The super-awesome 9/11 Commission’s (PDF) version of events:
About this time Card, the lead Secret Service agent, the President’s military aide, and the pilot were conferring on a possible destination for Air Force One. The Secret Service agent felt strongly that the situation in Washington was too unstable to return. Card agreed. The President, however, needed convincing. All witnesses agreed that the President strongly wanted to return to Washington and only grudgingly agreed to go elsewhere. The issue was still undecided when the President conferred with the Vice President at about the time Air Force One was taking off. The Vice President recalled urging the President not to come back to Washington. Air Force One departed at approximately 9:55, with no destination at take-off. The objective was to get up in the
air—as fast and as high as possible—and then decide where to go.
Condi Rice’s super-awesome version of events:
“The president got on the phone and he said: ‘I’m coming back,'” Rice recounted to the documentary. “I said: ‘You cannot come back here. The United States of America is under attack. You have to go to safety. We don’t know what is going on here.'”
“He said, ‘I’m coming back.’ I said, ‘You can’t.'”
“I said to him in a raised voice — and I had never raised my voice to the president before — ‘You cannot come back here.’ I hung up.”
Rice said Bush was “quite annoyed with me to say the least.”
“I’ve known the president a long time and I knew that he wanted nothing more than to be there at the helm of the ship,” she said.
Who knows what the truth is? All I know is that Cheney was commander-in-chief that morning…
Cheney, who told the commission he was operating on instructions from Bush given in a phone call, issued authority for aircraft threatening Washington to be shot down. But the commission noted that “among the sources that reflect other important events that morning there is no documentary evidence for this call, although the relevant sources are incomplete.” Those sources include people nearby taking notes, such as Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, and Cheney’s wife, Lynne.
…and that only afterwords did Bush exert control over our national security decisions. And, even then, he deferred to Cheney far too much and didn’t stop listening to him until after the Democrats retook Congress in 2006. When Robert Gates came in to replace Rumsfeld, Cheney no longer had the credibility or clout to win every argument. And things started to gradually improve.
