"Could we have prevented in 100% certainty? I don't think anything is that certain. However, we would have had a very, very good chance for preventing it"
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The power move here is the careful refusal to grant “100% certainty” - and then the immediate pivot to a damning near-certainty. Edmonds speaks in the idiom of bureaucratic plausibility, where absolutes are career-ending and probability is the safest weapon. By conceding uncertainty up front, she inoculates herself against the predictable attack: you can’t prove a counterfactual. Then she tightens the vice: “a very, very good chance” suggests not a missed detail, but a missed system, something closer to negligence than bad luck.
The wording also betrays the environment she’s talking from. “Prevented it” is deliberately vague, a placeholder for an event too politically radioactive (and often legally sensitive) to name. That vagueness is not evasiveness so much as a signal: constraints are in play, clearances and gag orders hovering just offstage. The repetition - “very, very” - is the only emotional leak in an otherwise measured statement, the moment the professional mask slips and urgency shows through.
As a public servant, Edmonds isn’t selling outrage; she’s establishing credibility while indicting process. The subtext is institutional: agencies prefer deniability to accountability, and after catastrophe, the argument shifts from “what happened” to “what can be proven.” Her line refuses that retreat. It frames prevention not as fantasy but as a probability squandered, turning uncertainty into an accusation the system can’t comfortably audit away.
The wording also betrays the environment she’s talking from. “Prevented it” is deliberately vague, a placeholder for an event too politically radioactive (and often legally sensitive) to name. That vagueness is not evasiveness so much as a signal: constraints are in play, clearances and gag orders hovering just offstage. The repetition - “very, very” - is the only emotional leak in an otherwise measured statement, the moment the professional mask slips and urgency shows through.
As a public servant, Edmonds isn’t selling outrage; she’s establishing credibility while indicting process. The subtext is institutional: agencies prefer deniability to accountability, and after catastrophe, the argument shifts from “what happened” to “what can be proven.” Her line refuses that retreat. It frames prevention not as fantasy but as a probability squandered, turning uncertainty into an accusation the system can’t comfortably audit away.
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| Topic | Decision-Making |
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