10:18 a.m. September 11, 2001: Navy Commander Passes on Vice President Cheney’s Shootdown Authorization to the Pentagon

Navy Captain Anthony Barnes, deputy director of presidential contingency programs for the White House Military Office, lets a general at the Pentagon know that Vice President Dick Cheney has given his authorization for the military to shoot down hostile aircraft. The general, who was concerned about a suspicious aircraft that is presumably hijacked and is heading toward Washington, DC, recently called Barnes and asked for permission to shoot the plane down (see (Shortly Before 10:10 a.m.) September 11, 2001). In response to the request, Barnes went to the conference room in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center below the White House, told Cheney about the aircraft, and asked for authorization for the military to engage it. Cheney promptly gave his authorization (see (Between 10:10 a.m. and 10:18 a.m.) September 11, 2001). Barnes now gets back on the phone with the general at the Pentagon and passes on what he said. “The vice president has authorized you to engage confirmed terrorist aboard commercial aircraft,” he says. “I… made sure that [the general] understood that I had posed the question to the National Authority and the answer was in the affirmative,” he will later comment. “We made sure that we did not stutter or stumble because the emotion at that point was very, very high,” he will add. [Summers and Swan, 2011, pp. 141-142; Graff, 2019, pp. 164-165]