Issue No. 8 – The Matrix (Spring 2005)

The Best Evidence Available on the 9-11 Conspiracy

By Don Paul

The most revealing statement about the conspiracy that orchestrated mass murder on September 11, 2001 was broadcast across the United States more than two years ago.

On September 14, 2002, the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) aired a documentary on reconstrucion of the former World Trader Center site in lower Manhattan. The show’s title was “America Rebuilds.” During this PBS documentary, the developer of World Trade Center (WTC) Building 7, Larry Silverstein of Silverstein Properties, said that he and “the commander” of the New York City Fire Department had decided to “pull” WTC Building 7 late in the afternoon of September 11, 2001.

The developer, then 70 years old, whose Silverstein Properties had become the principal lease-holder of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers just seven weeks before 9/11/01, told PBS:

“I remember getting a call from the, er, fire department commander, telling that they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire, and I said, “We’ve had such a terrible loss of life, maybe the smartest thing is to pull it”. And they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.”1

To “pull” a building, in the lexicon of realtors and Fire Departments, is to demolish it. Thus, in its context, Larry Silverstein’s repeated use of the phrase “to pull” means “to demolish.” At another point, earlier in this “America Rebuilds” documentary, there is a sequence of quotes about WTC Building 6, a building also brought to ground on the morning of 9-11, which makes clear that “to pull” means to demolish:

First, the PBS documentary plays an official’s voice on that horrendous morning: “Hello? We’re getting ready to pull Building 6.”

Then the documentary presents commentary by Luis Mendes of New York City’s Department of Design and Construction: “We had to be very careful how we demolished Building 6. We were worried about Building 6 coming down and then damaging the story walls, so we wanted that particular building to fall within a certain area.”

The conclusion? Larry Silverstein’s nationally aired statement means, simply, that he and others must have prepared WTC Building 7 for demolition. Could this preparation for demolition have taken place on a single afternoon? As we will see below, because it was a 47-story skyscraper containing 2 million square feet of office space, this preparation must have taken at least several weeks. Several weeks, that is, before Sept. 11, 2001.
For a Controlled Demolition, Call Controlled Demolition, Inc.

Controlled Demoliton, Inc. (CDI), of Baltimore, Maryland is one of the world’s leaders in demolishing large buildings. Owned for three generations by the Loizeaux family, CDI details on its website the ‘World Records’ that the company holds in demolishing huge structures — monuments such as the former Kingdome in Seattle. The CDI website also relates the timespans that have been required for the company’s accomplishments.

How much time would be required for the planning and emplacement of charges for the symmetric implosion of WTC Building 7 that we saw on 9-11? WTC Building 7 was a 47-story tower that sat less than 100 feet from other skyscrapers. We read on the CDI site about a 17-story building of reinforced concrete in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia — the Sheikh A. Alaki Apartment Building — which collapsed while under construction by the Bechtel Corporation in 1998.

The CDI site relates: ‘At the request of Bechtel, Controlled Demolition, Inc.’s team mobilized to the site in less than 24 hours, prepared the central-core, flat slab, reinforced concrete structure in another 27 hours, and put the balance of the building on the ground with absolute safety just 96 hours after the start of demolition preparations.’

96 hours. Four days. This was the time needed for emergency demolition of a 17-story building of reinforced concrete by a CDI team.

A building in Detroit, Mich. of comparable size to WTC Building 7 — the J L Hudson store, standing 35 stories tall and containing 2.2 million square feet — took CDI almost five months to prepare and bring down in 1998.

The CDI site reports that after four months of study by associate contractors:

CDI’s 12-person loading crew took 24 days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on columns on nine levels of the complex. Over 36,000 ft of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electric delay elements were installed in CDI’s implosion initiation system, some to create the 36 primary implosion sequences and another 216 micro-delays to keep down the detonation overpressure from the 2,728 lbs of explosives which would be detonated during the demolition.

So. Four months, plus an additional 24 days, were needed to place the charges necessary to demolish, within its 420-foot-by-220-foot footprint, a building 12 stories smaller than WTC Building 7.

How, then, could the preparation and emplacement of charges to “pull” WTC Building 7 be accomplished in a single afternoon? In particular, during the tumultuous afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, right there at ‘Ground Zero’?

What It All Means

Larry Silverstein’s statement on national television means that the preparation for demolition of WTC Building 7 must have preceded 9-11 by weeks, if not months.

Upon a moment of reflection, the developer’s statement also means that al Queda could not be at all involved in this most revealing part of the horrific 9-11 crimes.

It means, upon further reflection, that only those with secret access to WTC Building 7’s 25 central columns and 58 perimeter columns of structural steel could have been responsible for placing the charges that accomplished its symmetric, precipitous, inward collapse which took no more than a gravity-like 6.5 seconds as all of the skyscraper’s 570-foot-high mass crashed to the ground. It means that the building’s developer and lease-holder, Larry Silverstein, himself, was probably integrally involved in the 9-11 conspiracy. It means also that WTC Building 7’s mortgage-holders on 9-11, the Blackstone Group, Banc of America Securities, and the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, were probably also privy to the protracted planning and placing of explosive charges within their property. It means that these three pillars of the United States’ financial establishment were probably integrally involved in the conspiracy both to commit the terrible crimes of 9-11 and to reap enormous profits from the consequent “War on Terrorism.”

