WHAT ABOUT THE CELL PHONE CALLS?

We all know that the crazed Muslim hijackers used small boxcutters to overpower both flight crews and passengers on four commercial airliners on the morning of 9/11. But do we? This scenario has caused problems right from the start as some of the flight crews of the hijacked airliners were former military combat pilots, men unlikely to have meekly turned over the control of their craft to hijackers armed only with boxcutters or small pen knives without a fight. For example, Captain Charles “Chic” Burlingame, pilot of Flight 77, was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy who flew F-4 Phantoms from the carrier USS Saratoga from 1976 to 1979. His brother Mark 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.” LeRoy Homer Jr., the flight officer of Flight 93, was a graduate of the Air Force Academy and a veteran of the Gulf War.

And there is the problem, as we have seen, that flight data showed that at least on Flight 77, the cockpit door was never opened during flight.

But a major problem with the official story concerns the cell phone calls. As the idea that cell phones could not have been successfully used on September 11 gained credence, the official story that passengers had used cell phones changed. It was argued that passengers such as Edward Felt, actually had used the airline $10-a-minute back-of-seat Airfones. This explanation crumbled after it was learned that Felt, along with newscaster Barbara Olson, reportedly called from inside locked lavatories, which carry no Airfones.

Additionally, according to American Airlines, their Boeing 757s carried no such phones. In response to a request verifying that American Flight 77 did not have radio telephones, Chad Kinder with American Airlines customer relations wrote, “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.”

To explain the reported cell phone calls from passengers on the flights, Joe Vialls stated his belief that many of the calls were concocted after the fact. “There are no records of any such calls,” he said. “We had the media's invisible ‘contact’ at an airline who ‘said’ a hostess called to report a hijacking and we had a priest who ‘said’ he received a call from a man asking him in turn to call his wife and tell her he loved her.”

Lending support to Vialls’ allegations was a news release in July 2004, detailing a joint effort between the San Diego-based electronics firm Qualcomm and American Airlines to develop a practical method for allowing airline passengers to make a cell phone call at altitude in mid-flight. Cell phones long have been banned from use in flight as a precaution against interference with flight and navigation systems.

New technology was announced in 2004 using a satellite system and a “Picocell,” which acted as a cellular tower, to allow airline passengers to make an in-flight cell phone call. “Before this new ‘Picocell,’ it was nigh on impossible to make a call from a passenger aircraft in flight. Connections were impossible at altitudes over 8,000 feet or speeds in excess of 230 mph,” noted Alan Cabal of the New York Press. All of the jets that suffered hijacking were initially above altitudes in excess of 30,000 feet and all were eventually traveling at speeds far in excess of 415 mph, the structural integrity redline past which pilots tend to lose control. According to an article in the July 16, 2004, edition of USA Today, reception during the initial test of the Picocell was “generally good, although some calls were dropped.”

Additional arguments against the cell-phone story were the facts that airplane flights were generally too high for successful cell phone communication coupled with the fact that the chances of a cell phone tower being able to capture an airliner call at speeds in excess of 400 mph were almost nonexistent.

The case of Barbara Olson, a broadcaster for Fox News and CNN, only added more mystery to the issue. The wife of a Bush administration official, Solicitor General Theodore “Ted” Olson, she had repeatedly aligned herself with conservative causes and was a frequent critic of the Clinton administration. Olson reportedly called her husband at least twice on the morning of 9/11, according to her husband and the 9/11 Commission. At the time, Ted Olson advised CNN that his wife told him 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 box cutters.

It was only from the Olson call that the public learned of box cutters. Calls on other flights mentioned knives too but also guns and bombs. No explanation has been offered on if or how hijackers managed to slip guns and bombs on-board the aircraft.

But the main problem with the Olson calls is that they never happened, at least according to the FBI. During the 2006 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, officials of the bureau presented FBI Prosecution Trial Exhibit Number P200054, a summary of their Flight 77 investigation which included phone calls. This document noted that only one phone call was attempted by Barbara Olson at 9:18:58 a.m. and that it was “unconnected.”

In other words, Olson reached nobody. There was never a completed call. Ted Olson's report of his wife's call is critical to the official 9/11 theory. This was the only evidence that American Airlines Flight 77, was in the air after it had dropped from FAA radar screens about 9 a.m. Additionally, as his wife had been a well-known commentator on CNN, her reported death at the hands of Arab Muslims was instrumental in gaining support for the Bush administration's “War on Terrorism.” Barbara Olson's words also were the only source for the widely accepted idea that the hijackers overcame resistance with mere box cutters.

