Letter to the Editor: The truth about 9/11 [and Beck & Von Brunn, and the WTC Destruction]

http://www.timesargus.com/article/20090620/OPINION02/906200304

The truth about 9/11

Published: June 20, 2009

I read with interest the letter from William Rice about 9/11 and the subsequent response from a reader to Rice's observations that discount all the facts that he presented. 9/11 discussions on op-ed pages rarely go well. One writer will offer an observation and then another will claim that observation to be absurd. This was exactly the case last week. No matter what fact you may present that shows the official version of events to be dubious, you will almost certainly be called a conspiracy theorist, or worse. TV personality and Fox News commentator Glenn Beck recently lumped those of us who claim to be part of the 9/11 Truth Movement in the same category as James W. Von Brunn, the man accused of murdering a guard at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. It's a strange leap of logic, but 9/11 discussions rarely elicit logical thinking.

Here is a fact that we do know: All three buildings in New York collapsed at free fall speed. This is verified by both video footage and by seismic readings taken at Columbia University. The official version of events is that WTC 1 and 2 collapsed because fire from the jet collisions weakened the structure causing the top section to fall to the next lower level which collapsed. (WTC 7 is said to have collapsed solely from fires started by falling debris.) This is known as the pancake theory. Floor upon floor collapses to the level below all the way down.

But for this to happen at free fall speed, the laws of physics would have had to be suspended. The law of Conservation of Momentum says essentially that a motion will not change unless an external force acts upon it. Therefore, a moving object that encounters resistance will be slowed. Can you think of any instance where this wouldn't be true? So if the WTC buildings were pancaking down, they would have encountered resistance the entire route of descent. Free fall speed would have been impossible. The only possible explanation that would legitimize the pancake theory would be that resistance had been removed. Hmmm.

We don't know if the events of 9/11 were planned by anyone in government, or if they were executed by some entity outside government. We do know that the laws of physics can't be suspended. That should be enough to make anyone question the official version of events.

Larry Gilbert

Middlesex