So Sheldon, Have You Stopped Accusing Firefighters of Lying?

Sheldon Drobny pans Bill Maher's quite good comments about the 9-11 nutbars, and steps into the firefighters' wheelhouse.

By focusing only upon the controlled demolition theory of the Twin Towers, he excluded a more viable discussion of the collapse of building # 7 that was not hit by anything but the debris from towers 1 and 2.

As I have put it in the past, a lot of the crackpots seem to think that WTC-7 is the Gateway Drug to 9-11 Denial. Gee, it seems so harmless to engage in a little speculation about controlled demolition at WTC-7. After all, nobody died there, so you're not pissing on graves like you are when you talk about the Towers.

But that doesn't buy them a free pass, because in order to buy the CD of WTC-7, you've got to claim that an awful lot of firemen were lying. Firemen like:

Edward Kennedy:

"But this is as the day was going on and, of course, there were so many transmissions going over. I remember him screaming about 7, No. 7, that they wanted everybody away from 7 because 7 was definitely going to collapse...."

Lieutenant Rudolph Weindler:

"Captain Varriale told Chief Coloe and myself that 7 World Trade Center was badly damaged on the south side and definitely in danger of collapse. Chief Coloe said we were going to evacuate the collapse zone around 7 World Trade Center, which we did."

Firefighter George Holzman:

"We stayed there for quite sometime when I don't even know who, I think it was someone, Lieutenant Lowney spoke to, asked us to leave the area, they were concerned about 7 World Trade Center collapsing."

Firefighter Kevin Howe:

"At that time there was a lot of fire going on. I think it was the Customs House was roaring. The 7 World Trade Center was roaring."

Captain Robert Sohmer:

"As the day went on they started worrying about 7 World Trade Center collapsing and they ordered an evacuation from that area..."

Assistant Chief Harold Meyers:

"Chief Nigro directed me to continue monitoring conditions at the site. Specifically to monitor number 7 World Trade Center. We were very concerned with the collapse potential there, and to do whatever I could do to ensure site safety in that no additional people became injured."

Firefighter Fred Marsilla:

At this point, 7, which is right there on Vesey, the whole corner of the building was missing. I was thinking to myself we are in a bad place, because it was the corner facing us. But you do what you got to do as usual. We operated till they finally started pulling people back.

Firefighter Adrienne Walsh:

Then we were instructed to search through two or three buildings to make sure they were stable, and then they pulled everybody out because of the pink building. Was it 7 World Trade, that was going?
Q. Right.
A. Then they pulled everybody out.

Firefighter Kevin Quinn:

Then approximately I guess maybe two hours before number 7 came down, we went into Ground Zero and helped dig around and was there when they located Chief Feehan and one of the Chiefs pulled us all out because they said 7 was going to come down.

Captain Anthony Varriale:

At that time, other firefighters started showing up, Deputy Battalion Chief Paul Ferran of the 41 Battalion, and James Savastano of the First Division assigned to the Second Battalion showed up and we attempted to search and extinguish, at the time which was small pockets of fire in 7 World Trade Center. We were unaware of the damage in the front of 7, because we were entering from the northeast entrance. We weren't aware of the magnitude of the damage in the front of the building. We made searches. We attempted to put some of the fire out, but we had a pressure problem. I forget the name of the Deputy. Some Deputy arrived at the scene and thought that the building was too dangerous to continue with operations, so we evacuated number 7 World Trade Center.

Firefighter Vandon Williams:

It could have been an hour, hour and a half we were doing that before we were ordered to move away from that part of Tower No. 1 because there was an imminent danger of collapse of World Trade Center No. 5 and 7.

Firefighter Eugene Kelty, Jr.:

And 7 World Trade was burning up at the time. We could see it. There was concern. I had gone up to take a look at it, because I knew that the telephone company building, which is 140 West Street, was next to 7 World Trade Center, and there was a concern that if 7 World Trade came down, what would happen to this building?

Firefighter Richard Banaciski:

They told us to get out of there because they were worried about 7 World Trade Center, which is right behind it, coming down. We were up on the upper floors of the Verizon building looking at it. You could just see the whole bottom corner of the building was gone. We could look right out over to where the Trade Centers were because we were that high up. Looking over the smaller buildings. I just remember it was tremendous, tremendous fires going on. Finally they pulled us out. They said all right, get out of that building because that 7, they were really worried about.

Chief Frank Cruthers:

Early on, there was concern that 7 World Trade Center might have been both impacted by the collapsing tower and had several fires in it and there was a concern that it might collapse. So we instructed that a collapse area ?
Q. A collapse zone?
A. Yeah -- be set up and maintained so that when the expected collapse of 7 happened, we wouldn't have people working in it.

There are many more. Are you saying they're all lying, Sheldon?