David Cole is patterning his life's work after American patriot Samuel Adams, who wrote in a 1779 letter to fellow patriot James Warren, "If Virtue & Knowledge are diffus'd among the People, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great Security."David Cole had for several years been independently investigating the National Institute of Standards and Technology — making multiple requests for Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) records to obtain information on the September 11, 2001, collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 — when, in June 2013, he decided to join the AE911Truth's NIST Pursuit Team to further that goal.

Team leader Tony Szamboti couldn't be more pleased that Cole has brought his research skills and dedication to AE911 Truth's pursuit of justice for 9/11 victims, their families, and the rest of the world. He calls David "a meticulous and dogged researcher who has unearthed significant items in the 9/11 citizens' investigation of Building 7."

David was reviewing drawings of WTC 7 in 2012 when he came upon his most momentous find to date: He noticed that girder web stiffeners had been omitted from NIST's WTC 7 report, which was released in 2008. Through sheer tenacity, David was responsible for NIST finally admitting, in October 2013, to that glaring omission. Deliberately leaving out mention of key structural components in a government report may be grounds to take NIST, a U.S. Department of Commerce agency, to court. [See here and here.]

The hoped-for outcome is that Americans will obtain a truly independent investigation of WTC 7, which NIST insists fell as a result of raging office fires but which AE911Truth has concluded came down by controlled demolition. "We are doing a preliminary investigation to demonstrate that it will one day be possible to win the new, independent investigation that AE911Truth and many other deeply concerned citizens are calling for," David reports.

When asking that a portrait of Samuel Adams be used instead of his own photo to run with this article, David explained that he is trying to follow in the footsteps of Adams (1722-1803), a Boston Tea Party organizer and Massachusetts governor who is said to have spoken of "setting brushfires" in peoples' minds. The full quote, which some say is misattributed to Adams but may as well have been uttered by the famous American revolutionary, reads: "It does not take a majority to prevail . . . but rather an irate, tireless minority, keen on setting brushfires of freedom in the minds of men."