Barbara Olson — a victim of the 9/11 terrorist attack?
Filed under: TV shows,Uncategorized — Tags: Ted Olson, Barbara Olson, CNN, 9/11 — furtherglory @ 12:07 pm
I remember Ted Olson going on several TV talk shows right afterward, and it seemed to me that he was not at all sad about the death of his wife. He calmly told the story of how Barbara called him twice from her cell phone on the plane and gave important details about the Arab terrorists who had hijacked the plane, including the detail of how they used box cutters to threaten the passengers.
I was glued to the TV set on the day of 9/11, switching channels to get all the latest news. Late that day, CNN gave a news report which was later put on the Internet:
“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 CNN, Ted 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.”
Barbara Olson was a commentator on CNN, and she was on TV night after night, so I knew who she was. The two cell phone calls to her husband were evidence that American Airlines Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, was still in the air after it disappeared from FAA radar around 9:00 a.m. At first, Fox News had reported that Flight 77 was headed to the White House, but instead it turned and headed to the Pentagon.
Barbara Olson’s phone calls provided evidence that box cutters were the weapons used, and that the hijackers were Arab Muslims. Barbara’s phone calls helped immensely to get the support of Americans for President Bush’s “war on terror.”
Three days later, Ted Olson was on the Hannity and Colmes TV show and he said that Barbara had actually called the Department of Justice collect from the plane. He explained that she must have used the “airplane phone,” and she called collect because “she somehow didn’t have access to her credit cards.” It seems that Ted had learned that the technology for cell phones that could be used at high altitude was not available at that time, so he had to change his story. But wait a minute! To use the phones on the back of the seats in airplanes, you had to first swipe a credit card in order to activate the phone.
It was later learned that American Airlines Flight 77 didn’t even have phones on the back of the seats. So Ted Olson’s story of the phone calls was a total lie. But why did he tell these lies and why did he show no emotion about the death of his wife?
