Awesome =)

I do apologize - CNN stated that 800,000 children go missing every year not 8 million - here's the link for that. And they only seem to give an explanation for 1/4th of that number.

OK. Those are old numbers. The numbers have been going down for about two decades. The latest numbers are about 450-500K.

But this big number does not mean 450,000 kids are kidnapped off the streets every year. This is every time a child is reported as missing, even if it's just for a few hours and the kid is found safe. The number of abductions is way, way smaller and the majority of kids being abducted is when a parent in the middle of a custody battles snatches the kids.

http://www.pollyklaas.org/about/national-child-kidnapping.html

Is this for the article or your own understanding about pizzagate?

By the way, the more I think about it, this is probably a great exercise in teaching journalism. You can probably easily get a month of lessons how trying to pin down how pizzagate started and what caused it to start: Sorting Fact from Rumor on the internet, chasing down evidence on ephemeral digital media, weighing claims of fact from anonymous screennames, libel law, etc. You could probably use these and more as an argument.

As to your questions I can answer them and even back up my answers, but I don't know how much that matters to your story. Does it matter what I know/believe?

As a journalist what do you know about those emails and what do you know to be true? In fact, what made you focus on those emails? Have you already made assumptions of fact?

There's a few different fields that try help us find out what is true. Journalism is one. Science is another. Law, Philosophy---particularly Logic is very helpful. In the courtroom when they often use the phrase, Assuming Facts Not in Evidence. For example a woman is found dead in a hotel room. At what time did you walk in and find her dead? is a valid question. At what time did you walk in and find her poisoned? has an assumption in it. If the prosecutor asked the second question, the defense lawyer made say *Objection, counselor is assuming facts not in evidence." This means he has to prove she was poisoned first before asking that question.

So it seems to me you have an assumption that coded language is being used. In science, you can say you have a hypothesis that code is being used and then try and prove or disprove it is in fact code. That might be hard to get to scientific certainly. You could use logic. Is there a rational explanation for the language they use? As an outsider, who doesn't know how these folks speak, it's hard to start from a place of certainty. The truth you don't know why they phrased this they way they did.

There's a common phrase about the burden of proof used in Skepticism: Great claims require great evidence meaning it's up to someone making a great claim to provide sufficient evidence for that claim to be taken seriously. If you walk in the house and tell me you've returned from the store, that's a hell of a lot more likely than if you walked and said you've returned from Antartica. In this case the burden of proof lies on those making the claim A. They were speaking in code. B. They have figured out which words are code and C. They know exactly how to decode those words.

By the way, you may want to look up Libel law and Libel Per Se. Only some states have Libel Per Se, but per se means the libel is so great they don't need to prove they were damaged and they win the case. It cuts out most of your defense and accusing someone of a crime is Libel Per Se. All it would require is them showing they have never been convicted of that crime and they would win the case and damages.