'Loose Change' An analysis, by Michael B. Green

"Loose Change" An analysis

by Michael B. Green

My views on 911 are as dark and conspiratorial as most. I believe that the National Security Act of 1947 was masterminded by key members of the Council on Foreign Relations to create a privatized mercenary force (CIA Department of Plans) to undermine and topple secular nationalist governments that put the interests of their own peoples before the economic interests of the ruling faction of the United States. I believe that subsequent draconian secrecy laws and oaths, and outsourcing by means of Reagan's (read: BUSH's) Executive Order 12333, have created privatized covert action mercenaries whose moles and contacts within the military and intelligence agencies permit them even greater freedom of action than they had in the assassinations of JFK, X, MLK, and RFK, so that WTC93, OKC, and 911 are also their handiwork. I believe that the so-called "corporate" media is in large part, when needed for crisis management and gross disinformation, under the direct operational control of the intelligence agencies by means of class allegiances within the ruling elite. I also believe that the neocon cabal is at odds with the traditional Eastern Liberal Establishment and that there is currently a war amongst the rulers over who shall hold the reins of power; the "other side" is roughly a combination of Leo Straussian Zionists, crusading imperial Christian military of the Jerry Boykin cut, and pro-American imperialists like Tom Friedman of the New York Times. Although US world domination has long been the goal of the CFR, the muscular militancy of the neocons has gained especial appeal in a world of diminishing resources where an unregulated profit-driven economy has made the brute solution of military might attractive to many with limited compassion, wit, and imagination.

I have great respect for the courage of all the legitimate 911 researchers who try to find the truth and tell it to others, but they often forget a simple essential point. Because 911 (JFK, etc.) are not ordinary crimes, but crimes of state, they cannot be proven by simple forensic means. The proof of any such crimes requires rethinking our picture of the means of government from the ground up. People naturally do not wish to do this, and are propagandized to believe the contrary, so any effort to get their attention should be with evidence that is simple, clear, and convincing, not abstract, obscure, dubious or debatable. I do not pretend that this is enough. Orwellian "stop think" provides that "protective stupidity" that allows us to function in comfort and it is both difficult and painful to abandon. My best friend of nearly 40 years, and former co-author, now ensconced at Harvard, has trouble taking me seriously when I discuss 911. Within the past months he admitted not knowing that a 47 story steel building (WTC7) not hit by anything, and with only a few small fires, had collapsed as a perfect implosion would, nor did he know that the 911 Commission had refused even to mention WTC7 in its report, nor did he think much of these facts nor of his ignorance of them. This is a very smart man, open-minded in many respects, but giving up the world-view he inhabits is simply too hard, especially when there is nothing coherent with which to replace it.

If a film-maker or live lecturer has the good fortune of having the attention of someone like this, or good solid middle-Americans, for an hour-long DVD, or for a 2-3 hour live presentation, he had better use clear hard facts for persuasion, and not iffy, vaguely or ambiguously supported possibilities. The intelligence agencies that do the crimes try to control the counter-community's response by infiltrating moles that infect it with large falsehoods and impossible-to-prove technical questions (micro-analysis). The large falsehoods are designed to prove the community wrong and nuts if the need arises. The microanalysis into pointless or unanswerable questions, or into just plain dumb ones, is to divert its energies from using the clear hard facts to tell the story simply and clearly.

The DVD "Loose Change" by rising media artist Dylan Avery has been touted by some members of the 911-truth community as the best presentation yet, as the "best evidence" (a reference to David Lifton’s book, "Best Evidence" on the JFK assassination). This review will show that the DVD is anything but that; if it is not naive, foolish, uninformed and ignorant, then it is the work of a calculating mole or at best a naïf who has been used by such. “Loose Change” uses footage and analysis from the DVD “In Plane Site,” by Dave vonKleist who has praised “Loose Change” as the best overall DVD on 911, so “In Plane Site” too will come under scrutiny.[1] What, then, is amiss with “Loose Change”?

Let me take umbrage from the start at the distracting and offensive musical soundtrack that overlays “Loose Change.” It makes interviews hard to hear, substitutes the good feeling that goes with the beat for clear thinking, and generally supports the impoverished notion that effective political action comes from a good concert.

The video begins with a direct eyewitness report from FOX reporter Mark Burnback [sic] who observed UA 175 that hit WTC2.

It definitely didn’t look like a commercial plane. I didn’t see any windows on the side. Again it was not a normal flight that I’d ever seen at an airport. It had a blue logo on the front and it did not look like it belonged in the area.

