Reply #97: An Exceptional Post! [View All]

[Fainter]

Hamden, Jack's original post, and yours here, lay the foundation of a meaningful inquiry into 9/11. An investigation, like the law, has no majesty and is undeserving of our respect, if it is underpinned by what at best is a paradox and at worst a fraud. The way we come to know a thing is every bit as important as the thing we come to know.

MF's faith in the revelatory prowess of science is not misplaced, if enough hard data is known with certainty. But this is precisely the fault line between Truthers and Debunkers, isn't it? Do we have enough hard data about the fall of 7, and if we have enough, do we know it with enough certainty to answer the question what caused the collapse and who, if anyone, was responsible? Truthers remonstrate against both what they consider to be the paucity of hard evidence cited by the Debunkers, and the degree of certainty to which these data are known. The conclusions drawn by the Debunkers from the available data are increasingly viewed with suspicion because no attempt was made to collect dispositive evidence supporting a more obvious mechanism of collapse when the existence of collateral evidence supporting said mechanism was already well known by the appropriate investigatory bodies. The exclusion of all evidence tending toward the confirmation of an alternate explanation for the failure event was...deeply political.

When faced with such a conundrum, what is one to do? Exactly what Jack and Hamden have tried to do, which is to circumscribe the field of inquiry, and place an unsatisfactory forensic analysis in its likely context. Their approach does not attempt to tell us which truss failed (which is its chief appeal), nor must it pretend to know that which has long been unknowable, WHY the critical truss(es) failed. The firmness of the conclusion which OCTers wish to draw from the NIST report is wholly dependent on the exclusion of witness testimony and documentary evidence suggesting that explosives may have been used to bring 7 down and the related unwillingness to acknowledge the obvious point that the use of explosives accounts equally well for the "observed" damage to the concealed side, whether documented or modelled. It is inconceivable that NIST ruled out any serious consideration of the explosives hypothesis to explain the mysterious demise of the Salomon Brothers Building on a day during which myriad credible witnesses reported explosions in and around the towers and 7 itself. This alternate account is at least as compelling as NIST's which relies on an unlikely concatenation of events (debris, structural damage, cloud-borne ignition source, copious quantities of diesel fuel, fire, failure of key truss, global collapse) to explain the failure. Had the fascists won WWII, overweening counselors making such arguments would have been reproved by the law judges for "jackbootstrapping". When the "why" of this scenario is thrown into contention, "who" is waiting just outside the door, and "who" is reasonably, albeit not conclusively, known by the degree to which he stands to benefit from the event.