Of all the curious events of 9/11, none has aroused more suspicion among 9/11 truthseekers than Barbara Olson's alleged phone call from FL77 to her husband, Ted Olson, the US Solicitor General who was at his Justice Department office when the call was made. 

With the release of detailed records of all the phone calls from the flights attendant to the Zacarias Moussouia trial, however, we now know who was lying and who was telling the truth.  Barbara Olson is off the hook. She did not lie; nor did she tell the truth. It is not possible to do either in a phone conversation that lasts zero seconds, which is the verified length of the cell phone call she made to Ted.  Yes the call was made, but was disconnected before any conversation could take place.  [Note that the call was placed at 9:18, twenty-two minutes after the plane's transponder was turned off.  The altitude and speed of the plane at this time are unknown, but it may have been flying low and slow, making cell phone calls difficult but not impossible.]

http://www.911research.wtc7.net/planes/evidence/docs/calls/Flight77/BarbaraOlson.jpg 

Ted Olson came forward a few days after 9/11 and reported conflicting accounts of the phone call made by his wife:

A few days later, he says "She told me that she had been herded to the back of the plane. She mentioned that they had used knives and box cutters to hijack the plane. She mentioned that the pilot had announced that the plane had been hijacked.”..... He doesn’t know if she was near the pilots, but at one point she asks, “What shall I tell the pilot? What can I tell the pilot to do?”....By some accounts, his message that planes have hit the WTC comes later, in a second phone call.  In one account, Barbara Olson calls from inside a bathroom.  In another account, she is near a pilot, and in yet another she is near two pilots.  Ted Olson’s account of how Barbara Olson made her calls is also conflicting. Three days after 9/11, he says, “I found out later that she was having, for some reason, to call collect and was having trouble getting through. You know how it is to get through to a government institution when you’re calling collect.” He says he doesn’t know what kind of phone she used, but he has “assumed that it must have been on the airplane phone, and that she somehow didn’t have access to her credit cards. Otherwise, she would have used her cell phone and called me.” Why Barbara Olson would have needed access to her credit cards to call him on her cell phone is not explained. However, in another interview on the same day, he says that she used a cell phone and that she may have been cut off “because the signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don’t work that well.”  Six months later, he claims she called collect “using the phone in the passengers’ seats.”  However, it is not possible to call on seatback phones, collect or otherwise, without a credit card, which would render making a collect call moot. Many other details are conflicting, and Olson faults his memory and says that he “tends to mix the two [calls] up because of the emotion of the events.”      -from The Terror Timeline, by Paul Thompson

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/searchResults.jsp?searchtext=box+cutters&events=on&entities=on&articles=on&topics=on&timelines=on&projects=on&titles=on&descriptions=on&dosearch=on&search=Go 

This alleged phone call is the only report in which box cutters are mentioned as weapons being used by the hijackers.  It is also unique in that it is the only report placing the pilots of the planes in the cabin with the passengers.  This report has aroused much suspicion because it seems unlikely that pilot Chic Burlingame, an Air Force veteran, would have given up the cockpit to hijackers wielding only knives.

Since we now know conclusively that Ted Olson is indeed a big fat liar, we have to wonder why he lied and for what-- or for whose-- purpose. We should first consider that Ted lied simply because he couldn't resist. He wanted to project himself into such a major news story out of simple human weakness.  He wanted the attention.  We have all heard stories of war veterans tearfully telling stories of their exploits in great battles-- only to later learn that the soldier in question never left stateside, or never was in the military at all. It is a human need to draw attention to ourselves, and some can't resist the urge to lie to do so.  Is this the trap Ted Olson fell into?

The answer to this question has to be no.  Olson's fabricated account has worked too well as disinformation to have been solely the work of one troubled man.  First, his lie was what introduced the idea of box cutters into the official account.  The official story wanted us to believe in a primitive attack, carried out by fanatics with little or no connections at the airports or in the system at large.  The use of box cutters seemed to reinforce that the hijackers fit that description, especially since it was believed at the time that box cutters were legal to bring on to airplanes.  Later, it was revealed that while the government's rules never did ban box cutters, the airlines' own rules did.  The government ultimately dropped its contention that box cutters were used at all, changing the weapon to short knives.  But by then the disinformation had done its job.  Americans were convinced of a primitive attack by conniving Arabs manipulating airport safety regulations.

On another level, Ted's big lie was an even more insidious work of disinformation.  His obviously bogus account of the non-phone call from his wife has led 9/11 truthseekers to distrust all the accounts of phone calls from the planes, and to even conclude that these phone calls are impossible.  That is truly tragic.  As I have demonstrated in this essay,

http://www.911blogger.com/node/4190

the phone calls are not only real, but provide us with the best evidence we have of what actually happened on the planes-- and they do not, repeat DO NOT, support the government's official story.

And so we must wonder, who "assisted" Ted Olson in his fabrication of a phone call from Barbara?  It is quite suspicious that Ted received the call while sitting in the Justice Department building.  We know that the coverup was directed from the office of Assistant Attorney General Michael Chertoff.  Chertoff, a dual Israeli-American citizen, must be suspected of being one of the arch-conspirators of 9/11.  Did he, or some of his operatives, somehow manipulate Olson, perhaps by whispering in his ear that putting out this "information" would be the right thing to do for the country?

There is only one person who knows the answer to that question, and that is Ted Olson himself.  If we had a real media, they would be hounding Olson now, demanding he explain the discrepency between his story and the actual phone call records.  But we do not have a real media, we have a controlled media.  If we want to understand why Ted told his Big Fat Lie, we'll have to figure it out for ourselves.