"Loose Change" An analysis
by Michael B. Green
August 3, 2005
http://911research.wtc7.net/essays/green/loose_change.html
Both videos ["Loose Change" and "In Plane Site"] 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 Sight 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. Eager 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.
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Back to Mr. Avery’s Contribution ["Loose Change"]
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 757 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?â€
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.â€
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 Siteâ€, 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, The WTC 1,2,& 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, http://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, 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
[1] References are to the original version of “In Plane Site†unless otherwise stated.
[2] It is hard to see why there would need for a plane switch, a risky complication, instead of simply taking over the planes by remote control. But, perhaps the perpetrators did not wish to lower morale amongst their pool of patsies –- cronies of the “hijackers†who were aboard – by killing them. So perhaps a landing was made to remove the “hijackers†(if there were any) and load the unusually small number of commuters onto a single “rescue†plane for their final demise.
[3] David R. Wrone, The Zapruder Film, University of Kansas Press, 2003, p.54.
[4] As I wrote in an August 8, 2004 email debunking KPFK’s August 6, 2004 screening of “In Plane Siteâ€: As Dave vonKleist himself declared in person at Friday's screening, the most critical single claim made in "In Plane Site" is that the plane that crashed into WT2 had a huge pod attached to its right underbelly beneath the right wing. Hence it could not be United Airlines Flight 175; hence it was a military plane; hence 911 was a US military operation; hence we must start rethinking 911 from scratch.
[5] The specifications of the reinforced windows are from Esther Schrader, “Pentagon, a Vulnerable Building, Was Hit in Least Vulnerable Spot†Los Angeles Times, September 16, 2001. Due to extensive official disinformation it is impossible to know whether to credit this report, since it almost certainly came from Pentagon public relations.
Copyright Michael B. Green August 3, 2005
