WTC7 has received a lot of attention because of its inexplicable collapse at 5:20 PM on September 11.WTC7 purportedly burned for hours before collapsing, but the source of the fire remains a mystery, as does the complete failure of the building's modern fire- protection systems.

Another interesting fact is that the entire twenty-third floor of WTC7 was a state-of-the- art command center, reportedly set up by Mayor Giuliani. That floor was designed to serve as a base of operations during times of crisis. It was reinforced to withstand winds of 160 miles per hour, and had an independent air and water supply.

On September 11, 2001, the command center was monitoring the situation in lower Manhattan -- until personnel there received an order to evacuate. One official told the filmmakers: "to this day, we don't know who gave that order." [www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr43.html]

In a PBS documentary America Rebuilds" Larry Silverstein admitted that WTC 7 was "pulled," that is, intentionally demolished: "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. "[ http://www.pbs.org/americarebuilds/]

This explanation undermines the FEMA assessment: "The specifics of the fires in WTC 7 and how they caused the building to collapse remain unknown at this time."

Unfortunately, lots of documentation and evidence was lost with the collapse of WTC 7. The CIA's clandestine New York station was lost, seriously disrupting United States intelligence operations. "All of the agency's employees at the site were safely evacuated soon after the hijacked planes hit the twin towers, the officials said." [New York Times (11/04/01)]

Unfortunately, "Some further email records the committee has requested cannot be retrieved," wrote Citigroup Deputy General Counsel Jane Sherburne in an Aug. 7 letter to House Committee on Financial Services. "The backup tapes were lost when the building in which they were stored (7 WTC) was destroyed in the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001." [www.thestreet.com/markets/matthewgoldstein/10041194.html]

"Maybe no financial institution lost more critical documents than the Securities and Exchange Commission, which had its New York regional office at 7 World Trade Center. While the regulatory agency was fortunate in that it lost no employees in the terror attacks, it suffered setbacks in a number of long-running securities investigations." [www.thestreet.com/markets/matthewgoldstein/10041194.html]

"Regardless of what the regulators say, they lost a ton of files," says Bill Singer, a New York securities lawyer, who says one case he had pending before the SEC quickly settle because so many of the original documents were destroyed. "In my opinion it was a wholesale loss of documents." [www.thestreet.com/markets/matthewgoldstein/10041194.html]