Building Seven, Sept. 10 2001: Live Long and Prosper!

Building Seven.” How those words trill from the lips. “Building Seven, Building Seven, Building Seven.” Ah…

Yes, it’s the World Trade Center Building Seven (wtc -7) to which we turn today, as we hover around the fifth anniversary of the death of “The Old Normal.”

Building Seven, how noble she stands: 47 storeys reaching for the sky, somewhat shy of the Woolworth building at 60 stories, and less than half the height of its proud cousins the World Trade Center Towers One and Two, but tall enough. Okay, she actually kind of blends into the background of lower Manhattan a bit. Actually, you’d miss her in a blink of an eye.

Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Look over there, at the tenant list by the elevator:

the United States Secret Service,
the Department of Defense,
the Immigration and Naturalization Service,
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC),
the Mayor’s Office of Emergency Management,
the Internal Revenue Service Regional Council (IRS),
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Ooh, kind of spooky, ne-c’est pas? All those secret organizations, all of them, just waiting to be collapsed into a pit tomorrow afternoon. Hope there’s nothing too important stored there.

Talk about yer “blink of an eye.”

Oh, there are other tenants, but these are the notables. Actually, the famous U.S. coin, the 1933 Double Eagle, was here, in the U.S. Secret Service vaults: a symbol of the republic, and the world’s most valuable coin (sold at auction for $U.S. 7.59 million). On Sept. 10 2001 though, it’s been gone for a few weeks, transfered to Fort Knox back in July.

Wouldn’t want that lying around when the boom drops, now would we?

The boom. The big boom. The boom-diddy-boom.

Building Seven, your days are numbered.

See, Building Seven is to drop into the earth on Sept. 11, 2001. Oh, no one will die from the collapse. The building is dropped in what most experts say is a controlled demolition. It’s acknowledged that it will fall, and the building has been cleared of inhabitants well ahead of time. It’s not until 5:00 p.m. that building owner Silverstein tells the fire dept. it’s time to “pull it.”

About 20 minutes later, squibs of smoke are seen puffing from the upper stories and within seconds the entire steel building drops straight downwards into its own foundation pit.

Steel pulled from the wreckage days later glows red: it is molten from the heat of the explosions that leveled Building Seven.

Most experts? Okay, that’s an overstatement. Actually, the 9/ll Commission makes no mention of the building, one of three to collapse that day (the other two being, of course, the Twin Towers, which, after all, were struck by jet planes whose fuel burns at a temperature of 1700°F. That’s hot. Oh, yes, that’s hot all right. Water, in fact, boils at 212°F, so that’s lots hotter than water boiling. Steel? Well, yes, steel melts too. Everything has a point at which it burns or melts. Steel melts at 2800°F. Hmm, yes, that’s right: 1,100 degrees greater than the temperature of burning aviation fuel. You got a problem with that? What are you, some kind of conspiracy nut?).

Actually, a feature in New York magazine a few months back described the varying degrees of acceptance most people have of the “Official story” of the events of Sept. 11, 2001. The fact is, most folks have some spidey sense tingling at the back of their neck about the likelihood that something is wrong with the picture. And while it’s true, we all saw the plane hit the building, no plane hit Building Seven. Building seven had fires on the 12th floor. If Building Seven came down the way it did (in a replica of the famous demolition of St Louis’s Pruitt Igoe housing project) from just the heat of flames here and there, it would be the first time, ever, for a steel-framed tower of that type. It would sure make it easier to demolish buildings, when the time comes. Just set a fire on the 12th floor and let it burn for seven hours or so. Then–stand back!

Cheaper than explosives.

Oh and here’s a coincidence, for those of you who like a conspiracy. Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Centre’s twin towers, also designed Pruitt Igoe.

Why’s it worth asking, though? So what if Building Seven was demolished on purpose, by explosive charges laid ahead of time? What does that have to do with anything? What on earth does it have to do with car advertising?

The answer is the usual: “everything, and nothing.” First of all, obviously, if you start to doubt the official version of the collapse of Building Seven, you have to give creedence to the doubters of the official version of the collapse of the twin towers. Maybe you’ll look again at the videos of the collapsing WTC towers and see, with the conspiracy nuts, the “squibs” of smoke that indicate explosive charges, shooting out from the building walls on the floors just below the leading edge of the dropping building.

And if you can doubt that now-central myth at the heart of the New Normal, you can doubt anything. You can even begin to wonder, with the Allderblob, about the gospel of the car ad.

And when you get there, America, you’re in real trouble.

7 Responses to “Building Seven, Sept. 10 2001: Live Long and Prosper!”

  1.  

    the following is an unpaid political announcement:

    If you want a more indepth discussion of all this, including an examination of the official story that fires fed by the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management Oil storage tanks "weakened" the building, and a discussion of the links between the collapse of Building 7 and Oklahoma City's Murragh building bombing of 1995, it's essential you turn to Was WTC a Dud? at the encyclopedic 9/11 website Serendipity.

  2.  

    A further note clarifying the above: most commentators on the collapse of building seven (wtc 7) speak of the fact that "no one died."

    However in reading the "serendipity" link above, "Was WTC a Dud?" the author speaks of one death: "Reports that a body was found in the remains of Building 7 are intriguing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that other reports claim that there were no casualties in WTC 7 whatsoever. Nonetheless, the US House of Representatives website posts a tribute to Secret Service Special Officer Craig Miller whose body was found in the rubble of Building 7 after he'd apparently perished during the "rescue effort" that day. But what really happened to Officer Miller — Secret Service Special Officer Miller? Not a firefighter. Not a rescue worker or cop — a secret service special agent."

    The posting goes on to ask, why send a secret service operative into a building that had already been evacuated? What was Miller's real business there?

  3.  

    Italian TV documentary pointing out the obvious errors in the building seven story. Punchline: "if the authorities were lying to us about how building seven came down, why should we believe them about the other WTC buildings?"

  4.  

    [...] of an opponent he was “sensing” when he made those oft-quoted statements following the Events of September, 2001: “This is all wonderful news. It is time to finish off the US once and for [...]

  5.  

    [...] Of course, the irony is they thought they were talking about the evil of the attackers from “outside:” Al Qaeda, 9/11, etc. When in fact the evil was at the heart: Al Greenspan, 7/11 and so forth. [...]

  6.  

    [...] while Kunstler occasionally annoys us with his sense of certitude and his dismissal of the facts, as we see them, about the collapse of WTC Building 7, we are nonetheless greatly entertained by him. If anything, [...]

  7.  

    [...] Relax, people, they say. It was just a prolonged fire, coupled with a failed sprinkler system, that dropped the 47-storey steel-framed building and all its secret offices into the ground. There was no explosion or controlled demolition, as some have claimed. [...]

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.