I hope you will agree that whether or not the skepticism is warranted, this is a dangerous situation for our country. If the skepticism is unwarranted, allowing nearly half of our countrymen to harbor needless suspicions about possible lies and crimes at the highest levels of our government needlessly corrodes the trust on which a healthy polity must operate. And if, on the other hand, the skepticism is justified, and the American people have not been given the truth about the events of 9/11, then surely the future health of our polity would need the truth to be told and dealt with.
It is the fact that -either way-we need to solidify the truth and dispel the falsehoods that now leads me to wish to convene a debate between the strongest and most knowledgeable possible advocates on each side of the issue. And it is to ask your help in convening such a debate that I am approaching you now.
At present the two sides of the issue -those who support the 9/11 Commission Report as essentially valid and satisfactory and those who doubt its validity and believe it fails to explain the evidence satisfactorily-propound their positions separately, but never confront the other point of view directly. There has been no rigorous debate of the kind that would enable sound arguments to prevail over bogus arguments.
The debate I propose would be conducted in writing and via email, and posted publicly. I would like to have at least three good participants from each side, perhaps more, especially where specialized expertise is relevant. The place on which the debate would be posted would be my own website, www.NoneSoBlind.org. I would serve as a moderator, seeking only to help make sure that each side dealt responsibly with the questions and challenges from the other. I myself am uncertain about which side is the more right, and am interested solely in helping the truth to emerge.I will paste here a brief bio to introduce myself to you.
Would you be willing to participate in such a debate? And whether the answer to that is yes or no, can you recommend anyone else who you think might ably represent the 9/11 Commission Report in such a public forum?
I look forward to hearing back from you. And thank you for your consideration.
I sent out more than a dozen of these invitations, and the answer I received was completely consistent: absolute silence. Not a word of response from a single person.
What is one to make of such a failure to respond?
The sheer uniformity of the response suggests that some explicit policy to stonewall has been handed down from above. If some of the invitees had sent some sort of refusal while others had simply ignored the invitation, this inference about a general policy would be harder to draw. But when a substantive invitation like this elicits not a single word of response from more than a dozen people, it seems hard to believe that each recipient is making his own decision about how to respond.
Which leads to the question: why would there be such a policy of stonewalling?
If it were not for the Zogby poll results, one might imagine that the forces behind the Commission Report might have decided that the Report is so persuasive and valid that it can stand on its own, with no need for further defense, that the challengers are so off-the-wall that it would be a mistake to dignify their claims by bothering to refute them.
But in view of those poll results --cited in my invitation, of course-- showing that 42 % of the American public believes there's been a cover-up, and in view its being one of the Commission's responsibilities to produce a national consensus and leave the matter unresolved, this policy of not "dignifying" the skeptics seems unsupportable.
The committed challengers whom I invited offered a different explanation. The Commission, they maintained, knew that in a fair and rigorous debate the findings of their Report would be ripped to shreds. Thus they are stonewalling in order to avoid having the Report fully discredited in the eyes of the rest of the American public.
That explanation is plausible, and if it were true it would mean that the Commission failed to do BOTH aspects of the job it was supposedly charged with, i.e. that it had not only failed to produce the national consensus the country needed nor had provided the country with a valid account of the events of 9/11.
On that point --on whether the official version is basically valid or full of holes-- I remain uncertain, still wanting the kind of rigorous encounter of ideas that would enable non-experts like me to see which notions survive scrutiny and which do not.
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