9/11 - The Truth behind the Third Tower The Conspiracy Files

This programme contains some strong language.

-Holy fuck!

-Oh, my God!

We all remember how the Twin Towers were destroyed on 9/11.

It's gone...the whole tower. Holy crap.

SHOUTING AND SCREAMING

But there was a third huge skyscraper that collapsed that day.

Unlike the Twin Towers, no plane hit Tower 7.

Keep your eye on the building. It'll be coming down soon.

What could cause a seemingly sound 47-storey building to collapse?

In the building, I heard explosions. Outside, I heard explosions.

The building began to shake and it was as if you were in an earthquake.

Could one use a controlled demolition on any building? Sure.

Did it happen to WTC7 on 9/11? No, it did not.

But now, seven years on, the official report has finally been released.

Will it answer the many questions

surrounding Tower 7's extraordinary collapse?

The reason for the collapse at World Trade Center 7 is no longer a mystery.

World Trade Center 7 collapsed because of fires fuelled by office furnishings.

It did not collapse from explosives.

But that makes this the first and only skyscraper in the world

to have collapsed because of fire.

CHANT: Wake up! Don't be afraid! Wake up! Don't be afraid!

Critics say there are many unanswered questions and claim it's a cover up.

We will not stop until we get a real investigation.

The official report given is unscientific and full of mistruths.

We talk to witnesses who have become central figures in the controversy.

It hurts when you're being accused of mass murder.

And look at new evidence to unravel the last great mystery of 9/11.

You have to wonder how much of the truth have we been told?

In the American West, the internet phenomenon that is Loose Change has come to town.

This is no longer a fringe conspiracy.

This is over half the American public that fully believe

the 9/11 Commission is a cover up at the very least.

We just know we've been lied to in a big way and that's why we need a new investigation.

Loose Change claims a government conspiracy was behind the events of 9/11

and the ensuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Its makers say more than one hundred million people have seen the film,

making it one of the most viewed internet movies ever.

Now there's a new version for the big screen.

Conspiracies have become big business.

'Our entire foreign and domestic policy

'has been based upon the events of September 11th.

'It has enabled the passage of Patriot Act One and Two.'

The Truth movement is heavily centred on Building 7.

And for very good reason,

a lot of people are very suspicious about what went down that day.

Hidden behind the Twin Towers stood 7 World Trade Center.

It was almost like the little sister of the two big towers.

About half the size in height.

And it struck me as a very modern well-constructed

office building.

It was a building that had a lot of security.

There was always

like police officers, undercover cops out front.

It was very, very heavily guarded.

On the outside an unremarkable building, but it had some unusual occupants.

The Secret Service, The CIA, The Department of Defence

and the Office of Emergency Management,

which would coordinate any response to a disaster or a terrorist attack.

You have to look at what was inside Building 7.

You had the largest CIA field office,

a number of government agencies in the building.

So automatically, for a number of people, myself included, that is enough to at least raise an eyebrow.

Some say the government had to demolish Tower 7 because

it's where plans were hatched for a massive conspiracy on 9/11.

Why building 7?

Let's ask the question again. As the WTC Command Centre,

was it the hub for the 9/11 plan?

Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward.

And freedom will be defended.

Some think the attack on the Twin Towers was orchestrated by the Bush administration

and the hijacked aeroplanes were guided to their targets from Tower 7.

Others believe the government also wanted to destroy key files held there about corporate fraud.

After its collapse, a CIA team is reported to have scoured the rubble

looking for secret documents.

The people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.

CHEERING

Our government will willingly kill its own citizens for whatever gain it seems necessary

and then lie as much as they need to to cover it up.

It was the third tower to collapse that day,

but its destruction was never mentioned in the 9/11 Commission Report.

And the first official inquiry into Tower 7

was unable to be definitive about what caused its collapse.

Regardless of what you think happened to the building,

it does look like and it does resemble a controlled demolition.

I do believe, it's the first in architectural history,

a steel high-rise building has collapsed simply because of damage and fire.

Despite that, all the steel from the 47-storey skyscraper

was taken away to be melted down.

Some made its way into this new US navy vessel.

But it turns out one section of steel was kept.

How it got to be in its present state was described by the New York Times as

"perhaps the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation."

There's parts where

the entire half inch of the beam is gone.

Entirely dissolved, right through and so some something happened to cause the steel

to really thin and in some places to disappear entirely.

Critics say if you look carefully at the events of that day

there's precious little evidence of damage or fire in Tower 7,

but plenty of unexplained questions

that suggest something far more sinister.

Tuesday 11th of September 2001

started like any other working day in downtown New York.

But as these pictures were being filmed that morning,

something extraordinary was already underway.

Early that morning, the fire alarm system for the entire Building 7

was "placed on test" because of "routine maintenance".

For the next 8 hours "any alarms received from the system"

are to be ignored.

