Speaker 1: Eddie Dragon with an astonishing update on the World Trade
Speaker 1: Center Building 7.
Speaker 2: Do you realize that because of you, this city is
Speaker 2: being overrun by baboons?
Speaker 3: Well, isn't that the fault of the voters?
Speaker 1: Eddie, do you have new conspiracies about Building 7? Because
Speaker 1: I thought that one was pretty clear.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: That the owner said pull it.
Speaker 4: Pull it. Oh, Walter, good morning. How about that full
Speaker 4: moon fever going on? Steve Cates, Dr. Sky, man, that's fun.
Speaker 4: And then how about these Nepalese floods? Have you looked
Speaker 4: at this stuff?
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 2: Do you realize that because of you, this city is
Speaker 2: being overrun by baboons?
Speaker 3: Well... Isn't that the fault of the voters?
Speaker 1: But about Building 7.
Speaker 4: Yes, sir. I'll get right on it.
Speaker 3: I apologize. I'm not going to miss.
Speaker 1: You've upset the woman with the baboons.
Speaker 2: Do you realize that because of you, this city is
Speaker 2: being overrun by baboons?
Speaker 3: Well, isn't that the fault of the voters?
Speaker 1: Building 7, Eddie Dragon.
Speaker 4: Yes, sir. Well, tonight, Walter, a new date has been
Speaker 4: placed on one of the longest running cases in American history.
Speaker 4: That's right. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the man that U.S. prosecutors
Speaker 4: have described as the principal architect of the September the
Speaker 4: 11th attacks. We're 15 days away. Big gala, you know,
Speaker 4: memorializing September the 11th, the day we should never forget,
Speaker 4: by the way. There's a schedule to go on trial.
Speaker 4: This just coming out today before a military commission at Guantanamo,
Speaker 4: June 5th, 2028. So a military judge, Walter rejected the
Speaker 4: government's push for a January, 2027 start saying there is still,
Speaker 4: still too much unresolved pretrial litigation. So arguments over evidence
Speaker 4: procedure and the legal legacy of a case that has
Speaker 4: been delayed for more than two decades, 27 years is
Speaker 4: what the official number is going to be when it
Speaker 4: finally gets underway in 2028. So Muhammad is, uh, expected
Speaker 4: to be tried with three alleged co-conspirators, including Waleed bin Atash,
Speaker 4: Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and Mustafa Al Hawassawi. Now, the
Speaker 4: date itself is staggering, of course, because the day that
Speaker 4: we'll live forever, September 11, 2001, is now almost a generation,
Speaker 4: maybe two behind us. And many Americans who were not
Speaker 4: yet even born are to believe that mourning our adults today.
Speaker 4: And The criminal case surrounding the attacks has still not
Speaker 4: reached a verdict. And that long delay has helped keep
Speaker 4: the questions alive. And some of the legal questions, you know,
Speaker 4: can a military commission, I don't know, handle a case
Speaker 4: this consequential at this point, nearly 30 years later? What
Speaker 4: evidence is admissible after interrogations that involve torture? Can there
Speaker 4: ever be an actual trial where the families of victims
Speaker 4: regard as both legitimate and final? There's a lot of
Speaker 4: other questions that have taken a very different form, of course,
Speaker 4: and they've become the territory of suspicion and distrust and
Speaker 4: internet argument and conspiracy theories. And at the center of
Speaker 4: all that is what we're going to talk about tonight,
Speaker 4: Midnight Misfits, Walter, and that's the second category. 15 days
Speaker 4: from September 11th, the 25th anniversary of that, sits World
Speaker 4: Trade Center, Building 7. And at 5.20 that afternoon, depending
Speaker 4: upon what you're watching, what you're seeing back then, 47-story
Speaker 4: office tower north of the main World Trade Center WTC
Speaker 4: complex collapsed, and it was not hit by an airplane.
Speaker 4: The building had been damaged when the north tower came
Speaker 4: down at 1028 that morning. Debris struck its south face,
Speaker 4: and fires burned for hours on multiple floors. They were burning.
Speaker 4: That is there. Water supplies compromised. course the fires could
Speaker 4: not be effectively controlled and building seven fell millions of
Speaker 4: people later saw the images and you know they all
Speaker 4: asked the same questions that we all asked to this
Speaker 4: very day how does a 47 story steel framed building
Speaker 4: collapse in a way that to the untrained eye to
Speaker 4: all of us looks almost like a planned demolition and
Speaker 4: that's the question that has sustained building seven controversy now
Speaker 4: for more than 25 years and It's worth being really
Speaker 4: precise about all this and what is known, what's alleged,
Speaker 4: and what has not been proven as of yet. And
Speaker 4: Building 7 was not some sort of obscure structure. It
Speaker 4: was actually completed significantly later, 15 years later than the WTC, 1987.
Speaker 4: It was home to major commercial tenants, Solomon Smith Barney.
Speaker 4: It also housed government offices, something that has become you know,
Speaker 4: sort of the central argument in all of this. And
Speaker 4: there's other notable three-letter federal agencies, of course. And some rumored,
Speaker 4: by the way, this is not all real, okay? People
Speaker 4: have said, you know, of course the IRS was in there.
