Greetings Gautam,
Thank you for your response. I appreciate the level headed tone and
reasonable queries. And for giving this a much-needed new thread
label.
Conspiracies "theories", are just that until proven and are by
necessity vague to some depth. I am earnestly seeking answers and
clarity. I had trouble with the initial reports about the physical
causes of the collapse and indeed the follow-up NIST report repudiated
what my vague gut or churning subconscious had told me was wrong even
before I got into this in a serious way. So, in this regard I've
already had positive feedback justifying my skeptical line of query and
continue to raise others - particularly around WTC7. I am not alone.
I have no idea if your accomplished friend is in on anything. If I had
I would have directly said so. I wasn't trying to besmirch her, I was
pointing out many people accept a go-along-to-get-along mentality and
yet others find this quite handy for climbing the ladders of power.
It's called suck-up and a common trait across the ages. It was really
meant to highlight the later part of my letter concerning very real &
proven conspiracies our governments have committed against the people.
Although I will reserve final judgment, that statement was clumsily
worded in this regard. My apologies. May the insult never arrive.
Personally, I had never considered massive {in repurcussion} internal
conspiracies from within until I read Tom Clancy's "Red Storm Rising"
many years ago: facing an internal crisis a central soviet cabal
orchestrates an attack on the schoolchildren by terrorists as pretext
to hide other systemic failures by launching WWIII. Webster Tarply's
role in uncovering NATO intelligence behind the multiple false-flag
machine-gun terror attacks by "Reds" in Italy - and one such kidnapping
which killed a government minister is part of the Italian public
record. General Smedley "war is a racket" Butler was approached by a
cabal of wealthy industrialists who sought to overthrow Roosevelt in
the 1930's, but he refused and exposed them - with no action taken to
imprison them: this ought to inform your opinion of some timeless facts
about American power structures. Operation Northwoods was concocted by
American generals in the early 1960's to hijack planes and kill
Americans as pretext to inciting a Cuban invasion - Kennedy nixed it
and fired the perps.
I'm reminded of a saying Gore Vidal once said describing how things
have long worked in D.C., "I won't rat out your scheme, if you don't
rat out mine." Much mischief gets done all the time by our so-called
protector class. Why insist black hearted and aristo-minded people
could not possibly treat us as expendable chattel? Corporate execs do
it with predictable regularity via known bad products laced with
poisons or faulty designs or poor safety standards, all in the name of
their personal profit and institutional advancement. It's graph-able
by now to anyone working on their graduate thesis and one could almost
say its time-honored.
I am saying it appears very possible that it is indeed a high level
conspiracy. I merely hold the MIT studies mentioned under minor
suspicion in a box labeled To Be Followed Up and raise reasonable
questions a person should consider if their is indeed a cover up of
some nature. It gets placed in this category because of the amazing
number of connections to the hijackers, ObL family, and the finances of
this president, his family & the megabucks those around him garner -
figures who are indeed holding unprecedented power & unheard of levels
of secrecy over the government in this era. I think I'm being
reasonable in this light.
I have no doubt there was a massive explosion at the Pentagon, but what
it was is open to question. I'd like to know if your friend that close
to the impact actually saw the exact airline in question since almost
nothing remained, even a dent where the engines should have impacted -
let alone survived. A simple 3-6 clips showing the impact from
different vantage points would clear up the issue a great deal - the
absurd chunky digital frame or two fobbed off on us last year did
nothing to quiet the concerns and as I recall only raised the
temperature of discussion. Surely, you must wonder why this event is
still shrouded when it could be so easily dispensed with? The public
wonders, like it or not.
Like the three blind men feeling different parts of an elephant, we can
all take different measures of the same item before us. I do not doubt
your impressive credentials. I recognize your name from the NOVA
update to 9-11 last week. I also do not doubt your family pedigree and
the earnest deliberations you've had with them. I do know my own
training as an {admittedly non-practicing} architect and trust my
colleagues who did get their AIA certificates when they raise these
issues themselves, unbidden. Add in the curious eye witness
testimonies around just how events unfolded and something - admittedly
vague - smells horribly fetid to many of us.
OK, to answer your questions directly.
I subscribe to none of your assumptions about the nature of this
nefarious act:
1) No, I have no reason to think your actively & particularly involved
with covering up a heinous crime. I doubt you'd be writing this if you
were. I am sure your well meaning.