An hour later, American Airlines Flight 11 leaves Boston's Logan International Airport.

We have a problem here.

We have a hijacked aircraft headed towards New York, and we need you guys to...

we need someone to scramble some F-16s or something up there, help us out.

-Is this real world or exercise?

-No, this is not an exercise, not a test.

At 8:46, a Boeing 767 slammed into the North Tower.

Holy shit!

It was carrying around 10,000 gallons of jet fuel.

I watched it. I seen it go around I heard the boom.

See I thought, as soon as it happened, I said "Was it terrorists?"

The fire department been waiting there, like they were waiting for them to come in.

And I said, "What is the fire department just sitting there for? Is it a conspiracy?"

I heard a boom.

SIRENS WAIL

Straight away, the emergency operations plan was put into action

and police, fire, health and other teams were called to Tower 7.

Holy shit!

A second Boeing 767 laden with jet fuel hit the South Tower.

Two more planes had been hijacked.

And the order was given to evacuate civilians from Tower 7.

The police department and Intel

and FBI, they were telling us

we had a plane hit us in the Pentagon,

and we now realise, it didn't take too long to realise we were under attack.

What building would be attacked next? Tower 7?

It could have been a target, I felt, because of where we were.

It could have been a serious target. Plus the other federal agencies.

In an emergency, we were supposed to go

and huddle and plan and strategise with Mayor Giuliani

in the Emergency Manager Center on the 23rd floor. That was the plan.

But the decision is taken to evacuate

the very office designed to respond to a terrorist attack.

Oh, they're jumping!

But not everyone leaves. Unaware of the evacuation order,

two city officials head up to the 23rd floor.

They are about to be trapped inside a building on the verge of destruction.

They have become key witnesses

in the controversy over what really happened inside Tower 7.

I didn't realise, and maybe that's a good thing,

I didn't realise how close I was to death.

Everyone had been evacuated, except the two of us, who actually

made the huge error of going back into the building and upstairs.

-SIREN BLARES

-When Barry Jennings

reaches the Office of Emergency Management, he is shocked.

To my amazement, nobody's there.

I saw coffee that was still hot, it was still smouldering.

They had screens all over the place, the screens were blank.

So I didn't know what was going on.

And at that time, I received a phone call from one of my higher ups

and he said, "Where are you?"

And I said, "I'm at the Emergency Command Centre."

A long pause, and then he came back and he said,

"Get out of there, get out of there now."

At 9:59, the 1,300 foot South Tower collapses.

Debris and dust are thrown over a huge area.

And Tower 7 doesn't escape.

These are some of the only pictures of Building 7 at that moment.

Just over a minute later, the fire alarm in Tower 7 is triggered.

But because it's on test, there's no information about where the fires are.

-What happened?

-The side of the building came down.

Something fell?

What did you see?

It was pretty clear at one point, then this whole bunch of smoke and glass.

I think we're just about the last ones in this building right now.

I think you should leave. Everybody else has gone.

I wanted to get out of that building in a hurry.

So I started, instead of taking one step at a time, I'm jumping landings.

When I reached down to the sixth floor, there was this eerie sound. The whole building went dark.

A great deal of smoke came into the stairway, the sprinklers went on,

I hit a wall and I was ahead of Barry

and the building started to shake.

At 10:28, the North Tower collapses in just 11 seconds.

This time, Tower 7 takes a direct hit from the collapsing building.

According to the official account,

this is the start of a chain of events

that will ultimately lead to the collapse of Tower 7.

The World Trade Center complex in the heart of downtown Manhattan

contained seven buildings occupied by many of the world's leading financial companies.

The Twin Towers rose above the site, more than 1,300 feet tall.

Tower 7 was 610 feet tall, and just 350 feet away from the North Tower.

As the North Tower collapsed, debris hit Tower 7

and fires were immediately reported in the building.

Early evidence of explosives or just debris from a falling skyscraper?

Barry Jennings and Michael Hess

were still trapped inside on the eighth floor.

Outside these big glass windows, the wind was blowing,

papers and ash were flying all over the place.

And it was just like the end of the world.

They heard sounds that unnerved them.

Sounds interpreted by others as evidence of explosives.

The building began to shake, and it was as if you were in an earthquake.

I've never really been in one, but it's what it felt like - the whole building was shaking.

The first explosion I heard when I was on the stairwell landing,

when we made it down to the sixth floor.

Then when we made it back to the eighth floor I heard some more explosions.

EXPLOSION

What sort of sound?

Like a boom, like an explosion.

-And more than one?

-Yes.

It's seven years on from 9/11

and we finally have the official explanation.

Dr Shyam Sunder led a team of more than 50 investigators.

It took three years of extensive research

and cost millions of dollars.

But they are confident the last mystery of 9/11 has been solved.

Our science shows us in

great certainty it was fires that caused the collapse of building 7.

We know that it wasn't intentional demolition that caused the building to collapse.

What we now know is it was fires that primarily caused the building to collapse.

Every year, more police state!

But this has not silenced the critics.

Wake up! Don't be afraid! Wake up!

For these protestors at Ground Zero on the anniversary of 9/11,

this new report is further evidence of an official cover up.

Leading the calls for a new investigation is a group called

Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.

They question the official explanation

and refuse to accept its findings.

Richard Gage is a member of the American Institute of Architects.

He's been an architect in California for 20 years.

He set up the group, which now has around 500 professionals from around the world.

No steel frame high-rise building has ever collapsed due to fire.

And we have over a hundred examples from which to choose.

In 1991, a fire in a Philadelphia skyscraper raged for 18 hours.

But it didn't collapse.

In 2005, a 32-storey building in Madrid burned for a whole day.

There was a partial collapse but the building remained standing.

Tower 7 burned for seven hours.

The Madrid building burned for 24 hours

and my understanding is that the steel around the perimeter was not fire proofed.

In Building 7, we have a completely fire-proofed building to two and three hours.

What's more, a series of experiments were carried out in these giant hangars

in Cardington, Bedfordshire in the mid-1990s.

They showed that steel buildings were more robust than previously thought.

The Cardington tests in the UK were exemplary

in that the steel did not collapse as a result of these tests.

A purpose built eight-story steel building was set on fire.

For a short time, the steel reached temperatures of more than

1,000 degrees centigrade, far hotter than in Tower 7.

Ceiling beams did sag but no collapse was observed in any of the six experiments.

I'm deeply troubled by the collapse of Building 7

because if the official story is true,

then what they're telling us is that our existing building codes,

to which thousands of skyscrapers are currently designed with two and three hour fire protection,

there's a serious problem.

After being trapped for three hours, Barry Jennings and Michael Hess

are finally led to safety through the lobby of the building.

It was amazing! Because then, this big five-storey atrium was totally black and white.

There were wires hanging down from everywhere that were black,

and the rest of the whole lobby was white with ash.

It was as if you, all of a sudden, had a black-and-white movie.

When we get outside, a police officer comes and says, "You have to run.

"We have more information of bombs, so you have to run."

I ran for about two blocks and, after two blocks of running,

I mean, obviously, curiosity got a hold of me

and I said I wanted to turn around and I almost couldn't believe it

and my mind is trying to process what happened to these 100-storey buildings.

When I got to the 19th block,

Channel Seven says, "Can we talk to you?"

I said, "I need an ambulance." "Let's talk quickly."

We started walking down the stairs. We made it to the eighth floor.

Big explosion blew us back into the eighth floor.

'All this time, I didn't know it.'

All this time somebody had called my wife, told her I'd died in the building.

Big explosion... 'Who comes over the TV set?'

Whose voice comes over? It's mine.

And my sister said, "Wait a minute. That's Barry right there."

I said, this is it. We're dead.

We're not going to make it out of here. I took a fire extinguisher and I bust the window out.

My wife comes back down the stairs and says, "Wait! Is this live? Because we were told he was dead."

And the little caption in the corner, left hand corner of the TV set said it was live.

The two tallest buildings in New York had just collapsed

cutting the water mains and severely hindering fire fighting.

Fire boats were brought in to pump what water they could from the Hudson River.

Just after midday, fire fighters were watching Tower 7 nervously.

The Deputy Chief of the New York Fire Department that day remembers the scene.

We had our special operations people surveying instruments to monitor

see if there was any movement of the building.

We were concerned of the possibility of collapse.

We had a discussion with one particular engineer there,

and we asked him if we allowed it to burn

could we anticipate a collapse and if so how soon?

It turned out that he was pretty much right on the money,

that he said, in its current state, you have about five hours.

Some people have interpreted this anticipation of collapse as evidence

that the fire department and others were planning its destruction.

Silverstein, a commercial real estate tycoon with international political connections acquired...

And the owner, Larry Silverstein, has also been accused of being part

of a huge conspiracy to destroy the buildings.

It all stems from a TV interview when he used the phrase "pull it".

I remember getting a call

from the fire department commander telling me they weren't sure

they were gonna be able to contain the fire.

And I said, "We've had such terrible loss of life,

"maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it."

And they made that decision to pull. Then we watched the building...

From here, we watched the building collapse.

My personal response to his comment is that he was, um...

involved in a decision to bring the building down.

But who knows what he was thinking or saying?

This is just speculation.

Critics say just two months before 9/11,

Larry Silverstein took out a 3.5 billion dollar insurance policy on the Twin Towers,

a policy that would pay out in the event of a terrorist attack.

But without this policy Larry Silverstein would not have been able to buy the buildings,

and the insurance was not just for terrorism.

The insurance on Tower 7 dated from 1987 when it was built.

You don't say "We made the decision to pull it," which refers to something.

You wouldn't say that about a group of firemen.

You would say, "We made a decision to pull them out of the building."

Larry Silverstein denies any involvement in any possible conspiracy.

CHANT: Arrest Larry! Arrest Larry! Arrest Larry!

-And there's no evidence to suggest he was.

-Arrest Larry!

Is there a simpler explanation?

The fire chief who was forced to assume command of New York's rescue operation that day

had narrowly escaped death with the collapse of the South Tower.

It was like the surface of another planet.

All there was was

powdered debris and metal.

It was a very strange scene.

Emergency teams scoured the wreckage desperately searching for survivors,

among them hundreds of their own friends and colleagues.

At three o'clock, with the condition of Tower 7 deteriorating rapidly,

Chief Nigro was forced to make an impossible choice.

The biggest decision was to make an evacuation zone around building 7, to pull everyone away,

to stop the rescue efforts that were going on,

which was very difficult to do

because there were people trapped still,

and to step back, to step back and wait.

But was Larry Silverstein really giving the orders?

We don't need to ask permission from the owner, no.

When we're in charge of the building, we're in charge

and that decision would be the fire chief's and his alone.

That's why I know there is no conspiracy,

because for me to be part of that would be obscene

and it disgusts me to even think of it.

At 5.21pm, Tower 7 finally collapses.

The 47-storey skyscraper and its contents are pulverised to dust.

A sixth grader can look at

this building falling at virtually free-fall speed,

symmetrically and smoothly, and see that it is not a natural process.

Buildings that fall in natural processes

fall to the path of least resistance.

They don't go straight down through themselves.

Tower 7 was a large skyscraper.

At 610 feet high, it had 47 floors each the size of a football field.

There were only a few places foundations could be put down

because it was built over a subway and an electricity substation.

So long beams were needed to take the weight of the building on the east side, on the right here,

and it had to be reinforced on the fifth to seventh floors,

and also between the 22nd and 24th floors.

It had 82 columns, 58 columns around the edge and 24 core columns inside.

In order for the perimeter to fall

perfectly and symmetrically, which it pretty much does, Building 7,

all of those columns have to be removed within a tenth of a second of each other.

Fire cannot do that.

Controlled demolition can.

Did Building 7 collapse because of damage from the falling North Tower

or was it also a controlled demolition?

Loose Change has found one demolition expert

with 28 years experience who thinks he knows what happened.

When shown the video for the first time he was taken aback.

And you're sure it was the 11th?

-That can't be.

-Seven hours after the World Trade Center.

Really? Then they worked hard.

AUDIENCE LAUGHS

But it's not a view shared by other demolition experts.

Controlled Demolition Incorporated is one of the world's leading demolition companies.

They were consultants to the official report on the collapse of building 7.

Mark Loizeaux has been in this family business all his life.

He knows what it takes to bring a building down.

The largest steel structure

we've taken down which I think is still a Guinness record is

the J L Hudson building in Detroit.

It took months to design it.

It took months to prepare the structure for the placement of the explosive charges, months.

It's noisy.

There's just no way to get around it.

You go in you knock out usually all the walls on the floors where you place explosives, gut them.

Then there's the placing of all the hundreds of explosive charges,

plus literally miles of initiating cable and miles of detonating cord.

Is it actually possible to have done a controlled demolition of a building like Building 7

and it to be occupied and no-one to have seen anything?

In a screenplay, in a movie,

something with Bruce Willis in it maybe.

In reality, no.

But the architect Richard Gage has an answer for that.

It's possible, although this is mere speculation, that the explosives

could have been planted prior to each floor being remodelled,

or during such remodelling or even during the initial erection of the building.

When would that be? What sort of dates would you get into for that?

The building was built in the eighties.

Really?

I don't know what to say to that.

These explosives have a life expectancy. They have a shelf life.

Some of the ones manufactured in this country they say use within three years,

or you can't trust them to go off at all.

The official investigators specifically looked

at the theory of controlled demolition.

They determined the smallest charge needed

to destroy just one column in Tower 7 was 9lbs of explosives.

But even that would've produced a huge noise.

What we found is that about a mile away

from this particular site, we would have a sound level

of somewhere between 130 and 140 decibels,

which would be as loud as a jet plane engine

or being in front of speakers at a rock concert.

Investigators say that sound was not picked up

by any videos or witnesses that they talked to.

But what about sounds eyewitnesses heard inside Building 7?

When the North Tower collapsed,

some of the debris that hit the building

scooped out the southern face of the building,

causing a lot of window damage, causing a lot of exterior columns

to be broken in the lower south west corner as well as the very top.

So it's likely that all of those huge failures and damage really caused

noises that were incredibly loud.

And one crucial eyewitness, who assumed there'd been an explosion in Building 7,

is now clear it was something else.

My position - and I'm quite firm on it -

there were no explosions.

Did I feel the building shake? Absolutely.

And I recollect that.

And I know now that that was caused by the northern half of number one

falling on the southern half of our building.

