Let me put it this way

I've been surprised by some of the reaction to The Guns of 9/11. My point, I thought, was modest and uncontentious: the case for conspiracy should be led by the strongest material and with the least amount of speculation. I suggested that the weakest evidence, as it is the most subject to interpretation, is the physical. "Enough happened that is beyond reasonable dispute," I wrote. "We shouldn't let our conjecture about how it happened dominate the argument. Even if it's well-founded." As examples of stronger material, I suggested such things as the movement of wealth, the coincident war games, and the Florida flight schools. And there is much more.

Charles Shaw wrote:

Although your “Coincidence Theorist’s Guide” is one of the most brilliant things on 9/11 I have as yet read, I am absolutely flummoxed by the obtuseness and spinelessness of “The Guns of 9/11”. Are you trying to sabotage our movement? Or have you just completely lost your moxie? If you are not part of the solution, you are merely another part of the problem. If that is in fact the case, do us all a favor and get the hell out of the way.

Charles, you're not the first I've flummoxed with obtuseness, so here's another stab at clarity. And while I'm glad you appreciate the "Coincidence Theorist's Guide", I wrote in "Guns" that I intentionally omitted from the Guide issues of physical evidence because I didn't want to dilute its argument. So if you think I didn't have moxie last week, maybe I didn't have it last August, either.

And perhaps I should repeat here something I wrote last September about the "9/11 Truth Movement":

"As my quotation marks hopefully suggest, I don't exactly embrace the term. Truth, especially with a capital "T," is elusive at the best of times, and these aren't they. We ought, rather, to be 9/11 skeptics, of not only the official story but also the competing narratives, because if we abandon critical thought and lapse into solipsistic dogma, we become nothing but evangelizing priests of a conspiracist cult. (And if that happens, then my wife is going to say 'I told you so.')"

My fear for the "9/11 Truth Movement" is that it is making the same missteps the Kennedy assassination researchers made 40 years ago when there was still a chance for something like justice.

Philadelphia lawyer Vincent Salandria was one of the earliest and best critics of the Warren Commission. Immediately after its Report was issued, he wrote a highly detailed critique for The Legal Intelligencer analyzing how the trajectories and ballistics were all wrong. In 1975, as Gaeton Fonzi was preparing for work as a government investigator on the staff of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he visited Salandria, whom he found dejected about the fruits of a dozen years of research.

Fonzi quotes Salandria in his important book, The Last Investigation:

I'm afraid we were misled. All the critics, myself included, were misled very early. I see that now. We spent too much time and effort microanalyzing the details of the assassination when all the time it was obvious, it was blatantly obvious that it was a conspiracy. Don't you think the men who killed Kennedy had the means to do it in the most sophisticated and subtle way? They chose not to. Instead, they picked the shooting gallery that was Dealey Plaza and did it in the most barbarous and openly arrogant manner. The cover story was transparent and designed not to hold, to fall apart at the slightest scrutiny. The forces that killed Kennedy wanted the message clear: "We are in control and no one not the President, nor Congress, nor any elected official - no one can do anything about it." It was a message to the people that their government was powerless. And the people eventually got the message....

The tyranny of power is here. Current events tell us that those who killed Kennedy can only perpetuate their power by promoting social upheaval both at home and abroad. And that will lead not to revolution but repression. I suggest to you that the interests of those who killed Kennedy now transcend national boundaries and national priorities. No doubt we are dealing now with an international conspiracy. We must face that fact - and not waste any more time microanalyzing the evidence. That's exactly what they want us to do. They have kept us busy for so long. And I will bet that is what will happen to you. They'll keep you very, very busy and, eventually, they'll wear you down.

Microanalyzing keeps us busy. Meanwhile, they get away with it, again. 9/11 is a crime, and as I've said, crimes are not in the end How Done Its, they are Who Done Its. And if we are ever to reach the end, which is justice, then we had better get it through our heads that knowing the mechanics of their magic doesn't get us there.

Consider the superior studies of 9/11. Michael Ruppert's Crossing the Rubicon takes the form of the case for the prosecution, and Daniel Hopsicker's Welcome to Terrorland regards Florida as a crime scene. Neither touch the physical evidence.

Here's Ruppert, writing in the Fall of 2003, in The Kennedys, Physical Evidence, and 9/11:

To those with long-suffering sacrifice in the field of assassination research, the fortieth anniversary of the death of JFK must seem like a bad dream that has finally ended. There are many lessons from the barrage of JFK anniversary programming, from JFK's death itself, and from the murder of his brother Robert, which show that physical evidence - as obvious and as glaring as it might be - has never before succeeded in overturning an established government lie in the minds of the people. That awareness was with me on 9/11 and it remains validated by experience in the post-9/11 world.

Once I knew the meaning of Kennedy's murder, it no longer mattered to me how many gunmen there were, or from where they pulled their triggers. I knew who paid for the bullets.

Once I knew the meaning of the falling towers, it no longer mattered to me how they fell. I knew who paid for that, too.