Ted Olson's ever-changing story of the phone call(s) seems to indicate deception—that he was lying. And Olson previously had made a statement which could call into question his own words. While arguing a case before the Supreme Court, Olson declared, “It is easy to imagine an infinite number of situations…where government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give false information out. It's an unfortunate reality that the issuance of incomplete information and even misinformation by government may sometimes be perceived as necessary to protect vital interests.”

But there is an intriguing possibility which might explain the communication with his wife. A 1999 Washington Post article revealed the development of voice “morphing” technology at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. During a demonstration of this new technology, the former Commander-In-Chief, US Special Operations Command, Gen. Carl W. Steiner, was chagrined to hear his own voice say, “Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government.” By taking a few minutes of digitally recorded samples of Steiner's voice, scientists had cloned his speech patterns and developed an accurate facsimile of his speech. Daniel T. Kuehl, chairman of the Information Operations department of the National Defense University in Washington, remarked, “Once you can take any kind of information and reduce it into ones and zeros, you can do some pretty interesting things,” The Los Alamos team also cloned then-Secretary of State Colin Powell's voice using clips from public speeches. Powell's voice was heard to clearly state, “I am being treated well by my captors.”

Persons in the Pentagon, following the 1991 Gulf War, even conceived of a plan to distribute a computer-faked videotape of Saddam Hussein crying or displaying other such manly weaknesses, as a psychological warfare weapon for use in the Middle East. William M. Arkin, commenting in the Post, stated, “Whereas early voice morphing required cutting and pasting speech to put letters or words together to make a composite, [the] software developed at Los Alamos can far more accurately replicate the way one actually speaks. Eliminated are the robotic intonations. Video and photo manipulation has already raised profound questions of authenticity for the journalistic world. With audio joining the mix, it is not only journalists but also privacy advocates and the conspiracy minded who will no doubt ponder the worrisome mischief that lurks in the not too distant future.”

Could voice-morphing technology have been used on 9/11?

Such technology could explain the odd phone call—one of the few that actually reached a relative as most were relayed by third persons—to Alice Hoglan, the mother of Flight 93 victim Mark Bingham.

On the morning of 9/11, Bigham's aunt, Cathy Hoglan, took a call from Bingham and was told his plane had been taken over by hijackers. He then said, “I love you all very much in case I don't see you again.” His mother then took the phone and told CNN soon after 9/11 she answered, “Mark?” and her son responded with, “‘Hi, Mom, this is Mark Bingham. I’m in the air…I’m calling you on the Airfone of the airplane….I want to let you know that I love you very much. I’m calling you from the plane. We've been taken over. There are three men who say they have a bomb.”

His mother then asked, “Who are they, Mark?” Hoglan said the caller then repeated that he loved her and seemed to become distracted, said something to the effect that “It's true,” and then the call was disconnected. The question has been raised by researchers as to why Bingham would identify himself by his full name when he was talking to his own mother, who had taken the phone from his aunt, knew who was supposedly on the phone and had already addressed him by his name?

On July 15, 2005, 150 relatives of passengers and crew aboard the four airliners hijacked on September 11, 2001, were invited by the US Department of Justice to hear tapes of calls from the doomed 9/11 planes. They told the media they were moved by the the accounts of heroic efforts of the passengers. However, they were not allowed to divulge any details of what they heard as government officials told them the phone calls might be used as evidence in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. They were required to sign non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from discussing the contents of the tapes or the briefings and they were not allowed to make recordings or take notes. Furthermore, calls from just two people—American Flight 11 attendants Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney—were played during the three-hour briefing. All other calls were summarized and related to the family members by Justice Department prosecutors, who then took questions.

“The one thing that the [Justice Department] made irrefutably clear to us was that to the extent we disclose any information, we are only aiding the terrorists,” said Hamilton Peterson, whose father and stepmother were on United Flight 93.

But one person did speak out and that was the mother of Mark Bingham. By 2005, her account has changed slightly. She emotionally recalled the conversation, saying she was told, “‘Mom, this is Mark Bingham. I just want to tell you that I love you. I am on a flight from Newark to San Francisco. There are three guys on board who have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb. You believe me don't you, Mom? I’m calling you from the air phone.’ And then we were disconnected…That's not information I got today. That's information I got at 6:44 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time [on September 11, 2001] from the lips of Mark Bingham.” But ws it? Without an objective investigation, the truth may never be known.