2) N/A
3) N/A
4) Idiots don't get multiple degrees, but it is true that people with
degrees can be fooled from real estate to oil gusher deals as easily as
a plumber. As I think about that statement I recall my own experience
watching people with doctorates that have been more naively trusting of
scam artists than day workers - it's in their assumptions that trip
people up as any magician could tell you. I have been stripping away
mine trying to get at the nub of a truth I never intended to search
for, but here I am.
Now, do you think you would be on that NOVA show -or- invited to these
government study meetings if you were making alternate-history noises?
This is what I refer to about the Bread & Who Butters It issue, but at
an indirect and subconscious way: you have to admit you have an
investment in this POV - for the many and good reasons you've
outlined. As an exercise, how long do you think you'd still be invited
to VIP symposia if you voiced strong disregard for the current
premises, get votes of confidence by decision makers for prominent
chairs or ever-more important panels {or documentaries}?
As a small personal aside, I was a defense contractor on 9-11 and had
an army officer tell me while striding across military grounds in
November 2001 that we are unequivocally going to invade Iraq when we'd
barely started the Afghanistan operations. I watched as this
administration proceed to bend all manner of reality and media and
intelligence for years to coerce this country into fulfilling their
private agendas and feel quite strongly that this pattern is typical
and consistent with the further theories around their motivations
behind 9-11 I've encountered or developed.
Most people disbelieve & dismiss the Smedley & Northwoods & NATO
false-flag type events out of hand as too distasteful to be real -
until they look them up. We've been taught that Machiavelli is the
exception when it's far more the rule in how the powerful conduct
themselves. That your family had this training and live an obviously
international professional life says you are from the upper echelons of
India and may well share the same attitudes I simplistically lump as
go-along-to-get-along. I don't mean this in a nasty way at all, but as
a factor of human nature that frames assumptions & colors judgment.
That you do not deign to visit the nitty gritty questions raised
doesn't help this assessment. I'm certainly open to a better
presentation and would hope you are willing to re-assess as well. Form
an empowered government panel AND invite a prominent critic or two to
sit with you through it all if you want to disarm all this.
Given government compartmentalization secrets can actually be kept a
very long time, and people made unwitting accomplices -or- hapless
dupes simply by performing the roles that are expected. It sounds like
from your history you can appreciate this at least on an intellectual
level even if you disagree with me on this instance. My sense is that
when you have an historically unprecedented number of security drills
and both Black & White hat teams {remember Able, and Able Danger are
two sides of the same coin} enacting their roles to test our systems
this is exactly the point where a well-placed and small group can
co-opt the vertical integration of our government and society to tweak
a minor point that results in a deadly outcome. This is the heart of
what those of us seriously {don't laugh, please} looking at the problem
have come to believe. Many of us have training in structures, in
building trades, in material sciences who have reasonable doubts about
the ever-changing official line and when you add in a surprising number
of colluding interests from the head of Pakistani ISI wiring Atta $100K
and meeting with Porter Goss in the AM on 9-11, the pilot training of
some of these hijackers on military grounds, or ex-CIA front orgs, or
even living with FBI informants, the amazing number of warnings that
went blithely unheeded by this administration, who shorted the stocks
that day... well, you follow up on these and it gets ever murkier. I
don't have the time or energy right here to exhaustively reiterate all
the Brin-L threads have already mentioned.
I would like a pleasant resolution to all this, but my unease only
grows. From my POV, the points I've raised recently don't get
addressed by figures closer to the issues - which does little to dispel
them. In fact, the nearsighted & narrowly focused professor or CYA
bureaucrat archetypes are an impediment here if you can't disarm the
admittedly wild speculation we sometimes see by lay people. Hopefully
you can look back at the links and discussions of these various
theorists and actually give them a listen - as I've looked over all the
official reports I can take in my wee head. If you seriously intend to
address the festering and growing public rumble over this issue, then
hold your nose and wade in - else be prepared for a lifetime of
questions and doubts. It's easy to waive a hand full of many fine
degrees, but you'll get little traction dispelling rumors when an air
of superiority or condescension is the aftertaste common folk have to
their questions. It's human nature.
I hope this clarifies my own position and gives you additional traction
on the topic outside your normal circles. This did nothing to inform
my own take on events, but I know that wasn't the point of your letter.
I hope we do reach a consensus, and I'd love a denouement that would
instill more faith that our leadership can keep us safe, but on this
and so many fronts {speaking as a former citizen of New Orleans} they
have been an abject failure.
To a more enlightened future,
- Jonathan { make sure you spell it right ;-) } Gibson -
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.formandfunction.com
On Sep 15, 2006, at 7:52 PM, Gautam Mukunda wrote:
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
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