This statement is taken as gospel both by Mr. Avery and his admirers, an amusing fact given the deserved reputation FOX enjoys as a propaganda station for the Cheney/Bush administration. Mr. Avery has lifted parts of the quote from Dave vonKleist’s “In Plane Site”, but has not mentioned that in the fuller version witness Birnbach states that he was at a subway stop in Brooklyn, hence at least a mile from the plane that was silhouetted against the sky, so that Birnbach would not be not able to see any windows because of both the distance and the lighting. Eyewitness reports for brief shocking events are notoriously unreliable; and other photos of the plane definitively show it had standard United Airlines markings; airplane wreckage with windows was found amongst the rubble at WTC5. Thus, Mr. Avery makes selective use of unreliable eyewitnesses ill placed to make the relevant observations, and he ignores other available evidence that this witness is mistaken. That’s just for starters.

Both Messrs Avery and vonKleist also ignore the obvious. 911 was not a low budget operation. If a switch of planes were necessitated for some reason, the substitute plane would look exactly like the plane it replaced.[2] The covert operators cannot control all the people taking photos and would not risk having a good clear picture of a plane that did not look exactly like AA11 or UA175. So they would not use a commercial plane without windows with an aberrant blue logo (“circular” per Birnbach’s full statement), and would not attach a huge pod or missile to the underside of the plane. In fact, the historical precedent for 911 was Operation Northwoods, a top-secret project to provide a pretext to invade Cuba that was approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962 but vetoed by President Kennedy. One Northwoods project involved hijacking a Cuban or American airliner, and if an American airline, switching it with a remote controlled drone that would be crashed over Cuba to blame the Cubans. Northwoods states in pertinent part:

…8. It is possible to create an incident which will demonstrate convincingly that a Cuban aircraft has attacked and shot down a chartered civil airliner enroute from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, or Venezuela. The destination would be chosen only to cause the flight plan route to cross Cuba. The passengers could be a group of college students off on a holiday or any grouping of persons with a common interest to support chartering a non-scheduled flight.

a. An aircraft at Eglin AFB would be painted and numbered as an exact duplicate for a civil registered aircraft belonging to a CIA proprietary organization in the Miami area. At a designated time the duplicate would be substituted for the actual civil aircraft and would be loaded with the selected passengers, all boarded under carefully prepared aliases. The actual registered aircraft would be converted to a drone. (Emphasis added)

To put matters plainly: any substitute plane would be an exact duplicate of AA11 or UA175. To do anything else would be inviting disaster.

The point may be made another way. One of the major problems facing the JFK plotters was the control or destruction of the photographic record. The car carrying the photographic press corps that usually travels immediately behind the presidential limousine was moved to the back of the motorcade by Secret Service agent Winston Lawson as part of the assassination. Some cameras were seized and some photos were bought or grabbed, but the Zapruder film that shows the assassination in its entirety presented a special problem because it showed JFK’s head blown back and to the left by a shot from the front instead of being thrown forward by a shot from the rear. The CIA and its assets were forced to mount an entire separate complicated operation to purchase, sequester, and lie about the contents of that film until its impact could be minimized. They also had to fiddle the Warren Commission so that the Zapruder film was viewed by only its operatives (Allen Dulles, John McCloy, Gerald Ford).[3] This was a lot of work and a lot of risk.

The perpetrators of 911 knew they would have a much-photographed event, but they intended to succeed by spectacular shock caused by their boldness and supplemented by manufactured “expert opinion” to explain such complex events as the collapse of the Twin Towers. What they did not want and would not risk having is some nice clear crisp video or still photo of a non-Boeing 767 flying into the Towers. That would not be part of the spectacle, but hard cold evidence.

Mr. vonKleist and Mr. Avery claim that photos show that the plane that hit WTC2 had a pod or bulge; both correctly note flashes of light when AA11 and UA175 impact their respective targets (WTC1, North Tower; WTC2, South Tower). Mr. Avery declares that the flash is from a missile launched from the planes hitting the towers. Again, Mr. Avery’s refusal to think while listening to the beat of his music has served him ill. If the covert action operators were concerned that jet fuel needed some help to ignite because a 500 mph crash into a steel building were not incendiary enough, there are any number of means of planting the necessary explosives without creating a huge bulge in the profile of the plane.

I will be brief. The “pod” or “missile” is an artifact of light and shadow reflecting from the fairings of the UA175. The fairings are the elongated ovular pods under each wing of a Boeing 767 into which the landing gear retract. They extend from roughly the point where the front of the wings join the plane to several feet behind where the back of the wings join the plane. It is a scandal of both “In Plane Site” and of “Loose Change” that neither mentions the existence of wing fairings.

Mr. vonKleist is an especially tricky fellow. His original DVD slides invisibly from proving that the “pod” is real to showing that “there is no illusion” that a “flash” occurred by showing four videos that each displays a flash when UA175 goes into WTC2. This proves that the “flash” is not an illusion, but does not address the pod. I used my home DVD to freeze-frame and enlarge the four videos. To make a long story short, there is no “pod” because there is no constancy of size and shape of the supposed attachment. In the best of the visual artifacts the imaginary “object” is huge and much larger than the engines, but there is nothing like this in other views of the underside of the plane in the four videos that show the flash. Of his new and improved version of “In Plane Site” Mr. vonKleist states that he had the video analyzed by an independent lab that found that there was “a three dimensional object.” Well, Mr. vonKleist, who enjoys a military background, knows how to ask the wrong question to get his preferred answer. Of course the fairing is a three-dimensional object. But I am not aware of Mr. vonKleist asking that lab whether there is any evidence of a three dimensional object other than the fairings.

