9/11 Conspiracies Explained: Dancing Israelis, Larry Silverstein, and “Pull It”

There are these five Israeli men, they're working for a New Jersey moving company, I think it's called Dominic Souter, and they're detained by police after a resident in New Jersey reported them, saying that they were acting suspiciously, they were smiling, they were taking pictures of the burning towers. Now they were all deported back to Israel, mostly over immigration violations. But interestingly enough, the company's owner also fled the United States. So to your point, this is now known as the dancing Israeli theory. Could Israel have been in on the attack on September 11th? When I say absolutely not, it's not just because that's my knee-jerk response, but I have looked into this for two years during the book. I went and talked to intelligence sources, not only in the United States, but in the UK, in Germany, and in Israel as well. And I'm convinced that one of the things that the Israelis would have done if they'd had advanced knowledge of this attack, they would have earned a chit of good credit from the United States forever. They would have given the information to the U.S. about what was to happen. And then once the U.S. unraveled that plot and stopped the attack on America, we would have been indebted to the Israeli government, I say at least for a decade or two, although memories are short in Washington, but for a long time. Now something very interesting about the five Israelis, the dancing Israelis, guess what? The person who made the call into the police, she never said that they were there before the attack took place. She said after the attack, she was watching it from her own window with a pair of binoculars. And then she noticed out of the corner of her eye, these guys were on the roof of a van that they worked for at a moving company and they were watching as well. She never said they were laughing in the original police report. She just thought it was unusual that they were standing on the van and she had called the police on it. That became over time the story of laughing Israelis. And why? Because everybody forgets about this. Mohammed Atta's father gave an interview to an Egyptian newspaper a few weeks after 9-11 and he's the one who uses the phrase for the first time, laughing Israelis, because he's trying to take the blame off of his own son and the rest of his compatriots who pulled off the hijacking. And that gets picked up by French newspapers and Le Monde and others and it becomes a story that makes the rounds. Now, you say that those five were detained by the Department of Justice originally? They talked to them for two months, they gave them polygraphs and everything else, and the final conclusion, the bottom line, absolutely nothing to do with it at all. What are they doing? What are they thinking? They gave interviews, some of them, when they went back to Israel on Israeli television in which they said, we were told to watch it because this is what happens to us in essence. We have experienced this terror for all this time. Now we're seeing it play out here in the United States. And one last thing, five Israelis picked up, they become the story. But do you know how many people were picked up after 9-11 because they went through a sweep looking for people that had immigration, they weren't U.S. citizens, they had overextended their visas, they had some connection? With those five, 762 is the minimum number. Some of the estimates go up to 1,200. And guess what? They are almost all deported because they've all overstayed their visas, they've extended their visas, they're given closed hearings, and they're sent home. So the only ones we hear about 25 years later are five Israelis. Isn't it interesting? That in the other 762 people who are picked up, nobody ever mentions them, doesn't know if they're Pakistani or they're French or Venezuelan or whatever else, because that doesn't get the news. No Jews, no news. In this case, it was five Israelis. That becomes the news. Mohammed Ata's father is the one who puts the spin on it. So let's say for argument's sake, you've convinced me it's not the Israeli government. But what about the Jewish people themselves? And you brought it up, Larry Silverstein, he's the leaseholder of the World Trade Center buildings. Silverstein acquired a 99-year lease on the complex just weeks before September 11th. He actually fought a legal battle after the attack, saying that the two planes constituted two separate events, which culminated in a much larger payout, close to $5 billion. Plus, Silverstein himself, on the morning of the attack, was not at his usual breakfast spot in the World Trade Center building that morning. He says it's because of a dermatologist appointment scheduled by his wife. So do you think that Jews could have had advanced warnings of the attack? Somebody should tell that, and I'll answer Silverstein one by one. But somebody should tell the fact that Jews had advanced warning of the attack to the approximately 400 Jews who died in the towers coming down. So forget about that. You know, a story went out, by the way, also Egyptian-made, Egyptian newspapers, it came out from Hezbollah originally and then picked up in Egypt, Lebanese papers as well, that 4,000 Jews had received calls in the morning of 9-11 not to go to work. That was literally a Hezbollah-created trick, it gets into the Arab press. People forget that about 400 Jews died in the towers, and Israeli citizens, some Israelis, were on the planes that came down. So it's very interesting to completely ignore what I call the real facts. Silverstein, fantastic. If Silverstein had been Catholic or Protestant or whatever else, I guess we wouldn't even have this type of discussion. We'd be talking about World Trade Center 7 in a different light. But because he's Jewish, that adds an additional inflammatory factor to it. So he does in fact get the lease, 99-year lease, just in the summer of 2001. He fights, let me tell you, any real estate developer who has a catastrophic event take place which is unprecedented to their building, we can talk about the specifics of it afterwards, and that building comes down as what I call an adjacent part of the terror attack on those two towers. It's going to do everything they can to fight for the last dollar of insurance coverage. There isn't anybody that says, oh by the way, the insurance company told me they're going to pay X dollars. I'm happy with that. They went ahead and they had a novel theory that it was two different payoffs that should be made, and guess what? It wasn't so crazy, they actually won that theory in a court of law. They went ahead and they were able to do it. So it makes absolute sense to me that they fought that. Silverstein has to go ahead and prevail on that. The doctor's appointment he has that morning, he's not the only person who didn't go into work. You know the World Trade Center had thousands and thousands of workers. We knew some of them who did not go to work on that day. We knew some who did go to work, makeup artists who did end up there on that day. It was a twist of fate. His doctor's appointment, by the way, had existed for nearly a month. He kept it that morning and he wasn't there. He says, by the way, you know, people think that the payout that he got on insurance went into his pocket. That was for rebuilding. They rebuilt on that site. He was under an obligation. He had an obligation under his 99-year lease that he had signed to continue paying the Port Authority, whether the building was there or not. It didn't say in the lease, by the way, if the building goes down, you're free of paying us. It was nothing like that. He had to continue paying us, so he had to rebuild. That's why the insurance money becomes so important. But there's another thing about him. He's told that he says on a particular morning, on that morning, before the building comes down, pull it. And people have interpreted that to mean that he was giving the order to start the demolition. First of all, it's fantastic to think the demolition means that somehow he was able to get into World Trade Center 7 after the towers had come down. And I was down near ground zero. We lived in New York at the time. We went down to see if there was anything we could remotely do. You couldn't get near the place. The zone was so big, keeping people out. But somehow a demolition team was able to go and strip all of the fire protection off the girders, be able to put it on the girders, make sure that it was wired, pull it off and get it down. Pull it. By the way, if anybody wants to, go ahead and do a Google search on it. It is a developer term for a small masonry building or a small standing structure that they attach these large cables to, and then they pull it down. It's not what you do to a 47-story skyscraper. You know what pull it meant? It meant to the fire department at that time, pull it, meaning pull yourself back, pull off the fire department. You're not going to make any effort to try to save this building. Guess what? It was redundant because the fire department had already made that decision. We forget that when the North Tower went down, as it came down with the rubble, it cut a 10-story gash in the World Trade Center 7, which started the fires inside World Trade Center 7. They were burning for seven hours without anybody doing anything because water had been cut off. There was no water pressure down there. The fire department had already pulled back a perimeter for what they call the collapse zone by the time that Larry Sorensen had said, pull it. They expected it to collapse. CNN and BBC had reporters who went on the air and said, by the way, World Trade Center 7 has come down because they were told that it was about to collapse. And meanwhile, you can see it in the background behind them. They didn't even know what World Trade Center 7 was. Hey, if you enjoyed that clip, make sure you click the link below to watch the full episode of this week's The Brief.