skyking.....Your post on WTC 7 illustrates very well the need to get facts straight, which was the point of my question to Butters (who claimed that WTC 7 did not have "any structural damage"). It displays a photo of the north face of the building which shows no visible damage and fires on only two floors, and you claim that this photo is representative of "what we are to believe took the building down". You claim that "this is the south side, the side that sustained the damage," but that is not true. It is, in fact, the side that faced away from the WTC, which could not possibly have been hit directly by debris.
If you had examined photos showing the south side and the southwest corner of the building, you would have seen that (1) there was a huge hole along the southwest corner many stories tall, (3) a similar hole on the south face, and (2) the whole south face engulfed in smoke from fires burning along the south face (notice how the smoke line starts abruptly at the southwest corner).
The last six frames are from a video looking east up Vesey that clearly shows that the column of smoke is coming from WTC7. There are also all the statements by firefighters which I posted in a similar thread a while back, which describe the structural damage mentioned above:
"A little north of Vesey I said, we'll go down, let's see what's going on. A couple of the other officers and I were going to see what was going on. We were told to go to Greenwich and Vesey and see what's going on. So we go there and on the north and east side of 7 it didn't look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of 7 there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors. Debris was falling down on the building and it didn't look good. But they had a hoseline operating. Like I said, it was hitting the sidewalk across the street, but eventually they pulled back too. Then we received an order from Fellini, we're going to make a move on 7. That was the first time really my stomach tightened up because the building didn't look good. I was figuring probably the standpipe systems were shot. There was no hydrant pressure. I wasn't really keen on the idea. Then this other officer I'm standing next to said, that building doesn't look straight. So I'm standing there. I'm looking at the building. It didn't look right, but, well, we'll go in, we'll see. So we gathered up rollups and most of us had masks at that time. We headed toward 7. And just around we were about a hundred yards away and Butch Brandies came running up. He said forget it, nobody's going into 7, there's creaking, there are noises coming out of there, so we just stopped. And probably about 10 minutes after that, Visconti, he was on West Street, and I guess he had another report of further damage either in some basements and things like that, so Visconti said nobody goes into 7, so that was the final thing and that was abandoned...There was a huge gaping hole and it was scattered throughout there. It was a huge hole. I would say it was probably about a third of it, right in the middle of it. And so after Visconti came down and said nobody goes in 7, we said all right, we'll head back to the command post" [1]
"By now, this is going on into the afternoon, and we were concerned about additional collapse, not only of the Marriott, because there was a good portion of the Marriott still standing, but also we were pretty sure that 7 World Trade Center would collapse. Early on, we saw a bulge in the southwest corner between floors 10 and 13, and we had put a transit on that and we were pretty sure she was going to collapse. You actually could see there was a visible bulge, it ran up about three floors. It came down about 5 o'clock in the afternoon, but by about 2 o'clock in the afternoon we realized this thing was going to collapse" [2]
"They told us to get out of there because they were worried about 7 World Trade Center, which is right behind it, coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom corner of the building was gone. We could look right out over to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up. Looking over the smaller buildings. I just remember it was tremendous, tremendous fires going on. Finally they pulled us out. They said all right, get out of that building because that 7, they were really worried about. They pulled us out of there and then they regrouped everybody on Vesey Street, between the water and West Street. They put everybody back in there. Finally it did come down. From there - this is much later on in the day, because every day we were so worried about that building we didn't really want to get people close. They were trying to limit the amount of people that were in there. Finally it did come down" [3].
Moreover there is Camera Planet footage of WTC 7 from the afternoon of 9/11 of a firefighter who points out that WTC 7 was leaning and was going to collapse:
"You see where the white smoke is and this thing leaning like this. It's definitely coming down. There's no way to stop it. Because you have to go up in there to put it out and its already -- the structural integrity is not there in the building".
There is also CBS coverage around 5pm on 9/11 and one of their reporters, Scott Pelley, just visited the site and described what he saw:
"The smoke that you see behind me is coming primarily from a 50 or 60 story tall building that was half a block from the World Trade Center. That building is deeply involved in flame, there is flame shooting out of the windows. When we were below it just about 30 minutes ago, big panes of glass were popping out of the building and crashing down below. Rescue workers really can't get into that area right now because it is much too dangerous....There were a number of firefighters and police officers in the area. They were watching Building Number Seven burn because there was frankly nothing they could do about it. The inferno was huge. So much of the building was collapsing into the street, bit by bit, that they were unable to do anything with it."
I don't want to get mired into a technical discussion about how the building came down...the only reason I posted in this thread is to point out that erroneous claims are often passed around as "basic facts" in much 9/11 research on the internet. If one wants to make a credible counter-claim to the standard version of events, it should be based on the best evidence possible and avoid getting basic facts wrong.