HAUER, SILVERSTEIN, AND OLSON: 9/11 LIARS ON RECORD
While my assertion is that the 9/11 OS (“official story”) is a lie from start to finish, it is rare to find liars who speak, as it were, “on the record,” expressing themselves in a manner that is directly violative of the truth. Most of the lies that we hear are at least once- or twice-removed, giving the speaker plausible deniability: he is, after all, only reporting what he has been told. Media lapdogs, as well as state- and corporate-appointed public relations spokesmen have this readymade excuse, and many of them are no doubt credulous enough actually to believe what they have been told, just like much of the propagandized public, whom they are charged with the responsibility to (dis)inform.
In a few cases, however, we have instances of people who have behaved far more boldly; that is, they have positively asserted that which is demonstrably false, or at the very least, deeply dubious, claiming the testimony of personal witness. For such as these, there can be no excuse (excepting sheer insanity, whereby one wholeheartedly believes that one experienced things which in fact never happened). Here we have pure, crystallized mendacity in its most essential form. It is worth lingering over such instances, since they give us a true opportunity to observe and scrutinize, if only momentarily, the minds of such men, who, even in the midst of a claque of shameless liars, are clearly the most brazen of the lot.
I will here consider the specific cases of a trio of high-profile 9/11 liars, three men who, needless to say, have received no comeuppance, recompense, or reckoning for engaging in not inconsequential and quite intentional deceit.
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1) In an interview with Dan Rather on CBS just a few hours after the collapse of the towers on September 11th, Jerome Hauer found himself placed in an awkward situation.
Hauer, a national security advisor, director of the high-tech crisis center in Building 7 as well as a managing director of highly-placed insurance outfit Kroll Associates, had offices in the WTC complex. Nevertheless, in his 9/11 interview with Rather and later with ABC’s Peter Jennings, he expressed little if any emotion concerning his workmates in the complex being killed, or his workspace being destroyed; instead, he rather calmly stuck to a seemingly prearranged script, informing the news anchors and their audiences that this was a clear act of terrorism and that Osama Bin Laden was obviously to blame.
Mostly, these interviews went smoothly—though, again, those who were aware of Hauer’s position might well have blanched at the callousness he displayed in speaking so coolly about the situation mere hours after his workmates perished so horribly in the collapsing towers—but during his conversation with Rather, one major hiccup occurred, temporarily interrupting the steady flow of carefully-crafted, deeply disinformative rhetoric. For a moment, that is, Hauer was flummoxed, and his flummoxing, and attempted recovery, has thankfully been preserved for history.
It seems that, for whatever reason, Rather went “off script,” pressing an inquiry that Hauer did not see coming.
Hauer responds, of course, with an immediate and emphatic, “No,” before Rather is even done talking. Hauer goes on to declare that, “My sense is just… on the velocity of the plane and the fact that you have a plane full of fuel hitting that building, that burned, uh, the velocity of that plane, uh, certainly had an impact on the structure itself, and then the fact that it burned, and you got that intense heat in the structure as well, and I think it was just, uh, the planes hitting the buildings, and uh, causing the collapse…”
Hauer then shifts to talking about the rescue crews and the New York fire department, and the incredible job they are doing in the aftermath of the disaster, and the subject of the cause of the towers’ collapse never again gets mentioned.
It is unclear what prompted Rather to ask this question—perhaps he was actually, of all things, being a journalist!—but it was a prescient question to ask indeed; the striking thing is that Hauer felt the need to preemptive negate the entire line of inquiry, and to stammer out that his “sense” led him to believe that no explosives were planted in the towers. Given that Hauer ought in fact to have had no clue whether or not “prior positioning of explosives” occurred, his reply to Rather’s query should have been more circumspect. A responsible answer would have been, “We don’t know for sure about what caused these buildings’ collapse, but we intend to conduct a thorough investigation of the wreckage, and find out.” But instead it seemed crucial to emphasize that the only acceptable account of events would be the impossible one, the very one which asserted passenger planes flying at impossible speeds, crashing right through sturdily-constructed, steel-fortified buildings that they couldn’t possibly have penetrated, resulting in those same buildings inexplicably dissolving into dust.
