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Like I said, if they're willing to say "I don't know" and leave it at that, I'll be perfectly willing to wait for the engineers to figure it out. Until then, the more they try to spin me, the more suspicious I get.

I don't see any "spin" going on at all. I also see nothing of value to the Government in a cover up. However; I have seen some on this forum stating that the Government would blame future incidents on terrorism to expand even further their "police state". When you have a conspiracy theory for all occasions the credibility problem is NOT with the government it is with the conspiracy industry.

Monday Nov. 12, 2001; 11:34 p.m. EST Former NTSB Official Doubts Accident Caused Flt. 587 Crash Aviation expert and former National Transportation & Safety Board official Vernon Grose said late Monday that he's increasingly skeptical that the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 was purely accidental. "I am backing away from the ready idea that this is simply an accident," Grose told Fox News Channel's John Scott. The veteran air crash prober said that he questions the sequence in which the plane broke up over Jamaica Bay before slamming into a residential area in Rockaway, Queens. "Photographs you've already shown tonight (indicate) the vertical stabilizer of the aircraft with the American Airlines insignia right on it (fell into) Jamaica Bay long before the engine falls off in Queens," he told Scott. Grose said that if the vertical stabilizer detached from Flt. 587 over Jamaica Bay, which the plane traversed before plummeting to the ground in Rockaway, it suggested that catastrophic engine failure alone may not have caused the crash. "No, I don't think that's the situation at all," he told FNC. "The engine that came free, which apparently was the number 1 left engine, and crashed on land. That was well after the vertical stabilizer was detached from the aircraft and that tells me that somehow..... the airplane was progressively disintegrating, not just losing an engine and then diving into the ground." "Earlier today I thought it was simply the loss of an engine that caused this," Grose said. "But I'm not convinced now.... I am becoming more skeptical."

Yeah, I've seen a lot of stupid stuff on this forum too, and I don't go along with it, but I think the truth is that the government simply doesn't know, and they aren't simply willing to state that, and leave it at that. They're trying to reassure people, to get them not to panic, and the more they try to reassure me, the more angry it makes me. I WATCHED Ari Fleischer yesterday-- he was almost AVUNCULAR. I just wish they would stop sending politicians out to talk to us, and send the engineers instead.

Interestingly, neither of you dealt with the logical aspects of my argument. Unarguable, isn't it? Exactly what sorts of assumptions should we start with, in this world, or should we start with ANY assumptions? (BTW, if Ari or anyone else had evidence of mechanical failure, they certainly didn't present it.) It also bothers me that I haven't read anywhere which parts of the plane fell where, and they surely know that by now. So, why the wait? It doesn't require them to draw conclusions-- just to present data. So why don't they? Well, they don't want to WORRY people, to fuel SPECULATION.

Look, I think the Bush people will tell us the truth-- eventually. But I do think they are trying to manage the timing of the process and the message, and I think the American people deserve the straight truth, whatever that is, with no spin. When they know a fact, they should say so. When they don't know, they should likewise say so.

When I stop to think more carefully about WHY they might be managing the message, it pretty clearly looks like a psychological game to me. Why were the attacks of 9/11 so devastating? Because there was no separation time between the impact of the effect and the realization of the cause. On the other hand, had there been any doubt, if it could have been possible that some natural cause, or some mechanical problem happened, the impact on America's psyche would have been muted. With approval ratings for the war running 90%, the only possible impact of more terrorist attacks is purely negative-- for the economy, for public perception of government effectiveness, in every way. So, if the government can leave everyone with an initial impression of "probably an accident", and drag out the investigation for a few months or even weeks, it's a win for them. In fact, in that case, a good portion of the American public will never have a clear idea what caused the crash.