Silverstein's First Public "Pull It" Response

I just stumbled across the first real public response for Larry Silverstein's "pull it" remark. It comes from the U.S. State Department's Spreading Disinformation, I mean "Identifying Misinformation" website (paid for at taxpayers expense of course) posted on Sept. 16, 2005 that included in a rebuttal to, among others, a section about the WTC 7 from the new 9/11 conspiracy book, 9/11 Revealed...

"The book suggests that the 47-story World Trade Center 7 building, which also collapsed on September 11, was intentionally demolished, citing a comment by the property owner that he had decided to “pull it.” The property owner was referring to pulling a contingent of firefighters out of the building in order to save lives because it appeared unstable."

It posts a statement released by Silverstein Properties spokesperson, Mr. Dara McQuillan, on Sept. 9, 2005 that says the following:

"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."

Then the USINFO site goes on to say...

"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."

Just what I thought, he gives the "pull out the firefighters" response! "It" referred to "the contingent of firefighters"??? Yeah right! If that was the case, Silverstein would have said "pull them out", not "pull it". No one misspeaks that bad. The word "it" clearly refers to the building (singular), not a "contingent of firefighters" (plural). How condescending that he would refer to a contingent of firefighters as "it".

Also, it's already been reported that the FDNY never sent any firefighter "contingency" inside the WTC 7 and this order was made at 11:30 am...

"With the collapse of both towers by 10:30 a.m., larger pieces of the twin towers had smashed parts of 7 World Trade and set whole clusters of floors ablaze. An hour later, the Fire Department was forced to abandon its last efforts to save the building as it burned like a giant torch.

Falling debris also caused major structural damage to the building, which soon began burning on multiple floors, said Francis X. Gribbon, a spokesman for the Fire Department. 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." - New York Times (11/29/01)

and then FEMA reported that the FDNY never even attempted to fight the fires in the 7...

"In addition, the firefighters made the decision fairly early on not to attempt to fight the fires, due in part to the damage to WTC 7 from the collapsing towers. Hence, the fire progressed throughout the day fairly unimpeded by automatic or manual suppression activities.

It appears that the sprinklers may not have been effective due to the limited water on site and that the development of the fires was not significantly impeded by the firefighters because manual firefighting efforts were stopped fairly early in the day.

WTC 7 collapsed approximately 7 hours after the collapse of WTC 1. Preliminary indications were that, due to lack of water, no manual firefighting actions were taken by FDNY." - FEMA (05/02)

So there is a conflict of facts here with the Silverstein spokesperson saying the Fire Commander called in the "afternoon" to say firefighters were attempting to contain the fires in the building and the news and FEMA reports saying the firefighters never attempted to put of the fires and had already been called back in the late morning and not "later in the day" as the spokesperson claims.


(Note: I wrote this post rather hastily late last night. I am going to rewrite a little better when I have more time.)