The Silence Surrounding Building 7

The American public was treated to wall-to-wall television coverage of the September 11th attack throughout the day and for nearly the entire following week. Yet most Americans remember only two skyscrapers collapsing in Lower Manhattan on the day of the attack: the Twin Towers. The total collapse of the third huge skyscraper late in the afternoon of September 11th was reported as if it were an insignificant footnote. The television networks played video of the jets impacting the Twin Towers hundreds of times. But most people never saw video of Building 7’s collapse.

Building 7 was neither hit by an airplane nor, apparently, by heavy fallout from the collapse of either of the Twin Towers. If you believe the official story that it collapsed from fires, it would be the first case in history in which fires induced the total collapse of a steel-framed building. Shouldn’t that have been newsworthy, given its implications for building safety and rescue and firefighting operations? Incredibly, it is difficult to find any mention of Building 7 in newspapers, magazines, or broadcast media reports about the September 11th attack.

The collapse of Building 7 was reported on 9/11/2001, apparently by all or most of the television networks. These reports were so obscure that it was not until 2007 that researchers discovered that the BBC and CNN had announced the collapse before it occurred.

Despite the enormity of this event, there is no mention of it in a timetable of press flashes, alerts, and bulletins from the day of and after the attack compiled by the Associated Press. ¹