“In Plane Sight” – DVD
Review by Kent Manthie
A short, concise little documentary, made on video, rather than film, “In Plane Sight” is a cerebral run-through of just a small slice of the myriad panoplies of “questions” raised from the 9/11 conspiracy mongers.
It’s hosted by Dave von Klienst, host of the St. Louis-area talk show, “Power Hour” the kind of show that one finds in the seedy underbelly of AM radio, a place where local cranks and loudmouths in every radio market can vent their paranoid ravings while foaming at the mouth. Well, at least Dave isn’t a neo-Nazi and hard-core white supremacist like Michael Savage or an ultra-hypocritical, lying, smearing, doctor-shopping dope fiend, addicted to oxycontin, which is an opioid, making Rush Limbaugh a junkie, no different from the average heroin addict.
When it first started rolling, I had a really cynical viewpoint regarding this subject. I’m not a Republican and I have this visceral hatred for Bushy, who I regard as trying to wreck the country and set up a corporate oligarchy after having dissolved the Constitution and negated the bill of rights, all of which have indeed happened right under our noses and with nary a peep from any of the charlatans and harlots of the “mainstream media”(it’s like the boiling frog allegory, we get the heat turned up just a little bit at a time until suddenly we are boiling alive without realizing it)-so I don’t want to send the wrong signal and sound like I’m in lock-step with these outlandish ideas, even though I don’t give a damn what most people think. One really can’t call these weird hallucinations “theories” even; there is no rational basis at all for most of their conclusions.
Now, to be sure, there are many anomalies as there are in any accident, natural disaster, fire, bombing, plane crash, urban, armed street battle, or what-have-you. Nothing ever goes as planned – even in the best of circumstances, so why would any rational, sane person expect all these government agencies and individual bureaucrats to have performed smoothly, flawlessly, in a balletic sort of symphonic death-jam that in hindsight came off without a hitch and the thousands of co-conspirators involved at so many levels have kept their mouths shut all this time, that none of them has ever revealed anything to the press, anonymously or otherwise. Do you understand what I’m laying out here? It is absolutely lunatic to think that this kind of over-arching, clockwork precision worked out perfectly – wherein 10,000 people around the world did a helluva job working in synch to flawlessly execute this master plan that resulted in the death of 3000+ people, the total destruction of three buildings and the damage of the Pentagon.
SO! Do you still think that there was this giant conspiracy, an “inside job”, as it were? If so, you need professional psychiatric help.
Now, the broad overview of the entertainment: “In Plane Sight” is not a boring show; it surely isn’t slow or dry or blasé. From the beginning Dave Von Klienst seduces viewers with his fire-engine red sweater and his wavy black hair and that typical over-emoting talk-show vocalization (using one’s diaphragm to bellow out in a deep baritone speaking voice). Mr. Dave takes us through the looking glass on this twisted, turning scavenger hunt. He frames each point with a question, pursuing the issues in a methodical, Socratic way, asking rhetorical questions, “What happened at the Pentagon?” is one question, one of the first, wherein we see much photographic and videographic evidence. In fact, much of “In Plane Sight” is a culling through of many, many pictures, photos taken by journalists, government people and average Janes and Joes with cameras, there at the right time.
One such right-place/right-time piece of video from that day was the work of two French brothers who happened to be making a documentary on the NYFD were interviewing a few firemen seconds before the first plane hit the north WTC tower. Their video camera was the only camera that captured on tape the first plane hitting the south tower.
The exploration of the twin towers and each plane that hit them has some new stuff that I’d not heard about before, like this flash that happened on both planes before each hit one of the towers. When the video images are slowed way down you can plainly see this small but bright flash just before it makes impact. It is up by the nose of the planes
Why is there a flash and where did it come from? Naturally, a broad, objective debate or discussion about the true source of the flash was not done. This was only seen and presented as prima facie evidence of a conspiracy. This “evidence” was accompanied by an additional new item to me: the existence of some sort of tubular or cylindrical-shaped bulge that stuck out of the belly of the supposed American Airlines-owned Boeing 757 jetliner; images of that airplane were slowed down for this too – they stopped or slowed it down and zoomed in as best they could to show this bulge protruding from the belly of the plane and compared it with photos of other 757s and there were no bulges on any commercial 757s, but when they went through different examples of military aircraft they showed several army and air force planes with the a similar bulge that was seen in the video of what was supposed to be flight 175 (gawd, I’m talking like them now).
Another, corroborating bit of stuff they showed us were eyewitnesses who had been interviewed on TV – both Fox & CNN as well as local affiliates. One such clip, from FOX was of the second plane hitting from a vantage point of quite a bit outside of downtown and this woman who is walking by the camera is seen and heard to say, repeatedly, after witnessing the plane hitting the second tower, “That was not American Airlines; that was not American Airlines” in a tone of absolute certainty. Another news outfit had a shot of an eyewitness describing what he had just seen; he described the plane that he had just watched fly into the south tower and it was not a commercial airliner he described. He mentioned that the plane he saw hit the tower was a big, gray airplane, that it wasn’t a commercial airplane because he said “there were no windows on it”.
That is odd, I’ll admit; two different, disparate eyewitnesses describe similar things, that is, both say that the second airplane (at least) was not a commercial airliner; that one said it was a “big, gray airplane…with no windows”. That is weird, but hey –then what the hell happened to the American Airlines 757, flight 175? But then again, that morning was a bright, sunny morning, a beautiful day, but also a very sunny morning, the sun was heading up from the east, not all the way up but shining brightly, nonetheless. So, is it possible that what those eyewitnesses saw was obscured by the brightness of the sunlight? Remember, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky that morning. You must admit, that sort of thing is equally plausible, in fact, it’s actually more likely than the grand conspiracy notion, but again, this possibility is also not even mentioned. It’s another sign of conspiracy which is what Dave would like us to believe.
Be open-minded for sure; don’t go in there with an equal lack of willingness to listen to more than one side of the coin. Yes, there are interesting questions raised but the thing I don’t like about it is that they don’t include any plausible answers to these questions that compete with the answers they are predisposed to accept.
What the conspiracy nuts always leave unspoken and probably never even think about is the one big thing that undermines the whole house of cards they rest their theories on: namely, they assume that thousands of people would be able to pull this whole scheme off like clockwork, without a hitch, without making any mistakes – you’re talking about some kind of superhuman feat here. Then there’s the problem of keeping the whole thing secret forever afterward. I’m not even factoring something that Alexander Cockburn brought up: no one has come forward to confess, there have been no deathbed confessions or anything like that. I might add too that there would also be the very real possibility of fallings out of friendships, associations or what-have-you, meaning that years later no one has come out to get back at one of their fellow co-conspirators, stabbing each other in the back and spilling the beans in the process. There are just an endless amount of scenarios like this that one could argue against any conspiracy theory – not only 9/11.
Anyway just remember that next time you are tempted by some titillating allegations and/or rumors or even so-called “evidence” of some far-fetched, unbelievable conspiracy theory. The events of September 11, 2001, have not necessarily all been perfectly explained; there are unanswered questions, strange anomalies have popped up here and there, but what do you have to compare it to? It’s not like people fly airplanes into buildings every day, so you can’t point to the last several similar incidents to say that this should’ve happened or that had to occur if the official account is to be believed or not. Like I said, watch “In Plane Sight” with an open mind, but don’t let their version of events close it, remember that they don’t answer their own questions all the way, they only give one possible scenario, not a definitive account in any way. They may, in fact, raise more questions. If you want to check out more about Von Klienst, check out http://www.powerhour.com – KM.