The argument that both Mr. Avery and his mentor Mr. vonKleist use to “prove” that the flash is a missile, or in vonKleist’s case a separate event from the plane striking the building, deserves close attention. Only the Naudet brothers captured the impact of AA11 into WTC1 on film. The clincher used by Mr. Avery and his mentor is that the flash, the supposed missile explosion, occurs before the shadow of the plane meets the plane when it hits the tower, hence that the flash is a separate and prior event caused by the missile impact. Unfortunately, my critique applies not only to Mr. Avery but the any audience that has seen his film. There is a thin cylindrical shadow of the plane’s fuselage that advances toward the tower as the plane does, and that meets the tower when the plane does, at which point the flash occurs, corresponding to the front of the fuselage impacting the tower. There is a second larger shadow of the wings that arrives later, but only this “late shadow” from the wings “proves” the missile theory. Thus, the analysis of both films is such a gross distortion of their content that I am inclined to think it is deliberate misinformation; that it works is a sad commentary on audience gullibility. Indeed, both films play the crash in reverse to prove their point with narratives that state that the flash occurs “before” the shadow meets the building because you can see the flash yet see that the shadow has not yet touched the building. The trouble is that it is only the shadow of the wings that have not yet touched the building. The shadow from the front of the fuselage meets WTC1 just when the flash occurs. It is one thing to let this error slip by you in a theater, quite another to see it scores of times as both these film makers have and keep peddling it to your audience.

A final illustration of Mr. vonKleist’s artistry is his proof that the flash is not caused by the fuselage impacting the South Tower. Obviously, it not surprising that a fuselage and engines of aluminum-titanium hitting an irregular surface of concrete, steel and cosmetic siding would be expected to generate friction and intense heat producing a flash like the sparks from a giant grinding wheel as metal is forced against it at some 500 mph., but vonKleist denies this innocent explanation. By using the third of his four video clips, vonKleist rebuts skeptics who claim that the flash is caused by the fuselage impact.

Let’s take another look at this one clip and you’ll notice that the flash is a separate event than the contact of the fuselage as it hits the building. Some folks have stated that the flash was the result of the fuselage making contact with the trade center building. But as you can see the flash is indeed to the right of the fuselage and in fact as the fuselage makes contact with the world trade tower you can see a reflection of the flash in the fuselage which further supports the contention that these are two separate events.

This interpretation is patently false, since the first of the video clips – the CNN footage that gives the best, longest, fullest and clearest picture of this impact from an angle almost directly behind the plane just to the right side of the fuselage – shows there is no such separate event, but only a flashpoint where the fuselage hits the tower, but not to the right of it. My point is not simply that vonKleist is wrong; but that his error is likely a deliberate hoax from someone who is pretending to be so careful to check all known videos to make sure that the flash (not the pod!) is not an illusion. Mr. Avery’s video is especially offensive because it displays frames from the “flash” side-by-side between 3:25 and 3:32. As any reader can see by freeze-framing the movie at 3:29, the illusory missile present in one (or with vonKleist the flash to the right of the fuselage as a separate event) is not present in the main CNN footage. This should make any reasonable person appreciate that grainy footage of fast moving objects vary greatly depending on such factors as whether one has a digital or analogue camera, how steady one holds it, the quality of the camera, and whether or not one captures a reflective burst of light from the plane exterior or a building window pane. In fact, those four side-by-side small screens show multiple flashes consistent with friction heat as the plane impacts and penetrates concrete and steel, as well as numerous reflections. The fact that Messrs. Avery and vonKleist prefer imaginary incendiaries or missiles fired from an immensely implausible non-existent “pod” suggests that they are hoaxers. The best full rebuttal of their nonsense is by Brian Salter, “Analysis of Flight 175 ‘Pod’ and related claims,” from which the photos in this article were copied.

It may be found at http://www.questionsquestions.net/WTC/pod.html.

Why it is unlikely that Mr. vonKleist has made an innocent mistake

The USG intelligence community is for the most part smarter and better educated than the people it fools, and it is certainly better organized, funded, and equipped for its tasks than its audience is to resist or expose them. Many of the operatives who write the dialogue come from the best universities and are inclined to amuse themselves by mocking the rubes that they fool. This mockery is typically done by announcing what they are doing in disguised form, and then doing it with verve and bravado. In Mr. vonKleist’s video, he states:

Let’s take another look at this clip [of plane hitting south tower, CNN, #1] in slow motion but before we do, keep in mind that sometimes the best place to hide something is in plain site. We’ve all seen this video clip, and there have been many publications that have taken frames from this video and published them in hundreds of magazines. Here’s an example, on page 3 a full size blow up of this picture. And in this magazine, it was published on page 4. And on the back of this book that we discussed earlier, it’s on the back cover. I suggest you all take a copy of your magazines and books and if you have the video footage, take a good hard look. We’ve all got this. Now let’s take a look at this in slow motion. As the plane approaches the south tower, notice carefully, the belly of the plane, there appears to be something attached, and just as it hits the building there’s a flash. Let’s take another look in super slow motion.

