The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [93]
WOLFOWITZ: My God.
CHENEY: So it’s clear we’ve got to get in there. Are we agreed on this?
ALL: Agreed.
CHENEY: All right. Well, I’ve got a plan.
WOLFOWITZ: We get George elected in 2000 and go in, right? Tell the public Saddam’s in violation of his UN restrictions or some shit like that? He is anyway, isn’t he?
CHENEY: No, that would never work. The public would never stand for it. (Everyone bursts out laughing.)
CHENEY: Seriously.
WOLFOWITZ: Oh, wait—you’re serious?
CHENEY: Absolutely. No, I think the way to go is to cook up some kind of justification. Something that will really get the public behind the invasion.
FEITH: I know! We go to the UN, show bogus photos of Saddam’s secret store of chemical and biological weapons, evidence of his nuclear weapons program. Tell the world he’s planning to attack.
CHENEY: No. Not emotional enough. I mean something really hot.
KRISTOL: It could be a human-rights thing. Some emergency, like he’s gassing Kurds again or something. That worked for Clinton in Kosovo. I mean, who gave a shit about Albanians, right? I wouldn’t know an Albanian if I caught one in bed with my wife. But that whole rape-camp thing was good enough by a mile to start that war.
CHENEY: No, no, that’s not vivid enough, not Band of Brothers enough. We need the people all lathered up, their mouths full of spittle, howling for blood, like pit bulls. You guys need to think to scale, think big, think like Michael Bay.
FEITH: Michael Bay, Jesus. Okay, okay, what then?
CHENEY: We attack the World Trade Center.
KRISTOL: Perfect! And blame it on Saddam!
CHENEY: No, we bomb the World Trade Center and blame it on Osama bin Laden.
FEITH: Oh. How?
CHENEY: Easy. First, we cultivate nineteen suicidal Muslim patsies from a variety of Middle Eastern countries, I’d say mostly from Saudi Arabia. We bring them to the U.S., train them at U.S. flight schools. They should be high-profile terrorist suspects who are magically given free rein by the security agencies to travel back and forth to various terrorist training camps to study passenger jet piloting. Actually, that process is already under way now. Our friends in the Clinton administration are seeing to it that four groups of Arab men are being brought along by the FBI and the CIA.
WOLFOWITZ: How is it that the Clinton administration is already helping us with this, when we haven’t even planned this yet?
CHENEY: They just are. Okay?
WOLFOWITZ: Okay, fine. And what do we do with these hijackers?
CHENEY: We sit idly by while they plot to hijack a series of passenger jet planes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House.
WOLFOWITZ: And how do we get them to do that?
CHENEY: We just do. You see, we worked with these people back in the old mujahideen days in Afghanistan. So naturally we’re still thick as thieves with them.
FEITH: Oh, of course. So we get them to fly into these buildings. And the impact from the planes will bring down the World Trade Center.
CHENEY: No, Doug, dammit, you’re not following me. The impact from the planes most certainly won’t be sufficient to knock down the towers. We know this because we’ve privately conducted studies that show that the towers will easily be able to withstand impact by two jets loaded to the gills with jet fuel. That said, the jets will likely cause skyscraper fires hot enough to kill everyone above the point of impact; we’re going to have to assume, of course, that the exits from the higher floors to the lower floors will be mostly blocked after the collisions. So assuming we crash the planes about two-thirds