"...the FBI put out a report to the Moussouai trial in 2006 in which they contradicted virtually every thing that the public has believed, for example, that Barbara Olson made a call, they say no she didn't..." - David Ray Griffin on the Charles Goyette show, February 20, 2008.

In case anybody was wondering why we don't have Bill Douglas' OpEdNews piece front and center at 911blogger, I just want to point out that what Griffin said wasn't exactly breaking news, the essence of his claim was posted at Pilots for 9/11 Truth last June. Here is the pertinent information from the article by Rob Balsamo and David Ray Griffin;

In the course of doing research for this article, we learned, to our amazement, that even if, contrary to our evidence, Flight 77 did have functioning onboard phones, the US government has now said, implicitly, that Ted Olson’s claim about receiving two calls from his wife that morning is untrue.

As we mentioned earlier, the FBI report on phone calls from AA planes on 9/11 does not cite records from the DOJ showing that any calls from AA 77 were received that morning. Instead, the FBI report refers merely to four “connected calls to unknown numbers.” The 9/11 Commission, putting the best possible spin on this report, commented: “The records available for the phone calls from American 77 do not allow for a determination of which of [these four calls] represent the two between Barbara and Ted Olson, although the FBI and DOJ believe that all four represent communications between Barbara Olson and her husband’s office.” That is, it must be said, a very strange conclusion: If Ted Olson reported receiving only two calls, why would the Commission conclude that the DOJ had received four connected calls from his wife?

That conclusion is, in any case, starkly contradicted by evidence about phone calls from Flight 77 presented by the US government at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in 2006. Far from attributing all four of the “connected calls to unknown numbers” to Barbara Olson, as the 9/11 Commission suggested, the government’s evidence here attributes none of them to her, saying instead that each of them was from an “unknown caller.” The only call attributed to Barbara Olson, moreover, is an “unconnected call” to the Department of Justice, which was said to have been attempted at “9:18:58” and to have lasted “0 seconds.” According to the US government in 2006, in other words, Barbara Olson attempted a call to the DOJ, but it did not go through. The government itself has presented evidence in a court of law, therefore, that implies that unless its former solicitor general was the victim of two faked phone calls, he was lying.

It may seem beyond belief that the US government would have failed to support Ted Olson’s claim. We ourselves, as we indicated, were amazed at this development. However, it would not be the first time that the FBI---surely the agency that prepared this report about phone calls from the flights---had failed to support the official story about 9/11. We refer to the fact that when Rex Tomb, the FBI’s chief of investigative publicity, was asked why the bureau’s website on “Usama bin Laden” does not list 9/11 as one of the terrorist acts for which he is wanted, he replied: “[T]he FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.”

In any case, an interesting question about the government’s claim concerning the four “connected calls” from AA 77 is whether they were supposedly made from cell phones or passenger-seat phones. The government’s Moussaoui-trial evidence does not explicitly say. We can, however, make an inference based on its evidence for phone calls made from United Flight 93.

Although it had been generally believed that there had been approximately ten cell phone calls from UA 93---including the four widely publicized calls reported by Deena Burnett from her husband, Tom Burnett---the government’s document on this flight identifies only two calls as cell phone calls: those made at 9:58 by passenger Edward Felt and flight attendant CeeCee Lyles. One might conclude from this information, to be sure, that the government simply remained neutral on some of the other calls that had been thought to be cell phone calls, such as the Burnett calls, leaving open whether they were from cell or onboard phones. But that is not the case. A reporter at the Moussaoui trial wrote:

In the back of the plane, 13 of the terrified passengers and crew members made 35 air phone calls and two cell phone calls to family members and airline dispatchers, a member of an FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force testified Tuesday.

The government explicitly said, therefore, that only two of the calls from UA 93---which were identified in the government’s report on this flight as being from Felt and Lyles---were cell phone calls.

We can infer, therefore, that because these calls from Felt and Lyles are the only two calls from all the flights that are identified as cell phone calls, all the calls from the other flights are now said by the government to have been made from onboard phones.

The distinctive thing about the calls from Felt and Lyles is that they reportedly occurred at 9:58, after United 93 had descended to about 5,000 feet. By limiting the cell phone calls from all four flights to these two from UA 93, the government is no longer, even implicitly, supporting the view that high-altitude cell phone calls from airliners are possible. The government has thereby implicitly overcome, by conceding the point, one of the 9/11 movement’s main arguments against the government’s conspiracy theory.

This is a rather amazing development. Much of the official story about 9/11 has been based on the assumption that high-altitude cell phone calls were made. The film United 93, for example, portrayed five cell phone conversations. The 9/11 Commission Report, discussing UA 93, said: “Shortly [after 9:32], the passengers and flight crew began a series of calls from GTE airphones and cellular phones.”

Four cell phone calls from UA 93 were, as mentioned earlier, supposed to have been made by Tom Burnett. His wife, Deena Burnett, repeatedly said Tom used his cell phone. She knew this, she said, because the Caller ID identified his cell phone as the source. Her testimony has been repeated countless times in the media. For example, a special segment about her on CBS’s Early Show said: “Tom Burnett made four cell phone calls from Flight 93 to Deena Burnett at home, telling her he and some other passengers were going to ‘do something.’” In a letter published in the National Review, Tom’s father spoke of “Tom's four cell-phone calls from Flight 93 to his wife, Deena.”

The government’s evidence presented in 2006 at the Moussaoui trial, however, implies that she was mistaken, even though, given her statement that she saw her husband’s Caller ID number, the government’s new position means that she was either lying or, as we believe, the victim of a faked call using a device that, besides morphing her husband’s voice, faked his Caller ID number.

However, although the government has undercut much of the basis for the official and popular accounts of 9/11 by denying the occurrence of any high-altitude cell phone calls, it has, by paying this price, protected itself from the 9/11 truth movement’s charge that the official story is falsified by the fact that such calls are impossible.

We come now, in any case, to the implication of the government’s Moussaoui-trial evidence about phone calls for the government’s position on whether AA 77 had onboard phones. According to this evidence, there were five connected calls from AA 77: one from Renee May and four from “unknown callers.” Given what we have learned from the government’s evidence about calls from UA 93---that all calls not identified as cell phone calls are said to have been made from onboard phones---we can conclude that, by virtue of not identifying any of the five “connected calls” from this flight as cell phone calls, the government is implying that this plane did have onboard phones. It does not, therefore, support our view on this issue.

Nevertheless, whether one accepts our evidence, which indicates that there were not any onboard phones on AA 77 from which calls could have been made, or trusts the government’s evidence presented at the Moussaoui trial, the conclusion is the same: The two conversations reported by Ted Olson did not happen.

Griffin does not claim that Olson is lying. He leaves open the possibility that Olson, like other people who believed they received calls from loved ones on the planes, was duped. He wrote an entire chapter about the Olson anomaly in his new book, 9/11 Contradictions. Hopefully, this will clarify his position.