Reply #117: I think our problem is a different idea of the context of the discussion.

[eomer]

My original comment was that this statement implies a level of certainty that is not justified:

"The Bush administration neither orchestrated the attacks nor deliberately allowed them."

I think that the way you and I are out of sync on this has to do with context. Or, in other words, I think that there is a right time and place for speculating about what we don't know.

I worry that the goal of the excerpted statement is to foreclose discussions about something we don't know, and to do so by making it seem that we do know something that we don't.

So, if by defend the OCT you mean you will argue that we know for a fact that there was no inside job aspect of 9/11 and therefore no one should even discuss such a possibility, even when they make it clear that their discussion is speculative, then we disagree. But I get the feeling that we don't disagree. Rather, I think that we are applying two different understandings of the context of the discussion. You're discussing what we know, while I'm trying to have a discussion about what we don't. An impedance mismatch, if you will.