After the 9/11 attacks, international investigations were launched into financial transactions that seemed to indicate foreknowledge about the coming catastrophe.¹ For its part, a technology firm named Convar, located in Pirmasens, Germany, had been tasked by the U.S. Department of Defense to restore data on damaged hard drives gathered from the ruins of the destroyed WTC skyscrapers. These investigations stemmed from suspicious and untracked transactions – up to 100 million dollars – carried out using WTC computers right before the attack, pointing to foreknowledge of the total destruction of the evidence.

In what follows it will be demonstrated that Convar's investigations were followed and reported by global media in 2001–2002, and that in 2003 the FBI denied that they had ever been carried out. Pliantly, the media became silent about the investigations, and the 9/11 Commission did not mention them at all in its report.

The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat (CTBUH) recently published their comments on the NIST draft for final report on WTC 7, as reported on 911Blogger.

CTBUH's comments and NIST's investigation are discussed on this CTBUH forum.

When one reads the exchanges, it becomes pretty obvious that DScott, the CTBUH Chairman, displays no interest at all in discussing any of the difficult questions raised by several posters about NIST's report and WTC 7 investigation.

This becomes even more obvious when one sees what kind of a "putsch" took place after I challenged DScott on the issue of evidence destruction, and after Chris Sarns of AE911Truth had concluded that NIST had changed their previous statements about the use of shear studs in girders in order to facilitate their latest theory.

All four of my posts and Chris' latest post were deleted and the discussion forum closed. On CTBUH's homepage it now reads "The forum on this topic has now closed, however, click here to read over the comments that were posted....."

I emailed the following comments to NIST today, well before the deadline for submitting comments. I utilized Kevin Ryan's recent critique of NIST's draft report. Gregg Roberts gave useful feedback on the text and "Americanized" the language.

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Dear Sirs,

Here are my comments on the long-awaited draft for public comment of NIST's report on WTC 7, issued by NIST on August 21st, 2008.

1. Collapse Models

On February 29, 2008 I submitted a complaint to the BBC concerning their lack of investigative journalism in connection with the London bomb attacks on July 7, 2005. Please read a copy of my complaint here:

http://july7bombing.blogspot.com/

The BBC's reply is below. They are basically saying that 1) I should have been prescient; and that 2), because the authorities did not see any problem with the triple coincidence under consideration, the BBC did not consider it necessary to engage in any kind of investigative journalism.

However, the BBC has considered my comment, which I submitted under the "General" category, to be about the Panorama program aired a year before the attacks. As that was not the case, I think I have grounds for re-opening the compaint.

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[...]
Thank you for your e-mail.

Due to the length of time that has passed since the original broadcast I'm
afraid there is very little I can say by way of response. Our complaints
process asks that viewers contact us within twelve weeks of transmission
and the programme you refer to was broadcast nearly four years ago. You
can find full details at our website:

www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

We know that viewing, commenting and favoriting videos on YouTube increases their popularity. YouTube has categories like "Most viewed", "Most discussed", "Top favorites", etc. So it's a good idea to view, comment and favorite 9/11 truth videos.

However, when I browsed through the top video categories on YT, no truth videos showed up. I spotted one 9/11-related video, and that featured Penn and Teller attacking truthers.

These are the videos that I've commented on recently:

"BBC Reported Building 7 Collapse 20 Minutes Before It Fell"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C7SwOT29gbc&feature=related
(766,905 views; 20,926 comments; favorited 1,945 times)

"Seven is Exploding"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58h0LjdMry0
(231,000+ views; 6,780 comments; favorited 864 times)

By way of comparison, the Penn and Teller video has been commented 42,046 times, making it into the top 60 most discussed videos.

The most viewed videos have tens of millions of viewers, making a breakthrough in that category difficult. Commenting a video seems to be a much easier way to add visibility to 9/11 truth videos on YouTube.

I, together with two other individuals (a Doctor of Political Sciences and a Senior Engineer), yesterday submitted the following to a number of NIST personnel, including lead investigator S. Shyam Shunder, who in 2006 said to New York Magazine "But truthfully, I don't really know. We've had trouble getting a handle on Building No. 7". The contact information used can be found at the end.

The idea was mainly to remind them that there are people who will be looking at their report (if they come up with a report one day) with a critical eye.

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Dear NIST investigators,

we undersigned wish to pose a few questions and comments to NIST regarding the still ongoing WTC 7 investigation.

NIST has stated that "no steel was recovered from WTC 7". This is clearly not accurate. FEMA has noted, e.g., that a steel sample from WTC 7 had undergone thinning due to "high temperature corrosion due to a combination of oxidation and sulfidation". FEMA continues: "Evidence of … oxidation and sulfidation with subsequent intergranular melting, was readily visible in the near-surface microstructure." Please see

As someone belabored, truthers haven't been able to even add a link to a WTC 7 collapse video to Wikipedia's WTC 7 article, and I decided to try to do something about it. Here's Wikipedia's WTC 7 page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_World_Trade_Center

Interestingly, the WTC 7 article has been selected as

"a current featured article candidate. A featured article should exemplify Wikipedia's very best work, and is therefore expected to meet several criteria." (see the discussion page)

Anyway, I added this to the section entitled "Collapse":

There are numerous resources for viewing the collapse of 7 World Trade Center on the Internet, including [http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=collapse+of+wtc+7 Google Video].

