Mineta testified before the 9/11 Commission that Cheney was aware of special orders concerning a plane heading toward Washington. Mineta said: “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 later followed up with reporters and stated, “When I overheard something about ‘the orders still stand’ and so, what I thought of was that they had already made the decision to shoot something down.”
It now appears that PDAS was used by Cheney to implement on the morning of 9/11 a new policy issued on June 1, 2001 that provided for a ”stand down” protocol that replaced a long-standing shoot-down order for hijacked and suspected hijacked planes.
The new order transferred the authority to shoot down aircraft from the Pentagon and NORAD military commanders to the president, vice president, or secretary of defense.
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