When we look at the different, but nearly equally obvious, demolitions of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, and consider the amount of time needed for the planning and placement of charges to collapse these gigantic structures as they actually fell (straight down into their footprints), we see that the entity which controlled the Twin Towers for decades and which awarded the lease of the Twin Towers to the consortium of realtors headed by Silverstein Properties in April 2001 — the New York Port Authority — must also come under suspicion in the emplacement of the charges that were necessary for the demolitions and the killing of more than two thousand people.

Connecting the Dots

Banc of America Securities. The General Motors Acceptance Corporation. The New York Port Authority. We’re led still deeper into the heart of the United States’ financial establishment, for the New York Port Authority is a body long controlled by the family most powerful and manipulative in Manhattan real estate: the Rockefeller family.

Of the Rockefellers, the banker David, head of both the Chase Manhattan Bank and the Council on Foreign Relations from the late 1960s into the 1980s, was the main mover behind construction of the World Trade Center from the early 1960s forward. During this period of consrtuction, David’s brother, Nelson, was Governor of New York, and thus, as Governor, the ultimate, nominal boss of the New York Port Authority, the entity that was for many years the largest tenant (with 20,000 employees resident) in either Tower.

In October 2000, David Rockefeller’s close associate Peter G. Peterson, who was Chairman of both the Council of Foreign Relations and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on 9-11, led the multifold-investment company of which he was also Chairman, the Blackstone Group, into purchase of the portion of the mortgage on WTC Buildling 7 that was held by the Traveler’s Group.

In February of 2002, the Blackstone Group, Banc of America Securities, the General Motors Acceptance Corporation, and Silverstein Properties shared in a award from Industrial Risk Insurers of $861 million for loss of the obviously demolished WTC Building 7. The total investment of the lease-holder and mortgage-holders for WTC 7 was $386 million. Thus they shared in a profit of $475 million for the demolished Building 7.

At the time of the Towers’ transfer from the New York Port Authority to Silverstein Properties they faced much more than $1 billion in costs for renovation and asbestos-removal. Eric Darton’s excellent study of the World Trade Center, Divided We Stand, published in 2000, summarizes the property’s problems as real estate:

‘To maintain the trade center as class-A office space commanding top rents, the [Port Authority] would have had to spend $800 million rebuilding the electrical, electronic communication, and cooling systems.’

These problems were, of course, removed from the Port Authority when it leased away the Twin Towers and World Trade Center Buildings 4, 5, 6 and 400,000 feet of retail space to the consortium led by Silverstein Properties seven weeks prior to 9-11. The $3.2 billion long-term price for the 99-year lease was widely thought to be low for properties estimated to be worth $8 billion over that time-span. JP Morgan Chase, the flagship of Rockefeller-controlled Banks, advised the Port Authority in the award of this lease. The new lease-holders immediately took out insurance policies worth more than the total, long-term price of their new WTC holdings. Silverstein Properties itself invested only $15 million of the less than $600 million actually transferred to the Port Authority. The British Financial Times reported on September 14, 2001:

The lease has an all-important escape clause: If the buildings are struck by “an act of terrorism,” the new owners’ obligations under the lease are void. As a result, the new owners are not required to make any payments under their lease, but they will be able to collect on the loss of the buildings that collapses or were otherwise destroyed and damaged in the attacks.

Taking It to the Bank

In April 2004, Silverstein Properties and its partners won an award of $4.8 billion from their claim for $7.1 billion in losses to their 2001 World Trade Center acquisitions as a result of the 9-11 attacks.

Other insurance-related profits followed from the mass destruction and death in lower Manhattan on 9-11. There were huge increases in the premiums subsequently paid to the largest surviving insurer corporations. In this regard, an interview CDI Executive Mark Loizeaux gave to New Scientist in July 2004 is instructive. The CDI executive was asked: ‘But 9/11 has also sent your insurance up, hasn’t it?’ Mark Loizeaux replied: ‘It’s gone up about 2000 percent since 9-11. Not only because of 9-11 but because insurance companies lost a great deal of money in the stock market collapse just preceding 9-11 with the collapse of dot.coms.’

The amounts of revenue and profit for two of the largest US insurer Corporations — Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway and Maurice Greenberg’s American International Group — between 2002 and 2003 were exorbitant.2

Large as these amounts to insurer corporations are, they’re dwarfed by the post-9/11 financial gains from the “War on Terrorism” accruing to: oil-and-gas corporations such as Chevron, Exxon, British Peteroleum and Royal Dutch Shell; weapons-making corporations such as Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grunman, and General Dynamics; and money-laundering banks and stock markets through which the post-2001 $180-billion-per-year in profits from Afghan-grown opium are flowing. These profits are charted or noted in Waking Up from Our Nightmare: The 9-11 Crimes in New York City, a book Jim Hoffman and I have written.

All of these corporations are connected in multiple ways through their interlocking boards of directors and major stock-holders. As of 1993, the Rockefeller family was among the top five vote-holders in 93 of the United States’ 122 largest corporations. As of 1997, the Chase Bank and Citigroup controlled more than half the stock of the privately owned Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

All of these corporations have vital connections to the heart of the US financial establishment, which is thoroughly represented among the financiers who constructed or controlled the World Trade Center before the demolition of the Twin Towers and WTC Building 7.

Thus, developer and lease-holder Larry Silverstein’s nationally televised statement concerning the decision to “pull” WTC Building 7 is itself the most clear-cut key we now have on the public record for unlocking the whole of the conspiracy which orchestrated the demolitions and the resulting murder of thousands in lower Manhattan on Sept. 11, 2001, as the pretext for more war outside the US and more repression inside.

Don Paul, author and activist, recommends www.wtc7.net for more information on what really happened on 9-11. Books and albums of his are up at www.wireonfire.com/donpaul.