Westgate
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Joined: 02 Jan 2007
Posts: 79
Location: Cambridge
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 Posted: Tue May 08, 2007 12:50 pm Post subject: David R. Griffin - AA77 onboard phones correction |
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Barbara Olson’s Alleged Call from AA77
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A Correction About Onboard Phones
By David Ray Griffin
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17659.htm
05/07/07 "ICH" -- - In my recently released book, Debunking 9/11 Debunking,[1] I claimed that Boeing 757s made for American Airlines did not have seat-back phones or any other onboard telephones.
This claim, if true, would be very important, because one could use it, as I did, to argue that the alleged telephone call from Barbara Olson to her husband, US Solicitor General Ted Olson, could not have occurred. It might be thought, to be sure, that the call could have been made from her cell phone. Ted Olson did, in fact, make this claim at times. As I reported, however, the evidence indicates that cell phone calls from high-flying airliners would not have been possible in 2001, given the cell phone technology of the time. In any case, Ted Olson, after going back and forth between these two claims, finally settled on the claim that the calls were made on a seat-back phone. If Flight 77, being an AA Boeing 757, had no onboard phones, we would have to conclude that Olson’s claim could not be true. I myself drew that conclusion (while saying that this would leave open the question of whether Olson invented the story or was himself a victim, like the relatives of other passengers, of faked phone calls).
My Error
I based my conclusion on conversations that Ian Henshall and Rowland Morgan had with American Airlines in 2004 while they were co-authoring book. In this book, 9/11 Revealed, they said: “A call by us to American Airlines’ London Office produced a definitive statement from Laeti Hyver that [AA’s] 757s do not have Airfones. This was confirmed by an email from AA in the US.”[2]
Although this email correspondence was not printed in their book, or in Morgan’s later Flight 93 Revealed, in which it is also reported,[3] they allowed me to print it in Debunking 9/11 Debunking. In reply to their letter asking whether “757s [are] fitted with phones that passengers can use,” an AA spokesman wrote: “American Airlines 757s do not have onboard phones for passenger use.” To check on the possibility that Barbara Olson might have borrowed a phone intended for crew use, they asked, “[A]re there any onboard phones at all on AA 757s, i.e., that could be used either by passengers or cabin crew?” The response was: “AA 757s do not have any onboard phones, either for passenger or crew use. Crew have other means of communication available.”[4]
The conclusion that Barbara Olson could not have made a call using an onboard phone seemed further confirmed by a page on the AA website that says, “Worldwide satellite communications are available on American Airlines' Boeing 777 and Boeing 767,” with no mention of AA’s Boeing 757.
My mistake, like that of Henshall and Rowland before me, was to assume that the AA spokesperson and this website were talking about AA 757s as they had always been, not simply about 757s at the time of the query, in 2004.
But the latter was evidently the meaning. Elias Davidsson, an Icelandic member of the 9/11 truth movement, sent me a news report from February 6, 2002, which said: “American Airlines will discontinue its AT&T in-flight phone service by March 31, a spokesman for the airline said Wednesday.”[5] Davidsson also pointed to a 1998 photograph of the inside of an AA 757 showing that it did have seat-back phones.[6]
Reasons for Still Doubting the Olson Calls
Does this evidence, that Flight 77 did have seat-back phones, mean that we must infer that Barbara Olson’s alleged call to Ted Olson really occurred? Of course not. All the reasons that had previously been given for doubting it still hold.
One problem with the story about this call is that Barbara Olson was the only person on the plane who allegedly used a seat-back phone to call someone. There were, in fact, only two people altogether from this flight who allegedly made any calls, the other one being flight attendant Renee May, who supposedly used a cell phone to call her parents. Moreover, Barbara Olson reported, according to her husband, that all the passengers and crew members had been herded to the back of the plane. Yet we are supposed to believe that none of the other people, seeing Barbara Olson make two phone calls, grabbed one of the other seat-back phones to make their own calls. We are also supposed to believe that no one else, while seeing Renee May use her cell phone, decided to use their own cell phones to call someone. This scenario is extremely implausible.
Another problem with Ted Olson’s story is that he has repeatedly changed his claim about the means his wife used to make the calls. Three days after 9/11, Olson suggested on one TV show that the call was made on a seat-back phone. Then, on another show that same day, he suggested that his wife had used her cell phone. Six months later, he returned to his first story, saying: “She wasn't using her cellphone, she was using the phone in the passengers' seats. . . . [S]he was calling collect.”[7] One would think that the details of this call---his final conversation with his wife before she died---would have been burned so indelibly into his memory that he would not have said different things at different times.
There is, however, an even more serious problem, which was stated in an essay by Rowland Morgan in 2004: “Ted Olson could give his adherents closure, and shut his critics up,” Morgan pointed out, “by simply producing the Department of Justice’s telephone accounts, showing a couple of hefty reverse-charges entries charged from Flight 77’s Airfone number at around about 9:20 AM on 11th September, 2001.”[8]
This passage, incidentally, evidently played a role in another error I made, this one entirely my own doing. My text contains this statement: “He [Ted Olson] later produced Department of Justice telephone accounts purportedly showing that there were two reverse-charge calls from Flight 77’s Airfone number about 9:20 a.m. on September 11, 2001.”[9] When I came across this statement as I was re-reading my account, I was puzzled by the fact that it had no reference. Why had I not given the source for such an important claim? In looking for this source, I discovered the just-quoted statement from Morgan’s essay. I am completely baffled about how this error occurred. Perhaps during my note-taking process, I somehow transformed Morgan’s hypothetical scenario into an actual fact. (This transformation could not, of course, be explained as either deliberate distortion or wishful reading on my part, because the DOJ records, if they had actually been produced, would have significantly strengthened the case for the truth of Ted Olson’s claim about the calls.) But whatever the explanation, this error, like the more important one discussed earlier, will be corrected in the second printing of Debunking 9/11 Debunking.........................
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