Error Theory

TBogg has edited a comment thread to remove an important piece of evidence about the Memorial Project’s cover up of Islamic and terrorist memorializing features in the planned Flight 93 memorial. A historically important comment left by a consultant to the Memorial Project has been deleted.

INTERJECTION UPDATE: TBogg has posted an excuse for the deleted Flight 93 document, but the Wayback Machine says that he is not being honest. END INTERJECTION UPDATE.

In January 2006, I baited the TBogg leftists for insisting that it is perfectly okay to plant a giant Mecca oriented crescent on the Flight 93 crash site. TBogg's comment thread swelled to epic proportions and eventually yielded something more than the usual litany of moonbat excuses for not thinking straight. At the end of the thread, posted sometime in March or April of 2006, there appeared an extended comment, about 600 words long, posted anonymously, and written as a semi-formal evaluation of my January 2006 report to the Memorial Project.

I would later find out that this anonymous comment was the sole piece of written feedback on which the Memorial Project was basing its denial of Islamic features in the winning design. (Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, pp. 149-50.)

The Project only communicated snippets of the TBogg comment, so the fact that the whole thing had been posted online caught them by surprise, undermining their ability to control the story. In particular, the TBogg comment did not deny the Mecca orientation of the giant crescent. On the contrary, it acknowledged that the crescent at the center of the memorial is geometrically similar to a traditional mihrab (the Mecca-direction indicator around which every mosque is built), and offered a variety of excuses for why people should not be concerned about this similarity. (e.g. "[J]ust because something is 'similar to' something else, does not make it the 'same'.")


Dr. Kevin Jaques

Only in the last couple of weeks has the identity of the anonymous scholar who wrote the TBogg comment been learned. Last week’s blogburst about the Park Service's fraudlent internal investigation discusses a Memorial Project “White Paper” that identifies the TBogg commentator as Dr. Kevin Jaques, an Islamicist (a scholar of Islam), at the University of Indiana.

One of Dr. Jaques excuses for not being concerned about the half-mile wide Mecca-oriented crescent is that it is so much bigger than any other mihrab:

Thirdly, most mihrabs are small, rarely larger than the figure of a man, although some of the more ornamental ones can be larger, but nothing as large at the crescent found in the site design. It is unlikely that most Muslims would walk into the area of the circle/crescent and see a mihrab because it is well beyond their limit of experience. Again, just because it is similar does not make it the same.

You might recognize it as a giant crescent from an airplane like Flight 93 flying over head, but from the ground? Pshaw.


It’s too big to recognize!


TBogg deleted the Kevin Jaques comment from his comment thread

For most of 2007, the original TBogg comment thread has not been available, but TBogg now has it reposted, with one glaring omission: Dr. Jaques comment has been removed.

If you want to see what TBogg is posting now, the url for his 2006 "Lunacy abounds" post is http://tbogg.blogspot.com/2006/01/lunacy-abounds-nuts.html.

For posterity, here are copies of the original comment thread, as of 5/29/2006, with Dr. Jaques' comment intact at the end, and the comment thread repost, as of 12/3/2007, with Dr. Jaques' comment deleted.

A full discussion of what TBogg properly calls "the infamous comment thread" can be found in Chapter Eight of my Crescent of Betrayal book (download 3, pp 131-).

The question now for Mr. TBogg is why he deleted Kevin Jaques’ comment. Did he do it on his own, or did he do it at someone’s request? Did Dr. Jaques ask him to delete the comment? Did architect Paul Murdoch ask? Did someone in the Park Service ask?

Whether TBogg acted on his own or was prompted, it is obvious that he understood that he was deleting an important piece of evidence. Just the fact that he singled Jaques' comment out for deletion shows a conscious act of cover-up. Maybe he did not realize the full import of having the comment remain publicly available via its original source, but he certainly knew he was covering up something important.

What kind of blogger deletes a piece of evidence that he knows to be central to a high profile controversy? (Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo (R-CO) sent the Park Service a letter last month asking that crescent design be scrapped entirely.) This is very bad behavior.


Was TBogg’s comment thread originally removed in order to hide Jaques comment?

It was odd enough when the “infamous comment thread” first disappeared from TBogg's blog. What blogger removes anything famous from their blog? But at that time, there was no publicly available information that could have alerted TBogg to the significance of that last anonymous comment. The most likely explanation for the disappearance of the comment thread seemed to be that TBogg simply had a coding glitch, or maybe he is cheap enough to have been worried about bandwidth.

Now that the comment thread has been restored without the Jaques comment, it seems likely that the reason the comment thread came down in the first place was to hide the Jaques comment. The interesting thing about this scenario is that at the time the comment thread was removed (sometime between June 2006 and June 2007) the only way TBogg could have learned the importance of that last anonymous comment would have been through the internal investigation conducted by the Park Service in the spring and summer of 2006. No one else knew that the comment came from an advisor to the Memorial Project until July 2007 when I released the downloadable “Director’s Cut” version of my book. (Given the urgent public need to know, World Ahead Publishing graciously allowed me to make my then final draft available for free download until the print edition—still being updated—comes out in the first quarter of 2008.)

