Titanium Cat

Which just goes to show how much we differ. I am not even remotely shocked that the three masters of structural engineering, Duvidoo, eagleclaw, and VKMHVM2 somehow convinced themselves that a building like the Pentagon should be just as or even close to as vulnerable to total collapse as the WTC towers. Not even a little bit shocked.

Ptech

You're not shocked at anything at all TC. You're not shocked that buildings presumably collapsing from gravity have magnificent explosive plumes with pyroclastic flows.

You're not shocked that a Boeing with passengers and baggage was atomized and rendered invisible by a collision with the ground.

You're not shocked by the coincidence that the government just HAPPENED TO BE conducting training exercises with scenarios identical to the events of the day.

Nor do you tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories, just as your master has told you to.

You are utterly unquestioning and pliable. Completelly gullible, or working for the government.

Duvidoo

And never will be. Amen. It was all so totally natural and believable ... and like Bushco you had absolutely no idea that anyone might hijack planes and use them as missiles. But it all went off quite tiggety boo and there's no need to question anything or make sure that the families of the victims receive closure. Damn the det cords and let's move ever onwards towards Iran. A wee Pearl Harbor is all that's needed....

Titanium Cat

You have no clue about how much energy was being released by those collapses. The majority of space inside of those buildings was air and as it was rapidly compressed by the falling concrete and steel it blasted out a lot of material with it. More basic physics that you don’t understand and are too lazy to even attempt to understand.

Except of course for the pieces of the plane that were found, the cockpit voice recorder, the flight data recorder, personal effects, and yes human remains. There was debris found all over the surrounding area. I suppose you think there would be a mostly intact airplane left after it hit the ground at around 600 mph making a primary creator 20 feet wide and 15 feet deep.

LOL, they weren’t exactly identical. The plane crash exercise had a small corporate jet crashing into one of the headquarters buildings after a mechanical failure, a far cry from a commercial airliner being used deliberately as a weapon. The war games were attacks from Russia and monitoring Russian military exercises, not exactly unusual in nature.

I don’t tolerate ridiculous conspiracy theories that are severely contradicted by the facts.

You are utterly stupid and lazy and are incapable of actually making a logical argument.

A twoofer telling someone else that they are gullible, now that’s a laugh.

Titanium Cat

Yeah like you're helping them bring closure, that's a laugh.

Duvidoo

Much more chance of me than you.
You are stuck in the gumbo.

Titanium Cat

Yeah I'm sure that family members want to be told that the calls they got from loved ones before they died were faked. That's closure for you.

eagleclaw

TC , you really believe the bullshit you spew?

Especially when cell phones were not a reliable means of making phone calls from 40,000 feet up in the air.

And what ever became of the Barbara-Ted Olson phone call?

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.

__________________
All the time, always

Titanium Cat

Where is that cut & paste job from? The liars from Loose Change or from David Ray Griffin?

Renee May called and talked to her mother from Flight 77. Is her mother in on the conspiracy that killed her daughter?

Titanium Cat

And what about this statement of yours:

"Especially when cell phones were not a reliable means of making phone calls from 40,000 feet up in the air."

Which calls were made from a cellphone 40,000 feet up in the air?