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What was Larry Silverstein describing with his "pull it" remark in the PBS interview?
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Larry Silverstein was the owner of WTC7, and long term leaseholder of WTC1 and WTC2 on that fateful day of September 11th, 2001
Did he commit a classic Freudian slip with the "pull it" remark?
Transcription of Silverstein's actual 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 then they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.”
VIEW VIDEO EXCERPT |
Many people, even some seasoned 9/11 Truthers, are unsure of the true meaning of Larry Silverstein’s infamous “pull it” comment made during his PBS interview. Some believe he might possibly have meant "pull the fire fighting contingent", as his recent attempted retraction states.
A review of the facts tends to indicate otherwise.
Larry Silverstein, principal of Silverstein Properties, is a multi-billionaire, and is revered within his circle of influence. However, unlike Donald Trump, Larry is no camera-loving media magnet, and therefore is simply not used to the flattering attention a professional media crew can bring. I believe Silverstein was caught up in his 15 minutes of fame, and in an unconscious attempt to appear suave and just a little bit “hip”, carelessly revealed the fact that his WTC7 was wired for a controlled demolition far in advance of the attack, and here’s why;
- As we all know by now, "pull" is indisputably a construction industry term for initiating a pre-prepared controlled demolition. Silverstein is a true commercial real estate mogul, has been in the business of buying, selling and managing NYC high-rise buildings for many years, and is knowledgeable of their construction and demolition. He is considered savvier in the NYC Skyscraper business than Trump. This fact is not an absolute guarantee his “pull it” comment meant “demolish” during that interview, but it is a guarantee he clearly understood that term to mean a controlled demolition from his everyday professional life.
- He could not have been speaking of “pulling” the firefighters from WTC7, as there were no firefighters inside at that time. Earlier in the day the building was completely evacuated and the building sealed against further entry. The Fire Department Commander would have been 100% aware of this fact, and would have informed Silverstein there was no one to "pull". Consequently their conversation could not have centered on removing people to prevent any further "terrible loss of life". That whole comment would not have been mentioned by Silverstein during the interview, because that issue was off the table.
- The most revealing clue comes from an analysis of the grammatical structure of Silverstein's statement, and reinforces the fact he could only be referring to demolition, not evacuation. Anyone trying to convey that they decided to remove all personnel for safety reasons might have phrased that sentence more like this;
"And then they made that decision to pull, and thankfully we were able to get everyone out just before the building collapsed.”
But certainly not;
"And then they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse.”
The words "decision to pull" are directly coupled with "we watched the building collapse". They pulled, (then) it collapsed. There is no reference to the lives saved, in the nick of time that his righteous decision was able to accomplish. This guy is in the media limelight with a puff-piece interview, tooting his own horn, yet his statement completely failed to mention the most salient point of the whole episode; He saved lives by making a great decision.
That’s because he wasn’t pulling out people, he was pulling down a building.
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The Truth About Fusion Centers
Will Blow Your Mind
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Sunday, 23 March 2008
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Imagine that somewhere close to your local community there exists a secret computer center. Equipped with powerful mainframe computers and the database integrating powers of XML, this government-funded facility gathers data from thousands of sources including local, state and federal law enforcement, social welfare agencies, hospitals, banks, telephone companies, ISPs, computer search engines, private security companies, schools--essentially an endless list. With its massive computing power, this secret outpost is able to search and sift this data using vaguely defined criteria like "suspicious activity" in order to identify individuals for even closer scrutiny. Finally, this computer center dispenses the results of its analyses to local, state and federal law enforcement and to the military so that they can take action against the citizens tagged as threats.
Such a scenario is no longer the product of a paranoid, over-stimulated imagination. It is a reality called "fusion centers," forty of which have been established throughout the United States.
Initially part of the "Total Information Awareness" (TIA) program headed by Bush buddy and Iran-Contra convict Admiral John Poindexter, fusion centers suffered a setback when Congress de-funded TIA back in 2003 because of privacy and civil liberties concerns. But an idea that grabs so much government power at the expense of its citizens' privacy always has a phoenix-like ability to resurrect itself, and so the fusion center initiative has been reborn under the Department of Homeland Security's "Global Justice Information Sharing Initiative" and been provided with $380 million in funding for 40 installations throughout the country.