The TBogg comment thread was removed before the Director’s Cut release. (Noted in Crescent of Betrayal, download 3, at p. 131.) Chief Ranger Jill Hawk, who was conducting the investigation, would not tell me who wrote the anonymous TBogg comment, but I warned her to be suspicious. Given the overtly dishonest nature of its excuse making, I urged her to double check its provenance. She answered back that she had been able to get email confirmation of authorship.

This email communication with Jaques might well have alerted him to the faux pas he committed by posting his comment on the TBogg thread. Did he then contact TBogg and ask for the comment to be removed?

That would seem to be the most likely scenario. Others who were privy to the internal investigation could have also contacted TBogg, but there is no evidence for any other such route of transmission.

It is disturbing to think that TBogg would have acceded to any request to remove evidence about a possible enemy plot. He is fully aware of what I am claiming: that an al Qaeda sympathizing architect entered our open design competition with a plan to build a terrorist memorial mosque and won. Kevin Jaques' TBogg comment is crucial for understanding how such a plot could succeed, revealing the utter fraudulence of the internal investigation that should have detected any such plot. As the lone consultant to the Memorial Project on the crescent design, Jaques engaged in overtly dishonest excuse-making. And TBogg is willing to help him cover it up?

If TBogg has some other explanation for his deletions, the rest of us would sure like to hear it.


The fraudulent internal investigation

For more of Kevin Jaques' dishonest excuse-making, see last week's blogburst on the bogus internal investigation. Before the Park Service was done, it managed to round up two more academic frauds in addition to Kevin Jaques. There is Dr. Daniel Griffith, who claims there is no such thing as the direction to Mecca, and a third Mosqueteer still to be discussed. (Saving the worst for last.)

But Jaques is the central fraud, being the Memorial Project's sole source of feedback during a crucial period when its dismissive posture was set in stone. In addition to being an expert on sharia law, Jaques has also proved to be an expert at taqiyya.


UPDATE

TBogg has posted a reply. He says that he lost all his comment threads when he changed comment systems:

Sometime following that event, after I was done picking up the beer cans, cigarette butts, and the assorted discarded underwear, I switched from Blogspot comments to Haloscan. In the process, all of the previous comment threads were lost...

That prompted me to do some looking on Wayback Machine for what was deleted when (thanks to the first commenter for reminding me).

Turns out that the last Wayback copy of his Lunacy Abounds post that still has the comment thread (October 28, 2006), ALREADY has the Jaques comment deleted. That is, the Jaques comment was deleted before TBogg made the comment system change-over.

That looks bad, but with some further searching, I found that an innocent explanation is still possible. The Wayback copy from July 5th 2006 has the Jaques comment intact. Then on August 21st the whole comment thread is down. Then in October it is back up, without the Jaques comment at the end.

It is possible (and plenty plausible) that while TBogg was experimenting with changing over his comment system in August 2006, he used a backup from early March 2006 (before Jaques left his comment), and that is why the October 2006 thread and the currently posted thread lack the Jaques comment.

If this is what happened, well, it’s a good thing there is a Wayback Machine. But TBogg himself has not yet answered the question. He suggests the innocent explanation about the comment system switch-over, while adding:

So, yes. I have been busted. I've been getting more payoffs than Bill Bennett with a roll of nickels at Circus Circus. Between George Soros and Osama bin Laden I've received so many Miatas, that some of them are still sitting around in the blister packs.

Can we have a simple yes or no? Did TBogg intentionally take down the Jaques comment or didn’t he? And if he did, did he do it on his own or was he asked, and by whom?

Why do I have to ask this twice?


UPDATE II: Looks like TBogg is duping his readers

Upon further investigation, it is NOT plausible that the Jaques comment got chopped off by TBogg restoring his comment thread with an old back-up copy. It is not even possible. On all the Wayback Machine snapshots linked above, all of the comments are hosted by Blogger, not Holoscan, and Blogger does not have back-up and restore functions.

I was just looking into what us Blogger bloggers can do with comments, and we can only do three things. 1. We can open and close commenting. 2. We can hide or show comments. 3.) We can delete individual comments. People who leave comments also have the power to remove their own comments, so long as they were logged into blogger accounts when they left the comments.

Kevin Jaques posted his comment anonymously, so the only way it could have gotten deleted is if TBogg deleted it.

I also noticed that on the day when the TBogg comment thread shows up on Wayback as turned off (August 21, 2006) it is the only post of his that has the comments turned off. That obviously did not have anything to do with TBogg changing over from Blogger comments to Haloscan comments.

When TBogg temporarily turned the comment thread back on again (by October 28th, 2006) the Jaques comment is missing from the end of the thread. All still through the Blogger comment system. No Haloscan changeover had anything to do with any of this. (Did he ever actually change over. None of Wayback's snapshots say so, but they only have one link for 2007, and that won't open.)

TBoggs deception here is very Clintonesque. He does not actually lie to his readers. He never denies that he deleted the comment. Instead, he makes some noise about doing the comment system changeover, without ever claiming that the changeover was responsible for the disappearance of the Flight 93 evidence. Then he adds his: “I have been busted” statement, throwing in nonsense about taking money from George Soros so that no one would take his admission seriously.

Hey TBogglings. Looks like your mentor meant it when he said he was busted. Maybe he can come up with an innocuous explanation, but I sure don’t see how.


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