Reply #74: Let's take Gage's slide #17 [View All]

I've already demonstrated one of Gage's most egregious lies -- the altering of the CD soundtrack.

I've also pointed out how Gage says there's no evidence of pancaking, and then actually shows that evidence in two of his slides (the "meteorites").

Let's look at a single slide, now, close to the beginning. In this slide, we begin to meet Building 7, the 47 story building that fell at 5:20 pm EDT on the day of the attacks.

Gage makes a colossal error in this slide, and I'm not sure whether he's intending to deceive or if he's just unable to comprehend spatial distances. He is a licensed, degreed, and practicing architect, so I would have thought he'd have spatial thinking down.

The main thing that Gage is stressing in this slide is how far Building 7 is from WTC 1. This is important because debris from WTC 1 damaged Building 7 very badly.

But Gage can't have that. He won't show you a single picture of this damage. In fact, this slide is being used to suggest no damage at all!

The Out-of-Scale Rendition

The rendition on the left of the slide is not to scale. He's taken it without citation, so I don't know where it's from. It resembles graphics done in the New York Times, but it could also be from the FEMA report.

Either way, Building 7 isn't close to its actual size.

Here's a scaled drawing of WTC 1 and 7, with Building 6 in between. It comes from the site Skyscraperpages.com:



Richard Gage is an architect. He should have instantly recognized that building 7 isn't tall enough in that drawing.

Gage also stresses that the buildings are 110 yards (100 meters) apart. As you can see above, 110 yards isn't a lot of distance to cover when the North Tower is almost a quarter of a mile high.

The Mislabeled Picture

On the right of the slide, Gage has a picture of Building 7 from the rubble of Ground Zero.



He says that this is in the area of WTC 1. I am assuming Gage believes that you can see a part of Building 6 beside still standing debris from the North Tower. That would put the camera at the red X in the map below:



However, anyone can recognize that at that angle, WTC 7 should have been flat to the perspective of the camera. It's not. It's much further off to the left of the camera. That means the camera is actually around the location of the green X, close to or actually on Church Street.

What Gage thinks is Building 6 is actually part of Building 4. You can even see Building 5 further down the street in the picture, beyond the flags.

So the picture is not taken in the area of WTC 1's collapse, but WTC 2, the first building to collapse on 9/11.

The Picture Was Taken Between Collapses

Now the real chicanery starts to come into focus.

The first thing to understand is that this picture was taken after the South Tower fell at 9:50 am EDT, but before the North Tower fell at 10:28 am EDT. WTC 7 didn't suffer very much damage at all until debris from the North Tower plowed into it.

Yet by posting this picture, Gage is giving the impression that the North Tower has already fallen, and there stands Seven World Trade, unscarred.

But wait, there's more! As you can see above, Gage says clearly that WTC 1 is 110 yards away from Building 7. But the picture is also labeled as being from the WTC 1 area.

The picture is not taken from 110 yards away, however, but from around 275 yards away. That's about two and a half times further away than the information on this slide. It gives a false impression of distance to the viewer of this slide, not to mention a false impression of debris stacked up in the Pile.

Just How Wrong Can One Person Be?

For an architect, that gross an error of scale is unconscionable. In fact, there are so many mistakes in this single slide that I'm going to list them all again.

* The use of a graphic without citation
* Use of an improperly scaled graphic
* Mistaking the location of the photograph
* Giving the misleading visual impression that 110 yards is much further that it actually was
* Giving the misleading visual impression of minor debris in the middle of the Pile
* Giving the misleading impression of the extent of damage to Building 7 from the North Tower collapse

Faced with this litany, we have a choice before us. Gage is either a clumsy fool or deliberately lying to us again.

No, that's not exactly right. There is a third choice here. It could be that there is a little bit of both going on.