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Ted Olson's Report of Phone
Calls from Barbara Olson on 9/11: Three Official Denials
David Ray Griffin
Global
Research
Thursday, April 3, 2008
Late in the day on 9/11, CNN put out a story that
began: “Barbara Olson, a conservative commentator and attorney,
alerted her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, that the plane
she was on was being hijacked Tuesday morning, Ted Olson told
CNN.” According to this story, Olson reported that his wife
had “called him twice on a cell phone from American Airlines
Flight 77,” saying that “all passengers and flight
personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the
plane by armed hijackers. The only weapons she mentioned were
knives and cardboard cutters.”2
Ted Olson’s report was very important. It provided the
only evidence that American 77, which was said to have struck
the Pentagon, had still been aloft after it had disappeared from
FAA radar around 9:00 AM (there had been reports, after this disappearance,
that an airliner had crashed on the Ohio-Kentucky border). Also,
Barbara Olson had been a very well-known commentator on CNN. The
report that she died in a plane that had been hijacked by Arab
Muslims was an important factor in getting the nation’s
support for the Bush administration’s “war on terror.”
Ted Olson’s report was important in still another way, being
the sole source of the widely accepted idea that the hijackers
had box cutters.3
However, although Ted Olson’s report of phone calls from
his wife has been a central pillar of the official account of
9/11, this report has been completely undermined.
(Article continues below)
Olson’s Self-Contradictions
Olson began this process of undermining by means of self-contradictions.
He first told CNN, as we have seen, that his wife had “called
him twice on a cell phone.” But he contradicted this claim
on September 14, telling Hannity and Colmes that she had reached
him by calling the Department of Justice collect. Therefore, she
must have been using the “airplane phone,” he surmised,
because “she somehow didn’t have access to her credit
cards.”4 However, this version of Olson’s story, besides
contradicting his first version, was even self-contradictory,
because a credit card is needed to activate a passenger-seat phone.
Later that same day, moreover, Olson told Larry King Live that
the second call from his wife suddenly went dead because “the
signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work
that well.”5 After that return to his first version, he
finally settled on the second version, saying that his wife had
called collect and hence must have used “the phone in the
passengers’ seats” because she did not have her purse.6
By finally settling on this story, Olson avoided a technological
pitfall. Given the cell phone system employed in 2001, high-altitude
cell phone calls from airliners were impossible, or at least virtually
so (Olson’s statement that “the signals from cell
phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well”
was a considerable understatement). The technology to enable cell
phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created
until 2004.7
However, Olson’s second story, besides being self-contradictory,
was contradicted by American Airlines.
American Airlines Contradicts Olson’s Second Version
A 9/11 researcher, knowing that AA Flight 77 was a Boeing 757,
noticed that AA’s website indicated that its 757s do not
have passenger-seat phones. After he wrote to ask if that had
been the case on September 11, 2001, an AA customer service representative
replied: “That is correct; we do not have phones on our
Boeing 757. The passengers on flight 77 used their own personal
cellular phones to make out calls during the terrorist attack.”8
In response to this revelation, defenders of the official story
might reply that Ted Olson was evidently right the first time:
she had used her cell phone. However, besides the fact that this
scenario is rendered unlikely by the cell phone technology employed
in 2001, it has also been contradicted by the FBI.
Olson’s Story Contradicted by the FBI
The most serious official contradiction of Ted Olson’s
story came in 2006 at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called
20th hijacker. The evidence presented to this trial by the FBI
included a report on phone calls from all four 9/11 flights. In
its report on American Flight 77, the FBI report attributed only
one call to Barbara Olson and it was an “unconnected call,”
which (of course) lasted “0 seconds.”9 According to
the FBI, therefore, Ted Olson did not receive a single call from
his wife using either a cell phone or an onboard phone.
Back on 9/11, the FBI itself had interviewed Olson. A report
of that interview indicates that Olson told the FBI agents that
his wife had called him twice from Flight 77.10 And yet the FBI’s
report on calls from Flight 77, presented in 2006, indicated that
no such calls occurred.
This was an amazing development: The FBI is part of the Department
of Justice, and yet its report undermined the well-publicized
claim of the DOJ’s former solicitor general that he had
received two calls from his wife on 9/11.
Full
article here.
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