These fusion centers are usually located deep in the bowels of some state law enforcement agency (you can find your local one using this map). All forty coordinate and share data with each other, but no single agency, Congressional or otherwise, has oversight authority over them.
Civil liberties organizations like the ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center see the fusion centers as a huge threat to privacy and even democracy. They thought they had been successful in stopping such a massive data gathering initiative when TIA was defunded, but today, there are forty fusion centers up and operating in the United States.
Why should you care if you aren't planning to crash some airlines into skyscrapers? Think for a moment about how fusion centers operate.
Say that you're planning to have a neighborhood get together. You head to the local supermarket and pick up a few of those big pork and beans cans and plenty of bottled water and soft drinks. Of course, you give the clerk your shopper card to save a few bucks. The record of your purchase heads to the supermarket's central database which they have patriotically agreed to share with the local fusion center. The out-of-the-ordinary purchase is flagged because the government is on the lookout for survivalist types who are stocking up for Doomsday and thus violating anti-hoading laws. Your bottled water purchase is cross-checked against other records, and the following turns up:
- recent ammunition purchase made with a credit card (for a quail hunting outing, but they don't know that)unusually large cash withdrawal of $3,000 (for buyng your neighbor's used car for your kid)
- visits to "questionable" political web sites like the one where you're reading this (information courtesy of your ISP)
The fusion center computer is now in a frenzy because of the obvious threat you pose to national security. Thanks to the kind of speed that $380 million can purchase, it spits out your name and address just in time for the heavily armed SWAT team to show up at your barbecue.
Seriously, anyone who doesn't think that all this unsupervised information collecting poses no threat to democracy needs only to remember those government employees poking through Barack Obama's passport records to understand what fusion centers could mean for democracy.
The sad fact is that no one is going to shut these fusion centers down in the forseeable future. The best we can do is to cut their access to our information by practicing good personal privacy habits. Don't use that supermarket card or a credit card when you make purchases. Guard your privacy against ISPs and search engines by using an elite proxy or VPN. Encrypt your email.
If we can't stop the government from violating our privacy, we can at least make their job more difficult. Begin to resist today.
Try the following exercise, Google the phrase Fusion Centers
Always remember, when they tell you about a new project or new weapon and its capabilities, you should multiply the admitted specs by a factor of TEN to gauge what the real truth is.
And if you are uncertain about who the government now considers "terrorists", please read the following articles
- ED |
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Crime-Busters Turned Snoopers
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| Are the shadowy “terrorists” the FBI is chasing simply a convenient creation of the government, invented solely to gain total control of the innocent citizenry? Are the promotions and budget dollars flowing to those agencies that are on board to the max with this unconstitutional power grab? Yes and yes! – ED |
LOMPOC RECORD EDITORIAL
A team of research analysts at Syracuse University has been tracking the FBI's activity in domestic crime investigations. The results are revealing.
For example, in 2007, the FBI made 2,300 referrals of cases to be prosecuted to the U.S. Justice Department. In 1993, the FBI made 20,900 such referrals.
Two decades ago, FBI investigations contributed 36 percent of the total cases prosecuted by the Justice Department. Last year, the FBI referrals were down to 16 percent.
So, if FBI agents aren't investigating crime in the United States, what are they doing? Ferreting out terrorists, apparently, and invading your privacy in the process.
Internal audits indicate the FBI has continued, and even expanded, its pursuit of information on American citizens - made possible by the Patriot Act - although it was ordered by a federal judge last year to cease and desist.
The judge's ruling came after testimony that the FBI had issued more than 140,000 “national security letters” in the period from the beginning of 2003 through 2005. In his ruling, the federal judge called such snooping the “legislative equivalent of breaking and entering.”
So, in the opinion of at least one judge, instead of solving crime and helping to put criminals behind bars, the FBI has instead focused its energies on violating the privacy rights of U.S. citizens.
Those national security letters allow the FBI to comb through phone, Internet and bank records in an effort to thwart terrorism. It seems highly unlikely that there are many terrorists, or U.S. citizens with connections to terrorist groups, among the hundreds of thousands of citizens whose lives have now been pried into by the FBI.
FBI officials admitted last week that the federal judge's order to stop snooping, or at least slow the pace, had basically been ignored. The bureau apparently continues to eavesdrop.
