911, 13 Long, Sad, Lie-filled Years On........

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Peter Lemkin]

[Albert Doyle]

If you are ever frustrated by the lack of traction on this just be gald that you are not one of those useful idiots being lined up for propaganda camera shots in the memorial anniversary ceremonies.

[Peter Lemkin]

http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/106480

[Michael Barwell]

Tourists suck.

[Peter Lemkin]

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[TD="class: contentheading"]Why Do Good People Become Silentor WorseAbout 9/11?[/TD]
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[TD]Written by Frances T. Shure, M.A., L.P.C. [/TD]
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[TD="class: createdate"]Thursday, 11 December 2014 00:00 [/TD]
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Part 13: Prior Knowledge of State Crimes Against Democracy and Deep Politics

by Frances T. Shure, 2014

Editor's Note: Frances Shure, M.A., L.P.C., has performed an in-depth analysis addressing a key issue of our time: "Why Do Good People Become Silent or Worse About 9/11?" The resulting essay, being presented here as a series, is a synthesis of both academic research and clinical observations.
In answering the question in the title of this essay, the November segment Signal Detection Theory examined how the "signal" of 9/11 Truth can be drowned out by excessive "noise" that comes from our information-overloaded world, our prior beliefs, and our psychological state of being.
Here, in the December installment, we continue Ms. Shure's analysis with Part 13: Prior Knowledge of State Crimes Against Democracy and Deep Politics, which explores how our prior knowledge of state crimes by governments, as well as our knowledge of the deep state as opposed to the visible public state in which we participate as citizens affects our reception of evidence that indicates we have been lied to about 9/11.
People with prior knowledge of corporate and governmental malfeasance, but especially of State Crimes Against Democracy (SCADs), have an increased capacity to accept evidence that contradicts the official 9/11 conspiracy theory.
Lance deHaven-SmithWhat are SCADs, and how do they differ from other political crimes? Lance deHaven-Smith, a professor of Public Administration and Policy at Florida State University, coined the term "state crimes against democracy" to distinguish them as the illegal or extralegal actions of public officials or elites who manipulate or subvert democratic processes and undermine popular sovereignty. In other words, State Crimes Against Democracy are high crimes that attack not only people, but democracy itself.[SUP]1[/SUP]
Therefore, according to deHaven-Smith, "election tampering, political assassinations, voter fraud, government graft, non-governmental rogue operations, state counter-democratic actions, and corporate collusion with extralegal initiatives can be classified as SCADs."[SUP]2[/SUP]
Before September 11, 2001, each of us had varying degrees of knowledge about political intrigue. If, for example, we had already read professor Peter Dale Scott's Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, or if we already had a solid understanding of known SCADs, such as Iran-Contra,[SUP]3[/SUP] the Gulf of Tonkin,[SUP]4[/SUP] and especially Operation Northwoods,[SUP]5[/SUP] then we likely had minimal resistance to the evidence pointing to 9/11 as a false-flag operation. On the other hand, those of us who possessed none of this knowledge before 9/11 would have been challenged by a huge paradigm shift when we awoke to the facts that contradicted the official storyline regarding that terrible day.
Peter Dale ScottLike State Crimes Against Democracy, the term "deep politics" is invaluable in that it helps us wrap our minds around the concept that there is a "public state" and a "deep state." The public state consists of the democratic republic that we are taught is our system of government and in which we dutifully participate as citizens. The deep state, on the other hand, is composed of the realpolitik powers and behind-the-scenes decisions about which ordinary citizens are unaware.[SUP]6[/SUP]
Scott defines "deep state" more specifically:
Those parts of the government responding to . . . [the top 1% of wealth holders] influence I call the "deep state" (if covert) or "security state" (if military). Both represent top-down or closed power, as opposed to the open power of the public state . . . that represents the people as a whole. . . . The deep state's secret top-down powers have become a major threat to democracy.[SUP]7[/SUP]

Unless we have had a prior understanding of the deep state, we will likely dismiss the evidence presented by 9/11 skeptics. Peter Dale Scott's invaluable book, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America, offers us this sorely needed historical context. In it, he writes:
In one sense, 9/11 is an event without precedent, and one that threatens to move America beyond the age of public politics to a new era in which power, more than ever before, is administered downward from above. But at the same time, 9/11 must be seen as a culmination of trends developing through a half century: toward secret top-down decision making by small cabals, toward the militarization of law enforcement, toward plans for the sequestering of those who dissent, toward government off-the-books operations, transactions, and assets, and toward governance by those [the 1%] who pay for political parties rather than those who participate in them.[SUP]8[/SUP] [Emphasis added]

