Matt Renner | FBI's 9/11 Saudi Flight Documents Released

This will probably get some comment. I'm in no position to judge. Here's the link.
Matt Renner | FBI's 9/11 Saudi Flight Documents Released:

Editor's Comment: Yesterday, CNN's Wolf Blitzer asserted the FBI documents released to Judicial Watch were generating conspiracy theories; an FBI spokesman appearing on the show agreed. Our editors have reviewed the documents carefully and feel that they are newsworthy. It's also worth noting that while the FBI now maintains that there is 'nothing new and nothing significant in these documents,' the FBI fought a protracted legal battle with Judicial Watch to keep them from bringing the documents to public view. TO/ma

Also see below:
FBI Documents

FBI's 9/11 Saudi Flight Documents Released
By Matt Renner
t r u t h o u t | Report

Friday 22 June 2007

Newly released documents reveal the FBI suspected that a plane hired to transport members of the bin Laden family from the United States back to Saudi Arabia might have been chartered by Osama bin Laden himself. The documents raise new questions about the FBI investigation into the 9/11 attacks.

Truthout reviewed the 224 pages of newly released documents over the past two days.

A heavily redacted FBI report on the incident begins by describing a private jet that was hired to pick up members of the bin Laden family that were in the US eight days after the 9/11 attacks. 'The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian Royal Family or Osama bin Laden," according to the declassified pages of the FBI investigation titled PENTTBOMB (page 3).

Subsequent references to the chartered flight in the released documents state that it was "chartered by the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, DC" (page 106). The possibility that the flight was arranged or paid for by Osama bin Laden was not addressed again in the subsequent 221 pages released by the FBI.

Some Fish tonight?

Stanley Fish - Think Again - New York Times Blog:

I should not be faulted, however, for maintaining that “there are no facts” or for declaring that “reality is subjective” or for “giving up the search for truth” or for saying that “there is no shared truth let alone an absolute truth.” I did not say and would never say those things. In most if not all cases there is certainly a fact of the matter, but just what it is will be worked out within the vocabularies or “dimensions of assessment” (J. L. Austin’s term in “How To Do Things With Words”) that at once limit and enable what we can see and say. And if two accounts of the fact of the matter are in competition, there is no algorithm or decision procedure independent of any dimension of assessment whatsoever that will tell us which is the correct one.

And as for reality, it is not subjective (a word I never use); it is out there prior to any of our efforts to describe it. But what we know of it (a knowledge constantly changing as our descriptive vocabularies change) will only be known through the medium of our descriptions; and disputes about it will be disputes about the adequacy of different ways of describing, again without the possibility of something that is not a challengeable mode of description settling the dispute once and for all. And the search for truth? It is the business we all should be in, but it is a line of work that can only be pursued within the linguistic and technical resource history affords us. There is an absolute truth, but short of achieving a point of view that is not a point of view–achieving, that is, godhead – it cannot be absolutely known.

The bottom line is that it is no contradiction at all to assert the firm existence of fact, truth and reality and yet maintain that they can only be known within the human, limited vocabularies we have built in the endless effort to get things right. Truth claims are universal, but their justification and elaboration take place in time and within revisable, contingent discursive structures.

The Gonzales Watch (somewhat half- heartedly): FBI agent told to keep quiet

From Yahoo! News::

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - An FBI agent was warned to keep quiet about the dismissal of a U.S. attorney after he told a newspaper her firing would hurt the agency's ongoing investigations and speculated politics was involved, a U.S. Senate panel heard on Tuesday.

FBI Director Robert Mueller defended the handling of the incident, saying: 'I do not believe it's appropriate for our special agents in charge to comment to the media on personnel decisions that are made by the Department of Justice.'

'I profoundly disagree,' replied Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, who told the panel of the warning to the agent. 'He (the agent) was simply saying that it would affect cases that were ongoing. And I think he's entitled to his opinion.'

Sounds kinda' like saying (with lots of brass beside you, and all around you) that you're following the advice of your generals, but ordering them to stay silent, but publicly visible and on display when they disagree. (Actually, it seems to come with military culture, without the need for potentially embarrassing direct orders. Very convenient.) All in the chain of command! Great PR for government work, when you can get it.

Nothing quite like a well-informed deliberative democracy in full flight. I wonder what that might look like?

Thanks to Truthout for helping me find this one. They need, and deserve, our support. And if more of us contributed, maybe they wouldn't have to beg quite so often.