military aide seemed to think that because Cheney had answered so quickly, he must have misunderstood the question. So he asked the vice president a third time.

"I said yes," Cheney said, not angrily but with authority.

"He was very steady, very calm," says Josh Bolten, then deputy White House chief of staff. "He clearly had been through crises before and did not appear to be in shock like many of us."

Cheney says there wasn't time to consider the gravity of the order he had just communicated. It was "just bang, bang, bang," says Cheney, one life-or-death decision after another.

The entire room paused after Cheney had given the final order as the gravity of his order became clear. At 10:18 A.M., Bolten suggested that Cheney notify the president that he had communicated the "shoot-down" order. Shortly after Cheney hung up, the officials in the bunker were advised that a plane had crashed in Pennsylvania.

[SNIP]

At 10:39 A.M., Cheney spoke to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for the first time. He reviewed the events of the past hour.

"There's been at least three instances here where we've had reports of aircraft approaching Washington," said Cheney. "A couple were confirmed hijack. And, pursuant to the president's instructions I gave authorization for them to be taken out."

There was quiet on the other end of the line.

"Hello?"

"Yes, I understand," Rumsfeld came back. "So we've got a couple aircraft up there that have those instructions at this present time?"

"That is correct," said Cheney. "And it's my understanding they've already taken a couple aircraft out."

"We can't confirm that," Rumsfeld told his former aide. "We're told that one
aircraft is down but we do not have a pilot report that did it."