But what about those sounds of explosions recorded

after the Twin Towers had fallen but before Tower 7's collapse?

LOUD EXPLOSION

The official explanation is that these sounds were caused

by exploding fuel tanks in the many vehicles around Ground Zero

and the enormous steel beams that were breaking and falling inside Tower 7.

All of that could have led to noises in the building

which seemed like explosions, sudden sounds.

When you're dealing with charges this size,

the amount of air that's displaced will break windows easily.

Mark Loizeaux was at Ground Zero three days after 9/11

to help organise the removal of debris.

He also advised the official investigation

on what a real controlled demolition would be like.

There were a lot of broken windows, mainly from impact of debris.

But I didn't see windows broken on the backs of buildings,

only where debris falling from the Towers struck it.

But come round the back side, no.

Windows weren't broken there. They were shielded from debris falling.

If explosives of the magnitude necessary to cut the columns in a big building were detonated,

the windows all the way round would have been shattered.

No way round it.

And they would leave behind some unmistakable signs of explosives.

In a structure taken down with explosives, you'd find these tubes.

You'd likely find the upper part of this cap, where the delay element is.

Every inch of the site was picked over by hundreds of people.

No-one reported any signs of explosives.

Up in Utah, there's a scientist who thinks he has an explanation.

Steven Jones' theory was not looked at by the official investigators.

They only looked at conventional demolition.

Professor Jones thinks he's found evidence of an unconventional demolition

in the dust that's he analysed from the World Trade Center.

It is rather like

a DNA in an investigation.

This dust carries all this information of what caused it, what created it.

Professor Jones thinks there was a conspiracy to destroy Tower 7 and the Twin Towers

using a strange substance that can quite literally melt steel.

Thermite is a very active chemical reaction that produces molten iron spheres.

The spheres you get from thermite matches the spheres I see in the World Trade Center dust.

The dust he found contains iron oxide and aluminium.

So does thermite.

What do you think?

I would say it melted out the whole side and went right through the aluminium.

So, as the thermite reacts, it blows molten iron into the air,

where it forms droplets due to surface tension.

And then those solidify and form these little spheres.

These iron-rich spheres can only be formed at very high temperatures.

Steven Jones says the fires in the buildings before their collapse were not hot enough.

Only a thermite reaction could have made them.

But official investigators say these spheres could have been formed

in the fires in the rubble after the collapse of the buildings.

Debris can trap heat and lead to long-lasting and very hot fires.

They also say that the ingredients found in thermite are not unusual.

Iron oxide and aluminium are very common materials.

They are used extensively in buildings.

So the fact that aluminium and iron combined together

in a chemical reaction under heat is not at all surprising.

Steven Jones is undaunted.

He thinks these red chips in the dust could be evidence of unreacted thermite.

It's not an opinion shared by the official investigation.

We feel very strongly that there was no credible hypothesis associated with thermite.

I saw thermite once in high school.

It was very impressive, but I've never seen anyone

use a material which melts steel for demolition purposes.

I don't see how you could possibly get all of the columns to melt through at the same time.

On the internet there are references to secret formulations of thermite that have special properties.

You can cut with thermite without a large explosion.

You see. In other words, thermite you can formulate to burn rapidly or slowly.

The key is nanothermite. Why won't people deal with super thermite?

It's like they don't want to see it, I guess. I don't know.

But it does exist.

We have reports of it in a sol-gel form.

It's very explosive. The sol-gel can be formed and shaped.

I suppose you can keep saying, "But what if? What if? What if?"

and you could go to fantasy land and make up whatever you wanted.

It's just not real, it's not real.

The materials and the technologies just aren't there.

If they were, I'd know.

Mark Loizeaux is not unbiased.

Due to his very wealthy clientele

he also works for the Federal Government.

He can't come out and say

this is a controlled demolition,

if he doesn't want to lose many of his top clients.

Is Mark Loizeaux part of a conspiracy?

Or is it that anyone who contradicts the alternative theories

is condemned as part of a cover up?

But they say that you did work at Ground Zero, which you did.

You've got the absolute perfect credentials for a government-paid demolition expert.

And of course, you're going to say, "I didn't do it."

But you absolutely fit the bill.

I'd make a great terrorist, I suppose.

Unfortunately, I don't have those inclinations.

Since 9/11, other people have gone much further.

Mark Loizeaux and his company have been the subject

of a hate campaign and even accused of mass murder.

I'm disturbed by 9/11. I'm disturbed by all of this.

But I think there are ways to handle it and ways that you don't handle it.

And you certainly don't terrorise, terrorise people

like the good folks that work here and family members.

A new building 7 was opened in 2006.

It's thinner, but taller than the previous one.

Over the last seven years,

the work on clearing and rebuilding Ground Zero has continued.

And new evidence has emerged which supports the official explanation that fire brought Tower 7 down.

This is some of the only footage of the south face of the building

and it shows the whole side engulfed in smoke.