The mental image is inescapable - the United States as become a nation of frightened people, cowering in a corner, giving up all semblance of privacy and civil freedoms in an effort to keep from being terrorized.
At least that's the image the Bush administration fosters in its relentless, unending search for the evildoers of the world.
March 10, 2008 |
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900,000+ Names on U.S. Terror Watch Lists
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1,000,000 names on the government's "Terror Watch" List.
This means they are:
Eligible for warrantless arrest as a "Domestic Terrorist".
Eligible for incarceration without legal representation.
Eligible for rendition to a secret location.
Eligible for torture.
Are you on the list? How would you even know?
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February 27, 2008 12:40 PMJustin Rood Reports: LINK TO ARTICLE
The FBI now keeps a list of over 900,000 names belonging to known or suspected terrorists, the American Civil Liberties Union said today.If that number is accurate, it would be an all-time high, exponentially more than the 100,000 names on the list several years ago. But the number needs to be taken with a grain of salt: after all, the ACLU doesn't keep the list, the FBI does, and the bureau doesn't generally like to talk about it. (Indeed, the FBI has not yet responded to a request for comment for this post.)But if the ACLU's figure isn't accurate, it's also unlikely to be off by that much. Last September, the ACLU notes, the Department of Justice's Inspector General reported the FBI watch list was at 700,000 names, and growing at 20,000 names per month.The ACLU says they "extrapolated" from those figures to determine the list's current size. ACLU's Barry Steinhardt added that the group had spoken privately with people familiar with the watch list, who told them the 900,000 figure was not outlandish.In the past, The FBI has told ABC News that the size of its watch list is classified. Despite that, both the bureau and the DoJ Inspector General have published the total figure in unclassified reports.There's no doubt the FBI's list is growing: just last June, ABC News reported it was at 509,000 names, based on information in an unclassified FBI budget document. But strangely, the list may be growing not because of swelling legions of foreign terrorists. Instead, it appears the FBI may be adding tens of thousands of names belonging to U.S. persons it suspects of being domestic terrorists -- people who have no known ties to international terrorist organizations.A separate entity, the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), keeps a list of all names believed to belong to terrorists linked to international terror groups. That list, which was at 100,000 names in 2003, grew to 465,000 names by last June – but since then has grown only modestly, according to NCTC spokesman Carl Kropf. Today, Kropf said that list stands at roughly 500,000 names. (Unlike the FBI, the NCTC does not maintain that the size of its watch list is classified information.)The FBI takes that list and adds to it a new collection of names which belong to U.S. persons believed to be domestic terrorists: people who have links to terrorism but not to any international group.Last June, the NCTC was responsible for putting 465,000 names on the watch list, and the FBI appeared to add an additional 44,000. By September, extrapolating from the DoJ Inspector General's report, the FBI's contribution appears to have grown to somewhere north of 200,000 names.Today – if the ACLU is to be believed – the FBI's contribution may be as high as 417,000 names. Which would raise a new question: Where are so many domestic terrorists coming from? Or do they simply use more aliases than foreign terrorists?
Update: The FBI responded late Wednesday afternoon. Spokesman Chad Kolton did not dispute the ACLU's figure, but noted that the watch list contains names, aliases and name variations for individuals. The number of people on the watch list, he said, was around 300,000, and only 5 percent are U.S. persons. Kolton noted that the list is "regularly reviewed for accuracy." Last year the bureau removed 100,000 records "related to people cleared of any nexus with terrorism," Kolton said. |
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Rule by Fear or Rule by Law?
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"The power of the Executive to cast a man into prison without formulating any charge known to the law, and particularly to deny him the judgment of his peers, is in the highest degree odious and is the foundation of all totalitarian government whether Nazi or Communist."
