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?
Be that as it may, when the Draft for Public Comment did finally appear in August 2008, it was announced at a press conference with much bravado. Shyam Sunder, NIST’s lead investigator for its World Trade Center projects, said:
“Our take-home message today is that the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery. WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fueled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives.”32
The mainstream media for the most part simply repeated Sunder’s claims. For example, an Associated Press story entitled “Report: Fire, Not Bombs, Leveled WTC 7 Building,” began by saying: “Federal investigators said Thursday they have solved a mystery of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks: the collapse of World Trade Center building 7, a source of long-running conspiracy theories.” Then, after reinforcing this message by quoting Sunder’s assurance that “the reason for the collapse of World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery,” this story concluded by quoting his claim that the science behind NIST’s findings is “incredibly conclusive,” so that “[t]he public should really recognize that science is really behind what we have said.”33
Reporters, however, could easily have discovered that this was not so. They could have seen, in fact, that NIST’s WTC 7 report repeatedly committed scientific fraud in the technical sense, as defined by the National Science Foundation.
4. NIST’s Falsification of Evidence
One type of fraud is falsification, which includes “omitting data.”34 While claiming that it “found no evidence of a . . . controlled demolition event,”35 NIST simply omitted an enormous amount of evidencefor that conclusion.
Omitting Testimonial Evidence
NIST failed, for one thing, to mention any of the testimonial evidence for explosions. Besides claiming that the event described as a mid-morning explosion by Michael Hess and Barry Jennings was simply the impact of debris from the collapse of the North Tower – which occurred at 10:28 and hence about an hour later than the explosion they had described – NIST failed to mention any of the reports of explosions just as the building started to come down.
Omitting Physical Evidence:
NIST’s report on this building also omitted various types of physical evidence.
The Swiss-Cheese Steel: One of these was the piece of Swiss-cheese steel reported by the three WPI professors in a paper that was, as mentioned earlier, included as an appendix to the 2002 FEMA report. After describing the erosion of this piece of steel, the professors had said: “A detailed study into the mechanisms of this phenomenon is needed.”36 When NIST took over from FEMA the responsibility of issuing the official reports on the World Trade Center, NIST’s director promised that its reports would address “all major recommendations contained in the [FEMA] report.”37 However, when NIST’s report on Building 7 appeared in 2008, it did not even mention this mysterious piece of steel, let alone explain how it had been produced. NIST even claimed that no recovered steel from WTC 7 had been identified, because the steel used in this building, unlike the steel used in the Twin Towers, “did not contain . . . identifying characteristics.”38
NIST made this claim, incidentally, even though it had previously published a document in which it had referred to steel recovered from WTC 7, including the piece discussed by the WPI professors in the appendix to the FEMA report. This claim about not identifying any steel was made by NIST (in August 2008), moreover, even though one of these professors, Dr. Jonathan Barnett, had during a BBC program on WTC 7 (in July 2008) discussed an “eroded and deformed” piece of steel that he and his colleagues had studied in 2001, explaining that they knew “its pedigree” because “this particular kind of steel” had been used only in WTC 7, not in the Twin Towers.39
Melted Iron: Deutsche Bank, which had a building close to the World Trade Center that had been contaminated with dust, hired the RJ Lee Group, a scientific research organization, to prove to its insurance company that the dust contaminating its building was not ordinary building dust, as its insurance company claimed, but had resulted from the destruction of the World Trade Center. Reports issued by the RJ Lee Group in 2003 and 2004 proved that the dust was indeed WTC dust, having its unique chemical signature. Part of this signature, the RJ Lee Group said in its final (2004) report, was “[s]pherical iron . . . particles,” and this meant, it had pointed out in its 2003 report, that iron had “melted during the WTC Event, producing spherical metallic particles.”40
The RJ Lee reports thereby provided additional evidence that temperatures had been reached that significantly exceeded those that could have been produced by fire. These reports, which were made known in an article published in January 2008 by a group of scientists led by physicist Steven Jones,41 were simply ignored by NIST.