Until recently, most people have only seen the other sides where there was much less obvious damage.

Richard Rotanz had to assess the damage to Tower 7.

And crucially, he saw the south face

just after the North Tower had collapsed slamming debris into it.

Well, looking at the upper floors at Tower 7,

you could see columns gone, floors collapsed,

heavy smoke coming out and fire.

The upper floors were an inferno.

And then he had to go into that building to assess it.

You could hear the building creak above us,

you could hear things fall, you could hear the fire burning.

You could see columns just hanging from the upper floors,

gaping holes in the floors up above us.

There was an elevator car that was blown out of the shaft and it was down the hall.

This is the massive impact from the fall of Tower 1 onto Tower 7.

We need volunteers for first aid.

Raid the buses! Raid the trucks!

One photographer was able to get close to Building 7

because he was an honorary deputy chief in the Fire Department.

-These are some his pictures.

-You could see part of

the south part of the building was damaged heavily.

There was a big hole on the corner of the south side of the building.

You could see part of the building has bowed out a little bit. To me, that's major structural damage.

And there's smoke on a lot of floors on the south side of the building.

I saw fire coming out some of these windows.

And that, through my experience of taking fire photography for the last 30 years,

to me that's an indication of extremely heavy fire condition and a dangerous fire condition.

The architect Richard Gage is not impressed.

He says the smoke on the south side may not be from Tower 7 at all.

This is indicative of a negative pressure which

drew the smoke from the World Trade Center 6 or 5

that was burning quite severely.

And there's no visible flames in any of that smoke.

So it appears to not be coming from World Trade Center 7.

It was from number 7.

The smoke was coming out of the building, not going from the opposite direction, that's insane.

It was coming out of the windows.

You see it on the video, in the still pictures.

There was heavy smoke. Numerous floors had fire on.

The small pockets of travelling fires in this building,

of which the official report claims there's about ten,

we see maybe five or six from the outside,

were not sufficient to weaken this building,

modern fire-proofed, steel-framed building,

to cause a global catastrophic collapse at free-fall speed.

But a fireman who was there on the day is clear

about the intensity of the fire.

We saw the fire and the smoke

on the south side of building 7.

A lot of damage, a lot of damage.

And a tremendous amount of smoke. I couldn't tell what floor it ended at.

And he also saw the east side of Tower 7.

The windows on approximately 10 to 15th floor of Building 7

started to fail from the heavy fire inside.

We looked at it and said, "There's so much fire in this building,

"nobody's gonna put this fire out."

Then after being told there was nothing more they could do to save Building 7,

he walked away and witnessed its collapse.

It sounded like a jet engine.

And we looked over the buildings, you could see the top of building 7

and it just started to shake and then just disappeared down.

And it was down in about seven or eight or nine seconds.

It was just gone.

I saw the damage and that was good enough for me.

I never heard any charges.

I never heard any sequence of explosions, timed explosions.

In the last few years, the scale of the alleged conspiracy has grown and grown.

Not just the government and foreign intelligence, but police, fire service and even the media.

Now, more on the latest building collapse in New York

you may have heard moments ago. We'll find out more

from correspondent Jane Standley. Jane, what more can you tell us?

Well, only really what you already know. Details are very sketchy.

But Tower 7 hadn't collapsed.

'Where did CNN and the BBC get their information,

'especially considering the building was still standing directly behind their reporters?'

You have to put it in the context of a chaotic day.

Our investigations suggest we were working on the basis of an incorrect news agency report.

We had this statement from Reuters. What it says is,

"On September 11th, 2001,

"Reuters incorrectly reported that one of the buildings

"at the New York World Trade Center, 7WTC, had collapsed before it actually did."

Do you think that's suspicious?

Not really. To be honest with you I didn't want to put that line in.

But, you know, I'm not the only person on the team.

I do think it's a little embarrassing on both the part of CNN and BBC.

Even more embarrassing, the BBC lost key tapes of its 9/11 coverage.

But we found them.

It turned out they'd been put back on the wrong shelf.

2002 rather than 2001.

Cock up rather than conspiracy.

What of the reporter herself? She's never talked about this before.

Jane Standley was a world affairs specialist and had just arrived in New York.

The BBC quickly found a place to interview her.

But she had precious little information to go on.

I was thrown

not a question but a statement of fact.

I don't know where that came from.

What can you tell us about the collapse?

'Only really what you already know, details are very sketchy...'

It's very difficult being in that position with no communications,

no access to information, that comes out of left field.

'Details are very sketchy.'

It was very upsetting about a year ago

because of the level of persecution and the virulence

in which I was spoken about.

It's very unfortunate that this whole conspiracy,

I think a rather ridiculous situation,

has grown out of what's really a very small and very honest mistake.

Unfortunately, I think we've lost the line with Jane Standley in Manhattan.

Even the way the interview ended is seen by some as evidence of a conspiracy.

