Saturday, October 13, 2007

An Astounding Discovery: More Evidence That The Official 9/11 Story Is Indefensible

In an article published by The Canadian, David Ray Griffin discusses New Evidence that the Official Story about 9/11 is Indefensible and why this new evidence has prompted him to revise his most recent book.
Early in 2007, Interlink Books published my Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory.
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I was motivated to put out the Revised and Updated Edition primarily because of new information about the alleged phone calls from passengers on the flights to relatives, through which reports of hijackers on the airplanes reached the public.

In the first edition, I presented extensive evidence that reported cell phone calls from the airliners, including the approximately 10 reported cell phone calls from United 93 (which crashed in Pennsylvania), could not have occurred, because the cell phone technology at the time did not allow calls to be made from airliners flying at a high altitude (Flight 93 was at 34,300 to 40,700 feet when the calls were reportedly made). I argued not that the relatives of the passengers had lied about receiving the calls but that they had been duped -- by means of voice morphing, which is now perfected to the point that, advertisers brag, you can fool your spouse.

Even after my book appeared, Popular Mechanics continued to claim, on the basis of very weak evidence, that high-altitude cell phone calls were indeed possible (see the History Channel special, “9/11 Conspiracies: Fact or Fiction”). However, as I reported in the Revised and Updated Edition of my book, the FBI had in 2006 presented, as evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui (sometimes called “the 20th hijacker”), a report on phone calls from the four airliners. According to this report, there were only two cell phone calls from United 93, and they were made at 9:58, shortly before the plane crashed, when it was down to 5,000 feet. When the FBI had to present evidence in a court of law, therefore, it would not claim that any high-altitude cell phone calls had occurred. (These two low-altitude calls from Flight 93 were, according to the FBI report, the only two cell phone calls made from all four flights).

The most well known of the reported cell phone calls from Flight 93 were four calls that Deena Burnett reported receiving from her husband, Tom Burnett. She knew that he had used his cell phone, she reported on several TV shows and later in her book, because she saw his Caller ID number. However, as I reported, there are now devices, such as “FoneFaker,” that will produce the person’s Caller ID as well as his or her voice. Deena Burnett and the others, I believe, were not lying; they were duped.

The most famous of the reported calls from the flights supposedly came from Barbara Olson, the well-known commentator on CNN who was married to Ted Olson, who was then the US solicitor general. Olson reported that his wife had called him twice from American Airlines Flight 77, stating that hijackers with knives and boxcutters had taken over the plane. Besides providing evidence of hijackers, this call also provided the only evidence that Flight 77 was still aloft (it had disappeared from radar and there had been reports of an airliner crash nearby). Although Olson went back and forth on the question of whether his wife had used a cell phone or an onboard phone, he finally settled on the latter.

In the first edition, I challenged this claim on the basis of evidence from American Airlines that their Boeing 757 (which is what Flight 77 was) had no onboard phones. After publishing the book, however, I became worried, because of some new evidence, that that statement from American Airlines, made in 2004, had referred only to their 757s at that time -- that their 757s in 2001 may well have had onboard phones. So I published a retraction, saying that the claim was uncertain.

That retraction, however, evoked new evidence, including a statement made by American Airlines in 2006 that their 757s in 2001 had had no onboard phones, so that anyone calling out from Flight 77 had needed to use a cell phone. Barbara Olson, therefore, could not have used a passenger-seat phone. That left open, of course, the possibility that Ted Olson was correct when he said that his wife had used her cell phone.

However, the evidence from the Moussaoui trial ruled out this possibility. In its report on AA 77, it listed one attempted call from Barbara Olson, which was “unconnected” and hence lasted “0 seconds.”

This was an astounding discovery. The FBI is part of the Department of Justice. And yet it had undercut the testimony of the DOJ’s former solicitor general, saying in effect that the two calls that he reported had never happened. The implication is that unless Ted Olson had, like Deena Burnett, been duped, he had lied. Although this should have produced front-page headlines, it has thus far not been reported by any mainstream publication.

The Revised and Updated Edition of “Debunking 9/11 Debunking” provides the documentation for these reports from American Airlines and the FBI, which pretty thoroughly undermine the idea that any of the reported calls were genuine: If the cell phone calls were faked, why should we believe that the reported calls from onboard phones were genuine?
This is the most relevant excerpt, but you can read the entire piece here.

This is what the mad bombers of the Mutual Assured Destruction era used to call "overkill". The official story was plenty indefensible already.

How many times must this dragon be slain?

You don't have to answer that.