Tuesday, February 27, 2007:
BBC World News started reporting that WTC 7 had collapsed about 23 minutes before the building actually came down, as video of news coverage on September 11th shows. The segment establishing this is available on the archive.org news service and was discovered by veritas911, a member of 911blogger.com.
(The 1-gigabyte original video is located at
http://ia311517.us.archive.org/2/items/bbc200109111654-1736/V08591-16.mpg)
Speaking from London on the afternoon of September 11th, BBC World News anchorman Philip Hayton asks reporter Jane Stanley in New York about the collapse of the "47-story Salomon Brothers Building," also known as WTC 7. Although the building is clearly visible and still standing through the window behind Stanley, its collapse is repeatedly described as a past event. Hayton even asks Stanley if there were any casualties in the building.
WTC 7 in fact collapsed about five minutes after Stanley's connection to London was cut off (reportedly due to a technical failure). My apologies to veritas911 for my hasty and dismissive judgment of his discovery, and to 911blogger.com for suggesting that the presentation of the BBC segment should be pulled off the site.
Allow me to explain my mistake: The BBC segment of September 11 was presented on Google Video yesterday morning by someone unknown to me, whom I will call the "Video Artist." This person added explanatory titles exhibiting a patently wrong understanding of how time zones are arranged. For example, the Video Artist's titles state that the BBC segment begins shortly before 5pm EST (Eastern Standard Time). In fact, New York on 9/11/2001 was using EDT (Eastern Daylight Time). 5pm EST is actually 6pm EDT.
On seeing these titles I concluded, perhaps falsely, that the Video Artist was intentionally trying to deceive about the timing of the BBC broadcast, and that the broadcast was actually at 6pm EDT (i.e., after the WTC 7 collapse).
One of the titles bizarrely claimed BBC World News was using BST (British Summer Time) when in fact it uses GMT (Greenwich Mean or universal time). This title states that 10pm BST is 5pm EST, which is in fact impossible! (10 pm BST=9pm GMT=5pm EDT=4pm EST).
As a result I feared someone was once again leading on 9/11 skeptics with a falsification, a sadly frequent occurrence. In this I ignored the simpler explanation: that the Video Artist was woefully ignorant of time zones, and failed to do the most basic research on the subject.
Thus was I temporarily blinded to the far more important paradox of Jane Stanley and the uncollapsed WTC 7. No clock is visible in the half-hour of the BBC segment, so the broadcast time still needs to be established beyond any doubt. But it is almost certainly before 5:20 pm, as the information available at archive.org states, and as various internal clues imply (chief among them that the building is still seen standing; also mentioning Bush having just flown out of Nebraska, which would have been just before 5 pm EDT).
If so, then the BBC was in possession of an accurate advance report on the future collapse of WTC 7, and chose to report this collapse "prematurely." As she spoke of it, the British reporter herself may have had no clue that she was looking at WTC 7 (since this was not a remarkable or universally-known building prior to 9/11).
Did the authorities in New York provide BBC with a written text or other communication predicting an imminent WTC 7 collapse? Who would have done that? The authorities have claimed that they knew from the state of the building that it would collapse, but the timing of the BBC report is uncannily prescient. Within five minutes after Jane Stanley's report is abruptly cut off, the building does actually collapse, as though on cue.
If by some chance the time of this segment is mistaken, as I first thought, and the segment was actually broadcast after 5:20 (as the deficient titles by the Video Artist led me to believe), this would be damning of the BBC, as the only explanation in that case is that it was somehow faking a live broadcast, by means such as a reporter speaking in front of a back-lit projection or video screen showing footage shot earlier. (This kind of deception may be common in the broadcast media, but it would still be scandalous and inexcusable.)
Either way, BBC World News must now explain why and how it was reporting on a future disaster as though it had already happened.
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ADDING ON EDIT: The segment as a whole is a great primer in the total propaganda established on 9/11/2001 - America discovers its vulnerability, things will never be the same, Americans are now wounded and fearful, Pearl Harbor, only foreigners could do this, only Osama could do this, retaliation surely coming, those Arabs liked that this happened, let's ask Shimon Peres what Americans should do since his people have suffered more from terrorism than any other, he says to treat any country that harbors'em as a terrorist nation, well here comes the swift fist of revenge!