Speaker 4: You had the SEC, Security and Exchange Commission there. What
Speaker 4: was not in there was the CIA, by the way.
Speaker 4: Other government tenants included the U.S. Secret Service, however. And
Speaker 4: that is not of course a three letter acronym, but
Speaker 4: the EEOC, the equal employment opportunity commission, all these offices
Speaker 4: that were there, the city's office of emergency management specifically
Speaker 4: was located there. Contemporary reports actually identified those agencies and
Speaker 4: the defense department related operations also in that building. But
Speaker 4: you'll often hear people say that the CIA, as I mentioned,
Speaker 4: had an office in there. That claim has been circulated
Speaker 4: all over the place, right? Online documentaries everywhere. And it
Speaker 4: is not included in the actual federal tenant list at
Speaker 4: the end of the day. So why does this tenant
Speaker 4: list matter to conspiracy theorists? And why do people keep
Speaker 4: going to this, right? There's something to hide there. That's,
Speaker 4: of course, because the IRS, the SEC are connected to
Speaker 4: the public mind, to taxes, regulation, corporate power, financial records, investigations.
Speaker 4: You know, people benefited from the World Trade Center's coming down.
Speaker 4: Some proponents have actually argued that the building's collapse conveniently
Speaker 4: destroyed sensitive files, evidence. Others have also pointed to the
Speaker 4: presence of, I don't know, security offices in that Building 7.
Speaker 4: It must have been more important, and that's why they
Speaker 4: had to have the building come down. But the existence
Speaker 4: of government tenants, Walter, is not by itself evidence that
Speaker 4: the building was deliberately destroyed. Office buildings in lower Manhattan
Speaker 4: routinely house government agencies alongside banks and law firms and
Speaker 4: brokers and private companies, etc. But the central conspiracy claim
Speaker 4: is not really about those tenants, is it? It's about
Speaker 4: the collapse. And you go and you look at the
Speaker 4: video and you watch the video and you say, well,
Speaker 4: how does a building come down that quickly? That controlled,
Speaker 4: quote unquote, demolition argument goes a little bit like this.
Speaker 4: And the midnight misfits can, you know, Correct me on
Speaker 4: any of this because everyone has their own version of that.
Speaker 1: They can't because they're drunk. They're not going to call
Speaker 1: and correct you. You're just going to be out there
Speaker 1: all on your own with this theory.
Speaker 4: Just me. I'm hanging out there.
Speaker 1: And as I was in Manhattan when this all happened
Speaker 1: and I watched that building and I saw that building. Yes,
Speaker 1: there were fires in the building on one floor in
Speaker 1: the middle. The slow burning fire and never in history.
Speaker 1: has a steel-framed skyscraper come down from a fire.
Speaker 4: That building accelerated at free fall acceleration pace. In fact,
Speaker 4: if you drop a ball next to it, it would
Speaker 4: drop at exactly the same pace. So you, of course, Walter,
Speaker 4: by suggesting what you're suggesting, are saying that there's more
Speaker 4: likely a controlled demolition involved in building number seven. But
Speaker 4: The National Institute for Standards and Technology, because all these
Speaker 4: architects and engineers, the architects for truth, you know, et cetera,
Speaker 4: have all like sort of, you know, come forward with
Speaker 4: all of this, right? You know, they're doing their very
Speaker 4: best to kind of uncover what's there. But critics have
Speaker 4: said that the means of the building structure must have
Speaker 4: been removed almost instantly.
Speaker 3: That's the argument.
Speaker 4: They highlighted that. a comment by a leaseholder, Larry Silverstein,
Speaker 4: in a 2002 television documentary, where he said, quote, decided
Speaker 4: to pull it, as you stated at the very beginning. Yeah,
Speaker 4: let's pull it, right?
Speaker 1: Well, there's even video of him on the phone with
Speaker 1: some foreman, and they were spelling out the problems to him,
Speaker 1: and he said, well, we should pull it. There's video
Speaker 1: of him saying that.
Speaker 4: And it's out there. Everyone's looking at this. But You know,
Speaker 4: there's an alternative reading to all this, Walter, and that's
Speaker 4: that Silverstein was actually referring to pulling the firefighters away
Speaker 4: from the unsafe building.
Speaker 3: Do you buy that?
Speaker 1: No, because he said pull it.
Speaker 4: Well, behind Silverstein's representatives and what they've given in all
Speaker 4: of this, that's all there. But there's one very important clip,
Speaker 4: and that's the BBC clip. On the afternoon of 9-11,
Speaker 4: BBC News mistakenly reported ahead of time that Building 7
Speaker 4: had collapsed while the building was still at that time
Speaker 4: standing in the background of that live shot, Walter. So
Speaker 4: whatever the official investigations say, we still don't know. There's
Speaker 4: still a lot of mystery around all this. And what
Speaker 4: say you?
Speaker 1: Tremendous mystery around it. Eddie Dragon with an update on
Speaker 1: Building 7 World Trade Center. Terrifying story. Thank you for
Speaker 1: being on the other side of Midnight.