And of course it must be added that, Hauer and his cronies clearly had no intention to conduct an investigation at “ground zero,” since almost immediately after the buildings collapsed demolition crews were at the scene, gathering up the bits of shrapnel which remained at the scene and shipping them off, loading them onto barges and sending them away to be junked. Thus nearly all of the evidence of this crime scene were effectively removed. One could almost conclude that such a move was deliberate, since it is utterly baffling to consider it in any other light.
It may not be possible to prove that Hauer’s claims in this interview are a deliberate lie, but it is easy to see that he is being highly disingenuous, since he dismisses a likely possibility out of hand while asserting his “sense” of what happened as if his “sense” were beyond dispute and the end to all possible debate. Of course, Hauer would never have felt the need to make such a transparently dishonest claim were Rather never to have asked him that awkward question and thus put him “on the spot.” As one who is not a fan of Rather or of any other mainstream media “talking head,” I do think it’s worthwhile to point out the rare occasions when they actually do or say something worthwhile, so right on Dan!
2) Larry Silverstein-- who came into ownership of the World Trade Center complex a mere six weeks prior to the 9/11 disaster, and who already racked up “suspicion” points for demanding a massively exorbitant insurance rate for the set of buildings, well above what was reckoned to be their actual market value-- is most notorious, not for a lie, but for apparently inadvertently expressing a shocking truth in a 2004 PBS documentary; namely, that he made the decision to “pull” Building 7, a seeming admission that controlled demolition was indeed used to bring down that skyscraper.
Afterwards, Silverstein’s handlers claimed that by “pull it,” he meant to remove a squadron of firemen from the building, but this neither squares with the facts on the ground (there were, it seems, no firemen in the building at the time), nor is it consistent with the general verbiage of Silverstein’s declaration (wouldn’t “pull them” be more appropriate, if he was speaking of ordering a group of men out of the building, instead of “pull it,” which suggests taking action involving something inanimate, i.e., a building?); what is more, Silverstein had no authority to order squadrons of firemen to leave a building, even if any had been in the building at the time.
But as much scrutiny as Silverstein’s “pull it” remark has received, I find his personal account of what happened earlier that day even more intriguing. In several interviews, recorded both in print and on camera (the most notable of the latter being with PBS’s Charlie Rose), Silverstein talks of how he escaped perishing at the WTC on September 11 because he just happened to have had an appointment with a dermatologist that day. Every morning prior to 9/11, for weeks on end, Silverstein had reportedly breakfasted in the Windows on the World restaurant at the top of the North Tower. He had spent his time there getting to know his new tenants and listening to their concerns. But on the day of destruction, “lucky Larry” skipped his Windows breakfast for the very first time, just to visit his friendly neighborhood skin care specialist.
Talking to Charlie Rose, Silverstein insists that he didn’t want to keep his appointment with the dermatologist, but was browbeaten by his wife into changing his mind:
“My wife, God bless her, made an appointment… I told her, ‘sweetheart, I’ve got so much to do downtown (at the WTC), I’ve gotta cancel this, I’ve gotta go downtown…. And she said (affecting a mean, scary voice) ‘You’re not gonna cancel this appointment!... So I said, ‘Yes, dear. I’ll go, I’ll go!’”
It was “just minutes later,” Silverstein said, that he witnessed the “horrendous circumstance” of “the first plane hitting, and then the second plane hitting… It was a horrendous, horrendous experience.”
It is not known exactly what Silverstein’s alleged skin condition was, though it is by no means outside the realm of possibility that he did have to consult with a dermatologist for some legitimate medical reason. However, it strains credulity to think that a man of Silverstein’s means (that is, a billionaire) would have any need to secure an appointment with any doctor in any manner that would present an inconvenience to himself. Indeed, a man of Lucky Larry’s means would, one imagines, have resources enough at his disposal to summon the services of a dermatologist, or any other medical specialist, at a time and place that would fit with his schedule, and not the other way around.
It is indeed, rather amusing to picture a man like Larry Silverstein have to attend a doctor’s office like the “common folk,” to imagine him waddling haplessly into a waiting room, telling the scowling lady behind the desk his name, dutifully filling out the tedious forms she puts before him, then obediently taking a seat and having to occupy himself with a three-year old copy of People or Sports Illustrated for a good hour or so past the time of his actual appointment, until finally some bitchily-voiced doctor’s attendant finally calls him in to see the doctor, at which time he is led to a patients room and told to sit unclothed in for thirty more minutes, until the doctor finally walks in to see him…
In short, it is highly unlikely that Silverstein-- billionaire, Manhattan real estate mogul, and owner of the World Trade Center complex-- would have had to put up with such indignities as the common man commonly endures at the doctor’s office. Rather more probable is the scenario wherein the medial specialist in question goes to visit Silverstein’s at the latter’s behest, at the time that the latter determines to be propitious, and that if anyone is made to endure the indignity of having to wait past the time of the appointment, it is most likely the hired specialist in question, NOT the billionaire Manhattan mogul.
