More On Griffin

Pat touched on this, but I thought it deserved further discussion, just how dishonest and offensive David Ray Griffin continues to be. For a couple of years now he has argued that the phone calls on 9/11 were fake, although he continues to change his story on exactly why. Now he is back to the "there were no airfones on flight 77" a theory that he at one point backed away from, and which we have disproved at length. He continues to focus on Barbara Olson, because he insists that it was necessary to the plot since Olson was a minor celebrity, because apparently America would not have been upset that 3,000 people were killed if none of them were television personalities.

From 4:30 in:

In 2004 when they sent their report to the 9/11 Commission, they still had their calls from Barbara Olson in the report. But in 2006 people in the 9/11 truth movement found out that flight 77 didn't have any on-board phones, no seatback phones of any sort. What are you going to do then? So call customers service, and talk to him. And he says "That's right, we didn't have any on-board phones." The Boeing 757s that were made for American, unlike those made for United, were not equipped with on-board phones.

What does the FBI do then? The can't say she called on a cellphone, because it was too high. They can't say she called on an on-board phone because there weren't any, so they change the story again in 2007. And the new story is this, there were no calls from Barbara Olson. You can find this now on the graphic for the report that they turn in, excuse in 2006, for the Moussoui trial. And you find the graphic for Barbara Olson, here is what it says "Barbara Olson, one call attempted, unconnected. And they always say how long it lasted, zero seconds.

Now Griffin is being doubly dishonest here. First of all, if the FBI were somehow trying to cover up the fact that there were no airfones on flight 77, because of that in-depth detective work by the truth movement, why would they still report 8 airfone calls from flight 77. Griffin, with his massive ego, is creating a cover-up, that never happened, just so he can cast himself as the protagonist. The FBI said there were phone calls, and they still say there were phone calls. This has never changed.

Secondly, as Pat pointed out here over 2 years ago, so Griffin has no excuse for not figuring this out by now, there are 5 calls from flight 77 in that report which list no destination. In fact, this was reported way back in the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission Report, which Griffin wrote a book about, so presumably he has actually read this, and just continues to lie.

57.The records available for the phone calls from American 77 do not allow for a determination of which of four “connected calls to unknown numbers” 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 (all family members of the Flight 77 passengers and crew were canvassed to see if they had received any phone calls from the hijacked flight, and only Renee May’s parents and Ted Olson indicated that they had received such calls).The four calls were at 9:15:34 for 1 minute, 42 seconds; 9:20:15 for 4 minutes, 34 seconds; 9:25:48 for 2 minutes, 34 seconds; and 9:30:56 for 4 minutes, 20 seconds. FBI report,“American Airlines Airphone Usage,” Sept. 20, 2001; FBI report of investigation, interview of Theodore Olson, Sept. 11, 2001; FBI report of investigation, interview of Helen Voss, Sept. 14, 2001;AAL response to the Commission’s supplemental document request, Jan. 20, 2004.

Liberal Blog Bites on "Contradictions"

I don't know how important BlondeSense is, but it does have some impressive links from big-time liberal blogs and (more important) from significant skeptic blogs like Pharyngula and Pandagon. Today, BlondSense Liz links to a selection from David Ray Griffin's (who?) new book that discusses the supposed contradictions in Ted Olson's account of his wife Barbara's phone calls from doomed Flight 77.

There are a lot of readers who want more of these kinds of articles at this blog. This is for you. Commenter Mel Odious brought this one to my attention and it was also over at SOTT. And it's not to say that I don't read articles like the one below. I do. While I don't "believe" that 9/11 was an inside job, the events and how our government handled them are quite suspicious and perhaps more than a little too convenient. You decide. I haven't made up my mind yet.

SOTT, of course, is Ouija Board mystic and doomsday cult leader Laura Knight-Jadczyck's site.

This part of Griffin's book is particularly offensive. He questions why Ted Olson did not have his story straight on how his wife called him. At first he reported it was a cellphone call, then an Airfone call, and he didn't know whether she called with a credit card or called collect.

Now, of all the trivia that the Troofers focus on, this is the most ridiculous. Apparently they think Olson should have been grilling his wife in the minute or two that they were connected on how she got through to him, rather than asking questions about the hijackers. And if you really believe that the government was behind it (which BlondeSense Liz says she doesn't), then wouldn't they have their story straight?

And get this at the end:

Hmm. Where is Barbara Olson? Some say that her plane actually flew over the Pentagon and out into the sea. Some say it's in Ohio. Or maybe she's in hiding? But why? Why would he make up this stuff?

And some say she's smuggling Italian Lira along the Polish-Austria border. Jeez, being a blogger means taking responsibility for the stuff you decide to link to. This is total crap, and Liz says she doesn't believe it herself (which she then contradicts by saying she hasn't made up her mind). If you don't believe this stuff, Liz, you are doing a grave disservice to your readers by linking it.

The World's Lamest Conspiracy?

As we (and others) have often pointed out, troofers are like Holocaust deniers in that they ignore the big picture, while attempting to focus on what they perceive as anomalies in particular bits of evidence. For example, ignoring the thousands of witnesses and documents, while insisting that the fact that they cannot find enough cyanide on a brick, proves there was no Holocaust.

One of my favorite truther examples of this is the idiots at Pilots for 9/11 Truth who insist that flight 77 could not have hit the Pentagon, because the flight data recorder, which was recovered from flight 77 in the wreckage of the Pentagon, says it did not. Ignoring the hundreds of witnesses to the crash, and the fact that the very black box they are pointing to as evidence... was pulled out of the wreckage of the plane... in the Pentagon...

Another example is David Ray Griffin's latest spin on the airphone thing, after being smacked down hard several times on this blog for lying about the removal of the phones from American Airlines planes, he is now insisting that FBI evidence shows that Barbara Olson never made a phone call to her husband former Solicitor General Ted Olson.



















Griffin is correct in saying that the flash presentation from the Zacarias Moussaouii trial shows that Olson made a phone call for zero seconds. This is nothing new, I saw this over a year ago when I first reported on this.

What does this mean, however? There are only a few options.

A. None of the phone calls ever took place. The FBI, under penalty of perjury, on a massive scale (over 7,000 agents where involved in the investigation at one point) made up the record of the dozens of phone calls for the trial, but then decided for some bizarre reason to incriminate themselves by saying that Barbara Olson's call was not connected, despite the fact that this phone call was widely publicized for years before the trial.

B. All of the phone calls but Barbara Olson's took place, and Ted Olson, for some strange reason decided to lie about it. That would be weird, but dozens of phone calls reporting hijackings hardly supports Griffin's case.

C. All of the phone calls, including Barbara Olson's took place, but for some reason (typo, computer error) it was reported as disconnected. There is also the strong possibility that since it was a a collect call, it may not have been recorded on a per minute basis like the other calls.

So which is it Dave?