9/11 Suspect Dick Cheney Cheats the Hangman

Did Israel devise the "Cheney doctrine" to con US leaders into allowing the attacks?

What would you say if I told you that if there is even a 1% chance that Dick Cheney didn’t really die, we must consider his non-death a 100% certainly, track down his undead corpse, pound his heart full of stakes, and shoot him full of silver bullets?

Anyone who actually carried out that plan would no doubt be arrested for desecrating the corpse of a war criminal. They would also be judged criminally insane. There may be, after all, a 1% chance that Cheney faked his death for some reason or other. And the media telling us he’s dead doesn’t settle the matter. The media lies all the time. But leaping from the minuscule chance that something as catastrophic as Cheney still being alive could possibly be true, to acting as though it’s an absolute 100% certainty and then waging all out “War on Cheney,” is sheer insanity. It’s like a parody of the crazy conspiracy theorist trope: “Hey, man, what if Elvis were still alive and living in Paraguay next door to Hitler? I mean, that’s theoretically possible, right? I can’t find any evidence proving he isn’t! So it must be true!”

So what was Cheney smoking when he came up with that 1% doctrine? For those lucky enough to have missed it, here is the relevant Cheney quote:

If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response.

The Cheney Doctrine is obvious madness. A sane person treats a 1% threat as a 1% threat, not as a 100% certainty. So how and why exactly did the US government, and the vice president’s office in particular, go mad?

Ron Suskind’s book The Cheney Doctrine claims Cheney’s (and America’s) madness erupted in November 2001 during a Bush Administration meeting on terrorism. But Cheney’s lunatic obsession with a “low-probability, high-impact event” echoed a firestorm of similar obsessions that consumed the top tier of the US national security community beginning in the mid-to-late 1990s. To take one notorious example, future 9/11 coverup commissar Philip Zelikow, alongside Ashton Carter and John Deutch, published “Catastrophic Terrorism: A National Policy” in a 1998 issue of Foreign Affairs, the flagship journal of the Council on Foreign Relations. The article flogged the terrifying possibility of a terrorist group getting hold of WMD and doing something really, truly horrible, like destroying the World Trade Center. (Gosh, that was prescient, wasn’t it?) The article argued for strong preventive medicine (like blowing up the WTC ourselves so we could take the gloves off?) The authors, presumably led by self-proclaimed “public myth” specialist Zelikow, accurately noted that the destruction of the World Trade Center, or an equivalent terrorist-induced disaster, would create a whole new historical reality by dividing time into a barely-remembered “before” (when Constitutional liberties still prevailed and insane wars were considered best avoided) and an “after” (in which everyone takes Orwellian unfreedom and endless insane wars for granted).

Having read more than my share of books, many of them somewhat tedious, detailing the thinking of the national security community around the turn of the millennium, and having had extensive public and private conversations with ex-insiders, I’m convinced that a tidal wave of contagious WMD paranoia was then washing over US decision-makers. Bill Clinton, for example, was quoted as saying he couldn’t sleep nights during his second term because of the terrifying briefings he’d been getting about what might happen in the event of a terrorist WMD attack. Bio-attacks, in particular, interfered with his nocturnal serenity. And I don’t think this was a Clinton peculiarity, any more than the Cheney Doctrine was a Cheney peculiarity. I think someone was deliberately driving these people, and other national security decision-makers, completely mad. And I think I know who that someone was. It was Israel.

The Israeli leadership, you see, had been planning 9/11 for years, if not decades. They wanted to make their enemies—the “terrorists” who object to the theft of Palestine and the rest of Greater Israel—the enemies of the whole Western world, if not all of global civilization. To that end, Netanyahu had convened the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism (JCIT) in 1979, summoning top-level US heavy-hitters to inform them that the current enemy of the Western world, (Godless) communism, would soon be replaced by (Islamic) terrorism. Twenty-one years later, 9/11 would be the public relations stunt that rolled out that epic shift.

But how could Israel, a nation of fewer than 10 million people, stage a spectacular attack on the United States, blame its enemies, and not get caught? Obviously the top level of US leadership would need to be co-opted into facilitating the attack, the cover story, and the coverup. To that end, terrifying rumors of (Islamic) terrorists getting WMD were unleashed. Israel’s assets in American high places were ordered to spread all kinds of false intelligence aimed at convincing the Americans that “Islamic terrorists with WMD killing millions of Americans” was not a fever dream but an ever-increasing likelihood…unless something monumental and unprecedented were done to prevent it.

David Ray Griffin, Webster Tarpley, and other 9/11 researchers have shown that Cheney appears to have seized control of the top of the US chain of command on the morning of 9/11, overthrowing the nominal rule of George W. Bush. The President was kidnapped by pilots and handlers who disobeyed his orders to return him to Washington DC from Florida, and instead, citing insider threats to shoot down the plane, took him to America’s most corrupt Air Force Base, Offut (where boys are run out of Boys Town for the enjoyment of Franklin Scandal perps). There Bush dallied for a few hours, letting Cheney run the show, before returning to DC that evening.

Was Cheney fully apprised of 9/11 in advance? Those arguing for that position say that the top of the command chain would need to know what both the right and left hands were doing, and Cheney was at the top. But others, notably Laurent Guyénot, have argued that Cheney and other non-Israeli-asset US officials may have approved plans to allow Israel to launch a relatively small attack on America and blame its Muslim enemies. Such an attack would trigger the pre-planned US invasion of Afghanistan, and would also allow the US national security state to take the gloves off in dealing with prospective terrorist WMD plots.

But Israel turned that planned “small attack” into a colossal, history-changing PR stunt by blowing up the World Trade Center and killing almost 3000 Americans. The US national security leadership, complicit in what it had expected to be a vastly smaller provocation, was left with no alternative but to join the Israelis in their coverup and cover story. Supporting that hypothesis, CIA asset Susan Lindauer has described her CIA handler, Richard Fuisz—who had demonstrated moderately detailed foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks—flying into a rage and screaming “the goddamn Israelis! The goddamn Israelis!” as they both watched the Twin Towers explode on television.

Was the madness of Cheney’s 1% doctrine symptomatic of his situation? Did he grossly exaggerate, far beyond the bounds of reason, as a wildly irrational but emotionally powerful justification of his decision to sign off on the Israeli-driven false-flag provocation that would become the 9/11 attack on America?