Demosophia

A Cautionary Note About 9-11 Commission Report

I've been saying for some time that the evidence that Atta met with IIS on the day in question was far from conclusive, and essentially not strong enough to reject the null hypothesis that no meeting took place. But a word of caution about the recently touted conclusions of the 9-11 Commission is probably in order:

First, the claim that Atta was in Florida, if based on cell phone records and ATM withdrawals, doesn't seem conclusive either. Now, bear in mind that I haven't read the report, and I'm only going on what I've heard on CNN, etc... but I can certainly loan my cell phone to someone, and unless the ATM withdrawal had a photo record, I can also give someone my PIN number and tell them to make a withdrawal.

Bottom line, unless there's a photo record that Atta was in Florida, or something equivalent to a photo record, we don't yet have conclusive evidence that he was here and not in Prague.

That does not mean that we can reject the null. We still assume that the meeting in Praque did not take place... because the consequences flowing from that assumption being in error are minimal.

Look, I really don't give a damn what the 9-11 Commission concludes. That's just an argument from authority, and I can make up my own mind looking at the evidence. Commission conclusions are notorious for being dominated by political considerations that don't flow from the evidence or from unbiased analysis. For instance, the conclusion of the Coleman Commission in summary was that resources available to black and white schools led to a disparate impact. However, the conclusion in the actual study was exactly the opposite, as anyone familiar with the history of education in America knows. The Commission deliberately misstated (actually reversed) the conclusion, because it was politically expedient to do so.

To this day no one has been able to disprove the Coleman conclusion that there is little evidence for a disparate impact based on the availability of school resources to predominantly black schools, and we've been researching this question for 40 years.

I suppose it's impossible to prevail upon the left to recognize the essential difference between an absence of evidence and evidence of absence, but the 9-11 commission statement below amounts to the former, and not the latter:

"We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States."

And note that they do NOT claim that there's any evidence whatsoever that, Saddam rebuffed the request for weapons and training-camp space. Here's the unvarnished status of what we currently know about a Saddam/Qaeda link:

We currently have insufficient evidence to falsify the null hypothesis that no operational link existed.

And that's it. It's not very sexy, is it?

What does the statement mean, and what doesn't it mean?

1. It does not mean that we know conclusively that no operational link existed, which is clearly what the left woud like it to mean. And they're apparently not above selling it as communicating such a meaning.

Nor, as far as I can tell from the coverage, has the 9-11 Commission made any statements about the Zarqawi/Saddam connection being invalid, nor has it made any statements about the training camps at Salmon Pak, or the VX connections in the Sudan leading to a production facility that Clinton bombed. (There is evidence of VX precursors in the soil.) It also says nothing about why Atta was in Prague on a number of occasions prior to the alledged meeting with IIS.

2. As I said above we have no proof, of any nature, that the request made by Al Qaeda for assistance was rebuffed. We can make that inference, because it's a component of the null hypothesis that has not been falsified... but that's vastly different from a claim that the null hypothesis has been proved.

Note that at least one of the pillars in the "incompatibility" argument has fallen. It has now been officially acknowledged that, at least from the perspective of al Qaeda, a collaboration between Totalitarianism 2.x and Totalitarianism 3.x was acceptable. This is compatible with statements Bin Laden made in his 1996 Declaration of War, that I've pointed to before on this blog.

I'm going to repeat this one more time, just in case anyone has missed it:

We currently have insufficient evidence to falsify the null hypothesis that no operational link existed between Al Qaeda and Saddam.

And that statement means exactly what it says, and nothing else.

Posted by Demosophist at June 17, 2004 03:08 PM | TrackBack