I also added a link to a Google video of WTC 7's collapse to the External Links section.

Finally, to test the waters, I added NIST's statement that "No steel was recovered from WTC 7" to a relevant section.

The Lost Flight -- Who Knew What and When About Flight AA77 On 9/11?

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7140292755378838617&hl=en

The video compares the two main versions of what was known about Flight AA77 on 9/11 before it allegedly crashed into the Pentagon. The versions are

(1) that there was prior awareness for up to about one hour before the crash about the flight at least with the military and the FAA and in the Presidential Emergency Operations Center, and

(2) that the FAA lost the flight for 36 minutes and did not inform the military or anyone else about it until four minutes before the crash.

Three important statements by former Transportation Secreatry Norman Mineta are shown in support of the first version. However, the viewer is encouraged to make her/his own conclusions. The material is mainly from the 9/11 Commission's video archives and other public sources and its use constitutes an instance of "fair use" of this material.

As opposition grows in America to the failed Iraq adventure, the Bush administration is preparing public opinion for an attack on Iran, its latest target, by the spring.

The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its dis aster in Iraq."We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."

"Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government." Like Bush's and Tony Blair's claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility.

http://www.propagandamatrix.com/articles/january2007/290107rockefellergoal.htm

Some excerpts from this very interesting article:

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Hollywood director and documentary film maker Aaron Russo has gone in-depth on the astounding admissions of Nick Rockefeller, who personally told him that the elite's ultimate goal was to create a microchipped population and that the war on terror was a hoax, Rockefeller having predicted an "event" that would trigger the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan eleven months before 9/11. [...]

Russo states that Rockefeller told him, "Eleven months before 9/11 happened there was going to be an event and out of that event we were going to invade Afghanistan to run pipelines through the Caspian sea, we were going to invade Iraq to take over the oil fields and establish a base in the Middle East, and we'd go after Chavez in Venezuela."

NOTE: I assume I do not need to clarify how 7/7 is connected with 9/11.

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Dear BBC journalists,

On May 6, 2004, the BBC Panorama program depicted a fictional terrorist attack involving four suicide bombs: three trains on the London Underground were blown up between 8-9 am, and one more explosion happened on a large street vehicle an hour or so later, in central London. This scenario was quite precisely realized a year later.

Then, on the day of the real attacks, the Managing Director of Visor Consultants, Peter Power, told in a BBC Radio Five interview that

"[A]t half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now."

http://www.envirosagainstwar.org/know/read.php?itemid=2927

This Washington Free Press article provides a great summary of the problems with NIST's report on the Twin Towers:

http://www.washingtonfreepress.org/84/worldTradeCenter.shtml

It is very well written and recommendable for people new to 9/11 Truth. It contains the points that the Loose Change guys should have raised when Ronald Wieck disingenuously said that truthers are not willing to engage in dialogue against the NIST report.

A retired physics teacher emailed to me that an object dropped from the roof of the Twin Towers would have reached the ground in 12 to 13 seconds. That is, in approximately the same time in which the towers totally collapsed.

According to a Finnish Doctor of Engineering, WTC 7 collapsed even slightly faster than an apple falling the same distance through air:
http://11syyskuu.blogspot.com/2006/02/destruction-of-wtc-7.html

The WFP article states "From high school physics, a floor by floor gravitational collapse of the undamaged 90 floors of the north tower would take almost 80 seconds, not including the time delay to break the columns of each floor". That sounds credible, but where could I get the calculations?

If and when the above holds, it is shocking to realize that the world's peer-reviewed scientific journals are not -- to Chomsky's chagrin - filled with articles debunking the NIST report and promoting controlled demolition hypotheses. It would be interesting to know to what extent such articles have been submitted for peer review and rejected. I assume not so many have been submitted in the first place.

Dear professor Chomsky,

you recently said in an interview that "the concept of 'false flag operation' is not a very serious one".

Apparently, then, you don't consider it "serious" that the Soviet artillery in 1939 fired the famous Mainila shots into their own territory, blamed them on the Finns and used them as a pretext to start the Winter War against Finland. Historians have for long known that this was a false-flag operation. But you don't regard it as "serious". Why not? Don't you think its consequences -- 23,000 dead Finns and 127,000 dead Russians -- were indeed serious?

Recently declassified documents show that the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which provided the legitimation for the Vietnam War, was fictional. Don't you think that 50,000 dead Americans and millions of dead Vietnamese is "serious"?

What about the fact that Italian terrorism trials revealed operation Gladio, a Cold War project based on a "strategy of tension" in which NATO's stay-behind armies and Western intelligence agencies promoted and assisted right-wing terrorist groups, whose attacks, killing hundreds of people in several countries, were blamed on the political left? Should you not know about this, read, e.g., historian Daniele Ganser's book "NATO's Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe" (2005) or watch the following BBC documents: