The World Trade Center Attack
The seven-building complex comprising the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan was totally destroyed in the 9/11/01 attack. News reports emphasized the impacts of the 767 jetliners with the Twin Towers and the ensuing fires. Yet these events, spectacular and deadly, produced far less loss of life, and relatively little destruction compared to the total collapses of the towers and Building 7 that followed.
Buildings 1 Through 6
World Trade Center buildings One through Six occupied a super-block bounded by West, Vesey, Church, and Liberty Streets. The
Twin Towers, or 1 and 2 World Trade Center, exploded into small pieces and fine dust, severely damaging the four low-rise buildings in the complex surrounding them. Large portions of Buildings 3, 4, and 6 were crushed. Severe fires raged in Buildings 4, 5, and 6 for several hours following the explosions of the towers.
Our analysis of the destruction of the Twin Towers divides the events into four parts:
Building 7
Building 7, or 7 World Trade Center, occupied its own block across Vesey Street from the WTC complex. Although projectiles hurled in all directions by the exploding towers caused extensive superficial damage to buildings surrounding the WTC complex, including gashes in 3 Financial Center to the west and the Bankers Trust Building to the south, they did not produce severe structural damage to those buildings. No photographs of 7 World Trade Center that can be corroborated by other photographs or videos show significant structural damage to it. Yet the building collapsed totally at 5:20 PM, showing all the features of a standard controlled demolition.
FEMA's inconclusive report tentatively blamed the collapse on small fires that burned for most of the afternoon.
e x c e r p t title: Waking Up From Our Nightmare authors: Don Paul and Jim Hoffman A question arises from the obvious demolition of WTC 7: Why destroy such a valuable piece of real estate?
We know that WTC7's developer and lease-holder, Silverstein Properties, and WTC7's mortgage-holders, the Blackstone Group, Banc of America Securities, and General Motors Acceptance Corporation, received a Court-awarded amount of $861 million dollars from Industrial Risk Insurers in February 2002. We know that about $386 million had been invested in WTC7 before its destruction. The Court-award meant that Silverstein Properties and the mortgage-holders would share in about $475 million of profit.
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Silverstein Properties is headed by Larry Silverstein, a large contributor to Democrat and Republican office-holders. Silverstein Properties became the primary owner of the WTC Twin Towers less than two months before 9/11/01 (Westfield Malls was Silverstein Properties' minority-partner). Buying from the New York Port Authority, Silverstein Properties invested only $15 million toward a total purchase-price of $3.2 billion for a 99-year lease on holdings worth an estimated $8 billion. The low-rise office buildings WTC 4, 5, and 6, and 400,000 square feet of retail space were included with the Twin Towers in this deal. Silverstein Properties immediately took out extensive insurance policies on its new holdings.
One clause in Silverstein Properties' insurance policies for the new WTC holdings soon proved instrumental. Quoting the British
Financial Times of September 14, 2001, the
American Reporter wrote that ‘ 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 collapsed or were otherwise destroyed and damaged in the attacks. ’
[SIZE=-1][9][/SIZE] Silverstein Properties is still contesting the amount of pay-out due for destruction of the Twin Towers—$3.55 billion for one ‘occurrence’ or $7.1 billion for two ‘occurrences’. The “terrorism” clause in his lease has given Larry Silverstein leverage in negotiating his new deal for the site.
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[SIZE=-1]8.[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]‘Rebuilding Begins for 7 WTC Despite Unanswered Questions’, Peter Grant,
Wall Street Journal, July 10, 2002,
http://homes.wsj.com/columnists_com/bricks/20020710-bricks.html . [/SIZE]
[SIZE=-1]9.[/SIZE] [SIZE=-1]‘No Fraud, but Huge Profits Seen in World Trade Center Attacks’, Joe Shea,
The American Reporter, August 1, 2004, reprinting piece from September 2001,
http://www.american-reporter.com/2,421W/1494.html . [/SIZE]
http://911review.com/attack/wtc/index.html
