Why Was World Trade Center Owner Larry Silverstein Never Investigated for Arson?

David Ray Griffin writes: "It certainly seems beyond belief that Silverstein, who had made almost $500 million in profit from the collapse of Building 7, would reveal not only that the building was deliberately demolished but that he himself had made the recommendation."[i]  Beyond belief or not, Larry Silverstein is on the record saying of Building 7 that on 9/11 he suggested "maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it" and then "they made that decision to pull, and we watched the building collapse."[ii] "Pull" is an industry term for controlled demolition.[iii]

 Silverstein, who had owned Building 7 since it was built, took over the rest of the World Trade Center on July 24th, 2001--six weeks before the destruction of the entire complex.[iv] The previous owner, the New York Port Authority, had carried a grand total of 1.5 billion dollars of insurance for all of the buildings.[v] Silverstein demanded, and got, 3.5 billion worth of insurance, payable in cash if the WTC were to be destroyed.[vi] Shortly after putting up only 14 million dollars of his own money for the deal, "Lucky Larry" Silverstein just happened to skip a very important meeting in the WTC on 9/11 because, he claims, his wife insisted that he visit his dermatologist.[vii] Likewise two of his children, who should have been at the Windows on the World restaurant atop the North Tower (where they would have died) miraculously survived because they just happened to be running late that day.[viii] 

 After 9/11, Silverstein demanded double indemnity, claiming that the two plane crashes constituted separate terrorist attacks.[ix] He soon walked away with more than 4.5 billion dollars cash from his 3.5 billion dollar insurance policy.[x] But apparently that four-billion-dollar profit on his six-week investment wasn't enough. On March 27th, 2008, the New York Times reported that Silverstein was back in court asking for another 12.3 billion dollars from airlines and airport security companies.[xi]

 Silverstein's prospective 17-billion-dollar payoff on a 14-million-dollar down payment might qualify as the world's best-ever investment. But had 9/11 not occurred, Silverstein's purchase of the World Trade Center could have qualified as the world's worst-ever investment. According to Trade Center plans, 5,000 tons of asbestos were going to be used in the Twin Towers, [xii] much of that total was actually used, and estimates of the amount that remained in the Towers on 9/11 range from 400 to 2000 tons.[xiii] On May 14th, 2001, Business Insurance magazine reported that the Port Authority had just lost a $600 million asbestos abatement lawsuit against its insurers.[xiv] Given that the Twin Towers were reputed to be money-hemorrhaging white elephants plagued not just with asbestos, but also with low vacancy rates due to their lacking any modern communications infrastructure, and that the Port Authority had reportedly been trying to find a way to demolish them but was prevented from doing so by the asbestos problem,[xv] Larry Silverstein's decision to take out a 99-year-lease on the World Trade Center makes very little sense unless he somehow knew they were slated for quick extra-legal demolition.

 When someone buys a dubious, asbestos-ridden property, doubles the insurance policy, and sees the property destroyed by fire and/or explosives six weeks later, an arson investigation normally follows. If the person of interest were to publicly confess to participating in the intentional destruction of said property, one would expect not only an investigation, but also a swift indictment, prosecution, and conviction.

 Why hasn't Larry Silverstein even been investigated? Was Israel Involved?

 "Lucky Larry" Silverstein just happens to be a close personal friend of Benyamin Netanyahu, the radical Zionist Likudnik Israeli leader who invented the "war on terror" back in 1979, and who is on record publicly celebrating the 9/11 attacks.[xvi] 

 Other circumstantial evidence for Israeli involvement in 9/11--or at least foreknowledge--includes:

 *Reports in the Bergen, New Jersey Record of September 12, 2001 that five Israelis were arrested in New York on 9/11 "carrying maps linking them to the blasts."[xvii] The article stated that Israelis in an Urban Moving Systems van were also arrested after they were caught filming and wildly celebrating the destruction of the Twin Towers.  ABC-TV's 20-20 later stated that the driver of the van, Sylvan Kurzberg, told police: "We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem."[xviii] ABC reported that one of the Israelis was carrying two foreign passports, while another had $4,700 cash stuffed in his sock.[xix] Not surprisingly, "the FBI believed Urban Moving may have been providing cover for an Israeli intelligence operation."[xx] Held for 71 days, the four men-- Paul Kurzberg, Yaron Shmuel, Oded Ellner and Omer Marmari were deported to Israel. One of them later stated on an Israeli talk show: "Our purpose was to document the event."[xxi] But how had they known there would be an event to document?

