The reality is that many thousands of New Yorkers in Lower Manhattan saw the second plane come in. A friend who works nearby told me, “there was nothing unusual about it except how low it was flying. I could clearly see the United logo on the tail as it flew past.” His father is an airline pilot and he was watching from an upper floor of Citibank offices located 5 or 10 blocks away from the WTC.

Regarding activism, I find all that is usually required to convince most people (those willing to look with an open mind anyway) is a couple of short videos: David Chandler’s ‘North Tower Exploding’ & the clips of WTC 7’s implosion. Along with a short list of easily verifiable facts, Such as: an overview of the debris fields, the DNA results, 1100 missing bodies, the explosiveness of 1&2, the 99 days underground fires, the molten metal, the squibs, the powdered concrete, dissembled cores, and testimony of explosions. The 9/11 Commission and NIST ignoring of many of these facts and testimony along with a reference to the Harrit et al. paper and to do their own follow-up research at 911research.wtc7.net website, and that’s it. That is all that’s really required to arouse doubt, if not completely convince, most people of the truth.

The fact is that many people have a very difficult time accepting such a disturbing truth and would rather not even look at it. I try to remind them that that is a luxury that comes from not having been a victim yourself and that we need to pursue the truth for the victims and so the country can heal. A wound can only heal once it’s been properly treated and dressed otherwise it festers and only gets worse.

I also think it’s important to warn people about all the dis and misinformation out there regarding 9/11. There have even been faxing campaigns here in NY advertising No Planes Theories. I saw one that came into the management office where I have my office in Manhattan directing people to a ‘911hoax’ website. I have a hard time believing the guys from Loose Change or VonKleist would be ‘disinfo agents’ but would never refer anyone to that material. I am much more likely to warn them against it for obvious reasons.

It also seems ironic that FOX News is featuring one of our strongest pieces of evidence, while PBS is getting Loose Change. I wish we had more and better films to offer. I realize those involved have the best intentions and are working hard.

It’s often seen as a sin to criticize any Loose Change film because people get so hooked on the emotion it evokes and so get highly defensive of it and it’s film makers, but I have always had mixed feelings about the series in general (despite some versions being better than others) because of it’s reinforcement of “no planes” or “swapped planes”, passengers being herded into secret facilities, etc., even as it has made a big impact. The problem is that many people were initiated to the movement with this film, so they automatically assumed “no planes”, “no hijackers,” etc., and it’s been a real problem to correct. Even the pod claim was spread with this film early on, which is really sad.

And when everyone begged the filmmakers not to appear on Democracy Now to debate Popular Mechanics, but to instead allow the actual researchers and scientists to do that, they refused, claiming that DN wouldn’t have allowed any substitutions. So while there were a few good moments, for the most part, it was about the entertainment value and name-calling of who was the real liar, not about best evidence.

Hence, I always recommend at least these two resources that pull out the weak or baseless claims, and underscore the strong ones:

Sifting Through Loose Change
The 9-11 Research Companion to LOOSE CHANGE 2ND EDITION
( not to be confused with LOOSE CHANGE FINAL CUT )
A detailed point-by-point critique of the film using an illustrated transcript
http://911research.wtc7.net/reviews/loose_change/index.html

“Loose Change” An analysis
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2005/12/02/17873401.php
by Michael B. Green, August 3, 2005

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.
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2005/12/02/17873401.php