Now let’s take another good hard look at this video footage. As the plane approaches, it is irrefutable that there is something attached to the bottom of this plane, and a distinct flash as it makes contact. Now there are some that would say this is a trick of light, a reflection. [COMMENT: Which “this” does vonKleist mean, the pod or the flash?] Well let’s keep in mind that if you hold a mirror in your hand and reflect the suns rays, that reflection only goes where you aim that reflection. So a reflection should only be seen from one particular angle. Let’s take a look at this event, from another angle. [COMMENT: Each “angle” is a separate video.]

And now let’s take a look at it again from a 3rd angle.

And now let’s take a look at it again one more time from a 4th angle.

Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve just seen a very interesting event indeed. Not recorded by one, but by 4 different cameras from 4 different angles. There can be no doubt, that this is not the result of a reflection of any sort, but in fact was a flash caused by an explosion, a detonation, a missile, something happened that was not...a terrorist with a box cutter. (Boldface added)

The big boast is that the best place to hide things is “in plain site.” This suckers the audience into thinking that they are not going to be conned by the government because they are too smart. This is how Dave vonKleist cons them. The CNN footage has an artifact of shadow and lighting off the fairing that looks like a huge object. The problem is that the other three videos – even though grainy -- do not show this same shaped huge object. So how to hide such in plain sight? Well, Dave tells us truly that it is irrefutable that there is something attached to the plane (it’s the fairing) and that there is a flash when the plane hits the building. So what anyone who is interested in the truth would want to know is whether that huge something attached to the plane is in the other three videos. But instead, Dave switches the topic smoothly and invisibly – sheer distraction, sheer fallacy of equivocation – to show that sure enough, there really is a flash! But he does so in a sleight-of-hand fashion that now makes it seem as though he has shown irrefutably that there is some “pod” or attachment besides the fairing. And once he has done that, Dave can play all four of those videos side by side and no one tries to see whether the “pod” is in the other three. Better still, Dave makes a sly false inference from the genuine certainty that there is a flash to the specious claim of certainty that it “was a flash caused by an explosion, a detonation, a missile, something happened that was not...a terrorist with a box cutter. “ Of course, a plane hitting a building and causing a flash is not a terrorist with a box cutter.

Best, however, moments later at 42:52 Dave can add to the deception by showing video footage of the impact taken from an angle that shows the entire right side of the plane as it hits WTC2, and angled from just a little behind the point of impact.

Let’s take another look at this one clip [video #3, Spiegel TV] and you’ll notice that the flash is a separate event then the contact of the fuselage as it hits the building. Some folks have stated that the flash was the result of the fuselage making contact with the trade center building. But as you can see the flash is indeed to the right of the fuselage and in fact as the fuselage makes contact with the world trade tower you can see a reflection of the flash in the fuselage which further supports the contention that these are two separate events.

Mr. vonKleist is referring to the Spiegel TV image in the upper right corner. Well, dear reader, a part of the flash is to the right of the fuselage in that image, but that flash is some sort of reflection from the building to the camera; it is clearly not the same flash that occurs where the fuselage impacts the building. This “flash to the right” is Mr. Avery’s missile. But the CNN footage [video #1], which tracks the plane from behind (and to the right and below perspective) as it hits WTC2, shows that there is no separate event, full stop. The moving CNN video in DVK’s video gives a crisper image of the fuselage than the above CNN still and shows the flash hugging the point of impact, not the least bit to the right of it.

I don’t pretend to know what caused this separate flash, and do not care; anyone with a slow motion function on their DVD can find many such flashes at many points of impact (friction flares) and points of non-impact (sheer reflection) in the four side-by-side videos. Many of them are in some videos but not the others. So Dave vonKleist has succeeded in typical intelligence community fashion. The disinformation branch of the intelligence community mocks the rubes by telling them what they are going to do – hide the truth in plain sight -- then they do it, and they do it so deftly that they can show side-by-side photos where one disproves what Dave claims about the other, and the audience buys it without a thought.

Do you think I am kidding you? Dave vonKleist has even spelled out his rigorous scientific methodology for determining whether a flash is a genuine event as opposed to an imaginary one caused by a reflection. From above:

Now there are some that would say this is a trick of light, a reflection. Well let’s keep in mind that if you hold a mirror in your hand and reflect the suns rays, that reflection only goes where you aim that reflection. So a reflection should only be seen from one particular angle.

