Whole Lot of Shakin' Going On

Over at 9-11 Flogger, in the wake of Eric Larson's takedown of David Ray Griffin and his fantasy about cellphone fakery. That post is approaching 200 comments at this point.

Some of them understand the consequences of accepting that the phone calls were real:

I'm afraid that conceding the phone calls are real is would make the OCT true in many people's opinion, if not a whole lot harder to prove a conspiracy. Is there any plausible scenario how the hijackers could have been on the plane until the very last moment and it still be a conspiracy?

Aye, there's the rub. Remember, only last week we posted a video of Richard Gage, the reigning superstar of 9-11 Troof, saying that Muslims weren't behind 9-11. Now, it's probably true that the Troofers, like the three little pigs, can run to the next house in search of safety from the big, bad wolf. They'll say, well, okay there were hijackers but a) they weren't really Muslims and b) they didn't fly the planes:

Even if hijackers were on the planes, it is far from clear they were in control of those planes for the entire flights, or much beyond the point of hijacking.

No matter how many layers of the onion are peeled away, there's always a conspiracy theory left over.

It's amusing in a way, but also a little sad. We spend our time here poking fun at them, but reading the posts you can see that they really don't see how deluded they are. It's not an internet game to them. They've invested a great deal of time and effort in 9-11 Troof. Granted, some of them seem to have done it with half a brain. It's amazing how much hooey gets recycled in that post. One guy goes on and on about the length of some of the phone calls:

The phone call by Jeremy Glick would not have been interrupted by the crash of the aircraft. Phone call started at 9:37:41. line left open (7,565 seconds). So the call ends at 11:43:46. This conflicts with the official crash time of 10:03 AM.

There is no technical explanation that I know of and unless you can come up with one you should accept that these calls were not made from the plane. At very least this is evidence that the calls were not made from the plane.

Now, how deluded do you have to be to believe that the government would go to all the trouble of faking the phone calls, only to have it blown because somebody forgot to hang up the phone?

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.

David Ray Griffin and Those Phone Calls, Again

I have to give my co-blogger credit for his predictions. Just two days ago Pat pointed out how odd David Ray Griffin's infatuation with the airfone calls was, and how it would lead to other truthers attacking him, and now it has led to just that with this post on 911 Blogger. Of course the author of this piece only manages to hold on to his 911 fantasies through an even more difficult and elaborate plot.

Griffin’s logic is that since the calls were said to be cell calls, and that cell calls are impossible from higher altitudes, therefore all the calls were fabricated. He doesn’t, however, deal with the full implications of such reasoning. According to him, something like the following scenario occurred:

The perpetrators decide to bolster their story of an al-Qaeda hijacking by making phony calls to various loved ones of the passengers. They are able to voice-morph Tom Burnett’s voice so masterfully that they are able to fool his wife not once, not twice, but on at least three and maybe four calls. Despite their brilliance with voice-morphing, however, they are so stupid as to make their fake call appear to come from a cell phone, which is known to be impossible at the altitude UAL93 was at when Tom called his wife. Griffin believes the calls were made by cell phones because Deena supposedly said she looked at the caller ID. So the perpetrators They were able to make the call seem to come from Tom’s own cell phone– did they pickpocket his cell phone before the flight, and the phones of various others? In addition to the stupidity of making their fake calls from cell phones, the perpetrators inexplicably decide to throw in a report from the fake Tom of the hijackers having guns, which the FBI and media later go through great lengths to cover up and/or ignore.......

Can we believe this preposterous scenario?

Let me propose an alternate scenario:

AA 77 Airfones, the Final Story

To finish off a story that has been long in developing, we now have the documents showing when the air phones from American Airlines 77 were deactivated. This whole saga started when David Ray Griffin, in his book "Debunking 9/11 Debunking" claimed that AA 757s never had air phones. After we pointed out that they had them, but they were removed in the spring of 2002, he corrected himself, only to immediately turn around and decide that this was too big of a concession to reality and start trying to prove they didn't exist again.

With the help of Rob Balsamo from "Pilots for 9/11 Truth", Griffin finally came up with an anonymous American Airlines' mechanic who gave him a document describing the removal of the phones, discussed here, here, here and here. The problem with the document they provided though, was that they did not show the original Engineering Change Order (ECO) removing the phone. The fact that the phones were removed was not under contention, it was only a matter of when. According to a press release by American, it was sometime after February 2002. According the the "Pilots for 9/11 Truth" it was some unspecified date before January 2001.