Without some knowledge of this historical context, our deepest beliefs about our government and our democratic republic will be profoundly challenged when we first encounter evidence that refutes the official account of 9/11. The same is true when we encounter reports of past governmental treacheries, such as the deception that led to the Pearl Harbor attacks;[SUP]9[/SUP] Operation Northwoods the 1962 false-flag plot designed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to commit acts of terrorism in American cities and elsewhere to justify an invasion of Cuba, which was rejected by President Kennedy;[SUP]10[/SUP] Operation Mockingbird, a CIA plot to control the media, instigated after World War II;[SUP]11[/SUP] the atrocities of Project MK-ULTRA experiments on unaware citizens;[SUP]12[/SUP] and the 1933 plot by wealthy businessmen to overthrow the U.S. government and create a fascist state, as Major General Smedley Butler testified to in a 1934 congressional hearing.[SUP]13[/SUP]
"The deep state's secret top-down powers have become a major threat to democracy.

~ Peter Dale Scott

With rare exception, our educational system avoids the history of these and other betrayals by our government and/or elite interests, thus creating a naïve and credulous population, willing to accept passively the "reality" portrayed by the CIA-and-corporate-controlled media.
In fact, as Florida professor Lance deHaven-Smith informs us in his groundbreaking book, Conspiracy Theory in America, we have been conditioned to recoil psychologically from such "conspiracy theories," even when these theories are documented and credible.
Our current inability to look unselfconsciously at the evidence pointing to an official conspiracy behind 9/11 can be traced to a highly successful CIA operation. In 1967, four years after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, the CIA became concerned with the growing number of newspaper articles and books reporting on evidence in the Warren Commission report itself that contradicted the lone-gunman and single-bullet theories. Public opinion polls were beginning to indicate that a plurality of Americans did not fully accept the Commission's report, and the integrity of democracy in the U.S. was coming into question.[SUP]14[/SUP]
The CIA responded to this growing crisis by sending a secret dispatch memo 1035-960 to CIA agents worldwide. This directive instructed these agents to contact journalists and opinion leaders in their locales and ask for their assistance in countering the influence of "conspiracy theorists" who were publishing "conspiracy theories" that blamed top leaders in the U.S. for Kennedy's death.[SUP]15[/SUP]
Skeptics of the official 9/11 account have heard ad nauseam the retort, "I cannot believe that a conspiracy of this magnitude could be true because people can't keep secrets someone would have talked!"
This belief comes directly from one of the talking points of the memo: "Conspiracy on the large scale often suggested [by "conspiracy theorists"] would be impossible to conceal in the United States. . . ."
This now-ingrained belief in our society has successfully deterred many people from seriously considering the 9/11 evidence that contradicts the official story.[SUP]16[/SUP] As explained in Part 8 on brain research, it is these strong beliefs that may keep us from even considering the compelling evidence that 9/11 skeptics present.
Fortunately, memo 1035-960 was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act in 1976 and was released in full in 1998.[SUP]17[/SUP] Since 1967, the derogatory nature of the conspiracy meme skyrocketed in the press, so that anyone who had the audacity to question the official story-line of a significant event was viewed by most Americans as deranged or unstable. These CIA talking points are used to this day by ill-informed journalists and citizens to avoid seriously looking at facts and evidence that contradict any official story, including the story we were told about 9/11.[SUP]18[/SUP]
I was one who was thoroughly conditioned. A few years before 9/11, I responded, as if on cue, to a friend who was suspicious of the government's unlikely account of an event (it may have been the Oklahoma City bombing) with a glib "Oh! I don't believe in conspiracy theories!" But just weeks after 9/11, I began to open my eyes to the crystal-clear evidence of a conspiracy, which was presented to me by the then-nascent 9/11 Truth Movement. After reading a book on the subject in the summer of 2002, I was completely cured of my old conditioning![SUP]19[/SUP]
One would ideally expect academics to do research and think critically and to encourage students to do the same in order to determine whether the government's theory or an alternative theory is the more substantiated and correct one. Sadly, most professors disdain and even censor information that points to as-yet-unproven conspiracies.[SUP]20[/SUP]
Fortunately, though, social psychologists have taken the lead in reversing this censoring trend. They recognize that the term "state crimes against democracy" encourages inquiry, unlike the meme "conspiracy theory," which, because of our knee-jerk conditioning, encourages censorship.
Once social psychologists begin inquiring into suspected SCADs, they then will be able to identify "patterns in SCAD victims, tactics, timing, those who benefit, and other SCAD characteristics,"[SUP]21[/SUP] writes deHaven-Smith. The social psychologists who systematically examine suspected SCADs as they would examine any other social phenomena will better understand deep politics. This scholarly examination will then lead them to identify our system's institutional vulnerabilities. Armed with such studies, they will be able to recommend that protections be established or strengthened.[SUP]22[/SUP]
Without scientific inquiry by scholars and other concerned citizens into State Crimes Against Democracy, we are left floundering in a sea of competing theories, believing that we will never know the truth, so why even try. As deHaven-Smith observes:
When suspicious incidents occur that alter the nation's objectives, disrupt presidential elections, provoke military action, or otherwise affect the national agenda, Americans tend to accept the self-serving accounts of public officials, seldom considering the possibility that such incidents might have been initiated or facilitated by the officials themselves. The role and function of the universally understood concept of "agent provocateur" is grossly neglected in the idiom of American political discourse. This mass gullibility, which itself invites SCADs, is unlikely to change until SCAD detection and prosecution are improved.[SUP]23[/SUP] [Emphasis added]