So Dave states his investigative method, then flouts it, and the gullible, obedient, trusting audience laps it up. If there were a separate event it would be in the CNN video, but it is not. I am put in mind of the complaint of the great anti-imperialist English political economist J.A. Hobson who in 1903 rued the fact that the English populace could be so easily deceived by politicians who told them one story from one side of their mouth and another story from the other. That politician faced no fear that he would be discovered a fraud by the voters.

…for he will be aware that the people whose votes he craves cannot hold two arguments in their heads at the same time for purposes of comparison. (Imperialism: A Study 1938 ed., p. 104)

Well, the Americans have them beat. The Americans have got the two photographs in front of them at the same time yet cannot realize that one rebuts what Dave is telling them about the other. God Love them, KPFK was duped by “In Plane Site” last year and is now hyping “Loose Change” as the second coming. As for Mr. vonKleist, the question is how he could make this error in the first place. Clearly if one is putting together a video as he did, it would be impossible not to notice that the “separate event flash” is in just one of his four flash videos.

Both videos contain much good evidence and valuable material of explosions in the WTC that brought down WTC1, 2, 7 that cannot be suppressed. I suggest that the purpose in including both junk and substantive evidence is to discredit the latter. If rotten fish is wrapped in the same package as delicious truffles, few people with good judgment or good taste will attempt to retrieve and salvage the truffles. It is also to scant good evidence and thorough analysis in favor of cheap shots and one-liners that have no evidentiary value whatsoever. vonKleist wraps the good meat of the WTC blowing up between two pieces of rotten bread: the no-plane-hit-the-Pentagon, and the Pod & Flash fraud. If Mr. vonKleist is not a paid intelligence disinformation asset, then he is the dream of the intelligence community: someone who dissembles as artfully as they do, and with all their wit, but who doesn’t draw a salary.[4]

I do not know what hit the Pentagon, but the evidence strongly indicates it was a Boeing 757. The same general arguments that any substitute plane that hit WTC1 and WTC2 would be an exact duplicate would apply to the Pentagon strike. I have nothing against a missile, two planes, or other theory, but there is little to support them except junk forensics and uninformed intuitions. From its start the “no-Boeing” fight was a miserable tar baby facilitated by the release of five still frames allegedly from a Pentagon parking kiosk video absent the Boeing; such stills should make anyone suspicious of USG complicity realize that they have just been served a red herring.

Let me make this point about rotten wrappings concrete. Last year I bought In Plane Site and saw it twice before going to the KPFK screening on August 7, 2004. I was so moved by the power of the film, by vonKleist’s constrained moral gravity about the pod, that I sent an email to about 25 people with the subject “911 was a US military operation.” I spent the next morning replaying all four impact videos in slow motion, with magnification, and realized there is no pod. I wrote those 25 people an apology. They all now have reason to regard me as impulsive, a bit oddly drawn to and easily taken in by conspiracy theories, and to dismiss the idea that 911 was even in part a US military operation. Mr. vonKleist made me cry wolf, and even though it was (approximately) the right wolf, I had the wrong evidence. When I now try to urge these people to examine the evidence that the Twin Towers were blown up, they dismiss my enthusiasm as an expression of my quirks, and are more than happy to defer to knowledgeable charlatans like Professor Thomas W. Eagar of Journal of Metallurgy and NOVA. The situation is especially embarrassing for me because my scientific training has shown many situations where the correct explanation is at odds with even sophisticated common sense, but here I am urging the latter against the cool quantified experts and their lies.

Last August I thought that Dave vonKleist was acting in good faith, and I thought so in part because I had liked and admired the work of his wife Joyce Riley, who has exposed so many of the military’s lies. But after recently seeing “Loose Change” and hearing it hyped by vonKleist, I went to The Power Hour website to see how Mr. vonKleist’s education had progressed since August 2004. There he was asking classic nonsensical disinformation questions, of which the following is typical:

Why did a FOX News employee, who witnessed the second tower attack, report seeing no windows on “Flight 175” a commercial United Airlines jetliner? Why did another eyewitness report that United Airlines Flight 175 was not a commercial airliner? What kind of plane hit the second tower?

ANSWER: As FOX employee Marc Birnbach states in DVK's original IPS, he saw the plane from a subway station in Brooklyn, and it turns out that this subway stop was about two miles from the crash, which he did not see. Birnbach’s distance from the plane would make it impossible to see the windows of a plane silhouetted against the morning sky. I suspect that the other eyewitness is the hysterical woman separated from Manhattan by a very long bridge screaming, "That is not an American airline!" You don't have to be a genius to know that other closer eyewitnesses saw a commercial airline, and that other photos show the plane with UA markings, and that debris found in the WTC wreckage is of a commercial airliner with windows. But Dave's job is to keep those nonsensical questions in the mix.

Such nonsense prompted me to take a closer look at both DVDs and to write this review.

