Failure to Become Well Known
In addition to all these facts, WTC 7 was a very big building, being 47 stories high and having a base about the size of a football field. Although it was dwarfed by the 110-story Twin Towers, it would have been the tallest building in half of the states in the nation. For all of these reasons, the collapse of this building should have become one of the best-known facts about 9/11. But it did not.
2. Widespread Ignorance about WTC 7
A Zogby poll in May 2006 found that 43 percent of the American people were unaware that WTC 7 had collapsed,21 and that same year, as mentioned earlier, Danny Jowenko of the Netherlands still did not know about it, even though controlled demolition was his field.
A dramatic example of the fact that this building's collapse has not been prominent in the public consciousness was provided in a New York City courtroom in September 2009. Judge Edward Lehner was hearing arguments about a petition sponsored by NYC CAN to allow residents to vote on whether New York City should have its own investigation of the World Trade Center attacks. After Judge Lehner had observed that the 9/11 Commission had carried out an investigation and issued a report, Dennis McMahon, a lawyer for NYC CAN, said that this report left many unanswered questions. "One of the biggest questions," he added, "is why did Building 7 come down" - at which point Judge Lehner asked: "Building what?" McMahon replied: "World Trade Center Seven. There were three buildings that came down." When the judge, continuing to illustrate his ignorance about this building, asked if it was owned by the Port Authority, McMahon replied that it was owned by Larry Silverstein. 22
Judge Lehner, it should be emphasized, was not simply an ordinary American citizen. Besides being a judge presiding in New York City, he had been assigned to a case involving the 9/11 attacks in this city. So his ignorance about this building was surprising. And yet it was typical. With his query - "Building what?" - he expressed the ignorance manifested in 2006 by controlled demolition expert Danny Jowenko and almost half of the American people. How can we account for this ignorance?
Abnormal Circumstances
In a New York Times story in November 2001, James Glanz wrote that the collapse of WTC 7 was "a mystery that under normal circumstances would probably have captured the attention of the city and the world."23 Clearly these were not normal circumstances.
Part of the abnormality was the fact that Building 7, while huge, was overshadowed by the Twin Towers, which were over twice as tall. This fact by itself, however, would not account for the enormous ignorance of this third building's collapse. Knowledgeable people had said right away, as Glanz pointed out, that there was a sense in which the collapse of Building 7 should have been the bigger story. Why was it not?
Deliberate Suppression
The answer seems to be that it was a deliberately suppressed story. This conclusion is supported by the following facts:
First, after 9/11 itself, our television networks played videos of the Twin Towers being hit by planes, then coming down, over and over, but the collapse of Building 7 was seldom if ever shown.
Second, when The 9/11 Commission Report was issued in 2004, it did not even mention that Building 7 came down.
Third, after NIST - the National Institute of Standards and Technology - took over from FEMA the task of explaining the destruction of the World Trade Center, it repeatedly delayed its report on WTC 7. In 2003, NIST said that this report would be issued along with its report on the Twin Towers, the draft of which was to appear in September 2004. 24 However, even though NIST's report on the Twin Towers did not actually appear until 2005, the promised report on WTC 7 was not included: NIST said that it would appear in 2006. But when August of 2006 came, NIST said: "It is anticipated that a draft report [on WTC 7] will be released by early 2007."25 But it was not released in 2007 - either early or late. Instead, NIST in December 2007 "projected" that it would release draft reports on July 8, 2008, followed by final reports on August 8, 2008. 26 Instead, the draft report did not appear until August, and the final report not until November of that year - when the Bush-Cheney administration was about to leave office.
Moreover, when in 2008 NIST was accused of having deliberately delayed its report on WTC 7 (which the 9/11 Truth Movement had long considered the "Achilles Heel" or "Smoking Gun" of the official account of 9/1127), NIST lied, saying that it had worked on this report only since 2005 and hence for only three years - the same length of time it had worked on its Twin Towers report. Actually, however, NIST had filed progress reports on WTC 7 in December 2002 and May 2003;28 in June 2004, it published an Interim Report on WTC 7;29 and in April 2005, NIST released another preliminary report on WTC 7. 30 Then, after ceasing work on this building until after the report on the Twin Towers was issued in October 2005, NIST reported, "the investigation of the WTC 7 collapse resumed."31 In truth, therefore, NIST had worked on its report on WTC 7 for almost six years, not merely three. So there was good reason to suspect that this report had been deliberately delayed for as long as possible.
3. NIST's Draft for Public Comment: Mystery Solved?
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