Tuesday, February 27, 2007:

BBC World News started reporting that WTC 7 had collapsed about 23 minutes before the building actually came down, as video of news coverage on September 11th shows. The segment establishing this is available on the archive.org news service and was discovered by veritas911, a member of 911blogger.com.

(The 1-gigabyte video of BBC World News coverage on Sept. 11th starts at 4:54pm EDT and is available at http://ia311517.us.archive.org/2/items/bbc200109111654-1736/V08591-16.mpg)

Speaking from London on the afternoon of September 11th, BBC World News anchorman Philip Hayton asks reporter Jane Stanley in New York about the collapse of the "47-story Salomon Brothers Building," also known as WTC 7. Although the building is still standing and clearly visible through the window behind Stanley, its collapse is repeatedly described as a past event. Hayton asks Stanley if there were any casualties in the building, and advances an explanation for its collapse already provided by officials, that it was weakened structurally by the prior collapses of the Twin Towers.

WTC 7 in fact collapsed about five minutes after Stanley's connection to London was cut off. My apologies to veritas911 for my hasty and dismissive judgment of his discovery, and to 911blogger.com for suggesting that the presentation of the BBC segment should be pulled off the site.

Allow me to explain my mistake: The BBC segment of September 11 was presented on Google Video yesterday morning by someone unknown to me, whom I will call the "Video Artist." This person added explanatory titles exhibiting a patently wrong understanding of how time zones are arranged. For example, the Video Artist's titles state that the BBC segment begins shortly before 5pm EST (Eastern Standard Time). In fact, New York on 9/11/2001 was using EDT (Eastern Daylight Time). 5pm EST is actually 6pm EDT.

On seeing these titles I concluded, perhaps falsely, that the Video Artist was practicing an intentional deception about the timing of the BBC broadcast, and that the broadcast actually began shortly before 6pm EDT (i.e., after the WTC 7 collapse).

One of the titles bizarrely claimed BBC World News was using BST (British Summer Time) when in fact it uses GMT (Greenwich Mean or universal time). This title states that 10pm BST is 5pm EST, which is in fact impossible! (10 pm BST=9pm GMT=5pm EDT=4pm EST).

As a result I feared someone was once again leading 9/11 skeptics on with a falsification, a sadly frequent occurrence. In this I ignored the simpler explanation: that the Video Artist was woefully ignorant of time zones, and failed to do the most basic research on the subject.

Thus was I temporarily blinded to the far more important paradox of Jane Stanley and the uncollapsed WTC 7. No clock is visible in the half-hour of the BBC segment, so the broadcast time still needs to be established beyond any doubt. But the segment was almost certainly broadcast prior to 5:20 pm, as the information available at archive.org states, and as various internal clues imply. Chief among these is of course that the building visibly is still standing; the anchor also mentions Bush having just flown out of Nebraska, which further corroborates that the start time is just before 5 pm EDT.

If so, then the BBC was in possession of an accurate advance report on the future collapse of WTC 7, and reported this collapse "prematurely." As she spoke of it, the British reporter herself may have had no clue that she was looking at WTC 7 (since this was not a remarkable or universally-known building prior to 9/11).

Did the authorities in New York provide BBC with a written text or other communication predicting an imminent WTC 7 collapse? Who would have done that? The authorities have claimed that they knew from the state of the building that it would collapse, but the timing of the BBC report is uncannily prescient. Within five minutes after Jane Stanley's report is abruptly cut off, the building does actually collapse, as though on cue.

If by some chance this segment was in fact broadcast after 5:20 pm (as the deficient titles by the Video Artist at first led me to believe), this would be damning of the BBC. In that case it must have somehow been faking a live broadcast, by means such as having the reporter speak in front of a back-lit projection or a video screen showing footage shot earlier. This kind of deception may be common in the broadcast media, but is nevertheless scandalous and inexcusable.

Either way, it is up to BBC World News to explain why and how it reported on a future disaster as though it had already happened.

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ADDING ON EDIT: The segment as a whole is a great primer in the total propaganda established on 9/11/2001 - America discovers its vulnerability, who would have thought it possible, things will never be the same, this was an attack on the whole world, who can ever feel secure again, anywhere? Pearl Harbor! Americans are wounded and fearful, only Osama could do this, retaliation is surely coming, Arabs are happy that this happened. Let's ask Shimon Peres (who was brought on in the segment) what Americans should do, since his people have suffered more from terrorism than any other. (Like many other pundits on the day he recommends drawing up a list of terrorist nations and going after all of them.) Well here comes the swift fist of revenge!