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 …
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Ted Olson’s
Report of Phone Calls from Barbara Olson on 9/11: Three
Official Denials
by David Ray Griffin
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.
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.
Olson’s
Story Also Rejected by Pentagon Historians
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 supposed to believe that
60-some 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 erstwhile
opponents. 14 Also, the idea that Burlingame would have
turned over the plane to hijackers was rejected by his
brother, who said: “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
The Pentagon historians, in any case, 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. They
instead wrote that “the attackers either incapacitated or
murdered the two pilots.” 16
Conclusion
This
rejection 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.
Also, 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 technology to pretend 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, should
we not suspect that other parts were as well?
The fact
that Ted Olson’s report has been contradicted by other
defenders of the official story about 9/11 provides grounds
for demanding a new investigation of 9/11. This internal
contradiction is, moreover, only one of 25 such
contradictions discussed in my most recent book, 9/11
Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the
Press.
NOTES
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 (
target="_blank">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
(
target="_blank">http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2001/foxnews091401.html).
5
“America’s New War: Recovering from Tragedy,” Larry King
Live, CNN, September 14, 2001 (
target="_blank">http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0109/14/lkl.00.html).
6
In his “Barbara K. Olson Memorial Lecture,” delivered
November 16, 2001
(
target="_blank">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 (
target="_blank">http://s3.amazonaws.com/911timeline/2002/telegraph030502.html).
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 (
target="_blank">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 (
target="_blank">http://www.vaed.uscourts.gov/notablecases/moussaoui/exhibits/prosecution/flights/P200054.html
). These documents can be more easily viewed in “Detailed
Account of Phone Calls from September 11th Flights”
(
target="_blank">http://911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/calldetail.html).
10
FBI, “Interview with Theodore Olsen [sic],” “9/11
Commission, FBI Source Documents, Chronological, September
11,” 2001Intelfiles.com, March 14, 2008,
(
target="_blank">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
(
target="_blank">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 (
target="_blank">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
target="_blank">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.
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