Stratesec
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The story...

The Commission also did not mention that the CEO of the company that was in charge of security for the World Trade Center was Wirt Walker III, the president's cousin, or that Marvin Bush, the president's brother, had been one of this company's directors.
David Ray Griffin
http://911review.com/articles/griffin/testimony_cbc2005.html

Foreign terrorists could not have obtained access to the buildings for the hours needed to plant the explosives. Terrorists working for the Bush-Cheney administration, by contrast, could have gotten such access, given the fact that Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III---the president's brother and cousin, respectively---were principals of the company in charge of security for the World Trade Center.
David Ray Griffin
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060405112622982

Our take...

It’s certainly true that Marvin Bush and Wirt Walker III both worked for a company called Securacom (later Stratesec), and that company did do some security work for the WTC. But even without researching this, you might wonder about the claim that they were “in charge of security for the World Trade Center”. After all, the WTC had its own security head, John O’Neill, who took up the job on August 23rd and died when the towers collapsed. And at least some of the security was provided by the Port Authority: David Lim, a Port Authority police officer, was stationed at the WTC with his bomb-sniffing dog Sirius. In fact Lim told the 9/11 Commission that the Port Authority police were responsible for the safety of those at the complex (our emphasis):

Statement of David Lim to the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
March 31, 2003

I am a Police Officer in the employ of the Port Authority of NY & NJ. I have been such for the greater part of the last 23 years. On Sept. 11th, 2001, our Police Department suffered the greatest single day loss in Law Enforcement history @ the World Trade Center. 37 Officers from every rank (Superintendent to Police Officer) as well as my partner, explosive detector K-9 Sirius were killed in the attack. Many would ask what the PAPD was doing in the World Trade Center. A little known fact was that we were always there. Since the Port Authority owned the buildings, we (the Police) were responsible for the public safety therein...
http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing1/witness_lim.htm

It seems that WTC security arrangements aren’t quite as simple as Dr Griffin would have you believe.

What’s the real story about Securacom, though? For that we have to go back to 1996:

A terrorist bomb exploded underneath the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993, ripping out a three-story high crater, shutting down most of the electrical power and causing $500 million in structural damage.

The bombing, the first international terrorist attack on U.S. soil, claimed the lives of six people, injured more than 1,000 and forever changed the level of security at the landmark complex.

"Because of the bombing, they were looking for something that had the security of a nuclear facility," said E-J President Tony Mann. "But it's also a commercial office building that needs to be responsive to its tenants. The system provides an operating office building with the highest level of security."

E-J Electric Installation Co., the country's oldest independent electrical contractor, won a $28 million contract in 1996 to tighten security at the World Trade Center. The Long Island City, N.Y.-based contractor installed 2 million feet of fiber-optic cable, hundreds of security cameras, access control and 110 turnstiles, including systems integration. The parking garage also became restricted after a terrorist drove a van, containing a bomb, into the underground parking garage in 1993.
http://september11.ceenews.com/ar/electric_towering_security_2/index.htm

So the Port Authority naturally wanted to improve WTC security after the 1993 bomb. It took them a while, but finally they began to spend money in 1996, and E J Electric were the major contractor. Securacom, got a share as well, but not for very long:

Securacom got the $8.3 million World Trade Center security contract in October 1996 and received about $9.2 million from the WTC job from 1996 (a quarter of its revenues that year) to 1998. But in 1998, the company was "excused from the project" because it could not fulfill the work, according to former manager Al Weinstein, and the electronic security work at the WTC was taken over by EJ Electric, a larger contractor.
http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20050215bushes_3.cfm

If this is correct, then Securacom’s interest in the WTC ended in 1998, which you might have expected Dr Griffin to tell you. But is it true? There is one article that suggests otherwise:

According to its present CEO, Barry McDaniel, the company had an ongoing contract to handle security at the World Trade Center "up to the day the buildings fell down."...

Barry McDaniel, CEO of the company since January 2002, declines on security grounds to give specific details about work the company did at the World Trade Center. According to McDaniel, the contract was ongoing (a "completion contract"), and "not quite completed when the Center went down." The company designed a system, but &endash; as he points out -- obviously that "didn't have anything to do with planes flying into buildings."...
http://www.populist.com/03.02.burns.html

The first line here talks about “handling security”, the second mentions “designing a system” though, and the “not quite completed” suggests they were working on a particular task rather than “running security” for the whole complex.

Incidentally, the “up to the day the buildings fell down” line is sometimes used as a basis for saying that “the contract ran out on September 11th”, but we think that’s a real stretch. Having major contracts end on a Tuesday in the middle of the month sounds odd to us, and it seems much more likely that McDaniel meant the contract was active at the time, and only ceased because the towers collapsed. In the same way that a doctor saying “I treated him from the day he was born up to the day he died” doesn’t necessarily mean the patient in question was about to be transferred somewhere else.

Anyway, we can speculate about this completion contract, but that’s never going to provide any solid leads. A better approach might be to look at the SEC filings for Securacom, and see what they tell us about the company’s revenue and clients.

