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Edited on Thu Feb-19-09 09:56 PM by sofa king
I did a lot of research, trying to get overlooked Indian tribes federally recognized. The feds realized that the easiest way to prevent a tribe from being recognized was to hide and/or destroy historical documents, so they adopted a standard of evidence called "reasonable likelihood."
There are many standards of evidence: "beyond a shadow of a doubt" theoretically means 100% certainty; "preponderance of evidence" usually means 51% certainty. Astronomers have their own standards based entirely on passive observation, while most other scientific disciplines rely heavily on hypothesis confirmed by experiment.
"Reasonable likelihood," on the other hand, deals with evidence which has been tainted, destroyed, or otherwise compromised, often intentionally. It is sometimes also weighted in favor of the side getting screwed--all ties go to the Indians, in my old line of work.
I spent years fighting Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who is sure to become DU's best boy when he tries to unseat Joe Lieberman. The state of Connecticut is still absurdly racist, doesn't like Indians and sure as hell won't tolerate the existence of more tribes in the state. So they fought, and won.
Blumenthal's approach was multifold, but two of the approaches he took are worthy of comparison to 9/11.
First, any documents which could conceivably help the cases of petitioning tribes were quietly removed from the Connecticut Archives so that researchers like me couldn't use them, and when it came time to submit those documents for review (after most of our arguments were made) they were remarkably thin. On at least one occasion, I found copies of important documents in our file which the state claims never to have seen.
This is exactly the same tactic the federal government used when they slapped "Classified" labels on anything which might possibly tell investigators what happened, while no doubt also destroying evidence and hiding other documents far away where they will never be seen while they are relevant.
Second, they fought bitterly against the "reasonable likelihood" standard itself, trying hard to impose a "preponderance of evidence" standard instead, and eventually succeeding in throwing some of the cases into the courts, where those more stringent standards will be applied. They were fighting the standard while they were applying the exact same practices which required institution of that standard in the first place. There are plenty of goalpost-movers right here who do the same thing, every day.
The Bush Administration used a similar tactic to protect themselves, deftly arguing in favor of incompetence. If they were truly incompetent, they would have fucked that up, too. Instead, they sold it everywhere, expertly, while simultaneously pushing a legislative and executive agenda that must have taken years of planning to formulate, yet Jack Abramoff was shopping a draft Homeland Security bill around Washington within a few weeks of the attacks.
Neither of those strategies worked for Connecticut, and two tribes were in fact recognized by the Office of Federal Acknowledgment, in part because the state's devious actions were considered evidence in favor of the existence of the tribes--why fight so hard to cover something up if there's nothing to cover? States don't generally commit crimes unless there's something in it for them, and in this case, it's two less casinos.
So, someone called Haley Barbour and his lobbying firm, who cozied up to the gangsters in the White House, and they cooked up a bullshit decision on appeal which forced the cases into the courts, where the tribes will spend years and then eventually lose. Their land will be stolen from them, and they will be de-tribalized.
The point of all this is that when you see an operation like stacking the 9/11 Commission with "reliable men," the safe bet--especially when your children and your freedom rely upon it--is that the bastards are guilty as hell. You can't "prove" it, because the people who want to fuck you up control the evidence and don't wish you to prove it, except by taking note of who benefits from the crime.
I think there is a reasonable likelihood that elements of the federal government were well aware of the impending attacks of 9/11, stepped out of the way, and then busted their asses to cover it up so that their complicity and their plans would never be revealed to the extent that they could be punished for it. I can't prove that, because they deliberately acted exactly as one would expect complicit criminals to act. But I can use those actions as evidence of criminal behavior, and so I do.
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