Back to Mr. Avery’s Contribution

Let me then be very brief with the rest of Mr. Avery’s film, omitting mention of many erroneous or misleading points that would require endless background or debate.

1) The film shows two still photographs of the underside of two airplanes. The one on the right is of the plane that crashed into the WTC2; the one on the left “is what the underside of a Boeing 767 should look like,” Avery intones gravely, intending us to see that the plane that hit the Tower could not be UA175. (2:17) COMMENT: I can see no relevant difference except for the angle of the photos and the fact that the photo on the left is in color, the one on the right in black-and-white. If there is a relevant difference, Mr. Avery fails to mention it.

2) Mr. Avery makes much of Donald Rumsfeld’s slip of the tongue on 10/12/01 referring to the “missile that damaged this building.” COMMENT: Worth a snigger, no evidentiary value.

3) A valuable interview with Air Flight School instructor Marcel Bernard showing that alleged Pentagon pilot Hani Hanjour could not fly well is obscured by the musical sound track and omits such questions as whether Hanjour could have acquired the necessary skills in the month or two between when he was shown deficient and 911.

4) Mr. Avery makes much effort to prove that UA77 did not bounce off the Pentagon lawn. He even shows photos of other plane crashes that bounced off the ground and what they look like. The film gives no idea why this is relevant to anyone except, perhaps, the Pentagon gardener.

5) Mr. Avery states that “the downed light poles were thrown away from the Pentagon, not towards it, and the bases are ripped out completely. There is no indicated that these were bent or damaged by a Boeing 757 traveling at 535 mph. Instead, they seem to have just popped out of the ground.” (11:20-11:35) COMMENT: First, The direction of the light poles doesn’t much matter given that their final direction depends on the torquing forces to which they were subjected and the fact that they might bounce around on the ground once toppled. Hence, it is largely irrelevant. Second, the spatial relationship of the toppled poles to the Pentagon is nowhere apparent in most of the photos. Nonetheless, where it is apparent the photos in the film show the toppled light poles falling in the direction of the Pentagon, away from the highway, and roughly pointing in the Pentagon’s direction. Furthermore, every one shows significant structural damage at its top as though it had been clipped by a plane and popped from the ground.

6) Mr. Avery claims that the damage to the Pentagon is “completely inconsistent” with a being hit by a Boeing. He shows a video of a test crash of a small jet fighter smashing into a reinforced concrete barrier and advises that if a Boeing hit the Pentagon flying at full speed, “the wings would rip off outside.” Yet the crash video does not show the wings being ripped off outside, but of being smashed to smithereens just as the reinforced exterior wall of the Pentagon might be expected to smash or shred the Boeing’s wings. (11:55) He then asks why there are “absolutely no traces of the aircraft at all” even while showing a FOX News Alert that shows the entire area littered with what look like small pieces of aircraft debris. Mr. Avery even asks why there is “not one seat cushion,” on the outside, apparently having forgotten his own statement of moments before that the fuselage penetrated the Pentagon.

7) Mr. Avery shows a photo of Pentagon employees carrying away a large box shrouded in a blue plastic tarp and asks, “What was in that box? Why weren’t we allowed to see it?” COMMENT: Why should removal of materials from a sensitive site like the Pentagon and the fact that it is not made public be of any evidentiary value whatsoever, as opposed to idle speculation?

8) Mr. Avery states that the “official” account of the Pentagon crash claims that the intense heat vaporized the entire plane, and then he proves that titanium would not have been vaporized. COMMENT: I have no idea what “official” account he means and believe he has invented a straw man.

9) Mr. Avery offers extended discussion of the difficulty of identifying residue in the Pentagon proper that might be plane parts. Since the time, source, and subjects of most of the Pentagon photos are unknown – and since we do not know what photographs have been withheld – it is difficult to know what to make of the ones he addresses. I cannot follow his technical talk and we have seen that there is no reason to trust it. But Mr. Avery is clear in his rebuttal that a large diffuser case from the debris cannot come from a 757. (He seems to have forgotten what he said was the official version that everything was vaporized.) Mr. Avery then argues that the damaged diffuser case has circular bezels but both a diagram and an actual diffuser case from a 757 have triangular bezels. COMMENT: This observation might be of interest if Mr. Avery made use of the fact that at least two companies have made engines for the 757 (Rolls Royce, Payne-Whitney); that they almost certainly do not make them the same way, and that each company in turn may have made them differently at different times since the shape of the bezel is not an essential specification of performance, and it is the performance specifications that must be met, not the bezel shape. This is like arguing that the 1.6 liter engine found in the fiery crash of a 1983 Nissan Sentra could not be from a 1983 Sentra because, LOOK!!, Here is a photo and a diagram of a 1.5 liter 1983 Nissan Sentra engine. Well, Nissan makes both size engines for the 1983 Sentra.