Here’s what the annual report for 1997 tells us:

Revenues increased by 108.6% from $5.8 million in 1996 to $12.1 million in 1997. The increase was due to work completed for new clients and an increase in work completed on existing projects. Revenues from the World Trade Center project, which commenced in October 1996, increased from $1.6 million in 1996 to $6.6 million in 1997
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1037453/0000925328-98-000030.txt

And 1998:

Revenues decreased by 45% from $12.1 million in 1997 to $6.6 million in 1998. The decrease was due to the closeout of the World Trade Center Project.
http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1037453/0000925328-99-000032.txt

Just as mentioned earlier, the company left the WTC project in 1998. We continued reading, but didn’t see any other revenue booked to the WTC listed in any other financial reports. Feel free to check, though -- these documents aren’t exactly fun to read and maybe we’ve missed something. If accurate, however, and the company really received no money from the WTC after 1998, then that would suggest McDaniel’s contract was comparatively recent.

It could still be argued that the company were involved in some very sensitive areas, however, even if they only spent two or three years at the WTC:

Stratesec installed the initial security-description plan—the layout of the electronic security system—at the World Trade Center.
http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20050215bushes_3.cfm

The contractors for the permanent security system are E.J. Electric and Electronic Systems Associates, both of New York. Securacom, Woodcliff Lakes, N.J., is responsible for system integration.

Access Control & Security Systems Integration
July 1997
SECTION: Editor's Letter; ISSN: 1084-6425
LENGTH: 3516 words
HEADLINE: World Trade Center
BYLINE: By CAROL CAREY

If there was still some contact with the WTC through McDaniel’s “completion contract”, however minor, then maybe it’s significant that Marvin Bush worked there? 

Possibly not, as he left his directors job in the fiscal year 2000 ( http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0204-06.htm ).

Marvin Bush was reelected annually to Securacom's board of directors from 1993 through 1999. His final reelection was on May 25, 1999, for July 1999 to June 2000. Throughout, he also served on the company's Audit Committee and Compensation Committee, and his stock holdings grew during the period. Directors had options to purchase 25,000 shares of stock annually. In 1996, Bush acquired 53,000 shares at 52 cents per share. Shares in the 1997 IPO sold at $8.50. Records since 2000 no longer list Bush as a shareholder.
http://www.physics911.ca/Burns:_Security,_Secrecy,_and_a_Bush_Brother

So much for that particular Bush.

Others point to Wirt D Walker, President of the company through this time, and say he was related to Bush, too. These claims are sometimes made in a very definitive way:

The chairman of the board of Stratesec is Wirt D. Walker III, a cousin of Marvin and George W. Bush.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/101003_bush_death.html

However, they all appeared to be sourced from a single Margie Burns article:

Stratesec and Aviation General shared top executives, including Wirt D. Walker III, a distant relative "in the Walker branch of the Bush family," according to a former colleague...
http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20050215bushes_1.cfm

Here he’s a “distant relative”, not a cousin, and even this is only an unsourced comment from a “former colleague”. We’ve found no supporting references for any Bush - Wirt D Walker III family relationship outside of this story, and looking at the Bush family tree reveals no obvious links. What’s more, even Burns now appears to downplay the link:

A former colleague of the head of the company, Wirt Dexter Walker III, suggested to me that Walker is a distant relative of the Bush family. While any blood relationship to the Bush Walkers would have to be remote (the first Wirt D. Walker, two generations ago, was based in Chicago; the second in McLean, Virginia, in the DIA), there is no doubt that the company, Kuwait’s Al Sabahs, and Bush financial interests were closely linked for years. Management and control at Wirt Walker’s other companies, a small airplane company named Commander Aircraft (also bankrupt) and a private investment firm named KuwAm (short for Kuwait-American Corporation), were inextricably linked to management and control at Securacom.
http://www.margieburns.com/blog/_archives/2006/2/26/1784217.html

We’ve gone from he “is... a cousin”, to being a “distant relative”, to it just being “suggested” that he is a distant relative, and there’s still not the slightest verifiable evidence to support any of that. Until we can get in touch with Walker to get a comment, or some definitive evidence appears, we’re viewing this as “not proven”.

What is there in this story, then? We see no evidence that Stratesec/ Securacom “ran” or “were in charge of” security at the WTC. They were just a contractor, who did have a major role once, but were replaced by another company in 1998. The only evidence of further contact after that time is a couple of quotes from Barry McDaniel in one article, where he seems to be talking about designing a system that wasn’t yet finished, and nothing as major as managing the security of the complex.

Even if McDaniel’s contract was significant, there’s no obvious connection to Marvin Bush, as he left the company in June 2000. No-one has yet presented any proof to support the assertion that Wirt Walker is Bush’s cousin, either. And before we get too deep into family trees, how does being related to Bush act in any way as evidence of your willingness to conspire to commit mass murder, anyway?

Once again, an apparently significant point becomes much weaker once you look at the details. And in no way can this be regarded as even beginning to provide an explanation for how the WTC could have been prepared for demolition.

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