Ted Olson’s story has also been quietly rejected by the historians who wrote Pentagon 9/11, a treatment of the Pentagon attack put out by the Department of Defense.(11)
According to Olson, his wife had said that "all passengers and flight personnel, including the pilots, were herded to the back of the plane by armed hijackers."(12) This is an inherently implausible scenario. We are asked to believe that more than 60 people, including the two pilots, were held at bay by three or four men (one or two of the hijackers would have been in the cockpit) with knives and boxcutters. This scenario becomes even more absurd when we realize that the alleged hijackers were all small, unathletic men (the 9/11 Commission pointed out that even "[t]he so-called muscle hijackers actually were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5’5" and 5’7" in height and slender in build"(13), and that the pilot, Charles "Chic" Burlingame, was a weightlifter and a boxer, who was described as "really tough" by one of his former opponents.(14) His brother emphatically rejected the idea that Burlingame would have turned over the plane to hijackers, saying: "I don't know what happened in that cockpit, but I'm sure that they would have had to incapacitate him or kill him because he would have done anything to prevent the kind of tragedy that befell that airplane."(15)
In any case, The Pentagon historians did not accept the Olson story, according to which Burlingame and his co-pilot did give up their plane and were in the back with the passengers and other crew members. Instead they wrote that "the attackers either incapacitated or murdered the two pilots."(16)
Conclusion
This denial of Ted Olson’s story by American Airlines, the Pentagon, and especially the FBI is a development of utmost importance. Without the alleged calls from Barbara Olson, there is no evidence that Flight 77 returned to Washington. And if Ted Olson’s claim was false, then there are only two possibilities: Either he lied or he was duped by someone using voice-morphing and pretending to be his wife.(17) In either case, the official story about the calls from Barbara Olson was based on deception. And if that part of the official account of 9/11 was based on deception, other parts may be suspect as well.
It is now clear that Ted Olson’s account has been been seriously undermined by three other defenders of the official 9/11 story. This is a compelling reason to conduct a new investigation into 9/11, and is only one of 25 similar internal contradictions exposed in my most recent book, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press.
References:
1. This essay is based on Chapter 8 ("Did Ted Olson Receive Calls from Barbara Olson?") of David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008).
2. Tim O’Brien, "Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane," CNN, September 11, 2001 (http://archives.cnn.com/2001/US/09/11/pentagon.olson).
3.This was pointed out in The 9/11 Commission Report, 8.
4. Hannity & Colmes, Fox News, September 14, 2001 (http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/foxnews091401.html).
5. "America’s New War: Recovering from Tragedy," Larry King Live, CNN, September 14, 2001 (http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/lkl.00.html).
6. In his "Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture," delivered November 16, 2001 (http://www.fed-soc.org/resources/id.63/default.asp), Olson said that she "somehow managed . . . to use a telephone in the airplane to call." He laid out this version of his story more fully in an interview reported in Toby Harnden, "She Asked Me How to Stop the Plane," Daily Telegraph, March 5, 2002 (7. I discussed the technical difficulties of making cell phone calls from airliners in 2001 in Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2007), 87-88, 292-97.8. See the submission of 17 February 2006 by "the Paradroid" on the Politik Forum (http://forum.politik.de/forum/archive/index.php/t-133356-p-24.html). It is quoted in David Ray Griffin, 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (Northampton: Olive Branch, 2008), 75.
9. United States v. Zacarias Moussaoui, Exhibit Number P200054 (click here These documents can be more easily viewed in "Detailed Account of Phone Calls from September 11th Flights" (click here
10. FBI, "Interview with Theodore Olsen [sic]," "9/11 Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological, September 11," 2001Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008, (http://intelfiles.egoplex.com:80/2008/03/911-commission-fbi-source-documents.html).
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