The BBC says there's a simple explanation for the interview ending abruptly.

The satellite feed had an electronic timer,

which cut out at quarter past five exactly.

'This is the Alex Jones Show, on News Radio 590KLDJ...'

Boom! There's a huge explosion. There's dead people all over the lobby.

The cops say, "Don't look at them!" Remember they said that nobody died.

But, folks, we have them. This is so huge.

Every word used by eyewitnesses is picked over in a relentless search for a hidden truth.

Conspiracy talk shows and websites seized on an interview

for Loose Change with the crucial witness, Barry Jennings.

There's no evidence that anyone died in Tower 7 on 9/11.

But did Barry's interview suggest something else?

The amount of detail Barry gave us was unreal.

He says he was stepping over dead bodies in the lobby.

Trouble is, Barry Jennings himself disagrees with their interpretation of his words.

I didn't like the way

I was portrayed.

They portrayed me as seeing dead bodies. I never saw dead bodies.

But Dylan Avery has a recording of his interview and he's unrepentant.

'The fire fighter who took us down kept saying, "Do not look down."

'And I kept saying, "Why?" He said, "Do not look down."

'And we're stepping over people.

'And you know you could feel when you're stepping over people.'

I didn't take anything out of context.

I said it felt like I was stepping over them but I never saw any.

And you know, that's the way they portrayed me

and I didn't appreciate that so I told them to pull my interview.

Do I think our government would do something like that to its people?

No, I honestly don't believe that...

All I know that I was in there, heard what I heard, saw what I saw.

In New England, the claims of the mysterious melted steel

from Tower 7 has been unravelled.

The scientist who tested the steel is adamant

it wasn't caused by unconventional explosives like thermite.

Well, it was attacked by what we determined was a liquid slag.

When we did the analysis, we actually identified it

as a liquid containing iron, sulphur and oxygen.

You can see what it does is it attacks the grain boundaries

and this bit would eventually have fallen out

and continue the attack.

Professor Sisson says it didn't melt, it eroded.

The cause were those very hot fires in the debris after 9/11 that cooked the steel over weeks.

When a NASA plane flew over Ground Zero after 9/11,

the temperatures recorded were remarkably high.

The highest temperature within Tower 7's footprint

was 727 degrees centigrade.

I don't find it very mysterious at all,

that if I have steel in this sort of a high temperature atmosphere

that's rich in oxygen and sulphur,

this would be the kind of result I would expect.

With no steel from Tower 7 to study,

investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology

created the most complex computer simulation of a building collapse ever made.

NIST reconstructed the entire skyscraper

right down to the smallest bolt and then set fire to it.

A single computer run

in the case of World Trade Center 7 took eight months

compared to two months for the towers.

Scientists are certain the building collapsed,

because of fires that started when Tower 1 fell.

These fires were mainly on floors 6 through to 13,

except floor 10,

and there were fires initially on some of the upper floors.

The collapse of the Twin Towers also severed the mains water supply

preventing fire fighters tackling the fires

and, crucially, stopping the sprinkler system working.

There's no way to put the fire out.

We've got all kinds of water problems.

The Two Trade buildings took out the mains.

We can handle just about everything, but this is beyond.

To explain Tower 7's collapse,

it's vital to understand what was going on

inside the building in the seven hours before it fell.

Investigators focused on the east side, where the long floor spans were under most stress.

Here, fires burnt long enough to weaken and break

many of the connections that held the steel structure together.

Most susceptible were the thinner floor beams which required less fireproofing,

and the connections between the beams and the columns.

As they heated up, the connections failed and the beams also buckled.

Our analysis showed that it was the fires that, when it reached the north east corner,

it really was the reason why this building collapsed.

Unique to Building 7's collapse was thermal expansion.

The steel beams heated up quicker than the concrete floors.

As they expanded, the beams buckled,

causing many floors and connections to fail.

The weakening of those floors eventually led to the failure of a girder on floor 13,

which caused the floors to start collapsing one on top of the other.

And suddenly, you had a single column that was unsupported

over a nine-storey length and that buckled.

That initiated the collapse.

For those self-styled Truthers, who think 9/11 was an inside job by the US government,

no official report is going to convince them otherwise.

For the seventh anniversary, many of them gathered

at an event in New York called Now or Never.

-APPLAUSE

-Richard Gage flew in from California to speak to them.

He was scathing about the official report.

Let's get this started off with some evidence, what do you say?

It can't tear, it can't bend, it can't crush.

That means it is falling at free-fall speed

and can't do any other work.

This is a fundamental point for the critics.

They say Building 7 falls at free-fall speed.

Nothing in its huge steel structure slows its collapse.

They argue it looks and acts like a controlled demolition.

There is no resistance. The building would've slowed down

in order for it to crush these columns.

It didn't, meaning the columns had to have been removed.

I have two 15-storey buildings that I'm gonna drop.

