Riddle Me This (Part One)

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit - Bob Dylan

It may be that there are no stupid questions - though I wouldn't bet on it - but some questions are smarter than others.

Like the questions Peter Dale Scott asks. It's the quality of his decades-long inquiry into Washington's culture of conspiration - what he's called the "collusive mentality" of power and crime - that make his investigations so compelling. Because Scott knows the context and back-story to an event such as 9/11, he can see the threads of secret history rather than the apparent and disconnected anomalies of, say, Dylan Avery, and so he knows which questions need asking in order to deepen our comprehension of our time's covert narrative. And a smart question can accomplish this even when it remains unanswered.

For instance, Scott's presentation last February 25th before Arizona's 9/11 Accountability Conference, in which he examines the contradicting timelines for Dick Cheney's whereabouts between the second attack on the towers and the Pentagon strike. And of course, at the heart of this, though not standing alone, is former Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta's testimony of finding Cheney in charge at the Presidential Emergency Operations Center at 9:20, and Cheney's notorious "Of course the orders still stand!" exchange with an anxious young aid counting down Flight 77's distance from the Pentagon, who was evidently second guessing some astonishing command of the Vice President's.

Mineta's assumption that this was an order to shoot down a civilian aircraft doesn't accord with any of the accounts of when authorization for a shoot-down was given. That his testimony was an awkward fit is evident by its exclusion from the 9/11 Commission Report. That its dissemination was unwelcome is suggested by Mineta's abrupt and poorly-explained resignation the morning after Jim Fetzer aired it on Fox News.

Stupid questions aside, Fetzer has provided many stupid answers in the application of his curious conspiracy science. From moon hoax advocacy to a faked Zapruder film to beam weaponry at the twin towers, he couldn't be more injurious to a cause if he tried, so perhaps it doesn't matter whether or not he actually has been. But Fetzer that day raised an excellent question, one that tapped into the deep politics of the day and names names, but relevance was soon lost again in his bloviating noise of exotic weaponry and rococo hoaxes; subjects which lead not to justice, but only to hermetic and picayune circle jerks.

Truth's only agenda and advocacy should be itself, but we'll always bring our own agendas to it however benign and well-intentioned they may be. A true Truth Movement should care only about getting things right, but we also, and rightly, want to see indictments against high state criminals. Yet getting things right doesn't mean sexing-up the evidence in order to make a damning case more dramatic, which has been the fast and loose course of Dylan Avery.

This presents a serious problem, both for justice and for truth, as Nietzsche suggested in The Gay Science when he wrote that "the most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments." And it entails a bit of schizophrenia for 9/11 Truth, which presumes to play both prosecutor and judge; saying on the one hand that we're only asking questions, while on the other offering up a superfluity of contradictory and clumsy answers.

For the most part, I find the questions more penetrating than the alleged answers, some of which are to questions that don't even exist in their own right.