Well, new info is (finally) coming to light regarding every conspiracy theorists' smoking gun darling, the collapse of WTC7. Let's address these very popular misconceptions.
(I write "finally" because it was no easy task to determine and the NIST wanted to be certain).
Also damaged were all the other buildings in the WTC complex, buildings three through six, but conspiracy theorists love to harp on building seven.
The reason is because it collapsed and the collapse was caught on camcorders. As a result, those that pick and choose the facts have it in their heads that it's evidence they weren't supposed to see. Also, building seven housed some CIA, DOD, SEC and IRS offices. One supposes that the presence of these governement agencies in the building made the conspiracy tale into too much of a tasty morsel for them to resist wildly speculating upon. (The main tenant, however, (that had over half of the building) was Salomon, Smith & Barney).
WTC7 took around eight hours to collapse.
The building became severely structurally damaged right after the impacts of Flight 11 into building 1 and Flight 175 into building 2.
WTC7 is a couple of hundred yards from the main towers.
Planes, of course, did not hit it directly, so there was no jet fuel to sustain fires, but important to understand is that WTC7 housed the emergency diesel power generators for the whole WTC complex. When debris from towers one and two hit its right side in the mid-to-upper floors, it started a fire in one of these diesel lines.
Hours into the fire, building owner Larry Silverstein remarked to "pull it" meaning to no longer devote emergency personnel and resources to the building because it had been determined by that time that it would eventually collapse.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WYdAJQV100
Certain conspiracy theorists take Silverstein's remarks as a command to demolish the building, something he had no authority or wherewithal to even accomplish.
And demolition experts agree that the phrase "pull it" is not a term in their jargon.
From an architectural point of view, the 40-some-odd story building did not have a very solid foundation. Several of the bottom floors were like an amphitheater and the whole thing was built on trusses. Well, after hours of fires raging, one of the trusses heated up to the point of weakening considerably and its collapse in turn brought the entire building crashing down.
No ground zero workers, volunteer or otherwise, have ever so much as found even one fragment of a single blasting cap in all these years of excavation and analysis.
People stating that the collapse of WTC7 is a smoking gun proving that the government destroyed the building do a tremendous disservice to the real truth and to the memory of all the numerous victims of the 9/11 attack and their bereaved loved ones and families.
When will conspiracy theorists get their collective heads out of their collective asses and realize that
if a few persons with certain vested interests wanted the attacks to occur and had intelligence that al-Qaeda was determined to attack within the United States all that they would have to do is rely on lapsed security and allow it to happen?
Oh that's right, (silly me) it's a well-established fact that this intelligence concerning new attacks on the World Trade Center was known to exist beforehand and was revealed in the subsequent hearings.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYbWaMqWy7s
It's as good of a smoking gun as we're probably ever going to get. A very few specific actions and inactions by a very limited number individuals could bring the result. There is no need for all the gobbledegook bullshit that pervades the internet and various craptastic documentaries on 9/11 to sustain a theory. (The only ones worth a damn that I've seen are
Fahrenheit 9/11 (and
Bush's Brain is a supplement of sorts (even though
Bush's Brain doesn't deal so much with 9/11))).
All of this cockeyed business about a controlled demolition of WTC7 and Flight 93 actually being shot down instead of crashing is so far out from the truth that it makes one wonder whether is a result of deliberately bad information being spread with the foreknowledge that reprehensible dumbasses would certainly be sure to spread it, forever murking up the waters of the actual truth. But then again, it's far more likely that people, a high percentage of them being dumbasses, needed no special lead to assist them in regurgitating the dumbass things they and other dumbasses think.