9/11 Link To Saudi Arabia Is Topic Of 28 Redacted Pages In Government Report; Congressmen Push For R

[AZCat]

286. I would hope the NIST's info is better quality.

They produce lots of research that is the basis for building safety. Their fire science is pretty darn good, for example, and I would think it to be a reasonable expectation that all their work be held to the same standard.

Honestly, who knows? There could be all sorts of reasons: the data got lost or corrupted and nobody wants to admit it; the data shows shoddy modelling techniques and the NIST is embarrassed to show they paid somebody for poor quality work; there's a political dimension that isn't apparent to any of us (Bush-era secrecy, possibly); they are afraid of a deluge of questions from people who are picking through their numbers and they don't think they have the resources to respond.

None of these are significant (other than losing the data - you probably can't recover from that) and shouldn't hold up the release, but again I don't think this changes anything. Anybody who wanted to check the NIST's work built their own models anyway, and that way you can reduce the likelihood that the other models replicate possible errors in the NIST models.