Building 7 was the lower building that burned all day of September 11 and collapsed in the late afternoon. Its been the subject of some of the whackier of the whacky conspiracy nut thinking about the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11.
The NIST has been studying the engineering of the WTC building collapses, had earlier released studies on the main towers and today released a study about the collapse of Building 7. So I was reading this story about the study by the NIST off of Yahoo news. The news story is actually from an Associated Press writer. Now the Associated Press has been going down hill in quality at an increasing rate lately, and this story certainly is nothing for AP to be proud of. In this case, the AP story just does a horribly bad job of rewriting the NIST press release.
This story quotes a line from a Truther that is devoid of any real assertions:
Critics like Mike Berger of the group 9/11 Truth said he wasn’t buying the government’s explanation.
“Their explanation simply isn’t sufficient. We’re being lied to,” he said, arguing that there is other evidence suggesting explosives were used on the building.
So we can’t really get a complete sense of just how whacky they are. The AP story later cites to the top level NIST webpage without any deep link to show you the actual report, and in parallel cites the Truther website as if they were parallel references.
You can find the better written and more interesting NIST press release here. Compare the two to see just how useless the AP writer was. And you can find the whole NIST report here on the NIST website ( it is really a draft report and NIST welcomes comments … from people who don’t send AP press releases from their mother’s basement ). There are supplemental reports available on this page that are fascinating.
Oh, by the way, I think that the NIST just might know what a controlled demolition really looks like, after all, Mark Loizeaux’s name appears on the report among the list of contractors.