John Gibson wrote: I understand your acceptance. Interesting that your friend is well-placed and perhaps well-heeled - this actually fits a premise I'll go into later about people who know where their bread gets buttered. I'd really like to know just how these studies were funded, administered, who supplied their raw data and coordinated the results before accepting this - given so much else around the event is in question. It may well take serious scholarly work a decade or two to sift this out. If I have to eat old crow that is desiccated and moldy, so be it - are you equally prepared? -------------------------------- My response: Well, I left the list largely in response to this sort of thing, but against my better judgment, I have to reply to this one. I'll have four questions at the end, and I'd really like your answer to them. It's my friend you're slandering, after all. So, I notice that conspiracy theorists are often enthusiastic about in describing vague, overarching conspiracies, so it's worth taking this down to a concrete level. This isn't a "high levels of government" type conspiracy you're describing, after all, one just involving say, passive incompetence on the part of intelligence agencies or what not. You're suggesting that it's possible that the towers themselves were destroyed by something other than airplane impacts.
OK. So let's think about what that implies. On a personal level, I could put it this way. McKinsey was thanked publicly by Mayor Bloomberg for its analysis of the accident and the public safety response. I worked there, and while I wasn't part of that project, I did look at the results. If what you're positing did occur, we _should have_ noticed. You've mentioned that you don't believe the MIT study on the towers as well because you don't know who funded it. I'm a graduate student at MIT now, so there's another link. Finally, I have at least three close friends who were senior staff at the White House and Pentagon at the time of the attack (one of whose desks was 50 feet from the point of impact at the Pentagon, in fact), so they probably would have had to know too. On an even more personal level, my father is a structural engineer and has been for more than thirty years. We've talked about the attacks many, many times. If there was really something highly implausible about the way the attacks played out, he _should_ have noticed. My mother was trained as a nuclear physicist (in fact, she got her PhD at 22, making her surely one of the youngest people, and certainly one of the youngest women, ever to do so - and if you think that because she got it in India it's not a "real" PhD, I'd just point out that her professors were from MIT and CalTech, IIT Kanpur, where she got her degree, might be the most difficult school to get into in the world, and Richard Feynamn was there for the oral defense of her dissertation) who has spent the last 30 years doing safety analysis for NASA - and is good enough at it that she was one of the first people called to help with the Challenger investigation. So she certainly should have been able to tell if there was something wrong with the official explanation as well. Let's see. My friend on the 9/11 Commission was chosen to be senior staff on probably the most important investigation in history when she was in her mid-20s. After that she was accepted into, and is one of the best students at, MIT's Political Science program, certainly one of the 3 best programs anywhere in International Relations and Security Studies. Finally, people on the list know who I am. You can get my bio on the web by googling my name - it's the first thing that will come up. But I've spent a fair amount of my life studying organizations (particularly militaries) in crisis, and there's nothing strange or surprising about the way people behaved on 9/11 to me. So either my entire immediate family and a surprising proportion of my friends, and I, were all in on the conspiracy and thus guilty of the worst act of treason since Benedict Arnold or we are guilty of truly heroic levels of professional incompetence. I'd say, given the information above, there's at least a prima facie case that we're not incompetent. So I have to be either in on it, or a complete idiot. If what you believe is true, one of those has to be. So, John, my questions for you are really pretty simple. Given what I've written above: 1) Do you think I was part of the conspiracy, at least after the fact (I didn't have to be in on it beforehand)? 2) If you do, why? You've suggested that the people who believe the official story "know which side their bread is buttered on." OK - who's buttering my bread? 3) If you _don't_ believe I was in on it, that leaves two other possibilities. Do you think (as I described above) that a large proportion of my friends, family, and colleagues are all complicit in high treason and I just didn't twig to that? And if so, what's their motivation? 4) The other possibility, of course, is that all of us are idiots. I admit that this is a possibility. Do you have any particular evidence to suggest that this is the case? Best, Gautam Mukunda (make sure you spell it right when you do the Googling) Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