10) Mr. Avery then says to “forget the debris. The 767’s that hit the WTC left a very distinct outline of a commercial airliner. Therefore we should expect something similar at the Pentagon.” The film then flashes to the famous photo of the smoky Pentagon that shows the entry hole before the outer wall collapsed. Avery remarks, “The only damage to the outer wall of the Pentagon is a single hole approximately 16’ in diameter.” COMMENT: First, Avery advances a bad argument because whether or not the Pentagon should show the outline of an airliner in the same way depends on whether it is constructed of the same material as the WTC, and if not, upon the structural differences. Since the outer wall of the Pentagon reportedly was 18” of steel reinforced concrete and reportedly had many of its windows replaced with bomb-resistant 2,500-pound windows in the renovation process that was not yet completed, there is no reason to expect the same pattern.[5] Indeed Mr. Avery’s short attention span shows when he asks the relevant question at 21:35 “And is it merely a coincidence that the Pentagon was hit in the only section that was renovated to withstand that kind of attack?” Second, the area of damage caused by the wings to the Pentagon does in fact fit its outlines well. The photo that Avery mistakenly says shows just a small hole in fact shows massive damage to the façade where the right wing hit; the left side is totally obscured by black smoke. Other photos of the left area show a very close correlation to the angled wingspan of a 767. See “Revelations 911,” http://home.planet.nl/~reijd050/pentahole_dimensions_est.htm . For those who were awake during “In Plane Site”, the video contains a photo (9:38) showing massive damage from the left wing to the Pentagon façade even while Mr. vonKleist is acting like some fraud must have been committed because the ever-tapering ever-thinner 757 wings did not collapse every part of the Pentagon they impacted. Mr. Avery succeeds by simply ignoring massive damage in his own data and denying that it is there. Indeed, he continues “Why are the windows next to the hole completely intact?” while showing windows that are smashed open and have flames licking through them. As noted, the 2” 2,500-pound bomb-resistant windows may have done quite well while other windows not yet replaced were broken.

11) At 20:00 Mr. Avery plays a video that shows a car being swept from a highway and says, “This is what happens when a car gets too close to the wake of a commercial airline.” He implies that cars on the highway should have been blown off, but since they were not, no 767 passed overhead. COMMENT: Mr. Avery’s demo video does not show what happens to a car in the wake of a commercial airline. It shows a stationary airliner whose jet engine blast sweeps a car off the highway when it comes too close. The likely case at the Pentagon is that the cars on the highway were not that close and that the Pentagon jet was in the air with its jet engines slightly tilted upward away from traffic, and neither close enough to, nor pointed directly at, the cars near the Pentagon.

12) The Avery video then spews confusion by quoting many contradictory eyewitness statements to no good end, and without taking account of all the eyewitness statements and what they support as a whole: A 767 into the Pentagon. Again, see “Revelations 911” at http://home.planet.nl/~reijd050/home.html and also “Analysis of Eyewitness Statements on 9/11 American Airlines Flight 77 Crash into the Pentagon” by Penny Schoner at http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/F77pentaToC.html.

13) At 30:00 Mr. Avery describes an explosion in the lobby of the North Tower just after AA11 crashed into it. He notes an official explanation that this was caused by a fireball, but then says, “However there was no soot, no fire, no fuel residue.” Within a minute, Mr. Avery quotes approvingly of first-person testimony from “We Will Note Forget,” published in The Chief Engineer, in 9/2002 which quotes hero Mike Pecoraro describing how the WTC1 looked just after the blast, "When I walked out into the lobby, it was incredible," he recalled. "The whole lobby was soot and black, elevator doors were missing. …” This actual text is in Mr. Avery’s film, and Mr. Avery reads it aloud, but he ignores it. Earlier, a part of the article not in the film, states:

We smelled kerosene," Mike recalled, "I was thinking maybe a car fire was upstairs", referring to the parking garage located below grade in the tower but above the deep space where they were working. … The jet fuel actually came down the elevator shaft, blew off all the (elevator) doors and flames rolled through the lobby. That explained all the burnt people and why everything was sooted in the lobby.

The smell of kerosene would be from aviation fuel, not an internal explosion. Mr. Avery apparently does not read, nor remember what he said a moment before. (I believe that Mike Pecoraro is mistaken in holding that the explosions were caused by a fireball, but the evidence is complex and ambiguous and simply cannot be assessed in a video. The fact that Mr. Avery just tells his side of the evidence reduced his video to propaganda. I believe that WTC1 suffered an explosion in the sub-basement just prior to the impact of AA11, but this conclusion is from other evidence that Mr. Avery does not use. Mike Pecoraro may be reporting a secondary fuel spillage down the elevator shafts in the core, and may have been persuaded by the “official account” that a fireball caused the explosions.)

Let me conclude with two more points, one of which shows what is missing in Mr. Avery’s account, the other of which shows his lack of thought.

