"The Witches of East Brunswick"

By David Chandler

Ann Coulter grabbed some headlines for her new book, Godless: The Church of Liberalism, by labeling four 9/11 widows the "The Witches of East Brunswick." What was their crime? Using their high profile status as aggrieved widows to demand an independent investigation into the events of 9/11. Some would say "let bygones be bygones," but the 9/11 widows aren't going to let go that easily, and neither should we. Clearly the topic still has power for Ann Coulter, judging from the venom of her words.

There are many unanswered questions, and a lot of evidence that was quickly destroyed or stamped secret after 9/11, but enough public evidence remains to cast doubt on the official explanation. The problem is, a real investigation could lead in some uncomfortable directions.

I first became seriously interested in the "9/11 Truth Movement" when I read an article entitled, The North Tower's Dust Cloud: Analysis of Energy Requirements for the Expansion of the Dust Cloud Following the Collapse of 1 World Trade Center by Jim Hoffman.

The dust cloud within 30 seconds of the beginning of the collapse of the North Tower. Photograph from FEMA's Building Performance Assessment Report.

A very peculiar aspect of the collapse is that almost none of the concrete hit the ground; it was turned to dust in mid air. The falling buildings looked like volcanoes erupting. The dust cloud mushroomed immediately as the collapse began, and expanded rapidly. Jim Hoffman's article made conservative estimates of the energy required to crush the concrete into dust and expand the dust cloud to the observed size. His conclusion was that the energy to accomplish this feat was, at minimum, 10 times the gravitational potential energy of the building. In other words, gravitational collapse cannot explain the observations. The jet fuel was not the source of the energy: the North tower was burning for 1 hour and 42 minutes before it collapsed. All the jet fuel was consumed within minutes of the collision. There had to be a different energy source to drive the explosions.

South Tower mushrooming into a fountain of debris as it falls. Try imagining the floors "pancacking together," as in the official account, producing this kind of an effect.

Even apart from the detailed physics, consider that anything that falls picks up speed gradually. The speed is not very great at first, regardless of the weight. The concrete, under the initial low speed impact of falling floors, would break into chunks, but it would not be pulverized into dust and ejected horizontally at high velocity, along with fragments of steel girders.

There is a lot of video footage available, some of it showing the onset of collapse in detail. It is very clear that huge quantities of dust exploded outward at high speeds, even in the first seconds. On one video clip I measured the trajectory of a massive object ejected early in the collapse and found that it was thrown horizontally at over 60 miles per hour.

Another physics problem is that both buildings collapsed in about 15 seconds, only 50% slower than free fall in a vacuum. Is it believable that two steel structures built around cores with 47 huge steel box columns running vertically the full height of each building collapsed through themselves with almost no resistance? Consider that if the energy of the falling buildings were absorbed to pulverize the concrete, it would have slowed the downward acceleration significantly. The energy to do both did not materialize out of thin air. It had to have a source, pointing to the existence of explosives planted ahead of time throughout the building and detonated in sequence to bring the buildings down.

Where are those 47 gigantic columns in the rubble heap, anyway? They were the strongest elements of the buildings. If the floors simply pancaked, as in the official explanation, the central columns should have been left protruding high in the air or fallen onto adjacent buildings like toppled trees. The aerial photographs of the rubble, however, show only short, straight sections. It would be useful to examine the remains of the columns more carefully, at least to see why they failed, but they were quickly hauled away and recycled without a proper forensic examination.

This is just a taste of the many anomalies in the events of that day. If explosive charges were distributed throughout the buildings the hijackings were a cover story and the true perpetrators would have to be insiders who could coordinate the building demolitions with the flights, the coverup, etc. The implications are staggering, which is why many people refuse to even let their minds go there. There are, of course, those with X-files mentalities who take the discussion in weird directions, but there is a growing body of sober research based on the evidence.

George W. Bush has said, "9/11 changed everything." The fallout from 9/11 surrounds us daily. Getting to the truth behind what happened is as important now as it was when it happened. Of course you might be labeled a witch or worse if you open that door, but intimidation should not deter the search for truth.

To learn more about what happened on 9/11, see 911SpeakOut.org.

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(For a walk on the lighter side, see Walt Handelsman's animated editorial cartoon on Ann Coulter.)