After nearly two years of steadfast silence, Silverstein Properties have finally responded to questions about what Larry Silverstein meant when he told a PBS documentary that WTC Building 7 was "pulled" in the late afternoon of September 11 2001.

Building 7 occupied a city block immediately north of the World Trade Center complex. Photos taken minutes before its collapse show small fires on two or three floors. Building 7 became only the third steel building in history before or since 9/11 to collapse from fire damage. The other two were the North and South towers of the World Trade Center.

Any building that was not owned by Silverstein Properties strangely remained upright.

Photo and video evidence of the collapse shows classic indications of a controlled demolition. The standard 'crimp' in the center-left top of the building and the subsequent 'squibs' of smoke as it collapses clearly represent explosive demolition.

Even Dan Rather, commenting on the collapse for CBS News said that the collapse was, "reminiscent of those pictures we’ve all seen too much on television before, where a building was deliberately destroyed by well placed dynamite to knock it down.”

Click here for Alex Jones' video analysis of the collapse of Building 7.

Questions about the highly suspicious nature of the building's collapse remained comparatively muted until January 2004, when a PBS documentary, America Rebuilds, originally broadcast in September 2002, received attention across the Internet.

The documentary was made infamous for one comment made by Larry Silverstein on the subject of 9/11. Silverstein states, "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 they made that decision to pull and we watched the building collapse."

Click here to watch the clip.

We know that the term 'pull it' means to bring the building down by means of explosives because in the same documentary a cleanup worker (in December 2001) refers to the demolition of WTC Building 6 when he says, "...we're getting ready to pull the building six." The term is industry jargon for planned demolition.

Click here to listen to the clip.

For the following year and a half the Internet and alternative talk radio was aflame with talk of Building 7 and Silverstein's apparent admission. For many it is now the central issue of 9/11.

In June 2005 this website reported Silverstein's only response to date. It was an ambiguous comment made to New York Post journalist Sam Smith. Silverstein told Smith that he "meant something else" by the "pull it" comment but mysteriously refused to elaborate any further.

Silverstein Properties have finally provided a detailed explanation of what Silverstein meant when he said Building 7 was pulled.

The State Department, as part of its pathetic efforts to debunk 9/11 research, has posted the response from Silverstein's spokesperson Dara McQuillan on its website.

Bear in mind that the State Department said that China's organ trade was a conspiracy theory even though the State Department itself put out a report on how China harvests organs from executed prisoners on a different area of its website.

The response reads as follows.

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.

The State Department website then comments,

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.

The insurmountable problem with this explanation of Silverstein's statement is that there were no firefighters inside WTC 7.

Dr. Shyam Sunder, of the National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST), which investigated the collapse of WTC 7, is quoted in Popular Mechanics (9/11: Debunking the Myths, March, 2005) as saying: "There was no firefighting in WTC 7."

The FEMA report on the collapses, from May, 2002, also says about the WTC 7 collapse: "no manual firefighting operations were taken by FDNY."

And an article by James Glanz in the New York Times on November 29, 2001 says about WTC 7: "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."

Some defenders of the official 9/11 story say that the term "pull" is not demolition lingo for "bring down by controlled demolition". However, the same PBS video in which Silverstein makes his admission, contains the following exchange:

(unidentified construction worker): "Hello? Oh, we're getting ready to pull building six." Luis Mendes, NYC Dept of Design and Construction: "We had to be very careful how we demolished building six. We were worried about the building six coming down and then damaging the slurry walls, so we wanted that particular building to fall within a certain area."

But even this argument is beside the point. The building's collapse had all the hallmarks of controlled demolition.

Silverstein's explanation, after two years of stonewalling, that "pull it" meant to withdraw the firefighters is a lie. There were no firefighters in the building for hours before the building's collapse.

So what did Larry Silverstein mean when he stated: "I said, 'You know, we've had such terrible loss of life, may be the smartest thing to do is, is pull it. And they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse." He could not have meant that they should "pull" the firefighters from the building because there weren't any firefighters in the building, at least according to FEMA, NIST, and Frank Fellini, the Assistant Chief responsible for WTC 7 at that time. And if he meant "pull the firefighters" then why did he say "pull it", with no reference to anything other than the building? The argument that "pull" is not used to mean "demolish" a building is belied by the other footage in the PBS documentary. And consider the timing: "they made that decision to pull and then we watched the building collapse." Could it really be possible that some (nonexistent) fire brigade was removed from the building and just at that moment ("then") the building collapsed? Is there really any doubt here about what Silverstein meant?

The only reasonable conclusion is that Larry Silverstein's statement is an admission that WTC 7 was brought down by a controlled demolition, meaning that the official version of what happened to WTC 7 is false, and casting serious doubt on the official story that terrorists of a foreign origin destroyed the twin towers, as well as on the rest of the official account of 9/11. Note that this admission is a statement against Silverstein's own interests (putting him at odds with the official version of events and potentially jeopardizing his insurance claims). Such statements are given great weight as a matter of law.

In February of 2002 Silverstein Properties won $861 million from Industrial Risk Insurers to rebuild on the site of WTC 7. Silverstein Properties' estimated investment in WTC 7 was $386 million. This building's collapse alone resulted in a profit of about $500 million.

How concerned should we be therefore that Silverstein Properties bought the lease from MetLife for Chicago's Sears Tower in March 2004?

The length of time that it took Silverstein to respond to these charges and the fact that his eventual rebuttal does not correspond with the facts only gives us more grounds for skepticism.

A real, thorough, impartial, independent investigation of the collapse of Building 7 needs to take place and if the conclusions of that investigation are that Building 7 was professionally demolished, criminal charges need to be brought against those suspected of involvement.