Even later, Bingham's mother tried to explain the use of his full name, saying, “Once in a while he would say that. He would call up, and he was, he was a young businessman, and used to, used to introduce himself on phone as Mark Bingham, and he was trying to be, uh, strong, and level-headed, and, and strictly business. ‘Mom, this is Mark Bingham.’”

But there were other oddities. For example, Flight 93 passenger Todd Beamer's famous and heroic last words, “Are you guys ready? Let's roll,” were only heard by GTE Customer Service Center supervisor Lisa Jefferson in Oakbrook, IL, who then called Beamer's wife and repeated the message.

But even when the Moussaoui trial finally got underway in 2006, no one got to actually hear the reported tape recordings of the Flight 93 phone calls. According to the Los Angeles Times, Detective Sgt. Ray Guidetti of the New Jersey State Police, who had been assigned to a special FBI anti-terrorism task force in Newark, “methodically led the jury through what law enforcement has pieced together of the last minutes of the flight.”

Theologian and author David Ray Griffin questioned the phone calls from Tom Burnett, another Flight 93 passenger. “[E]xcept for uttering [his wife] Deena's name a few times, ‘Tom’ never mentioned a name. For example, when he, in his final call, asked about the children, he simply called them ‘the kids.’ That was not terribly surprising, but then, when Deena told him that the kids were asking to talk to him, he said, ‘Tell them I’ll talk to them later.’ This was 20 minutes after he had purposefully realized that the hijackers were on a suicide mission…Given the reported fact that the hijackers had already killed one person, the real Tom Burnett would have known that there was a good chance that he would die in the next few minutes, one way or another. Is it believable that, rather than taking this perhaps last opportunity to speak to his children, he would instruct his wife to tell them that he would ‘talk to them later’?”

The only message from Flight 93 passenger Lauren Grandcolas was a recording left on an answering machine. She apparently made the call from an Airfone.

Other than Barbara Olson, the most important of the 9/11 phone calls reportedly came from two flight attendants on American Flight 11—Madeline “Amy” Sweeney and Betty Ong—the ones who provided authorities, and hence the American public, with the information that there were hijackers aboard of “Middle Eastern descent” who had killed one passenger. They also are the ones who gave seat numbers out leading to the identification of three of the proclaimed perpetrators.

Yet, all the public information on these critical calls did not come from actual recordings but from reports from the FBI agents, who also warned all concerned not to discuss the calls with the media. FBI reports on the calls became suspect after they were changed from the use of cell phones to back-of-the seat Airfones following authoritative sources claiming that cell phone calls from high-flying jets—especially Sweeney's call which lasted 12 minutes according to American Flight Service manager Michael Woodward.

But again, questions arose over the use of the Airfones. Initially, it was said that most of the 9/11 calls were made from cell phones. But since it was only in 2004 that cell phone technology had advanced to the point where a call from an airliner at altitude was feasible, the official story changed. During the Moussaoui trial, it was stated that the calls from Flight 93 were made from the Airfones. Why then did Deena Burnett's caller ID show her husband's cell phone number? Why did FBI Agent James Lechner's report on Sweeney's phone call state she used a cell phone when The 9/11 Commission Report on page 453 stated she used an Airfone? And why was it only 2004 (the year that cell phone calls from jetliners became possible) that it was announced that a tape recording of Sweeney's call existed? Even Sweeney's husband, Mike Sweeney, was stunned when first informed of the tape by David Novak, an assistant US attorney involved in prosecuting the Moussaoui case, who admitted to Sweeney that the existence of the tape was news to him and offered him a private hearing. “I was shocked that I’m finding out, almost three years later, there was a tape with information given by my wife that was very crucial to the happenings of 9/11. Suddenly it miraculously appears and falls into the hands of FBI? Why and how and for what reason was it suppressed? Why did it surface now? Is there information on that tape that is of concern to other law-enforcement agencies?” asked Sweeney.

Even then, the tape played was not the voice of Amy Sweeney, but of American Airlines flight service manager and friend Michael Woodward. As there was no tape recorder in Woodward's office, he repeated Sweeney's account to a colleague, Nancy Wyatt, the supervisor of pursers at Logan. On yet another phone, Wyatt was simultaneously passing along Sweeney's words to the airline's Fort Worth headquarters. It was the relayed account that was played for the families.

Others did not even get a belated tape. When Peg Ogonowski, the wife of the American Flight 11 pilot, asked American Airlines to allow her listen to that tape, she never received a reply.

Many questions remain unanswered regarding the phone calls from the doomed 9/11 flights, although it was such calls which formed the basis for the entire “Muslim hijackers with boxcutters” theory of the attacks.