Larry Silverstein, WTC 7, and the 9/11 Demolition

The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time. Although the total diesel fuel on the premises contained massive potential energy, the best hypothesis has only a low probability of occurrence. [WTC 7 Report]

The Salomon Solution; A Building Within a Building
WTC 7 was a very solid construction

9/11/2001 radio broadcast: "We were just sitting here watching all the smoke pouring up from
number 7 ... we really couldn't see much damage on it ... I turned in time to see what looked like a skyscraper implosion, it looked like it had been done by a demolition crew ... that's number 1,
number 2, and now number 7 that have come down from this explosion and folks just simply can't believe it. ... I just never for the life of me imagined that these huge buildings would just fall, and that's what happened, they just crumbled." [338kB wma download]

The above photograph shows fires in World Trade Center 7 at roughly 3 p.m., as does this wmv video of the building.

If the FEMA collapse report were true then the fires shown would have been burning throughout entire floors, not just in a few rooms.

Larry Silverstein, the controller of the destroyed WTC complex, stated plainly in a PBS documentary that he and the FDNY decided jointly to demolish WTC 7 late in the afternoon of 9/11. In the documentary "America Rebuilds", aired September 2002, Silverstein makes the following statement;

"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." [wmv download]

In the same program a cleanup worker referred to the demolition of WTC 6: "... we're getting ready to pull the building six." [wmv download]

There can be little doubt as to how the word "pull" is being used in this context.

Note how WTC 6 collapses - straight down, lots of dust

Silverstein's "Pull It" Explanation Examined

The building fire alarm system [for WTC 7] was placed on TEST for a period of 8 h beginning at 6:47:03 a.m. on September 11, 2001. Ordinarily, this is requested when maintenance or other testing is being performed on the system, so that any alarms that are received from the system are considered the result of the maintenance or testing and are ignored. [NIST]

After the initial blast [Flight 11 hitting WTC 1], Housing Authority worker Barry Jennings, 46, reported to a command center on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center. He was with Michael Hess, the city's corporation counsel, when they felt and heard another explosion. First calling for help, they scrambled downstairs to the lobby, or what was left of it. "I looked around, the lobby was gone. It looked like hell," Jennings said. [Traverse City Record Eagle 9/11/2001]

See also: Hanging Around WTC 7

Explosions occurred in WTC 7 before either of the twin towers had collapsed.

Firemen evacuated the area as they prepared for the collapse of Building Seven. [Ground Zero Spirit]

"It's blowin' boy." ... "Keep your eye on that building, it'll be coming down soon." ... "The building is about to blow up, move it back." ... "Here we are walking back. There's a building, about to blow up..."

WMV video download (1 MB)

"We heard a Mayday for everybody to get out of the building [140 West] -- no, I'm sorry, an urgent, three urgents, and we came out of the building [before 4 p.m.]. ... We were then positioned on Vesey Street between North End and the West Side Highway because there was an imminent collapse on 7 World Trade, and it did collapse." [Brian Fitzpatrick, Firefighter (F.D.N.Y.)]

When buildings such as WTC 7 are demolished the collapse is initiated by an explosion in the central area of the basement. This causes the building to collapse in on itself and minimizes damage to surrounding structures [full details].

The video enlargement on the right shows part of WTC 7's roof crumbling seconds before the collapse. The only logical reason for this occurrence is the building was rocked by a powerful explosion.

WMV video download of above (213kB)

Videos Showing the
Controlled Collapse of
World Trade Center 7

Molten steel was found “three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed [from WTCs 1 & 2],” Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon. [American Free Press]

Molten steel is a by-product of a thermite reaction.

A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated in extraordinarily high temperatures, Dr. Barnett said. [New York Times]

Burning diesel can't produce enough heat to melt steel, so it certainly can't evaporate it, but thermite can.

Consider the facts:

Explosions occurred in WTC 7 before it sustained any damage from the twin towers' collapses.
The fires in WTC 7 were not evenly distributed, so a perfect collapse was impossible.
Silverstein said to the fire department commander "the smartest thing to do is pull it."
Firefighters withdrawing from the area stated the building was going to "blow up".
The roof of WTC 7 visibly crumbled and the building collapsed perfectly into its footprint.
Molten steel and partially evaporated steel members were found in the debris.

Note the white smoke

There can be only one conclusion as to what happened to WTC 7 - it was demolished.

This video (screenshot left) compares the collapse of WTC 7 to a controlled demolition. The characteristics and speed of the collapses are all but identical. Diesel fires do not collapse buildings in this manner.

WMV video download (190kB)

The fires in WTC 7 were supposedly started by the collapse of WTC 1 meaning there would have been no time the rig the building for demolition on 9/11, therefore this had to have been done whilst the building was still occupied prior to 9/11.

Doesn't this strike you as an odd and dangerous thing to do?

If there were no terrorist attacks on 9/11 then a disgruntled employee could have brought down WTC 7
by simply thumping a red button.

"You can stick your lousy job up your ass!"

There had to be a very good reason for this building to be rigged for demolition whilst it was still occupied. Did Silverstein, the new World Trade Center owner who wisely invested in insurance against terrorism, have prior knowledge of the attacks?

One thing is for sure, the decision to 'pull' WTC 7 would have delighted many people:

Click for full sized image

[WTC 7] contained offices of the FBI, Department of Defense, IRS (which contained prodigious amounts of corporate tax fraud, including Enron’s), US Secret Service, Securities & Exchange Commission (with more stock fraud records), and Citibank’s Salomon Smith Barney, the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management and many other financial institutions. [Online Journal]

The SEC has not quantified the number of active cases in which substantial files were destroyed [by the collapse of WTC 7]. Reuters news service and the Los Angeles Times published reports estimating them at 3,000 to 4,000. They include the agency's major inquiry into the manner in which investment banks divvied up hot shares of initial public offerings during the high-tech boom. ..."Ongoing investigations at the New York SEC will be dramatically affected because so much of their work is paper-intensive," said Max Berger of New York's Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann. "This is a disaster for these cases." [New York Lawyer]

Click for full sized image

Citigroup says some information that the committee is seeking [about WorldCom] was destroyed in the Sept. 11 terror attack on the World Trade Center. Salomon had offices in 7 World Trade Center, one of the buildings that collapsed in the aftermath of the attack. The bank says that back-up tapes of corporate emails from September 1998 through December 2000 were stored at the building and destroyed in the attack. [TheStreet]

Inside [WTC 7 was] the US Secret Service's largest field office with more than 200 employees. ..."All the evidence that we stored at 7 World Trade, in all our cases, went down with the building," according to US Secret Service Special Agent David Curran. [TechTV]

The collapse of WTC 7 also profited Silverstein Properties to the tune of ~$500 million through insurance payments.