Silverstein Answers WTC Building 7 Charges
Says "pull it" meant to evacuate firefighters, but there were no
firefighters in the building
Paul Joseph Watson | January 5 2006
http://www.prisonplanet.com/index.html
After nearly two years of steadfast silence, Silverstein Properties
have finally responded to questions about what Larry Silverstein meant
when he told a PBS documentary that WTC Building 7 was "pulled" in the
late afternoon of September 11 2001.
Building 7 occupied a city block immediately north of the World Trade
Center complex. Photos taken minutes before its collapse show small
fires on two or three floors. Building 7 became only the third steel
building in history before or since 9/11 to collapse from fire damage.
The other two were the North and South towers of the World Trade
Center.
Any building that was not owned by Silverstein Properties strangely
remained upright.
Photo and video evidence of the collapse shows classic indications of a
controlled demolition. The standard 'crimp' in the center-left top of
the building and the subsequent 'squibs' of smoke as it collapses
clearly represent explosive demolition.
Even Dan Rather, commenting on the collapse for CBS News said that the
collapse was, "reminiscent of those pictures we've all seen too much on
television before, where a building was deliberately destroyed by well
placed dynamite to knock it down."
Click here for Alex Jones' video analysis of the collapse of Building 7.
Questions about the highly suspicious nature of the building's collapse
remained comparatively muted until January 2004, when a PBS
documentary, America Rebuilds, originally broadcast in September 2002,
received attention across the Internet.
The documentary was made infamous for one comment made by Larry
Silverstein on the subject of 9/11. Silverstein states, "I remember
getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling me that
they were not sure they were gonna be able to contain the fire, and I
said, "We've had such terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing
to do is pull it. And they made that decision to pull and we watched
the building collapse."
Click here to watch the clip.
We know that the term 'pull it' means to bring the building down by
means of explosives because in the same documentary a cleanup worker
(in December 2001) refers to the demolition of WTC Building 6 when he
says, "...we're getting ready to pull the building six." The term is
industry jargon for planned demolition.
Click here to listen to the clip.
For the following year and a half the Internet and alternative talk
radio was aflame with talk of Building 7 and Silverstein's apparent
admission. For many it is now the central issue of 9/11.
In June 2005 this website reported Silverstein's only response to date.
It was an ambiguous comment made to New York Post journalist Sam Smith.
Silverstein told Smith that he "meant something else" by the "pull it"
comment but mysteriously refused to elaborate any further.
Silverstein Properties have finally provided a detailed explanation of
what Silverstein meant when he said Building 7 was pulled.
The State Department, as part of its pathetic efforts to debunk 9/11
research, has posted the response from Silverstein's spokesperson Dara
McQuillan on its website. It reads as follows.
Seven World Trade Center collapsed at 5:20 p.m. on September 11, 2001,
after burning for seven hours. There were no casualties, thanks to the
heroism of the Fire Department and the work of Silverstein Properties
employees who evacuated tenants from the building.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) conducted a thorough
investigation of the collapse of all the World Trade Center buildings.
The FEMA report concluded that the collapse of Seven World Trade Center
was a direct result of fires triggered by debris from the collapse of
WTC Tower 1.
In the afternoon of September 11, Mr. Silverstein spoke to the Fire
Department Commander on site at Seven World Trade Center. The Commander
told Mr. Silverstein that there were several firefighters in the
building working to contain the fires. Mr. Silverstein expressed his
view that the most important thing was to protect the safety of those
firefighters, including, if necessary, to have them withdraw from the
building.
Later in the day, the Fire Commander ordered his firefighters out of
the building and at 5:20 p.m. the building collapsed. No lives were
lost at Seven World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
The State Department website then comments,
As noted above, when Mr. Silverstein was recounting these events for a
television documentary he stated, "I said, you know, we've had such
terrible loss of life. Maybe the smartest thing to do is to pull it."
Mr. McQuillan has stated that by "it," Mr. Silverstein meant the
contingent of firefighters remaining in the building.
The insurmountable problem with this explanation of Silverstein's
statement is that there were no firefighters inside WTC 7.
Dr. Shyam Sunder, of the National Institutes of Standards and
Technology (NIST), which investigated the collapse of WTC 7, is quoted
in Popular Mechanics (9/11: Debunking the Myths, March, 2005) as
saying: "There was no firefighting in WTC 7."
The FEMA report on the collapses, from May, 2002, also says about the
WTC 7 collapse: "no manual firefighting operations were taken by FDNY."
And an article by James Glanz in the New York Times on November 29,
2001 says about WTC 7: "By 11:30 a.m., the fire commander in charge of
that area, Assistant Chief Frank Fellini, ordered firefighters away
from it for safety reasons."
Some defenders of the official 9/11 story say that the term "pull" is
not demolition lingo for "bring down by controlled demolition".
However, the same PBS video in which Silverstein makes his admission,
contains the following exchange:
(unidentified construction worker): "Hello? Oh, we're getting ready to
pull building six." Luis Mendes, NYC Dept of Design and Construction:
"We had to be very careful how we demolished building six. We were
worried about the building six coming down and then damaging the slurry
walls, so we wanted that particular building to fall within a certain
area."
But even this argument is beside the point. The building's collapse had
all the hallmarks of controlled demolition.
Silverstein's explanation, after two years of stonewalling, that "pull
it" meant to withdraw the firefighters is a lie. There were no
firefighters in the building for hours before the building's collapse.
So what did Larry Silverstein mean when he stated: "I said, 'You know,
we've had such terrible loss of life, may be the smartest thing to do
is, is pull it. And they made that decision to pull and then we watched
the building collapse." He could not have meant that they should "pull"
the firefighters from the building because there weren't any
firefighters in the building, at least according to FEMA, NIST, and
Frank Fellini, the Assistant Chief responsible for WTC 7 at that time.
And if he meant "pull the firefighters" then why did he say "pull it",
with no reference to anything other than the building? The argument
that "pull" is not used to mean "demolish" a building is belied by the
other footage in the PBS documentary. And consider the timing: "they
made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse."
Could it really be possible that some (nonexistent) fire brigade was
removed from the building and just at that moment ("then") the building
collapsed? Is there really any doubt here about what Silverstein meant?
The only reasonable conclusion is that Larry Silverstein's statement is
an admission that WTC 7 was brought down by a controlled demolition,
meaning that the official version of what happened to WTC 7 is false,
and casting serious doubt on the official story that terrorists of a
foreign origin destroyed the twin towers, as well as on the rest of the
official account of 9/11. Note that this admission is a statement
against Silverstein's own interests (putting him at odds with the
official version of events and potentially jeopardizing his insurance
claims). Such statements are given great weight as a matter of law.
In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties won $861 million from
Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein
Properties' estimated investment in WTC 7 was $386 million. This
building's collapse alone resulted in a profit of about $500 million.
How concerned should we be therefore that Silverstein Properties bought
the lease from MetLife for Chicago's Sears Tower in March 2004?
The length of time that it took Silverstein to respond to these charges
and the fact that his eventual rebuttal does not correspond with the
facts only gives us more grounds for skepticism.
A real, thorough, impartial, independent investigation of the collapse
of Building 7 needs to take place and if the conclusions of that
investigation are that Building 7 was professionally demolished,
criminal charges need to be brought against those suspected of
involvement.
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Thanks to our anonymous reader who contributed to this article.
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Related: Professional Demolition of World Trade Center Building 7
Related: Clips from Alex Jones' Martial Law video which details the
controlled demolition of both Building 7 and the twin towers.
Related: Police Found Suspected Bombs In WTC On 9/11
Related: http://WTC7.net the hidden story of Building 7