Live from the LP Convention: Who Planted Those Explosives in the Twin Towers, Anyway?

A bit after noon, Mary Ruwart held a punchy Q&A at the speaker's room at the back of the convention hall. She expressed a vision of compassionate libertarianism that could appeal to the left as well as the religious right; she also called Bob Barr an "unacceptable" choice because he attacked her age of consent passage from Short Answers to the Tough Questions (which she calls one of the "worst-written" things she's ever penned) on Glenn Beck's radio show. Some of the listeners (about 60 of them) were moved to tears and support for Ruwart, and Bob Barr made an apparent blunder by leading a brief, loud rally only a few yards away, before he marched to deliver his tokens for inclusion in tonight's debate. On the way over, Barr's supporters were heckled by radicals; one hummed the "Imperial March" from Star Wars.

Later I caught up with Andrew Ferguson and Mark Rand of Liberty, who'd conducted an interview with Ruwart. Her answer on why she signed the Libertarians for Justice pledge puzzled us. (That 1:30 minute answer is here.)

You know, when you have an attack or you have a crime, the thing that you do is take care of that site and protect it very carefully to deconstruct it, so you know exactly what happened. Our government did not do that on 9/11. What they did is they swept everything up, possibly for a legitimate reason; they didn't want to alarm the public, they wanted it to be erased as soon as possible.

The downside of that is that if we don't actually know what happened, how do we prevent it in the future? There's some evidence that there may have been some explosives involved in the demolition—some demolition involved in the buildings collapsing. If that were true, then we should know about that, because how did those explosives get there? What kind of things did the terrorists find out about our security that they learned in order to do that? Without knowing more, without deconstructing that site very carefully, we can't find that out.

So I do think we should have more investigation, because there's a lot of data floating out there that's been ignored by the official investigation and it's been brought up by a number of individuals that had access to that data, and that's something that is important to look at. So I believe we should go ahead, look at it for national security reasons, so we can prevent this in the future.

It sounded to me like Ruwart was making a rhetorical mistake. She didn't suggest that 9/11 was an inside job, just that controlled demolitions might have been part of the attack. Who knows who placed them? I found Ruwart again to get her to clear up the quote. What does she believe happened on 9/11?

I think we don't know because there are so many unanswered questions. That's why I think we should have investigated it as a forensic site. If I was the commander-in-chief that's exactly what I would have done, so we could prevent it in the future.

Who planted the explosives?

We have no idea at this point. How do we know? We don't have enough information. I'm a scientist—I don't like to jump to conclusions. And there's a lot of data left.

So, Ruwart's a skeptic. In the first (flawed) barometer of candidate support, she got 94 tokens for entrance into tonight's debate, tying Barr and Root. Ruwart had directed some surplus tokens to Steve Kubby, and Barr had passed some to Mike Gravel. The top seven candidates from my analysis of the LP field will all be debating.