The Collapse of World Trade Center 7
Allegation: 9/11 Revealed suggests that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 building, which collapsed at 5:20 pm on September 11, was intentionally demolished. The primary piece of evidence for this is a comment that Mr. Larry Silverstein, who owned the World Trade Center complex, made on the September 2002 television documentary American Rebuilds. Mr. Silverstein said:

I remember getting a call from the Fire Department commander, telling me they were not sure they were going to be able to contain the fire. I said, you know, “We've had such terrible loss of life that the smartest thing to do is just pull it.” And they made that decision to pull it and we watched the [World Trade Center 7] building collapse.

9/11 Revealed and other conspiracy theorists put forward the notion that Mr. Silverstein’s suggestion to “pull it” is slang for intentionally demolishing the WTC 7 building.

Facts: On September 9, 2005, Mr. Dara McQuillan, a spokesman for Silverstein Properties, issued the following statement on this issue:

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.

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 National Institute of Standards and Technology has stated unequivocally, “NIST has seen so evidence that the collapse of WTC 7 was caused by bombs, missiles, or controlled demolition,” in its Collapse of WTC 7 report (p. 6). NIST’s working hypothesis for the collapse of WTC 7 is that it was caused by the collapse of a critical column due to “fire and/or debris induced structural damage.” There was substantial damage to WTC 7 when the nearby WTC 1 tower collapsed and fires began shortly afterwards. Also, WTC 7 was a very unusual building because it was built over an existing Con-Edison power generation substation, which contained two large 6,000 gallon fuel tanks for the emergency generation of power. The fuel from these tanks could have contributed to the intense heat that apparently weakened the supporting columns in WTC 7.

(Gold9472: This statement, "The primary piece of evidence for this is a comment that Mr. Larry Silverstein, who owned the World Trade Center complex, made on the September 2002 television documentary American Rebuilds." is a lie. I haven't read this book, but I know that's not the primary piece of evidence. The VIDEO FOOTAGE is. And why won't Larry Silverstein publicly state this, or take questions about it?)

Insider Trading
Allegation: 9/11 Revealed repeats long-standing rumors of “insider trading [based] on advance warnings of the attack.”

Facts: The 9/11 Commission examined this issue in detail, stating, in The 9/11 Commission Report (p. 499):

Highly publicized allegations of insider trading in advance of 9/11 generally rest on reports of unusual pre-9/11 trading activity in companies whose stock plummeted after the attacks. Some unusual trading did in fact occur, but each such trade proved to have an innocuous explanation. For example, the volume of put options – investments that pay off only when a stock drops in price – surged in the parent companies of United Airlines [UAL] on September 6 and American Airlines on September 10 – highly suspicious trading on its face. Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11. A single U.S.-based institutional investor with no conceivable ties to al Qaeda purchased 95 percent of the UAL puts on September 6 as part of a trading strategy that also included buying 115,000 shares of American on September 10. Similarly, much of the seemingly suspicious trading in American on September 10 was traced to a specific U.S.-based options trading newsletter, faxed to its subscribers on Sunday, September 9, which recommended these trades. These examples typify the evidence examined by the investigation. The SEC [Security and Exchange Commission] and the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation], aided by other agencies and the securities industry, devoted enormous resources to investigating this issue, including securing the cooperation of many foreign governments. These investigators have found that the apparently suspicious consistently proved innocuous.

(Gold9472: "Yet, further investigation has revealed that the trading had no connection with 9/11." Ok, show us your findings.)

Absurd, Sinister Interpretations
9/11 Revealed often places the most absurd, sinister interpretations upon unremarkable occurrences in its effort to construct complex conspiracy theories. For example, it states:

According to the Kean Commission [9/11 Commission] Report (p. 168), in March 2000, [Mohammed Atta] “emailed 31 different U.S. flight schools on behalf of a small group of men from various Arab countries studying in Germany who, while lacking prior training, were interested in learning to fly in the United States.” Why would a terrorist openly approach flying schools in the USA this way?

The obvious answer, of course, is that Mohammed Atta was not afraid to openly approach flying schools in the United States because he presumably did not identify himself to them as a terrorist who wished to learn how to fly planes in order that he could crash one into the World Trade Center. This rather simple explanation seemed to have not occurred to the authors of 9/11 Revealed.

Similarly, 9/11 Revealed gives credence (p. 177) to nonsensical statements such as the one made by “Internet activist” Brian Quig: “[when Flight 77] bypassed a straight-in shot at the offices of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, only to hit an insignificant spot in the back of the Pentagon, I said to myself then, it is not a real terrorist attack.”

The authors of 9/11 Revealed apparently do not believe that the largest terrorist attack in history was large enough to demonstrate that it was real. Instead, in their minds, the fact that the terrorists did not fly even larger Boeing 747 jumbo jets into the World Trade Center towers, or attack an hour or two later, when more people would have been at work, or hit the offices of the Secretary of Defense or the Joint Chiefs of Staff, means that the events of 9/11 were not real terrorist attacks, but were engineered in order to minimize the number of deaths. 9/11 Revealed states bizarrely, “the attacks … seem almost designed to limit casualties.” One wonders how many more thousands of people would have had to die to convince the authors of 9/11 Revealed that the attacks were real.

In sum, 9/11 Revealed is a collection of unfounded conspiracy theories that bear no relationship to the tragic realities of September 11.

(Gold9472: I think it was real. I think the 3000 who died were real. I don't think what we've been told is the truth. I think evidence points more in the direction of the Bush Administration, and the military, than I do to Osama Bin Laden, and "Al-Qaeda". I think Osama Bin Laden has more connections to the Bush Administration than I do to Saddam Hussein. I think the Bush Administration, and other people associated with them had more to gain from 9/11 than I do Osama Bin Laden. I want a real investigation into 9/11 that doesn't consist of people who have past relationships with people who may have been involved. Is that too much to ask?)

End