Everybody watch The Dark Side on PBS tonight so you can tell me how it was.
On September 11, 2001, deep inside a White House bunker, Vice President Dick Cheney was ordering U.S. fighter planes to shoot down any commercial airliner still in the air above America…
I have to work but you probably don’t, and the critics who got to preview the Frontline special, like the Seattle Times, make it sound pretty must-see.
Comedians have made countless Darth Vader jokes about Cheney, but the film’s title is no joke about The Force. It’s from Cheney’s own words about America’s response to terrorists: “We have to work the dark side, if you will. We’ve got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world. A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly without any discussion, using sources and methods that are available to our intelligence agencies.”
But apparently he didn’t use the actual intelligence from the agencies.
The CIA and its then-director, George Tenet, knew immediately that al-Qaida in Afghanistan was responsible for the 9/11 attacks and said so. But author James Bamford says that while the Pentagon was still smoking, Rumsfeld said, “We’ve got to see, somehow, how we can bring Saddam Hussein into this.”
“The Dark Side” claims that 9/11 provided Cheney and Rumsfeld with a pretext for achieving their longstanding ambition to go after the Iraqi dictator and to boost executive power that they’d seen diminish ever since their days as allies in Nixon’s administration. As consummate political infighters, they resented and continually undermined Tenet — a sports-loving man’s man who had become pally with George W. Bush…
Damn. I might have to buy the DVD.