 * Carl Cameron's four-part investigative series on Fox News documenting a massive Israeli intelligence operation against the U.S. during the six months leading up to 9/11. According to Cameron, a highly-placed FBI source said "evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about the evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information."[xxii] Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Bob Graham (D-FL) echoed the suggestion about "classified information": "I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government ... It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now."[xxiii] (What "sovereign foreign government" has an American lobby powerful enough to keep such information classified for 20 or 30 years?) The French newpaper Le Monde added details in a report headlined "An Enigma: Vast Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the US."[xxiv] Salon.com reported that some of the Israeli spies were "living down the street from Mohammed Atta's house."[xxv]

Salon Journalist Christopher Ketcham was told by a high-level U.S. intelligence source: "The problem is that you're going into a hornet's nest with this. It's a very difficult time in this particular area. This is a scenario where a lot of people are living a bunker mentality....There are a lot of people under a lot of pressure right now because there's a great effort to discredit the story, discredit the connections, prevent people from going any further [in investigating the matter]. There are some very, very smart people who have taken a lot of heat on this -- have gone to what I would consider extraordinary risks to reach out. Quite frankly, there are a lot of patriots out there who'd like to remain alive. Typically, patriots are dead."[xxvi]

 *Reports in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that "that two workers at the Israeli company Odigo Instant Messaging Systems "received messages two hours before the Twin Towers attack on September 11 predicting the attack would happen."[xxvii]

 *Reports that Zim Israeli-American Shipping Lines vacated its World Trade Center offices, breaking its lease to do so, one week before 9/11.[xxviii] These reports of Israeli foreknowledge may explain why so few Israelis died in the Twin Towers, in proportion to Israel's presence in New York financial circles, compared to citizens of other nations. 

 *Reports that the Israeli company ITCS handled security at Boston's Logan Airport, where flights 11 and 175 took off, as well as "every other airport where planes were hijacked on 9/11."[xxix]

 Speaking of the wide-scale Israeli intelligence operation in the US prior to and on 9/11, University of Minnesota peace studies professor Michael Andregg says of the Isreali spies, "They were here--and lots of them. The question is, why?"[xxx] In his video Rethinking 9/11, Andregg urgently pleads with the Israeli Prime Minister to reveal the truth about this operation to the American people.

[i] The New Pearl Harbor p. 176.

[ii] America Rebuilds, PBS documentary, 2002. In 2005, reacting to 9/11 skeptics who had been harping on this quote for almost three years, the U.S. State Department cited a Silverstein PR spokesperson claiming that "pull it" meant pulling firemen out of the building. The many problems with this interpretation include: The fact that there were no firemen in Building 7 during the afternoon of 9/11; the fact that Silverstein has admitted that he made the statement in the afternoon, when no firemen were in the building ("We Are Change Confronts Larry Silverstein 3/13/08," www.911blogger.com/node/14361); and the juxtaposition "made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse" suggesting that the decision and the collapse happened in quick succession, with an implied causal relationship between the decision and the collapse.

[iii] Griffin, The New Pearl Harbor Revisited, p. 56.

[iv] http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=larry_silverstein

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Ibid.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Anemona Hartocollis, "Developer Sues to Win $12.3 Billion in 9/11 Attack," New York Times, March 27th, 2008 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/nyregion/27rebuild.html

[xii] " Asbestos use in Construction," http://www.asbestos.com/world-trade-center/asbestos.php.

[xiii] "The Trouble with WTC Asbestos," May 5th, 2008 http://joecrubaugh.com/blog/2008/05/05/the-trouble-with-wtc-asbestos

[xiv] Douglas McCleod, "Port loses claim for asbestos removal," http://www.allbusiness.com/legal/trial-procedure-judges/9160294-1.html

[xv] Eric Huffschmidt, Painful Questions: An Analysis of the September 11th Attack (Goleta, CA: Endpoint, 2002) p. 92.

[xvi] See note ___, chapter ___.

[xvii] Paulo Lima, "Five Men Detained as Suspected Conspirators," Bergen, New Jersey Record, September 12, 2001, cited in Justin Raimondo, The Terror Enigma (NY: iUniverse, 2003) xi.

[xviii] ABC News, "The White Van: Were Israelis Detained on Sept. 11 Spies?" June 22, 2002, archived at http://www.commondreams.org/headlines02/0622-05.htm.

[xix] Ibid.[xx] Ibid.[xxi] Ibid.[xxii] Cameron's report was taken down from the Fox website less than a week after it was posted. It is archived at http://100777.com/usa/israeli_spyring

[xxiii] PBS Newshour, December 11, 2002 http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/congress/july-dec02/intelligence_12-11.html

[xxiv] Sylvain Cypel, "An Enigma: Vast Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the US," Le Monde, March 5, 2002, tr. Malcolm Garris, archived at http://www.antiwar.com/rep/lemonde1.html

[xxv] Christopher Ketcham, "The Israeli 'Art Student" Mystery," Salon.com, May 7th, 2002 http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/05/07/students/index.html  On the close proximity of Mossad agents and alleged 9/11 terrorists, see also Mathias Gebauer, "Mossad Agents Were on Atta's Heels," Der Spiegel, October 1, 2002, cited in Raimondo 46.

[xxvi] Ibid.

[xxvii] Yuval Dror, "Odigo says workers were warned of attack," Haaretz, September 26, 2001 www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=77744

[xxviii] Ruppert 257.

[xxix] Ibid. 259.

[xxx] Michael Andregg, Rethinking 9/11: Why Truth and Reconciliation Are Better Strategies than Global War http://www.gzmn.org