- Winston Churchill, Nov. 21, 1943 |
Lewis Seiler, Dan Hamburg
Monday, February 4, 2008
Since 9/11, and seemingly without the notice of most Americans, the federal government has assumed the authority to institute martial law, arrest a wide swath of dissidents (citizen and non citizen alike), and detain people without legal or constitutional recourse in the event of "an emergency influx of immigrants in the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs." Beginning in 1999, the government has entered into a series of single-bid contracts with Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) to build detention camps at undisclosed locations within the United States. The government has also contracted with several companies to build thousands of railcars, some reportedly equipped with shackles, ostensibly to transport detainees. According to diplomat and author Peter Dale Scott, the KBR contract is part of a Homeland Security plan titled ENDGAME, which sets as its goal the removal of "all removable aliens" and "potential terrorists."Fraud-busters such as Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, have complained about these contracts, saying that more taxpayer dollars should not go to taxpayer-gouging Halliburton. But the real question is: What kind of "new programs" require the construction and refurbishment of detention facilities in nearly every state of the union with the capacity to house perhaps millions of people?Sect. 1042 of the 2007 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," gives the executive the power to invoke martial law. For the first time in more than a century, the president is now authorized to use the military in response to "a natural disaster, a disease outbreak, a terrorist attack or any other condition in which the President determines that domestic violence has occurred to the extent that state officials cannot maintain public order."The Military Commissions Act of 2006, rammed through Congress just before the 2006 midterm elections, allows for the indefinite imprisonment of anyone who donates money to a charity that turns up on a list of "terrorist" organizations, or who speaks out against the government's policies. The law calls for secret trials for citizens and non citizens alike. Also in 2007, the White House quietly issued National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD-51), to ensure "continuity of government" in the event of what the document vaguely calls a "catastrophic emergency." Should the president determine that such an emergency has occurred, he and he alone is empowered to do whatever he deems necessary to ensure "continuity of government." This could include everything from canceling elections to suspending the Constitution to launching a nuclear attack. Congress has yet to hold a single hearing on NSPD-51.U.S. Rep. Jane Harman, D-Venice (Los Angeles County) has come up with a new way to expand the domestic "war on terror." Her Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 (HR1955), which passed the House by the lopsided vote of 404-6, would set up a commission to "examine and report upon the facts and causes" of so-called violent radicalism and extremist ideology, then make legislative recommendations on combating it.According to commentary in the Baltimore Sun, Rep. Harman and her colleagues from both sides of the aisle believe the country faces a native brand of terrorism, and needs a commission with sweeping investigative power to combat it. A clue as to where Harman's commission might be aiming is the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, a law that labels those who "engage in sit-ins, civil disobedience, trespass, or any other crime in the name of animal rights" as terrorists. Other groups in the crosshairs could be anti-abortion protesters, anti-tax agitators, immigration activists, environmentalists, peace demonstrators, Second Amendment rights supporters ... the list goes on and on. According to author Naomi Wolf, the National Counterterrorism Center holds the names of roughly 775,000 "terror suspects" with the number increasing by 20,000 per month.What could the government be contemplating that leads it to make contingency plans to detain without recourse millions of its own citizens? The Constitution does not allow the executive to have unchecked power under any circumstances. The people must not allow the president to use the war on terrorism to rule by fear instead of by law.
Lewis Seiler is the president of Voice of the Environment, Inc. Dan Hamburg, a former congressman, is executive director.
Try the following exercise, Google the phrase REX 84
And if you are still uncertain about who the government now considers "terrorists", I have a have a 42" Plasma TV, permanently locked onto FOXNEWS to sell you
- ED |
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Miami Police Shoots Protester
then laughs about it.
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A CNN news video documents the excessive SWAT Team force directed at lawful and legal protestors, and the unnecessary firing of "less-than-lethal" projectiles - the very same type of projectiles that killed Victoria Snelgrove, a 21 year-old journalism major at Emerson College in Boston during a 2004 post-game Red Sox victory celebration. See what a rubber bullet can do - CAUTION - GRAPHIC IMAGES... The most chilling part of this video comes during the SWAT Team's debriefing "party", where their ranking officer demonstrates his gleeful approval at shooting the woman in the head, right through her sign, and makes derogatory comments about his own fellow American citizens, referring to them (us) as "scurrying cockroaches".
This outrageous performance makes it clear it will be an easy transition for our newly militarized police to escalate from "less-than-lethal" tactics to Deadly Force to dispatch the "scurrying cockroaches" when Martial Law is declared. |
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Our government assured the Fire Fighters, Police and EMT's that
the choking
cloud of dust and smoke at Ground
Zero was safe to breathe. They did not even issue paper masks. Over 70% of the 40,000 have contracted serious respritory illnesses, and hundreds have already died as a direct result. The government that lied to them has now
callously ignored and abandoned them.
