As a young lawyer, I had a mentor / boss who taught me an interesting lesson.
He told me, "Spike, when you're in court, if you've got the law on your side, argue the law; if you've got good facts, argue the facts; if you've got neither, pound like hell on the table!" His advice has proven, over the years, to be very good.
Applying that same reasoning to our current discussion, it is fairly obvious that there are some who are "pounding the table" here- or appear to be.
Noobie, I appreciate what you say about the records to trace the fuel back to the dinosaur whose timely demise made its existence possible, and ask: "Who cares?" The contention was that the fuel was unsafe, and the chemical analysis shows that it was not.
Now I, in my practice, have had many occasions when I hoped for an expert's report to come back and cast harsh light on the quality of a piece of work - and when the expert's analysis showed the work was sound, we had to retrench and find some other avenue to pursue (or, of course, we resolved the dispute, having found that the essential premise of our dispute, that the work was defectively-done, was false. In most such instances, however, the primary goal was a businesslike resolution of differences between two business entities.
In this instance, however, it strongly appears that the city's representatives have broadly different goals; they have already had their strong-armed effort to get rid of NBA rebuffed once, after a long and contentious court battle, the result of which was a binding judgment compelling them to renew the lease. That, my friends, is egg on your face, if you are among the cadre of public officials whose decisions led to the battle and the litigation in the first place.
So they thought about it, and decided to pursue a strategy of going after NBA on completely different grounds - "We'll say they're a public hazard!" And we find ourselves where we are.
Public offices and the power attendant thereto are heady stuff - many and many are the instances of stunning corruption, pursued in order to maintain or enhance that same corrupt official's power and privileges of office. If the battle to do so is costly, well, it's not their money anyway.
Dangerous fuel?
If the City truly believed that the fuel NBA had dispensed was dangerous (and this one is easy - they have presumably performed testing to determine the compliance of the fuel with the ASTM specs which define the fuel's required characteristics), the records confirming it would not be cloaked in darkness, they would be published for all to see, shining light on the evil deeds!
One last question we might ask ourselves: If the test results obtained by the City showed that unsafe or contaminated fuel had been dispensed, and if, as a result of that bad gas, an aircraft crashed or an engine was destroyed, would the city have liability for failure to warn. The answer, dear friends, is most assuredly, "Yes."
The gas is fine. The City hoped it would be otherwise, but their hopes were in vain. They are now scrambling to justify their ham-fisted efforts to avoid complying with the judgment of the District Court and renewing NBA's lease, and hoping against hope that they can get away from this tiger whose tail they have grasped, alive.
They are pounding the table.
And, from what I can tell, from what they are hiding, they will fail.
PUT UP OR SHUT UP.
