The Securities & Exchange Commission Burns

I can find only seven pictures on the web depicting fire in Building 7. All seven show fires on floor 11 and floor 12. Those were the two floors occupied by the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission. The fat lady is clearing her throat.


(Interestingly, I believe all seven images were taken by Steve Spak, a highly privileged hagiographer of the New York City Fire Department, who also took the only video showing the south side of the building, albeit, typically enveloped in smoke.)


That the photographic record of Building 7's demise was manipulated and censured I have no doubt. We were told that 9-11 was the most recorded media event in history. Set in the media capital of the nation, major conventions of accredited news photographers also just happened to be taking place close by.

No photographs exist, apparently, of the south side of WTC7 that are not completely obscured by smoke. Not a single image exists depicting fire on the south face of the building. Not a single image exists of the massive gash to the south face, supposedly caused by falling steel from WTC1. The NIST study, World Trade Center Investigation Status and First-Person Data Collection September 17, 2003, even asks plaintively that, "NIST continues to seek photos and videos from the south face of WTC7."

The fire department correctly determined mid-day on 9-11 that Building 7 was in danger of collapse, pulling back two blocks, even stopping work on the WTC1 rubble. Why no photographs exist from this position of retreat, which is variously described as having begun anywhere from two-and-a-half hours to one-half hour before the collapse, is unexplained.

One award-winning photographer who we can know was there is Thomas Franklin, who took a world-famous photo of firemen raising the American flag at ground zero. In an article he wrote for the May/June 2003 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, he said,

"Much of what happened to me on September 11 is a blur, but this moment I clearly remember: It was 4:45 p.m., and all the firemen and rescue workers were evacuating Ground Zero after word came that a third building -- WTC 7 -- was ready to fall. I had only a few frames left, and an entire day's worth of pictures to develop, so I prepared to head back to New Jersey."

What?! He is told a 47-story building is going to come down and he packs it up to go home?! The one moment he remembers is one of supreme professional dereliction and failure?! That he is so stupid as to readily admit this in a self-penned article in a professional journal makes his canned and sentimental flag-raising photograph even more obviously and hideously an example of the conspiracy between the media and their subjects. Too bad Mr. Franklin, you didn't take a picture of WTC7 before it--or as it--fell. You might have been really famous.

Good list's of eyewitness testimony concerning damage, fire and impending collapse can be found at the truther web sites 911Research.com, its affiliate, www.wtc7net, and in the Jones Report. But one of the most telling eyewitness reports is quoted in debunking911.com.
Told by Captain Chris Boyle, an 18-year veteran of Engine Co. 94, in the August 2002 issue of Firehouse Magazine, in WTC: This is Their Story, he says,

"We headed toward 7. And just around we were about a hundred yards away and Butch Brandies came running up. He said forget it, nobody’s going into 7, there’s creaking, there are noises coming out of there, so we just stopped. And probably about 10 minutes after that, Visconti, he was on West Street, and I guess he had another report of further damage either in some basements and things like that, so Visconti said nobody goes into 7, so that was the final thing and that was abandoned."

What could basement damage possibly consist of other than the preliminary effects of controlled demolition? It is in these very subtle slips of the tongue that fire-department members reveal their complicity in a case of controlled demolition. One must wonder how deep the subterfuge really goes, in the face of such deceit about WTC7, regarding the larger mythologizing of company heroism, valor and sacrifice.

In addition to the questionable lack of photographic evidence, what handful of photographs we do have, along with the single Spak video, appear to have been heavily photoshopped to obscure the truth of the building's condition behind a veil of smoke. In all the images of the south face of Building 7, we are asked to believe the entire building is emitting smoke.


Most troubling to me, from an evidential perspective, is the criminal destruction, before study, of the steel from Building 7. In NIST NCSTAR 1-3B, the Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster: Steel Inventory and Identification report, "the volunteers of the Structural Engineers of New York," whose "countless hours were unselfishly spent in the recovery yards searching for these invaluable pieces that are an integral component of this investigation," said of the steel they studied that "[n]o pieces could be unambiguously identified as coming from WTC7," thus "[t]he lack of WTC 7 steel precludes tests on actual materials from the structure."

Over on the JREF forum a poster named lapman references the photo above by saying, "BTW The picture you posted shows fire on the 5th floor," but he is wrong. The 5th floor is a mechanical floor without windows. The lower floor on fire here even has a floor underneath it that is fully windowed. It is that floor, which we can reference as the 6th floor, meaning the fires we see are on the 7th and the 12th floors.

In fact, we needn't argue this point, since Appendex L Interim Report on Building 7, from June, 2004, even tells us the time:

• Around 3 p.m., fires were observed on Floors 7 and 12 along the north face. The fire on Floor 12 appeared to bypass the northeast corner and was first observed at a point approximately one third of the width from the northeast corner, and then spread both east and west across the north face.

[L]apman makes for a poor disinformation merchant when he proffers an easy-to-disprove lie in tandem with a link to an officious quote from Harvey L. Pittman, Chairman of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, from his testimony before the U.S. House of Representatives on September 26, 2001, which offers an unequivocal assurance:

"There also will not be any serious long-term impact on the Commission’s oversight of securities firms located in the New York area. The Commission’s records related to examinations of all securities firms are maintained electronically in a central database, and were unaffected by the tragedy. Electronic copies of examination reports and deficiency letters are maintained off-site for investment advisers, investment companies, broker-dealers and transfer agents. Records relating to open examinations will be reconstructed from records that exist at registrants’ offices and from other sources."

But that is not what was said outside the administration: New York Lawyer "Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive," said Max Berger of New York's Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. "This is a disaster for these cases."

And that's not all Mr. Pittman said. In addition to the wholesale revisions contained in the Patriot Act concerning our freedom and safety, Mr Pittman testified

"[T]he Commission for the first time invoked its emergency powers under Securities Exchange Act Section 12(k) and, on Friday September 14, issued several orders and an interpretive release to ease certain regulatory restrictions temporarily."

Like the Fed lowering interest rates, it seems markets like jolts to their liquidity best, so general tonics like, "facilitating the ability of public companies to repurchase their own shares," resulted. That, plus many other changes were made after 9-11.

So given the abuse to our civil liberties that 9-11 engendered, and the wholesale deceit which fabricated excuses for our nation to aggressively invade innocent sovereign nations in search of plunder, the century-old battle between the foxes of Wall Street and the content's of America's hen house seems minor.

Given the clear pattern of arson on the 11th and 12th floors of Building 7, the floors that housed the S&EC, I humbly say, I imagine that Mr. Pittman, like lapman, isn't telling us the truth.

This 16-minute film collects much, if not all of the video record of Building 7's fall, then presents it unadorned.