9/11 Loose change 2nd edition

If that's the truth, then who is really disrespecting the survivors? I share in the view that people should give pause before engaging in reckless speculation.

I guess. That's not evidence that I have the capability to evaluate. The challenge has been made, though, that the fire couldn't have heated the steel to the temperatures assumed in the structural tests.

I didn't say what happened, if you'll actually read my post. And I was fairly clear, I thought, when I said that I wasn't an engineer, and so I didn't have the expertise to evaluate the evidence.I don't think the WTC was leveled by explosives. I think it was leveled by terrorists on airplanes - with the full foreknowledge of top government officials. Somebody, after all, called San Francisco mayor Willie Brown and told him not to fly on that day, eight hours before the first plane hit. Somebody applied the pressure that meant that warning after warning about the attacks was ignored and dismissed. Somebody made $5 million dollars betting against United and American airlines on September 10th.Somebody scheduled four seperate wargames on the very same day, including one that simulated airplanes crashing into an NRO office. Somebody decided not to scramble interceptors for the subsequent hijacked airplanes. Somebody - Bush - made it absolutely clear that, given a tragedy to rally America around, he'd spend that capital on an invasion of Iraq. In the subsequent days Cheney told intelligence staff to search for any possible connection between Iraq and 9/11, even implying they should fabricate some.Those are the facts that I'm aware of, and an explanation that our government was unprepared and incompetent seems to me to be the explanation that multiplies complexites - they say that "9/11 changed everything", well, apparently it changed government officials who were such idiots that they couldn't see it coming into geniuses who were able to take advantage of the tragedy in almost every concievable way.

Conspiracies happen, TS. I mean, even the official report was that 9/11 was committed by a conspiracy - an Al Queda conspiracy. And if you don't believe that our own government can enact a conspiracy that results in the death of hundreds or thousands, read about the Tuskeegee experiment - or even the Iraq war itself. Sure. My position is that he knew he would be able to do that in advance, and rather than take active steps to prevent a tragedy, both ignored the evidence presented and interfered, when possible, with those prepared to investigate further.Otherwise we're looking at an improbable convergence of incompetence; an incompetence that suddenly evaporated afterwards when it came time to exploit a nation's tragedy. At what point, though, are there so many "apparent" coincidences that an explanation of random occurance is much less likely than conspiracy?

Don't write me off like a crank. I've taken the trouble to read your arguments, understand them, and respond appropriately. Is it such an enormous thing for you to afford me the same courtesy?I'm no "true believer". I've laid out the verified facts that don't fit the official story, under any circumstances. You can either try to rebut that reasoning, or not. But if you can't, don't try to pretend that your failiure is the result of my refusal to examine evidence with an open mind. The fact that you haven't even come close to offering anything convincing doesn't indicate some unbreachable wall of suspicion I've erected - 9/11 happened while I was a Bush-supporting Republican, after all. What it indicates is that your arguments are so impotent and poorly-sourced that you're too embarassed to even half-heartedly defend them.Run off with your tail between your legs, if you like. But at least return some of the respect I've shown you, and don't try to insultingly wave the victory flag while you do so.

Oh, right. I mean, how unreasonable of me. Presumably, when you encounter a woman standing over a dead man with two holes in his chest, a smoking gun in one of her hands and pictures of the dead man and his mistress in the other, you don't know what to think, right? Surely the facts that he's been shot and she's holding the smoking gun are just coincidences, right? I mean, god forbid you come to the conclusion that you've just stumbled on a murder motivated by jealousy, because that would be "reading the minds and motives of people based on time-proximate events", right?Of course that's what I'm doing. That's how we know what people's minds and motives are - by what they do and when they do it. How else would we arrive at the truth about what people do?

Oh, so now time-proximate coincidences do have some significance?When one person is murdered by a citizen, you call the police. Who do you call when the man who may have murdered 3000 people is the man every police officer works for?

Sure. On the other hand, a lot of this stuff was invented out of whole cloth by a nationwide organization dedicated to the destruction of the Clinton presidency at all costs. Kenneth Starr investigated the Foster death, and if that guy concluded that it was a suicide, wouldn't he be the first person to sieze on any credible evidence that the official story was a cover-up?Ron Brown? Died in a plane crash during a difficult instrument landing in inclement weather. If that was murder, then Paul Wellstone was murdered, too. Waco? If you're talking about the flame-throwing tanks, that's not a jet of flame - that's a piece of sheetrock falling off the front of the APC.I'm no Clinton defender - in fact I wish I hadn't been such a Clinton foe, because it carried over to voting against Gore in 2000 - but most of these theories don't seem to hold any water. There's not a very compelling interest for the Clintons in most of them.

Are you under the mistaken impression that they have the Constitutional authority to arrest, detain, and investigate the president?

Nominally. The police are an arm of the executive branch; the President is the Chief Executive. I'm pretty sure that's not the case. Moreover, they don't possess the legal tools to circumvent the President's determination of which of his actions are state secrets, so they wouldn't even be able to begin an investigation of his activites, legal or not.But maybe you can advance a legal theory that contradicts me? What presidents have ever been arrested by capitol police?

Not really. Most of the "unanswered questions" involved in the "Clinton Mysteries" (lol) are just falsehood promulgated by the Arkansas Project.

Er, I think you misunderstood something. Where have I impled that the President is not subject to the law?The problem is, he's in the unique position of being able to determine what information the police are allowed to have. It's certainly possible for the President to commit a crime. But how would the police investigate such a crime when the President can simply not allow them to do so? How would a case against the President be made when the President can, by himself, effectively quash any search warrant or subpoena?

Not royal, realistic. Your average beat cop, or even your average district attourney, doesn't have the authority to, say, subpoena classified documents, or compel the testimony of the President.And it's probably good that they don't. Can you imagine how our government would be paralyzed if they did? Could the president ever get anything done if his testimony was being subpoenaed in every court in the country?