The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [94]
FEITH: Fantastic. I love killing people in the finance industry. It’s too bad the people on the lower floors will get to escape.
CHENEY: It is too bad—especially since we’re going to blow up the rest of the building complex anyway.
FEITH: We are?
CHENEY: Yes. You see, the way I see it, our best course of action is to first crash planes into each of the towers, trapping and killing those thousands on the upper floors of each building. After the impact, of course, the people on the lower floors will find their way out of the building and onto the street, where they will achieve relative safety—at which point we’ll finally detonate the massive network of explosive charges we’ve secretly hidden in the buildings in the weeks and months prior to the attacks.
FEITH: Wait, why did we do that again?
CHENEY: Because the buildings wouldn’t have fallen down unless we did.
WOLFOWITZ: But why do we need the buildings to fall down?
CHENEY: Because the events of the day will be insufficiently horrifying and impactful without the building collapses.
FEITH: So why don’t we detonate the charges earlier, so that we can kill the people on the lower floors, too?
CHENEY: That’s a good question. At some point we have to sacrifice effect for believability. You see, if the planes crash into the buildings and the buildings collapse immediately, everyone will be suspicious and they’ll be onto the presence of the explosives. So what we have to do is let the planes crash into the building, give the jet fuel time to start fires that will “soften” the building core, and then we detonate the charges. Afterward, we’ll be able to argue that the fires coupled with the impact actually caused the buildings to collapse.
FEITH: Why will we be able to argue that? Didn’t our studies show that impact and fire alone wouldn’t have caused the buildings to collapse?
CHENEY: Those were our secret, far-more-advanced studies, done with secret, far-more-advanced military technology. The vast majority of the world’s civilian structural engineers, however, can be counted on after the incident to conclude that the buildings collapsed due to a combination of fire, impact, and the knocking off of fireproofing from the building beams.
FEITH: Why can they be counted on to conclude that?
CHENEY: Because that’s what our secret research shows their not-secret research will show! Jesus Christ, work with me on this, will you?
WOLFOWITZ: I think I get it. We crash the planes, kill everyone above the impact of the planes, let the people underneath the impact out to safety, then collapse the buildings about an hour or so later using the explosives that we pointlessly incurred months’ and weeks’ worth of career-and life-threatening risk to covertly plant in a building complex visited by hundreds of thousands of people every week.
CHENEY: Exactly! The actual deaths will mostly be caused by the planes. But we’ll incur the massive additional risk simply to destroy the building for effect, because it will look cool and scary on television.
FEITH: I’m still confused about the our-studies and their-studies thing.
CHENEY (sighing): What’s the matter, Doug?
FEITH: If we know the planes won’t collapse the buildings, isn’t it possible that other people after the accident will figure out that the planes didn’t collapse the buildings?
CHENEY: Yes. But those other people will be a tiny minority of mostly nonscientists who’ll deduce the whole plan by researching the matter on the Internet. But we can count on their groundbreaking, visionary research being ignored by the mainstream scientific community, which will continue to insist the planes caused the collapses.
FEITH: Why can we count on that?
CHENEY: Because the mainstream science community, like the whole of the corporate media, the Congress, the Democratic Party, even the mainstream leftist political opposition, will