The word "corruption" is far too weak to describe the condition in which we find ourselves in the U.S. today. For example, there has been a merger of corporate interests within segments of our governmentsuch as the revolving door of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and other federal agencies designed to protect citizens. As a result, officials no longer even bother to adhere to the ethical standard of recusing themselves from a position of power or influence when faced with a conflict of interest.
Moreover, our government representatives have accepted a system of legalized bribery in the form of massive corporate campaign contributions. Thus we have, as investigative journalist Greg Palast satirically puts it, "the best democracy money can buy."[SUP]24[/SUP]
Add this to the stunning fact that, to date, we have yet to witness a real criminal investigation into the attacks of 9/11, and we clearly see that the United States of America has become a culture of unaccountability. More precisely, there is wholesale impunity for the elite operatives of the deep state, but not for the rest of us.
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind's report of a conversation with a former George W. Bush senior advisor gives us an idea of the relative invulnerability of these deep-state operatives. In his New York Times article, "Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush," Suskind wrote:
In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that realityjudiciously, as you willwe'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."[SUP]25[/SUP] [Emphasis added]

With blatant arrogance and remarkable clarity, this senior advisor was outlining his participation in the deep state. In fact, the operatives of the deep state, whether they are government officials or the business and banking elite of our country or their proxies, are the ones who would necessarily be the perpetrators of State Crimes Against Democracy the aforementioned historical SCADs as well as 9/11 and the accompanying anthrax attacks in 2001.[SUP]26[/SUP] Hand in hand, piece by piece, they destroy the representative democracy that we inherited from our forefathers, who, by the way, predicted and adamantly warned us against such treachery.[SUP]27[/SUP]
"This mass gullibility, which itself invites SCADs, is unlikely to change until SCAD detection and prosecution are improved."

~ Lance DeHaven-Smith

Another aspect contributing to the destruction of our republic is the common citizen's ignorance (willful or not) and/or acquiescence (witting or not). This is where the importance of the 9/11 Truth Movement and other movements working toward transparency and democracy can make a significant impact. There are numerous active groups around the world whose members have become informed on various issues. They work diligently to educate and transform societies so that all peoples may have health, prosperity, sovereignty, a sustainable environment, and accurate information for making informed decisions.
How does our knowledge of SCADs and of deep politics influence how we approach individuals with the evidence that indicates our government is lying to us about 9/11?
Well, this essay has established that a person's prior knowledge of high political crimes is key to whether or not they remain silent or worse about 9/11. Thus, we 9/11 Truth activists will be more successful in convincing people to accept our information if we first ascertain what our listeners already know. Then we can start a dialogue with them, based on how much knowledge they currently possess, rather than where we want their level of knowledge to be.
Clearly, prior knowledge of State Crimes Against Democracy and an understanding of deep politics are empowering assets that help us detect signals warning us that we are, once again, being deceived. However, as we shall see in the following section, detecting such signals may weaken some people, not empower them. This may be because they are the victims of "learned helplessness."
Editor's note: To be continued in the next issue with Part 14: Learned Helplessness. Electronic sources in the footnotes have all been archived. If they can no longer be found by a search on the Internet, readers desiring a copy may contact Frances Shure for a copy [ here ].