Yet Lucky Larry spins a scenario wherein he must endure the inconvenience of keeping an appointment with a dermatologist, by having to visit said dermatologist in his or her office at some out-of-the-way location. Already the account sounds dubious, yet to my mind Lucky Larry at least gets points for invoking a “relatable” set of circumstances: that of the henpecked husband. It was his wife, he reveals, who essentially nagged him into keeping his appointment; otherwise, he would have dutifully trudged to meet his doom at the WTC. It also happened, he reveals, that his two grown children, who also worked at the towers, survived because they were both stuck in traffic at the time of the catastrophe. So the entire Silverstein family was spared. Talk about luck! (In one interview, when asked if his survival was due to “the Silverstein luck,” Larry answered, “Definitely!” seeming positively giddy rather than properly somber about the destruction of his buildings and the deaths of numerous tenants and their employees.)
In several interviews, as I stated previously, Silverstein has repeated his “nagged by my wife into visiting my dermatologist” story. Yet not one reporter, as far as I am aware, has inquired into the identity of the dermatologist in question. Even if one were approaching the account from a mere “soft news/human interest” point of view, it would seem that finding Silverstein’s dermatologist would help to round out the incredible story he tells. Think of the powerful quotes this phantom doc could potentially provide! Something like the following, perhaps:
“When Larry came in that day to get his warts removed, and we learned that terrorists had attacked his place of work, he broke down and sobbed like a baby in my arms,” said Dr. Saul Dermawitz, a short, wispy man with horn-rimmed spectacles and a slight lisp…”‘What a horrendous circumstance, what a horrendous, horrendous event!” he kept repeating. “I know Larry, but luckily enough your entire family was spared, thank Jehovah,” I told him, reassuringly. “And I should’ve been there this morning, just like I was every morning for the past month, but my wife, God bless her, told me to come here instead!” he declared, awestruck at his luck. “You’re one lucky nudnik,” I agreed.
Yet no one has made an effort to find out the name of Silverstein’s alleged skin care specialist, nor the location of his or her office. Was this failure to ask questions attributable to a collective loss of nerve on the part of all journalists who covered this story, or does it in fact signify something even worse: a culpability on their part in helping billionaire Larry establish his outrageous-sounding alibi by not delving too deeply into his ridiculous cover story, explaining why he just happened to be absent from his workplace on the one day that it was destroyed?
3) Finally, and perhaps most egregiously, let us consider the claims of Ted Olson.
Olson held the title of solicitor general in President George W. Bush’s cabinet. According to the 9/11 OS, Olson’s wife Barbara, a conservative columnist and pundit, was one of the passengers on American Airlines Flight 77. She (allegedly) perished when that plane (allegedly) struck the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Mere days later, Olson gave two very high-profile interviews, one to CNN’s Larry King, the other to ABCs Barbara Walters.
The story he told of the final moments spent on the phone with his wife a was heart-rending one. Barbara called his office from the plane, Olson said, and told him that her flight had been hijacked, and that everyone from first class had been forcibly moved to the back of the plane, along with the pilots. The hijackers were middle Eastern-looking men armed with knives and boxcutters, she said. She wanted to know what she could do. The call abruptly ended, but she called back a moment later, and they conversed for about the span of a minute. Ted told Barbara that two other planes had been hijacked by terrorists and had crashed into the Twin Towers a short time earlier. Each told the other “I love you,” before the line went dead again, for the last time. Shortly thereafter, Ted received news that Barbara’s plane had flown into the Pentagon in Washington DC, killing everyone on board.
In both of these interviews, Olson’s demeanor remains curiously unemotional, his affect largely flat. Considering that he lost his beloved wife mere days prior, one would expect his grief to be overpowering; indeed, I daresay that most who have suffered such a loss would be in no mood to grant two television interviews and speak to millions of viewers about the intimate details of a devastating final conversation with one’s newly-deceased wife. Instead, the freshly-widowed husband stoically relates information which would soon largely inform the “official story”: namely, that middle Eastern men with knives and boxcutters forced the pilots out of the cockpit in order to crash the plane into a landmark site.
