9/11: 40 phone-calls that changed the world – but were they real?

an extract from the book VOICES: The US Govt’s 9/11 Phone Call Evidence by Rowland Morgan, Investigative Journalist

On March 22nd, 2006, U.S. high-court judges handed down a decision that allowed the release of all ¹ the evidence presented in the trial of a hereditarily paranoid-schizophrenic Moroccan named Zacarias Moussaoui. He had been in U.S. custody at the time of 9/11, but U.S. prosecutors claimed he had been an accessory to the plot and threw the book at him, demanding the death sentence. Much of the trial had been held behind closed doors, and avid U.S. mass-media corporations had applied collectively for release of what the judges called “the extraordinary quantity” of evidence presented.

In granting permission, the judges’ first sentence went as follows:

On September 11, 2001, members of the terrorist organization al Qaeda hijacked three passenger aircraft and crashed them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center towers in New York.” ²

Ironically, the very evidence the judges were releasing contained information that pointed to their own statement being mistaken.

The evidence gave unsourced details of more than 40 telephone calls that over the previous five years the U.S.A.’s war-mongering mass media had spun into a legend of heroism. The human face of the calls had always been a fascinating aspect of the events and sure enough, one of the three U.S. prosecutors in the case had given them prominence during the trial, as the Associated Press reported on April 6th, 2006:

Much of what happened aboard Flight 93 is known because passengers used cell phones in flight to call their loved ones. Earlier in the trial, prosecutor David Raskin transfixed the jury by reading accounts of the last moments of several of the Sept. 11 planes based on cell phone calls by passengers and flight attendants to family members and ground controllers.

This AP report showed that prosecutor Raskin had not studied his own evidence, which claimed only two cellular telephone calls out of some 35 ostensibly heard from Flight 93. It is no wonder that the AP reporter described the jury as “transfixed”, because the deluded prosecutor was describing to them cell phone calls that:

1. in 2001 people aboard Flight 93 at cruising altitude could not have made for technical reasons;
2. that the prosecution’s own evidence did not claim happened;
3. the alleged contents of which constituted inadmissible hearsay.

In the U.S.A. giving false testimony in court, the crime of perjury, is punishable by serving up to 20 months in federal prison.⁴, the possibility of some cellular calls on other flights nevertheless remained.

The evidence fudged the data, with phone numbers not given, and no computer data supplied that would have automatically been captured by Claircom or Airfone, the phone providers, had they in fact been seatback phone calls. Other voices heard ostensibly via seatback phones (although attributed to cell phones at the time) simulated cell phone calls by their brevity and by being cut off abruptly.⁵

The telephone data contained more bombshells of which Moussaoui’s prosecutors apparently were unaware:

• The world-famous 9/11 telephone calls from TV-pundit Barbara Olson to her husband Theodore Olson at his office in the Department of Justice had never occurred.

  (The U.S government’s call data said she made a call but did not get through. This meant that the U.S. Solicitor-General, a key member of the Bush administration, had connived at, or been deluded about, a crucial deception, one that had placed “hijackers” armed with “cardboard-cutters” aboard Flight 77 ostensibly speeding towards the Pentagon.)

• The world-famous 9/11 in-flight telephone call from Todd Beamer, the one in which an Airfone operator heard him shout the Pentagon’s recruitment slogan “Let’s Roll”, had never occurred.

  (The U.S. government’s fudged data said Beamer had made separate calls in the same second.)

Because the existence of hijackers aboard the rogue planes partly relied on them, the collapse of these two vital telephone calls alone badly damaged the U.S. Government’s 9/11 conspiracy theory. What’s more, internal evidence indicated that the evidence in these two vital calls had been fabricated with criminal intent in order to nod at the official story while evading a minimum 30-month prison sentence from the U.S. district court for obstruction of justice. ⁶

Furthermore, the demolition of these two famous phone calls meant that they had been faked during the events, opening up the possibility that other calls, too, had been fraudulent. The calls that fell under suspicion were those (a minority) that allegedly had mentioned hijackers and their atrocities.

It was not just U.S. federal prosecutors Robert Spencer, David Novak and David Raskin who were implicated. The trial evidence had been arranged at the highest levels. “These are political decisions,” [said] John Zwerling, a criminal defense attorney in Alexandria, Va:

The shots are being called at the very highest level of our government — the president, the vice president, and the attorney general. The prosecutors have to march to their orders, and whether or not they believe in it is irrelevant.”⁷

Even the venue of the trial was political:

after the [9/11] attacks [sic], the Justice Department decided to make the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia the hub of terrorism prosecutions. There were several reasons for the choice. Virginia juries had a reputation for being sympathetic to prosecutors, the federal court in Alexandria was known for quickly moving cases through its ‘rocket docket,’ and Alexandria lay just across the Potomac from Washington — where prosecutors would have easy access to their colleagues at Main Justice and the myriad federal agencies that would become involved in any trial.”⁸

Top Department of Justice (DOJ) officials had been involved in constructing the telephone evidence.

Moussaoui’s December 2001 indictment was signed by three officials representing each DOJ arm involved. There was Paul McNulty, the Eastern District of Virginia’s new and politically connected Republican U.S. Attorney (who has since been nominated to the DOJ’s No. 2 spot); Mary Jo White, the outgoing Clinton-era U.S. Attorney in New York whose office had overseen the first World Trade Center bombing and East African embassy bombings [sic]; and Michael Chertoff, the head of the Criminal Division at Main Justice in Washington and a former U.S. Attorney in New Jersey [now head of the vast Homeland Security department]. McNulty has appeared in the courtroom at key stages of the case.” ⁹

In addition to the manipulation of the official 9/11 story by lawyers, earlier the U.S. mass-media had spun the array of in-flight 9/11 cellular telephone calls so comprehensively that even U.S. prosecutor Raskin believed that they had occurred. He had expounded them to the jury, and the Associated Press had passed on his words to the world.

Yet his Moussaoui trial evidence proved that many of the cell-phone calls had not taken place. The U.S. prosecutor was deluded and the government’s conspiracy theory lay in shreds on the court-room floor. ¹⁰

This was in spite of the showmanship used at the trial. For example, prosecutors played to the jury the cockpit voice recording (CVR) alleged to have been retrieved from the mangled and buried wreckage of Flight 93 (that nobody outside the secret state had seen).

Passenger voices were heard shouting outside the cockpit (although normally only the pilots’ voices were recorded). The drama of shouting pilots and their chillingly cool rogue replacements was played out on high-tech equipment:

As jurors heard the cockpit recording Wednesday, they watched a color video showing a transcript, synchronized with the voices and the plane’s instrument readings of its speed, altitude, pitch and headings.

There was no mention of the crucial eight minutes of the recording transcript that were mostly marked “unintelligible”.

No mention of the original view that the CVR recording solved nothing.¹¹

No one explained to the jury how Flight 93’s rogue pilot could have obtained permission from Reagan International airport air-traffic controllers to change the flight plan and fly towards Washington D.C.¹²

The telephone evidence ruined all the prosecution’s video razz-a-matazz. As 9/11 sceptic David Ray Griffin had written:

If even one of [the] essential claims [in the official story] is disproved, then the official story as such is thrown into doubt. Critics do not need to show the falsity of every essential element in the official account; they need to show only the falsity of one such element.”¹³