---

[1] Lance deHaven-Smith, "Beyond Conspiracy Theory: Patterns of High Crime in American Government," American Behavioral Scientist 53, no. 6 (February 2010): 795825; this entire issue is devoted to research on State Crimes Against Democracy.
Lance deHaven-Smith, "When Political Crimes Are Inside Jobs: Detecting State Crimes Against Democracy," Administrative Theory & Praxis, 28, no. 3 (2006): 330355.
Lance deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America (University of Texas Press, 2013).
[2] Daniel K. Sage, "An Overview of State Crimes Against Democracy," 2013. See this article for other SCAD-like operations not mentioned by deHaven-Smith.
[3] http://globalresearch.ca/.../LOB308A.html.
[4] http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-tonkin-gulf-war-pretext.../5341718.
[5] http://whatreallyhappened.com/.../northwoods.html.
[6] Mike Lofgren, "Anatomy of the Deep State."
[7] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America (University of California Press, 2007), 4.
[8] Ibid. 2.
[9] Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor (Free Press; Touchstone edition, 2001).
[10] http://whatreallyhappened.com/.../northwoods.html.
[11] Alex Constantine, Virtual Government: CIA Mind Control Operations in America (Feral House, 1997), 3566.
Carl Bernstein, "The CIA and the Media: How America's Most Powerful News Media Worked Hand in Glove with the Central Intelligence Agency and Why the Church Committee Covered It Up."
William Casey, CIA Director, 19811987, candidly said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false."
[12] Constantine, Virtual Government.
[13] http://en.wikipedia.org/.../Business_Plot
An excellent article on proven conspiracies: http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/.../rethinking-conspiracy.
[14] deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America, 108.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid. 200.
[17] Ibid. 107.
See full dispatch here.
[18] An article depicting the continued use of several of these talking points here.
[19] Michael Ruppert's talk on VHS, Truth and Lies About 9/11 became available as early as the fall of 2001, and Nafeez Mosaddeq Amhed's book, The War on Freedom, was published in July 2002.
[20] Adnan Zuberi, 9/11 in the Academic Community. This excellent film details the taboo nature of 9/11 in institutions of higher learning.
[21] deHaven-Smith, Beyond Conspiracy Theory, 799.
[22] Ibid. 796.
[23] Ibid. 811.
[24] Greg Palast, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, (First Plume Printing, 2003), 25.
[25] Ron Suskind, "Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush," New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004.
[26] Graeme MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy (Clarity Press, 2014).
[27] deHaven-Smith, Conspiracy Theory in America.
Continued with Part 14: Learned Helplessness

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[Peter Lemkin]