Simple experiments don't lie. When I show this experiment to people,

'they get it intuitively.' Ready, one, two, three.

Oh, my God! The one that had no resistance under it

falls at free-fall speed! What happens over here?

The one that has 80,000 tons of structural steel on it,

it doesn't even give.

But investigators say columns hadn't been removed.

They'd been weakened by fires.

And what's more, the building did not collapse at free-fall speed.

The scientists timed the fall of the top 17 floors

before they disappeared from view.

It took 5.4 seconds.

A free-fall collapse will have taken 3.9 seconds.

Clearly, the time that this building took to collapse was longer

by almost 40-50% than the free-fall time of an object.

Well, 40% is a lot longer.

It's not 5%, it's 40%. It's huge.

# Live free or die. #

Good evening and welcome to Hardfire. I'm Ronald Wieck.

A community TV station in New York hosts a regular programme aimed at debunking conspiracy theories.

We're here at historic St Paul's Chapel on Broadway, where the Truthers are flocking.

For the seventh anniversary of 9/11, they're filming the show at Ground Zero.

I'm looking for someone seven years after the fact to tell me what happened seven years ago.

Give me some kind of coherent narrative.

A coherent narrative, um...

Well, basically, there is evidence that shows 9/11 was an inside job.

What happens if China came here and started building permanent bases here in the United States?

'We hear all sorts of scattershot criticisms and we hear'

outlandish theories that are eternally inconsistent.

Why would the government attack its own citizens?

Make sense of this to me. If you allege a conspiracy,

then someone benefits. Show me who and how.

I don't really know what happened. I have no idea.

I don't think anybody in this movement knows.

If there is... if there is a grand conspiracy,

and something much larger behind the scenes than we've been told,

it would probably be a little presumptuous of us to at least...

to at least try to form some kind of cohesive story from start to finish.

It would be setting ourselves up, you know.

You do know that NIST just released its final report

-on the collapse of WTC7?

-PEOPLE SHOUT OVER HIM

'These are beliefs. This is a faith.'

Wake up! Don't be afraid!

This is not a world view that's based on reality.

The chief counter-terrorism adviser to President Bush on 9/11 was Richard Clarke.

He was with Vice President Dick Cheney in the White House that morning.

People who believe in conspiracy theories

and particularly this one about WTC7 don't understand government

and clearly have never worked in government.

Anyone who's ever worked in government will tell you two things,

that the government doesn't have the competence to do

a large scale conspiracy like this,

and number two, it can't maintain secrecy.

There's almost nothing that I know of in 30 years

of having top secret clearances that hasn't come out

in the Washington Post and the New York Times.

There can be no whitewash at the White House.

So, there's no way this conspiracy

of knocking down WTC7 could have happened.

But he's got 30 years experience?

I don't care what kind of fucking experience he has. I don't care.

He's in the system. Of course he'll tell you those kinds of things.

You honestly think he'll say, "Of course the government was part of it, of course there's a cover up."

No, he'll fucking toe the party line and defend the government.

He'll defend his ex-bosses. Come on, man.

The former chief counter-terrorism adviser

does not think there's anything mysterious about Tower 7.

I was in the World Trade Center 7 on a number of occasions.

This was an office building in downtown New York.

The fact there were some government agencies in there is certainly true,

but there were lots of others and you could have rented an office or floor, anybody could have.

Sceptics reject the official report

and also question the integrity of the scientists who worked on it.

I don't know how to judge the good faith of the individuals at NIST.

But if I were them, I wouldn't be sleeping well at night.

CHANT: Osama bin Laden! CIA! Osama bin Laden! CIA!

It's surprising that there's a community of people who don't

accept solid science

conducted by people with impeccable technical expertise.

If you wanna know who did it, start researching secret societies!

We really have not seen any coherent theory

that really stands up to technical scrutiny.

This is part of an ongoing cover up.

The evidence exists. They are not letting it out.

CHANT: Wake up! Don't be afraid! Wake up!

'I guess everyone's entitled to their opinion.'

It kind of angers me, because I was there.

I've heard people talk about it that come from Cincinnati and California

and wherever else they come from. I was here, you weren't.

I think they have no respect for all the friends of mine that I lost

and all the people that died. It's like a slap in their face.

# Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light... #

Nearly 3,000 people died on 9/11,

including 343 New York fire fighters.

The man who was in charge that day hopes now,

with the release of the official report on Tower 7,

a painful chapter in America's history will end.

Conspiracies can always be more exciting than the real thing,

because you can always add to them. It makes for great fiction.

And I enjoy great fiction myself, but when it comes to real life,

I think we have to know that one side of the page is real life and one side is fiction,

and draw the line between them

and live in the real world and enjoy our fiction as fiction.

Find out more about this programme and others

in "The Conspiracy Files" series at our website bbc.co.uk/conspiracyfiles.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd

E-mail: [email protected]