"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. Shortly afterwards Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon" ... "Ted Olson told CNN that his wife said 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. She felt nobody was in charge and asked her husband to tell the pilot what to do."
At no point in the above report does CNN quote Ted Olson directly. If the report was authentic and 100% attributable, it would have been phrased quite differently. Instead of "Ted Olson told CNN that his wife said all passengers and flight personnel...", the passage would read approximately:- Mr Olson told CNN, "My wife said all passengers and flight personnel..." Whoever wrote this story was certainly not in direct contact with US Solicitor General Ted Olson.
Think about it, people! If you knew or suspected your spouse's aircraft had just fireballed inside the Pentagon building, how would you spend the rest of the day? Initially you would certainly be in deep shock and unwilling to believe the reports. Then you would start to gather your wits together, a slow process in itself. After that and depending on individual personality, you might drive over to the Pentagon on the off chance your spouse survived the horrific crash, or you might go home and wait for emergency services to bring you the inevitable bad news. As a matter of record, Ted Olson did not return to work until six days later.
About the last thing on your mind [especially if you happened to be the US Solicitor General], would be to pick up a telephone and call the CNN Atlanta news desk in order to give them a "scoop". As a seasoned politician you would already know that all matters involving national security must first be vetted by the National Security Council. Under the extraordinary circumstances and security overkill existing on September 11, this vetting process would have taken a minimum of two days, and more likely three.
The timing of the CNN news release about Barbara Olson, is therefore as impossible as the New Zealand press release back in 1963 about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. As reported independently by Colonel Fletcher Prouty USAF (Retired), whoever set Kennedy up, accidentally launched a full international newswire biography on obscure "killer" Lee Harvey Oswald, without first taking the trouble to check his world clock.
It was still "yesterday" in New Zealand on the other side of the International Date Line when the biography was wired from New York, enabling the Christchurch Star newspaper was able to print a story about Oswald as the prime suspect in its morning edition, several hours before he was first accused of the crime by Dallas police.
If the CNN story about Ted Olson had been correct, and he really had called them about Barbara on September 11, then he would most surely have followed the telephone call up a few days later with a tasteful "one-on-one" television interview, telling the hushed and respectful interviewer about how badly he missed his wife, and about the sheer horror of it all.
There is no record of any such interview in the CNN or other archives. Indeed, if you key "Barbara Olson" into the CNN search engine, it returns only two related articles. The first is the creative invention on September 12 at 2.06 am EDT [0606 GMT], and the second is on December 12, about President Bush, who led a White House memorial that began at 8:46 a.m. EST, the moment the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Center three months before. CNN includes this comment about Ted Olson:
"In a poignant remembrance at the Justice Department, U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson referred to "the sufferings we have all experienced." He made no direct reference to the death of his wife, Barbara Olson, who was a passenger aboard the American Airlines flight that crashed into the Pentagon..."
Regarding the same event, Fox News reports that, extraordinarily, Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson then said Barbara Olson's call, made "in the midst of terrible danger and turmoil swirling around her," was a "clarion call that awakened our nation's leaders to the true nature of the events of Sept. 11."
So Ted Olson avoided making any direct personal reference to the death of his wife. Clearly this was not good enough for someone somewhere. By the sixth month anniversary of the attack, Ted Olson was allegedly interviewed by London Telegraph reporter Toby Harnden, with his exclusive story "She Asked Me How To Stop The Plane" appearing in that London newspaper on March 5, thereafter renamed and syndicated around dozens of western countries as "Revenge Of The Spitfire", finally appearing in the West Australian newspaper on Saturday March 23, 2002.
I have diligently tried to find a copy of this story in an American newspaper but have so far failed. The reasons for this rather perverse "external" publication of Ted Olson's story are not yet clear, but it seems fair to observe that if he is ever challenged by a Senate Select Committee about the veracity of his claims, the story could not be used against him because it was published outside American sovereign territory.
Regardless of the real reason or reasons for its publication, the story seems to have matured a lot since the first decoy news release by CNN early on September 12, 2001. Here we have considerably more detail, some of which is frankly impossible. In the alleged words of US Solicitor General Theodore Olson:
"She [Barbara] had trouble getting through, because she wasn't using her cell phone - she was using the phone in the passengers' seats," said Mr Olson. "I guess she didn't have her purse, because she was calling collect, and she was trying to get through to the Department of Justice, which is never very easy." ... "She wanted to know `What can I tell the pilot? What can I do? How can I stop this?' "
"What Can I tell the pilot?" Yes indeed! The forged Barbara Olson telephone call claims that the flight deck crew were with her at the back of the aircraft, presumably politely ushered down there by the box cutter-wielding Muslim maniacs, who for some bizarre reason decided not to cut their throats on the flight deck. Have you ever heard anything quite so ridiculous?
But it is at this juncture that we finally have the terminal error. Though the American Airlines Boeing 757 is fitted with individual telephones at each seat position, they are not of the variety where you can simply pick up the handset and ask for an operator. On many aircraft you can talk from one seat to another in the aircraft free of charge, but if you wish to access the outside world you must first swipe your credit card through the telephone. By Ted Olson's own admission, Barbara did not have a credit card with her.
It gets worse. On American Airlines there is a telephone "setup" charge of US$2.50 which can only be paid by credit card, then a US$2.50 (sometimes US$5.00) charge per minute of speech thereafter. The setup charge is the crucial element. Without paying it in advance by swiping your credit card you cannot access the external telephone network. Under these circumstances the passengers' seat phone on a Boeing 757 is a much use as a plastic toy.
Perhaps Ted Olson made a mistake and Barbara managed to borrow a credit card from a fellow passenger? Not a chance. If Barbara had done so, once swiped through the phone, the credit card would have enabled her to call whoever she wanted to for as long as she liked, negating any requirement to call collect.
Sadly perhaps, the Olson telephone call claim is proved untrue. Any American official wishing to challenge this has only to subpoena the telephone company and Justice Department records. There will be no charge originating from American Airlines 77 to the US Solicitor General.
Mother of All White Lies.