Video game blogger beats NASA engineer in TV physics contest

Sometimes the truth about 9/11 shows up in the oddest places.
On a recent episode of the TBS reality show King of the Nerds, a bubbly, pink-haired video game blogger named Danielle was the unlikely winner of one phase of a science-related competition that pitted her against a NASA engineer and three other contenders. The most intriguing aspect of her upset win was that Danielle used "9/11 conspiracy" websites to outsmart her rivals.
How did physics-deprived Danielle excel in a physics competition? For the answer, read the article!Hosted by the stars of the Revenge of the Nerds movies, Robert Carradine and Curtis Armstrong, King of the Nerds features a group of contestants who compete in a series of challenges called "nerd wars" in a location called "Nerdvana." The challenge on this episode involved predicting how many panes of glass spaced apart vertically in much the same way floors in a high-rise office building are would be broken when balls of various weights were dropped from a tower.
At the start, the hosts did a demonstration to acquaint the five competitors with the problem they would have to solve. When they dropped a twelve-pound ball suspended fourteen feet above more than two dozen sheets of glass that were one-quarter-inch thick and spaced three inches apart, the top four panes broke.
Carradine and Armstrong then issued the assignment: The contestants had to calculate how many panes would shatter in each of three different tests. In the first and third tests, the only variable that changed was the density of the dropped object a six-pound nerd ball in the former, a fifteen-pound stuffed pig in the latter. (The audience is left to wonder what the heck the pig was stuffed with!) In the second test, besides the different density (an eight-pound nerd ball), the thickness of the glass and the space between the panes were also altered.
One by one, the young competitors revealed their academic backgrounds, familiarity with physics, and current vocations. There was Ivan, the smug-but-confused, role-playing game designer; Moogega, the cocky NASA engineering whiz; Genevieve, the stressed-out fantasy writer; Celeste, the pro-gamer; and Genevieve, the AP physics guide writer. The latter two collaborated "to improve our mutual chances of winning . . ." and ". . . to have a better chance of knocking Danielle out of this competition." Then there was Danielle, who, having taken zero courses in physics, initially declared the challenge to be "bull&@^*" because all her adversaries were more qualified than she was. (She majored in a pre-vet program, where "we didn't care how fast the cat moved . . . .")
Lack of expertise, however, didn't deter Danielle. Unlike her opponents, who got some sleep, she stayed up all night in search of answers. And while they appeared to rely only partially on the Internet (we see them referring to the available calculus books as well as scribbling lots of notes and equations a few from memory), Danielle depended exclusively on the World Wide Web.
"I might be the only one in the house who is looking at My Little Pony to try to solve a physics problem," she admitted at one point.
"I just beat a NASA scientist in physics."

~ Danielle

But the main sources of Danielle's research were 9/11 Truth websites. "The only thing I've found that's even similar to what we're doing are people who are trying to disprove 9/11 being a terrorist attack," she observed. "I have literally found probably ten websites using an example of dropping a bowling ball through panes of glass to explain why the Twin Towers is a conspiracy."
When the three tests were over, Danielle came out on top, having bested her two closest competitors by one point. Ivan was miffed that someone with no prior knowledge of physics had beaten them all. Meanwhile, embarrassed engineer Moogega saw her worst fear come true when she finished dead last.
"I just beat a NASA scientist in physics," a bemused Danielle beamed, then added, "What the f%^k?" She went on to thank "all the conspiracy theorists of America."
Curiously, in one night of research, the "queen" of King of the Nerds did more to forward the truth about the Twin Towers' destruction albeit indirectly and unwittingly than the mainstream media has done in thirteen years of pretending to prove the unprovable official account of 9/11.
Craig McKee is a journalist and creator of the blog Truth and Shadows.

[Peter Lemkin]

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[TD="class: contentheading"]#2 of 6: NIST's WTC 7 Reports: Filled with Fantasy, Fiction, and Fraud[/TD]
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[TD]Written by Simon Falkner and Chris Sarns[/TD]
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[TD="class: createdate"]Friday, 12 December 2014 00:00[/TD]
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Why 2,300 Architects & Engineers Demand Independent Investigation

PART 1: NIST and Popular Mechanics Fabricate Myth of WTC 7's "Scooped-Out" 10 Stories

Editor's Note: This fascinating and provocative technical piece on NIST's manipulation of the WTC 7 evidence is broken down into a series of six articles. The second installment (below) is PART 1: NIST and Popular Mechanics Fabricate Myth About WTC 7's "Scooped-Out" 10 Stories. The first installment was the INTRODUCTION. Stand by for the next four installments, to be published monthly.

A

Figure 2. We will be showing this "Plan View of Collapse Progression" graphic in three installments of this series of articles, starting with this installment, where we have labeled it "A." The identical graphic will be labeled "B" and "C" in the next two installments. NIST's 2004 Progress Report depicts a mythical hole supposedly "scooped out" of the center of the bottom 10 floors of Building 7. Figure L-31 in Appendix L of the report refers to the hole as the "Approximate Region of Impact Damage by Large WTC1 Debris." Since this damage did not exist in reality, NIST backpedaled and did not include its discredited Figure L-31 in the final 2008 report.

