A senior Bush administration official's first reaction to seeing the twin towers collapse on 9/11 was that the buildings had been deliberately imploded with explosive charges according to an account in Dick Cheney's new official biography, which also reveals that Cheney thought Flight 93 had been shot down after hearing of its demise in Pennsylvania.

Cheney: The Untold Story of America's Most Powerful and Controversial Vice President, by Stephen F. Hayes, is the VP's new official biography and segments from the book featured on the Neo-Con Weekly Standard website today.

Some are already claiming that the long passage about Cheney's activities on 9/11, which was also reprinted at Yahoo's website today, is nothing more than a cover story to absolve Cheney of the suspicion that he played a key role in facilitating the attack itself.

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After the collapse of both towers, the account records the fact that one of Cheney's close aides and now his chief of staff, David Addington, who was once described by U.S. News and World Report as "the most powerful man you've never heard of," instantly concluded that the towers must have been charged with explosives.

At 10:28, the north tower collapsed. The frenzy in the bunker came to a halt and, but for an occasional whisper, the room went silent. On the television, one floor after another gave way, a bit of order amidst the catastrophe. The building must have been charged, thought David Addington, counsel to the vice president, who was standing against the outer wall of the bunker.

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Later on in the account we learn that Dick Cheney was also surprised that the towers collapsed.

It had never crossed Cheney's mind that the towers would crumble. He remembers being surprised. "I think everybody was," he would say later. "I think Osama bin Laden was."

David Addington

The excerpt also reveals that upon hearing of Flight 93's demise in a Pennsylvania field, Cheney and Condoleeza Rice immediately concluded that it had been shot down, a assertion Cheney later communicated via a phone call to Donald Rumsfeld.

Everyone had the same question, says Rice. "Was it down because it had been shot down or had it crashed?" Rice and Cheney were both filled with "intense emotion," she recalls, because they both made the same assumption. "His first thought, my first thought--we had exactly the same reaction--was it must have been shot down by the fighters. And you know, that's a pretty heady moment, a pretty heavy burden."

For several impossible minutes, Cheney believed that a pilot following his orders had brought down a plane full of civilians in rural Pennsylvania. Even then, he had no regrets.

"It's my understanding they've already taken a couple aircraft out," Cheney said to Rumsfeld during the subsequent conversation.

Segments from the book are likely to be seized upon by adherents to the 9/11 truth movement over the next few days in order to weed out anomalies and inconsistencies with the official story of Cheney's movements on September 11, 2001.

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