The problem with Olson’s account is that it has conclusively been shown to have been completely fabricated.
Records indicate that Barbara Olson’s cellphone in fact made no calls during the time when Ted Olson claimed she called his office twice. In fact, she apparently tried to place a call during that span of time, but was unsuccessful. This shouldn’t be surprising, even if we grant, as per the 9/11 OS, that Barbara was indeed on board the plane when it got hijacked by Arabs armed with boxcutters, since—as previously stated—cellphones seldom if ever function on a plane flying at cruising altitude. What is more, Flight 77 was not equipped with air-phones, so Barbara couldn't have reached Ted that way, either.
Given that Olson’s account of events could not possibly be accurate, one would expect a major retraction to be forthcoming from the corporate media venues which broadcast his story. One would, further, think that Olson himself would receive significant flak for lying about his final moments speaking with his wife when such an incident in fact never even occurred. What sort of man, after all, would manufacture a story like that? How could one have the gall to exploit the death of his wife with a heartbreaking tale that is in fact a lie from beginning to end?
Yet of course no retraction has been forthcoming from CNN, ABC, or any of the print media which carried Ted Olson’s story and reported it as factual. Nor has Olson himself been called to account for lying about this reported final exchange between himself and his wife. Instead, he-- much like Hauer and Silverstein-- has continued to be a major player amongst the American/globalist power elite. He has faced no reckoning whatsoever for giving testimony which deceived the public into believing things which are plainly untrue; he has not been sued for helping to perpetuate the “19 Arabs with boxcutters” myth, which, despite being manifestly absurd, was nevertheless used as a pretext to launch two major wars of aggression, both of which resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths and untold destruction and misery across the planet.
Characters such as Hauer, Silverstein, and Olson are indeed a breed apart. Our notions of normalcy do not accord with theirs; our ideas of decency are as foreign to them as would be the manners and mores of some far-flung alien civilization. It is not, however, their dishonesty, strictly speaking, which sets them at a distance from us, psychologically speaking. After all, even we “ordinary” humans all know what it means to lie in an effort to save ourselves from getting in trouble. We have made recourse to lies when we feel that truth would be detrimental, either to ourselves or to others whom we wish to protect.
But the sort of liars profiled above are not at all like us, for even when we are at our most dishonest, we still cannot fathom the notion of perpetuating the sort of frauds that these men (if indeed we can call them “men”) uphold with nary the blinking of an eye; frauds on a massive scale, which destroy countless lives and plunge the world into chaos and terror.
At the same time, lest we be tempted to view such creatures as these with a kind of awe, due to their remarkable, indeed seemingly superhuman, propensity to tell such egregious whoppers without the least pang of conscience or sting of shame, we should take a second look and in so doing, disabuse ourselves of the notion that there is anything particularly impressive about them.
In fact, none of the three profiled here look at all convincing whilst engaging in their duplicitous rhetoric. Jerome Hauer sounds jumpy and overly-emphatic, protesting entirely too much in his panicked hurry to contradict the “prior-placed explosives” idea floated by Rather. Silverstein wins “creativity and panache” points for the “Can’t fight wives when they’re on the warpath, amiright husbands??” wisecrack, but he still comes across as cagey, sweaty, and fidgety; the moment where he seems to exult over his “luck” is cringeworthy in the callousness it puts on display. And Ted Olson oozes an offputting aloofness, managing to look extremely uncomfortable while telling his “I lost my wife on 9/11” sob story while not manifesting any recognizable emotion.
In short, these three individuals, while surely ghouls, are hardly ever masterminds or scheming sorcerers. Their “tells” are easy enough to recognize; the only problem is, not enough people are paying attention.
Creatures like Hauer, Silverstein, and Olson have survived and thrived because the culture of the power elite is as just as inhuman as they are. For twenty years, since the events of September 11, 2001, they have remained generally impervious to the “karma” that would have immediately overtaken them in a just world.
But their time is running out. May the day of justice hasten; may the blood of the innocent cry out from the earth; may their cries be heard, and the crimes of their victimizers be fully and wholly recompensed, may divine vengeance strike hard, soon and very soon.
Andy Nowicki is a blogger, vlogger, and writer. Visit his author page, his Amazon page, and his YouTube channel.
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