First, WTC 1, 2, and 7 were brought down by explosive charges. WTC1-2 literally exploded in mid-air before hitting the ground while WTC7 was demolished by a classic lower energy implosion. I recommend Jim Hoffman’s excellent site, www.911review.com, as well as the photos on the back of his co-authored book, Waking Up From Our Nightmare. One key to understanding the official hoax of WTC1 and 2 is to juxtapose official accounts of its flimsy or non-existent core with photos of the core 47 massive steel box columns held together by massive interlocking grid work, and connected to the peripheral columns by massive beams and girders as well as the lighter-duty trusses that supported the flooring. This is what gives the lie to the pancake theory –- even if the floors collapsed the core would still stand, or demonstrate terrific resistance to collapse instead of nearly free-fall descent. Again, though not definitive, the core being demolished first then makes sense of a video mounted on a tripod, focused on one of the towers, shaking several seconds before the building’s collapse (when the base is detonated); and again though not definitive, makes sense of a video taken from a helicopter photographing a WTC collapse that is rocked by propagating shock waves that would not occur from a simple collapse. Some of these facts are better presented in a print and still medium, but any video of the subject that wants to be effective should use them.

Second, the telephone calls from the airplanes are a difficult subject, and I have no firm idea whether any, some, or none were genuine. But Mr. Avery makes two claims that are pragmatic contradictions, and argues very badly for each of them. Mr. Avery argues that all the calls are bogus based on research by Professor of Physics A.K. Dewdney trying to make call phone calls from a chartered airplane over Canada. I don’t think that Dewdney’s self-funded research in Canada is definitive about how the entire lot of commercial cell phones in airlines at unknown heights may have behaved in the United States. Additionally, some reports of cell-phone calls may be paid air-phone calls.

Mr. Avery’s tack is then to scoff at the alleged implausibility of reported dialogue, which we shall show momentarily he does crudely and wrong-headedly. Perhaps the worst part is that as part of his debunking all the calls, Mr. Avery makes such comments as the following. Referring to Flight Attendant Madeline Sweeney’s 25 minute call with her ground manager Michael Woodward, Mr. Avery mimics and mocks her statement “near the end [when] she says, ‘I see water and buildings! Oh my god! Oh, my god!’ as though she had never seen the Manhattan skyline before in her life.” (53:00) COMMENT: Mr. Avery seems to have little capacity for understanding how people feel. If this is genuine dialogue, its obvious interpretation is that Madeline Sweeney has just realized that the hijacked plane is not going to be landed, but to be crashed into lower Manhattan.

Mr. Avery also narrates:

A man claiming to be Todd Beamer got through to a Verizon supervisor telling of three men with knives, one claiming to have a bomb. Thirteen minutes later he recites the 23rd psalm of the bible and drops the phone, turning to utter his rallying cry, “Let’s roll!” Why would Beamer spend the last minutes of his life talking to a complete stranger as opposed to a member of his own family?

The boldfaced, supposedly deep question unmasking the perpetrators’ charade, is designed to show that Mr. Beamer’s behavior made no sense, and to set up Mr. Avery’s own opinion that based on Dewdney’s research, “The cell phone call were faked. No ifs, ands, or buts.” It would take too much time to show in detail why this does not follow from Dewdney’s research, not least of which is that the altitudes from which the calls were made remain unknown, and the low probability given by Dewdney of getting through on any given call is offset in a hard-to-calculate way by automatic redial, not to mention that these calls may have been air-phone calls. But given Mr. Avery’s cry that the calls were faked, I don’t see anything but intelligence community irony in ending his film with a rallying cry to all Americans that we should follow Todd Beamer’s example and, “Let’s roll!” Why should we follow as an example what Mr. Avery has just told us is sheer fiction manufactured by the 911 perpetrators through voice morphing technology?

And as for Mr. Avery’s distinct incapacity to imagine the obvious, let alone see it in front of his face, here are several good reasons why Todd Beamer would spend the last few minutes of his life talking to a complete stranger rather than a family member:

a) Mr. Beamer may have been able to reach a Verizon supervisor but not able to reach a family member to whom he wanted to talk at a time like that.

b) Mr. Avery’s video displays a 9/22/01 article from the Post Gazette that states that the Verizon supervisor notified the FBI and Todd Beamer was apprising her, and presumably the FBI, of the status of the airplane in preparation to making a counter-attack. Mr. Beamer may have felt that speaking to her and the FBI would be more useful at that moment than speaking to a family member.

c) Mr. Beamer clearly did not know that he would die, and clearly hoped that he might survive. A passenger on that flight was a licensed commercial pilot and might have been able to land the plane. Todd Beamer asks the Verizon supervisor to call his wife and tell the wife how much he loved her in case he dies. Since he hoped to live, and since he needed to steel himself for the task immediately ahead, he may well have not wanted to burden his wife at such a moment as he then faced.

Mr. Avery did not ask penetrating questions, but asked shallow, immature, insensitive, callow and uninformed questions consistent with his performance through his video.

Michael B. Green, Ph.D.

Clinical Psychologist

Qualified Medical Examiner

August 3, 2005