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I think the point is to deflect the negative attention from him to a more deserving person. Heh silentsoul?

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I'm fuckin outta here! 4/5/04

no, I simply had the target lying around. I decided to go shooting today. I decided to post it, no point or anything.

Silentsoul,

I am cynical about your poltical leaders and Australias.

I just cannot have a bar of your theory on this.

Bush may be a bit of a nut but I think he is an american who wants his country to be safe.

There's a latin phrase, "cui bono?" or literally "who benefits?" that is probably one of the most mis-used concepts in the legal profession.

The idea is that you find the person who benefitted most from a crime....and that person, straight off, must be your primary suspect.

The problem with it tends to be that people benefit from things in very different ways. Moreover, what one person percieves as a small benefit may actually have been a very LARGE benefit to someone else. It leads both to incorrect suspicion of people who turn out to be innocent and a presumption of innocence for others who turn out to be guilty.

The REASON it's a poor standard to apply (either legally or to the rest of the world) is that it leads to ciruclar reasoning. The outcome was X, therefore Y must have been behind it. What evidence exists to prove Y did it? Ah, there is some, so the argument is proved. There's no place in that sort of reasoning structure for weighing positive against negative evidence....and letting that tell you, in the end, who must have done it. The conclusion drives the investigation.

It's also an argument structure that's seen a lot in conspiracy theories. It rarely leads to truth, and frequently to what scientists call "data dredging"....picking through the evidence for the few little bits that support your argument, while ignoring the 800 things that you dismissed along the way. It's not necessarily a wrong answer...but it's a very very weak one.

While I happen to agree that Bush and Co. were disgustingly opportunistic in the aftermath of 9/11 (a discussion for another time and place...if at all)....the fact that they benefitted politically or economically (if they did) is not actually evidence of their guilt. What didn't happen is only rarely evidence, and it's always the very weakest sort. Here, there are so many ways to retell the story....it's just not helpful if you're curious about what really happened.

I'm not saying all this to tell you you're wrong, SS. It's just that because you mentioned that your perspective into the world makes you more likely to believe conspiracy theories, I thought you might be interested in another way of looking at them. Maybe if you recognize the weaker forms of argument usually used to put these things forward....it might help you form stronger ones, even if it doesn't change your opinion.

Ok, what if someone so powerful, they could cover something up, even as big as this, to the point of the only evidence that remains is simply circumstantial yet surrounded by an overwhelming number of obvious facts.

What I'm saying is tactically, the best crime is a crime that no one would ever even think of as a crime. You know the whole "the best crime the devil ever commited was making the world think he didn't exist" thing.

I'm just presenting this as no more than a possibility. I'm not saying this is was happened, I'm not saying it's not, that's why it's called a conspiracy theory. Please don't think I'm nuts (even though I am, but that's beside the point) because I'm presenting a possibility.