[The most recent 'Error' page in a series which documents errors in the 9/11 literature. One of the goals of 911review.com is to highlight these errors and improve the quality of analysis in the community of skeptics.]
The idea that phone calls from passengers on the targeted flights were fake and actually created with voice-morphing technology has been promoted by several “no Boeing” advocates and in particular detail by author David Ray Griffin in his numerous books, talks, interviews, and essays.
The case for the ‘fake phone calls theory’ as articulated by Griffin has become ever more nuanced and complex as government and airline disclosures have undermined the simplicity of the original set of claims surrounding the calls, and other researchers have pointed out flaws in that case. However, the theory remains rooted in the premise, seemingly calculated to be offensive attack survivors, that the last voices heard from victims on the planes were faked.
Origins
The original form of the fake phone calls theory as promoted by A.K. Dewdney in his 2002 article Ghostriders in the Sky focused on Flight 93, from which passengers reportedly made a score of cell phone calls. It had two major tenets:
1. Cell phones in aircraft at altitude can’t communicate with ground stations, where most of the reported calls would have been at altitude.
2. Statements reportedly made by passengers had peculiarities suggesting that they weren’t genuine.
Dewdney, Mathematical Recreations columnist for Scientific American from 1984 to 1993, gave these arguments a veneer of credibility with his vivid style of writing, and publication of experiments showing limitations of cell phone reception from a light plane in Canada. However, rational examination of both tenets show that they are based on multiple fallacies, foremost being the presentation of a theory as the only explanation for alleged anomalies that in fact have many possible explanations.
For years, “no Boeing” advocates such as A.K. Dewdney, Eric Hufschmid, David Griffin, Jim Fetzer, and the Loose Change filmmakers have used victim Mark Bingham as poster child for the fake calls claims by highlighting his use of his full name in addressing his mother. During his one call from Flight 93 to his mother, Bingham reportedly says “Hi Mom, this is Mark Bingham”. Frequently overlooked in these accounts are the facts that Mark Bingham’s mother has a different last name, that she herself relayed the excerpt, and that she has no doubt that the caller was her son. Furthermore, adducing as evidence of fakery perceived anomalies in the reported behavior of people in highly stressful life-threatening circumstances is unscientific at best.
Perhaps one of most important researchers of our time Dr. David R.Griffin, is interviewed on R.T. covering a range of subjects from WTC 7 to the hijackers still being alive.
According to several left-leaning critics of the 9/11 Truth Movement, some of its central claims, especially about the destruction of the World Trade Center, show its members to be scientifically challenged. In the opinion of some of these critics, moreover, claims made by members of this movement are sometimes unscientific in the strongest possible sense, implying an acceptance of magic and miracles.
After documenting this charge in Part I of this essay, I show in Part II that the exact opposite is the case: that the official account of the destruction of the World Trade Center implies miracles (I give nine examples), and that the 9/11 Truth Movement, in developing an alternative hypothesis, has done so in line with the assumption that the laws of nature did not take a holiday on 9/11. In Part III, I ask these left-leaning critics some questions evoked by the fact that it is they, not members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, who have endorsed a conspiracy theory replete with miracle stories as well as other absurdities.
I The Charge that 9/11 Truth Theories Rest on Unscientific, Even Magical, Beliefs
Several left-leaning critics of the 9/11 Truth Movement, besides showing contempt for its members, charge them with relying on claims that are contradicted by good science and, in some cases, reflect a belief in magic. By “magic,” they mean miracles, understood as violations of basic principles of the physical sciences.
There are many questions to ask about the war in Afghanistan. One that has been widely asked is whether it will turn out to be “Obama’s Vietnam.” This question implies another: Is this war winnable, or is it destined to be a quagmire, like Vietnam? These questions are motivated in part by the widespread agreement that the Afghan government, under Hamid Karzai, is at least as corrupt and incompetent as the government the United States tried to prop up in South Vietnam for 20 years.
Although there are many similarities between these two wars, there is also a big difference: This time, there is no draft. If there were a draft, so that college students and their friends back home were being sent to Afghanistan, there would be huge demonstrations against this war on campuses all across this country. If the sons and daughters of wealthy and middle-class parents were coming home in boxes, or with permanent injuries or post-traumatic stress syndrome, this war would have surely been stopped long ago. People have often asked: Did we learn any of the “lessons of Vietnam”? The US government learned one: If you’re going to fight unpopular wars, don’t have a draft – hire mercenaries!
There are many other questions that have been, and should be, asked about this war, but in this essay, I focus on only one: Did the 9/11 attacks justify the war in Afghanistan?
