That was a thought-provoking post, Pete, and - in keeping with the canine analogies - quite a bit of bone to chew on.

Boyd's article is certainly formidable, and although these ideas are not necessarily new to me, I don't have adequate command of these concepts to incorporate them in off-the-cuff comments. Instead I'll attempt to respond directly to the points and questions you've raised.

You wrote:

To say that we have eliminated the impossible implies that we know what is possible and impossible in the first place. I am not satisfied that this is the case.

Nor I.

Nor do I believe that Doyle's dictum is the only way, or even the best way to seek the truth. The point, I think, is that bad information (the impossible) cannot be factored in the equation, and must be tossed out.

What is more, the identification of bad information can itself be instructive, and too much of it is often an indicator that someone is trying to conceal the truth. I acknowledge that some information I have accepted may itself be bogus, and I'm always ready to synthesize new or corrected data with the admittedly vaguely defined working hypthosis I have in place.

You stated that you do not believe that the full story of 9/11 has been told, and again, I am in complete agreement, but I might go further than you in noting that some of what has been told is certainly difficult to accept at face value, and that includes "the dog that didn't bark."

I'm familiar with the story of the exploding camera used in Massoud's assassination on Sept. 9, and also with the outlines of the story about the camera crew of Middle Eastern men who arrived at Bush's motel the morning of 9/11.

The president's visit to the Booker school apparently had been in the planning stages since August, and was formally announced on Sept. 7. The arrival of the television news crew at Bush's motel that fateful day underscores the fact that the president's location was not a secret. Any person or group intent on doing the president harm would have had as much as a month to prepare, a reality which makes the events at Booker even harder to understand.

But I will readily concede the point I think you're making about the scant attention afforded this curious event.

You also wrote:

One must constantly compare observations to known patterns, and compare known patterns to observations. If one or the other is out of whack, there's a problem. The trick is to decide if the problem is with the information or if the problem is with the law/rule/impossible/"everybody knows that..."

The pattern I perceive for American involvement in wars and conflicts over the last century is subterfuge in casus belli, and it's difficult for me to ignore the murky outline of that spectre hovering over the ruins of 9/11, especially when one recalls that a few zealous American globalists had been promoting the argument that the realization of their goals might take decades in the absence of a new Pearl Harbor.

You asked about specific warnings of the 9/11 hijackings.

It has been reported that fairly specific warnings of such action were provided by foreign intelligence services. It has also been reported that new (6/1/01) procedures required the approval of Sec'y of Defense Rumsfeld to initiate intecepts against hijacked planes. I'm not in a position to verify the reliability of these reports. Prior to this reported change, it is my understanding there were well-established procedures for dealing rapidly with planes that were hijacked, off-course, in no-fly zones, or otherwise in violation of regulations, and they did not require the approval of anyone at Rumsefeld's level.

What exactly happened in the air defense realm on the morning of 9/11 remains unclear to me, but the end result was that interceptors did not arrive in time to take any effective action. In the face of numerous apparent warnings, indications and appreciations of the threat posed by skyjacked jetliners, the failure to stop any of these planes (with the possible exception of Flight 93) seems inexplicable to me, and the failure to stop Flight 77 almost impossible to believe.

In that context, Norman Mineta's testimony to the 911 Panel about his observations of Dick Cheney in a presidential command post is interesting, to say the least:

Mineta said he arrived at the Presidential Emergency Operating Center (PEOC) at 9:20 a.m. where he observed the Vice President taking charge:

Mineta: There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, "The plane is 50 miles out.The plane is 30 miles out." And when it got down to, "The plane is 10 miles out," the young man also said to the vice president, "Do the orders still stand?"

And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, "Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?" Well, at the time I didn't know what all that meant. And.

Hamilton: The flight you're referring to is the.

Mineta: The flight that came into the Pentagon.

After some discussion of whether Cheney's orders meant to shoot down the hijacked aircraft, it was clearly stated on the record that there were no such orders to do so, which raises the obvious question of what "the orders" were:

source

I refuse to believe that the Pentagon could not defend itself given the kind of warning Mineta's testimony makes apparent, and assuming that it can be taken at face value.

To backtrack a bit, I have been somewhat lazy and proabably a little remiss in relying on sources like Rivero (not Romero) for raw material, without making it clear that I don't necessarily agree with their conclusions. Nevertheless, I think the question raised by Rivero - and others - is a good one.

At this point, I'm not ready to draw any conclusions, but in digging through the wheat and chaff, I often detect the odor of a furtive rodent.

And finally, to turn the tables a bit, what do you think?

S