By David ray Griffin, this article is based on a chapter from his new book,"9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press." (Northampton, Olive Branch, 2008)

::::::::

On September 11th, 2001, CNN published a story late in the day 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." In 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)

This report was very important. First, it provided the only evidence that American Flight 77, which was claimed to have hit 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). Second, Barbara Olson had been a very well-known commentator on CNN. The report that she died in a plane hijacked by Arab Muslims was of great importance in gaining the country’s support for the Bush administration’s "war on terror." Ted Olson’s report was important in yet another way, having been 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 central to the official account of 9/11, this report has now been completely undermined.

Olson Repeatedly Contradicts Himself

This process of undermining began by means of Olson’s self-contradictions. He initially told CNN, as we have seen, that his wife had "called him twice on a cell phone." But he contradicted this statement 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 this return to his first account, he finally settled on his second account, saying that his wife had called collect and therefore 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 in use 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 enabling cell phone calls from high-altitude airline flights was not created until 2004.(7)

However, Olson’s second story, besides being self-contradictory, was also contradicted by American Airlines.

Olson’s Second Account Contradicted by American Airlines

One 9/11 researcher, who knew that AA Flight 77 was a Boeing 757, noticed that AA’s website showed that its 757s do not have passenger-seat phones. He wrote to ask if this had been true on September 11, 2001, and 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)

Defenders of the official story might argue against this revelation by replyng that Ted Olson was evidently right the first time: she had used her cell phone. However, this possibility is not only rendered unlikely by the cell phone technology of 2001; it has also been contradicted by the FBI.

FBI Contradicts Olson’s Story in Court

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 the FBI presented to this trial included a report on phone calls from all four 9/11 flights. The FBI report on American Flight 77 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 extraordinary 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.

Pentagon Historians also Reject Olson’s Account

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).

11. Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007).

12. O’Brien, "Wife of Solicitor General Alerted Him of Hijacking from Plane."

13. 9/11 Commission Staff Statement 16 (http://www.9-11commission.gov/staff_statements/staff_statement_16.pdf).

14. Shoestring, "The Flight 77 Murder Mystery: Who Really Killed Charles Burlingame?" Shoestring911, February 2, 2008 (http://shoestring911.blogspot.com/2008/02/flight-77-murder-mystery-who-really.html).

15. "In Memoriam: Charles ‘Chic’ Burlingame, 1949-2001," USS Saratoga Museum foundation (available at http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/planes/analysis/chic_remembered.html).

16. Alfred Goldberg et al., Pentagon 9/11 (Washington DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense, 2007), 12.

17. Of these two possibilities, the idea that Ted Olson was duped should be seriously entertained only if there are records proving that the Department of Justice received two collect calls, ostensibly from Barbara Olson, that morning. Evidently no such records have been produced.

Authors Bio:
I am a retired professor of philosophy of religion and theology. Before I retired in 2004 I became interested in the events of 9/11 and have written 6 books on the subject.