In its infamous 2005 article, "Debunking the 9/11 Myths," Popular Mechanics quoted NIST director Shyam Sunder asserting that falling debris from the North Tower poked a huge "gouge" in the front of WTC 7: "The most important thing we found was that there was, in fact, physical damage to the south face of building 7." Sunder went on to say, "On about a third of the face to the center and to the bottom ― approximately 10 stories ― about 25 percent of the depth of the building was scooped out." [Emphasis added]
Remarkably, Sunder made this definitive statement despite having no solid evidence to back it up. In fact, a careful reading of its 2004 preliminary report reveals that NIST simply cherry-picked one eyewitness statement, even though other witnesses refute this dramatic, specific, and provably false claim of damage.
Specifically, the statement about the 10-story gouge appears on page 18 of NIST's 2004 report, but NIST conveniently ignored two other comments on the same page that are in conflict with its conclusion:

• "No heavy debris was observed in the lobby area as the building was exited, primarily white dust coating and black wires hanging from ceiling areas were observed." This is no small detail. A 10-story gouge created by external debris being thrown into the building at "the bottom" would have left a huge pile of rubble in the lobby. Any legitimate investigator would go back and check to see if the lone witness reporting a 10-story gouge was perhaps referring to other damage to Building 7 or even to another building entirely.
  
• "[D]ebris damage across one-fourth width of the south face, starting several floors above the atrium ([which] extended from the ground to 5th floor), noted that the atrium glass was still intact." This, too, is no small detail. The witness described damage to the south face, but placed the damage higher up, and the intact glass on the bottom five floors certainly contradicted NIST's placement of the claimed 10-story hole at "the bottom" of the building. Tellingly, this statement didn't place the damage at the center of the south face, so this witness was probably describing the collective damage west of center and above the fifth floor, as shown in NIST's Figure 5-92 below (see our Figure 3 below).
  

In sum, these two statements strongly suggest that evidence known to NIST at the time contradicted the statements it made in its own report in 2004 and via Popular Mechanics in 2005. NIST has since abandoned the story about the center of the bottom 10 floors being "scooped out" its final 2008 report. Yet it remains, as myths are wont to do, in the minds of most who read the NIST-sanctioned PM piece.
Figure 3. NIST's Figure 12-33, from its final 2008 report, depicts damage to the southwest corner that actually is supported by photographic evidence and witness reports. When this figure is compared to Figure L-31 in the 2004 preliminary report (see our Figure 2 above), it is apparent that NIST has abandoned the idea that there was a separate gouge that "scooped out" the center of the bottom 10 floors. Refer to PART 2 in order to discover why NIST initially fabricated the story about the gouge.
It may seem odd that a scientifically-oriented magazine like Popular Mechanics accepted Sunder's story about the huge (non-existent) gouge, since Sunder offered no photographs or clear witness statements to back up his claim. Then again, Popular Mechanics' severe lack of credibility has been previously addressed by AE911Truth in a series of damning articles.
It may seem even more peculiar that PM's editor at the time, James Meigs, wrote a piece titled, "The 9/11 Lies Are Out There: Editor's Notes," in which he bragged about the magazine's careful and thorough research. Meigs claimed that a team of editors, reporters, researchers, and "professional fact checkers" had "methodically analyzed, interviewed, and researched everything on the subject."
If the magazine did employ a team of competent, honest researchers, its work must have been tampered with or ignored. For even minimal truly scientific research would have revealed the bogus nature of Sunder's statements. To be fair, PM may have been completely unaware of the significance of Sunder's specific placement of the gouge, as will be discussed in PART 2. Still, that is no excuse for this journalistic failing, which comes across as more than simple naivety or mere incompetence.
Incredibly, when asked about the 2005 article, Popular Mechanics editor/researcher Davin Coburn could not have been telling the truth when he told Charles Goyette in a 2006 radio interview that he had seen photos of the 10-story gouge, even though they were never produced and "the gouge" claim was abandoned:
Coburn: "When the North Tower collapsed... there was damage to Building 7.... What we found out was... about 25% of the building's south face had been carved away from it.... We have seen pictures that are property of the NY Police Department and various other governmental agencies that we were not given permission to disseminate...."
Charles: "Popular Mechanics got to see them, but the average American citizen can't see them."
Davin: "Correct."

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In the next (third) installment of this series of six articles, PART 2: NIST's Fictitious Gouge Launches "Design Flaw" Myth and "Collapse Initiation" Theory, the authors explore NIST's motive for creating the myth about the non-existent 10-story gouge and for putting so much emphasis on it in a Popular Mechanics article.

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