Slide #21 - Dan Rather's Simile

The CBS Clip

In this slide, Gage simply plays a clip of 7 World Trade falling. It's from the CBS coverage of the day.

Gage also wants you to listen to Dan Rather. Dan says the following, which Gage so helpfully quotes a portion of:

Dan: Now, here we're going to show videotape of the collapse itself. Now we go to videotape of the collapse of this building.

(The collapse, already underway, continues to the end.)

Other Anchor: Hmm. It's amazing.

Dan: Amazing, incredible, pick your word. For the third time today -- it's reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen too much on television before, where a building was deliberately destroyed, destroyed by well-placed dynamite to knock it down.

To Gage's credit, he does quote the part of Dan's speech where he says it's "reminscent" of a controlled demolition. But he and other people who look to this quote simply make too much of Rather's statement.

What Is A Simile?

This is a problem that 9/11 alternate theorists seem to share: an inability to recognize figures of speech. Dan Rather has not just said that the building was literally a controlled demolion. He has only remarked how much that particular shot of the collapse looks like a CD.

This is known as a simile. Similes generally use the word "like" to compare two otherwise dissimilar things. Its close cousin is the metaphor, where you actually identify two different things as the same to highlight a similar characteristic they both share.

For example, a poet could describe someone's tears as "like" a rainstorm. Someone's strongly expressed grief could even be more strongly described as a "tornado of pain." Neither of these statements is meant to be taken literally.

This tendency of people to express remarkable events in similes and metaphors seems to befuzzle conspiracy theorists. This figurative language is seized upon so literally that you wonder if they really can't understand the nature of what's being said.

Without a doubt, that particular angle of 7 World Trade's collapse looks a lot like a controlled demolition. As Dan Rather put it, it is "reminscent" of such an event.

But there are many other angles to view this collapse from, and there is a lot of evidence left to consider. Indeed, the way that Gage keeps choosing shots that only come from the north or the north-northwest shows that he is using this illusion for his own benefit.

The Oslo Demolition Clip

In slides 12, 14, and 15, Gage continually looped a 15-story building in Oslo, Norway as it was demolished. The video on this and the next few slides are meant to be the payoff of that conditioning.

However, only one of them is close enough to have recorded any sounds of explosives (the clip on slide 25). And that clip is severely trimmed.

Because of the way Gage manipulated the sound on the Oslo clip, you didn't hear sounds of explosives going off there. So when you get to that closeup shot with actual sound, you aren't supposed to realize that you don't hear explosives.

However, the truncation of that and other videos from Gage are meant to obscure another feature of this collapse.

The East Mechanical Penthouse

Watch the Rather video again. The collapse begins at the very beginning of the clip, even while Rather is saying that they are going to videotape.

You can see the top of the building in the clip. And on the left side of the roof, you can see a structure fall down in the first few seconds of the clip. This is the east mechanical penthouse, and it is the first exterior sign of the final collapse of 7 World Trade.

This picture was taken from the south, so the east mechanical penthouse is on the right there, highlighted. Since 7 World Trade was about the size of a football field, it's quite a large building.

But the penthouse doesn't just fall down. As this closeup shows, the building first falls into itself, and then falls off into the building below.

YouTube Closeup of East Mechanical Penthouse Falling Into 7 World Trade

NIST has done computer modeling of this first stage of the collapse. The scenario that best recreated this outer geography was the collapse of a single core column - Column 79. That allowed the building to fall in the middle first as shown in several clips.

That column failure also means that the floors below the penthouse were collapsing before it. That gave the penthouse room to actually drop off into the building.

So that plus the contents of over 30 floors at least was falling down on the floors below at this point. As we shall see, what was below here was some crucial parts of the entire building's structure.

By the way, I hope you enjoyed that little glimpse of the east mechanical penthouse in Gage's presentation. You will never see it again from him.

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