The Great Derangement - Matt Taibbi [97]
KRISTOL: Or even better, we can drop them on the lawn from a circling C-130 after the crash.*5 Just have someone leaning out the cargo bay with big pieces of fuselage, dropping them strategically in between the rescue workers. We can do the same thing with the body parts; we’ll just take some of the bodies, barbecue them with jet fuel, and just sort of toss bits of them here and there around the site.
CHENEY: That works for me. What I like about that is that it’s so simple.
WOLFOWITZ: Okay, let me back up. Rather than just finding some patsies who can fly—which is exactly what we’ll be doing in New York—we instead seize an actual passenger flight and remove the passengers to a remote location and kill them, disposing of the plane later. Then we attack the Pentagon and kill one hundred or so of our own people with either a missile or a Global Hawk drone plane, banking on the probability that no one will see a plane shooting a missile in broad daylight in the nation’s capital. Then, after we execute this attack on the Pentagon, we go back to the site and cleverly rearrange the evidence to make it look like a plane crashed there, including planting the samples of DNA of all the people we killed in Ohio or whatever. I’m not saying it doesn’t sound like a good plan, but can I ask why we’re doing this? If we can’t find a patsy who can fly a plane, why not just not crash a plane into the Pentagon?
CHENEY: What do you mean? But a plane crashes into the Pentagon. That’s part of the plan.
WOLFOWITZ: Right, but since it’s our plan and we can change it, why don’t we just scuttle the entire Pentagon operation? We’ve already got the money shot with the towers—why do we need to go through all the trouble of finding hijackers who can’t fly, nurturing them in the womb of ineffective government surveillance, getting them on a plane full of passengers, and then faking the deaths of all these people, telling the world they died in a plane crash that was actually a sinister attack using our own technology? I mean, so many things can go wrong. You’ve got to get people to sign off on the DNA reports, you’ve got eyewitnesses with weird stories, you’ve got inconsistent radar data, you’ve got to put stuff there for the dogs to find…
CHENEY: Don’t worry about the dogs. We’ve got the dogs covered.*6
WOLFOWITZ: Oh, well, okay. But still—why not just skip the whole thing?
CHENEY: Are you suggesting that instead of executing hundreds of sinister, secretive, murderous subplans that all must go off flawlessly together to create a single underpublicized deception, that instead of that we just blow it off and go with the much larger and more spectacular World Trade Center event?
WOLFOWITZ: Right. Either that or find patsies who can fly.
CHENEY: Hmm. Interesting. What do you guys think?
FEITH: I don’t know, Dick. It seems much easier just to go with the whole fake-the-flight, kill-the-passengers, fake-the-cell-phone-calls, pass-off-the-missile-attack-as-a-plane-crash thing. I can’t think of any simpler way to do this plan than that.
KRISTOL: Yeah, Dick, frankly, neither can I. I like your plan better. It’s so much more…cloak ’n’ daggerier!
CHENEY: Well, it’s settled, then. Paul, you cool?
WOLFOWITZ: Hey, I trust you guys, you know that.
FEITH: Well, that worked out well. I mean, there are a few loose ends, but…
CHENEY: Look, the point is, we do the towers and pin it on bin Laden. That leads us to invade Afghanistan. A year and a half later, we invade Iraq.
FEITH: And we blame the whole WTC thing on Saddam.
CHENEY: Right, and…wait, what? No! No, actually we never make that connection, because none exists. I figure we can just say he’s in violation of his UN restrictions, and that will be a good enough reason to invade. He is anyway, right? In violation, I mean?
WOLFOWITZ: I think you’re right, he is!
Of course one could go on and on in this direction. To read 9/11 Truther lore is to enter a world where criminals commit dastardly acts without motive, where even brilliant Machiavellian politicians