Well now, along with a bunch of other supporting documents, we have the original ECO (FO871)ordering the phones to be deactivated. The ECO mentioned by Balsamo (FO878), is the order to actually physically remove the components. This, of course, occurs at an even later date. (The document is unaltered by me except for additional blacking-out of personal information)

Click to enlarge.

To no surprise, the date of March 2002 matches up perfectly with the public statements of American Airlines' press release, and not, as the truthers allege, over a year. This is just when the original order was given though, this does not say when it was carried out. We have that list too though, one of which is displayed below.

All of the deactivations were done in April of 2002. Flight 77 is not among them of course, since it crashed into the Pentagon 7 months earlier.

So this should pretty much settle this story, verified from mutiple sources, including internal documents, news articles and public statements from AA77. The air phones on flight 77 had not yet been removed in September 2001. Once again David Ray Griffin, the high priest of the 9/11 denial movement is shown to be wrong. It is probably too much to hope for, but maybe someday he will realize all this and let the victims of this fatal flight rest in peace.

The Airfones Issue Redux

(Update: See the bottom of this post)

Well, every now and then we get lucky. My co-blogger James B did a terrific job of debunking David Ray Griffin's claim about the Airfones having been removed from the 757s prior to 9-11; so good a job in fact that it was the first error that Griffin acknowledged making in his new book, at least briefly.

But then Rob Balsamo and the crackpots over at Pilots for 9-11 Denial got into the act. They posted a revision to the American Airlines 757 repair manual which seemed to indicate that the Airfones had been disabled prior to 9-11.

And here's where the luck comes in. At some point, we attracted the attention of a person who was in position to know a little more about the maintenance of American Airlines planes. He was mostly annoyed at the "Truthers" but when it came to this issue he really got ticked, so he did some digging.

He backtracked from ECO F0878 and came across ECO F0871 and F0874. F0874 tells the mechanics to put the airphone switch to the off position and pull the associated circuit breakers. F0871 requires installation of a placard on all the Airfones in the plane informing the passengers that the phones would no longer work. Both are dated March 2002.

Which means what, sports fans? Yep, that the Airfones on American's fleet of 757s still worked as of 9/11/01, and in fact were not turned off until a good six months later. Thanks greatly to our anonymous source on this! So now it's up to Rob Balsamo and David Ray Griffin to retract their claim that the phone systems were uninstalled prior to 9-11. Surely their source can check out ECO F0871 and ECO F0874 and tell them the dates those were issued?

Update: Rob Balsamo, obviously not the most trustworthy of sources, claims in the comments to have hoaxed me with this series of emails. So let's put up the red light on this one. I still think the JREF crew are right, that the PfT post is a phony. But unlike Rob, I'm not going to leave my post up without a disclaimer. I am no longer confident in this story, and in retrospect it should not have been posted.

Update II: I had a long phone conversation with Rob Balsamo last night. He stated eventually that he had not hoaxed me with the emails. I do feel that I jumped the gun a little with this post. On the larger issue (whether Airfones worked on Flight 77 on 9/11/01), I am confident that they did. Our buddy Pomeroo checked with American Airlines and this was their response:

Ron, I am doublechecking with my maintenance folks so I give you accurate data.

(June 29, 2007)

Ron, engineers at our primary Maintenance & Engineering base in Tulsa tell me that they cannot find any record that the 757 aircraft flown into the Pentagon on 9/11 had had its seatback phones deactivated by that date. An Engineering Change Order to deactivate the seatback phone system on the 757 fleet had been issued by that time.

It is our contention that the seatback phones on Flight 77 were working because there is no entry in that aircraft’s records to indicate when the phones were disconnected.

So this appears to be a validation of both sides on the issue. AA says that there had been an ECO to deactivate the phones prior to 9-11, but that change had not been made on the plane that turned out to be AA77. Note as well that in the Moussaoui trial, the government did not claim that phone calls had been made from Airfones; the phone calls that are listed in the flash animation do not list the row they were made from. This may be an issue with American Airlines as compared to United Airlines as I note that the only call from an AA flight that day that is identified by location on the plane called from is the call from Betty Ong, and that location may have been identified because she stated that she was in her jumpseat at 3R during the call.