Mineta testimony on Cheney stand down/shoot down censored

Total 411 Info | July 27 2005

Mineta’s Presidential Emergency Operations Center (PEOC) testimony was also edited out of the 9/11 Commission video archive.
When questioned about this, representatives at the National Archive stated that the video may have been lost because of a ‘snafu’. Following is a brief summary of the scrubbed video along with links to recently obtained C-SPAN video.

Mineta responds to an opening question by Commissioner Hamilton about the events in the PEOC and an alleged shoot down order. He describes a conversation between Cheney and a young man:

Mineta: “During the time that the airplane was coming into the Pentagon, there was a young man who would come in and say to the Vice President…the plane is 50 miles out…the plane is 30 miles out….and when it got down to the plane is 10 miles out, the young man also said to the vice president “do the orders still stand?” And the Vice President turned and whipped his neck around and said “Of course the orders still stand, have you heard anything to the contrary!??”

[...]

Mineta ultimately expressed the obvious, that the standing order was an open question only Cheney could answer. The fact that "The 9/11 Commission Final Report" discarded his testimony has never been explained. Secretary Mineta did not respond to an open letter addressed to him. It is not known whether the letter got past his spokesman Robert Johnson, who did not respond to multiple messages. It might be worth noting that Johnson was formerly the spokesman of Arizona Congressman Jon Kyl, who was meeting the morning of 9/11 with Porter Goss, Bob Graham and at the time Pakistan ISI Intelligence Chief Mahmood Ahmed. Ahmed was linked to the wiring of $100,000 to Mohammed Atta.

If Mineta’s testimony is to be taken into account, and there is no apparent reason why it should not be, questions about the timing of events the morning of 9/11 come into focus. Most obvious is, if the standing order given by the Vice President prior to the aircraft hitting the Pentagon was not a shoot down order, then what was it? Perhaps it was the danger of this question, and the danger that Cheney would have had to commit perjury to uphold the timeline reported in the mainstream press, that caused the Vice President to testify to the Commission along with the President in closed session, with no transcript, no witnesses, and no public accountability.