I have been trying to argue on the Sam Harris.org forum that 9/11 Truthers shouldn't have the burden of proof placed on them to falsify the official story. This is a response I made on 1/23/08 to someone taking issue with my statement that we should assume we don't know how the airplanes were controlled, rather than accept the official story (prevailing opinion) that Muslim hijackers were in control.

My quote of this someone: "How do any of these things disprove the idea that the hijackers were responsible for the attack? Are the 9/11 commission and the CIA both holding secrets from us that could tell us what REALLY happened?"

My response:

This gets at the crux of my point. I’m saying I shouldn’t have the burden placed on me of needing to disprove the prevailing opinion. I’m instead pointing out the complete lack of standards applied to the original explanation. By standards, I’m referring to the concept of the accused being presumed innocent until proven guilty. Or, that it is necessary to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

What should an equivalent standard be when the accused are deceased, therefore have no opportunity to stand trial? I don’t know, maybe a statement of findings by appropriate government authorities that, over time, holds up as consistent with the bulk of pertinent evidence. (I’m really grasping here, since usually the matter is considered moot. But in this case, it isn’t as much the individuals by name that is important, but their ethnicity and religion. This makes it much more a symbolic accusation against a people, with no opportunity for rebuttal or defense.)

In this case, the idea that Muslim hijackers were responsible for the attack was put out to the world immediately by the authorities, followed up by the naming of 19 individuals by FBI Director Robert Mueller three days after the event. When it came out that 7 of those 19 people were still alive, Mueller acknowledged one week later, as reported by CNN, “…some of those behind last week’s terror attacks may have stolen the identification of other people.”

The FBI, and later, the 9/11 Commission, never felt it necessary to follow-up on these type of matters of false identity, or at least didn’t feel obligated to report such matters to the public. They instead took the tack of just ignoring questions that members of the public raised.

Hundreds of inconsistencies have been noted by 9/11 family members, 9/11 researchers, and the public, and have been raised as questions to the 9/11 Commission. The 9/11 Commission and the government have by and large been unresponsive.

A number of formal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have been submitted, with the responses clearly representing the absolute minimum in response legally possible. When these absolute minimum responses raise new issues of inconsistency, questions about these inconsistencies are met with the same steadfastness in the ignoring of questions.

With each of these refusals to explain these inconsistencies, and their general lack of standing behind their findings, I don’t see any reason why a reasonable person wouldn’t reject the overall explanation for the 9/11 events that was presented by government authorities. We should all be calling for a new, completely independent investigation of the 9/11 events.