This question has thus far been considered off-limits, not to be raised in polite company, and certainly not in the mainstream media. It has been permissible, to be sure, to ask whether the war during the past several years has been justified by those attacks so many years ago. But one has not been allowed to ask whether the original invasion was justified by the 9/11 attacks.
Many remember the stories of phone calls on 9/11 allegedly made from victims on-board the planes. Many people know suspect that they could not have been made from cell phones for different reasons. Some reasons for not using cells in-flight are technologically inspired, some are more from a physical possibilities perspective.
The Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Aviation Administration have each recommended that airlines not allow passengers to use cell phones during commercial flights. The FAA fears that the RF signal emitted by devices using the 800MHz spectrum band might interfere with the navigation systems of the plane, specifically GPS instrumentation. Yet there is no documented case of an air accident or serious malfunction caused by a cell phone’s interfering with a plane’s navigation system.
The FCC’s concern is that wireless networks on the ground might be disrupted by the cell phones flying overhead. As a plane flies over a wireless cell tower on the ground, the FCC believes, the cell site will detect all the cell phones operating inside the plane and go to work registering those devices to operate on the network. But by the time the tower registers and connects all those mobile phones passing overhead, the plane will have passed into the range of the next cell tower on its route. This uses up system resources and could hurt network performance for connected phones on the ground.
But some experts believe that this worry is outdated. “Color me highly skeptical that this is a real problem with modern systems,” says Ken Biba, CTO of Novarum, a wireless consulting and engineering group. “Modern digital phones actually use lower power, and, further, the cell towers have very directional antennas designed for covering the surface of the earth [not the air above].”
In 2009, I published a little book entitled Osama bin Laden: Dead or Alive?1 Much evidence, I showed, suggested that Osama bin Laden had died on or about December 13, 2001. (Although this book was ignored by the US press, it received major reviews in British newspapers,2 and it even provided the basis for a BBC special.3) Pointing out that the only evidence to the contrary consists of “messages from bin Laden” in the form of audiotapes and videotapes that have appeared since 2001, I devoted one chapter to an examination of the most important of these tapes, showing that none are demonstrably authentic and that some are almost certainly fakes.
In the chapter preceding that examination, I discussed two videotapes containing purported interviews of Osama bin Laden in the fall of 2001, when the issue was whether he had been responsible for the 9/11 attacks. I suggested that both of these tapes, in which bin Laden allegedly admitted his responsibility, were fakes. If they were, I pointed out, this fact would increase the likelihood that all of the “Osama bin Laden tapes” appearing in the following years – when the question of whether he was still alive was added to that of his responsibility for 9/11 – were also fakes.
The clearest example, I argued, was the most famous of the so-called bin Laden confession videos. Having allegedly been found in a private home in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, in late November 2001, it is sometimes called the “November 9 bin Laden video,” because this date was stamped on it, implying that this was when it was made. It is also called the “bin Laden video of December 13,” because that was the date on which it was released to the public by the Pentagon – which is perhaps significant, given the evidence that bin Laden may have died on that day. (If he had, he would have obviously, and perhaps conveniently, been unable to comment on whether the tape was authentic.) In any case, I provided several reasons for concluding that this video was almost certainly fabricated.
David Ray Griffin will be presenting his most recent lecture, “Is the War in Afghanistan Justified by 9/11?” at the Harvard Epworth Methodist Church at 1555 Mass. Ave., Harvard Square, Cambridge at 7pm on Saturday May 8.
This will be his second visit to the Boston area in as many years. Last year, Dr. Griffin spoke to an audience of 400 people at Boston University, nearly half of which were hearing the 9/11 truth message for the first time. The church where Griffin will be speaking this year is adjacent to the Harvard Law School, home of Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, authors of the “Conspiracy Theories” paper that was recently uncovered.
According to the chief of Japans Democratic Party who says that the 9/11 hijackers are alive and that 9/11 was a complete hoax. Dr. David Ray Griffin is a professor and author who wrote The New Pearl Harbor Revisited and he says that he agrees; the World Trade Center was a hoax.
I comment here on the nanotechnology aspect of Jerry Mazza’s masterful review (Rock Creek Free Press, January 2010, page 6) of David Ray Griffin’s extraordinary 2009 book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False.
By the time we (Dorion Sagan – my eldest son and Sciencewriters partner – and I) met David Griffin in 2003 in his native habitat at the Center for Process Studies (which is on the campus of the Claremont School of Theology in southern California), he had written over two dozen books, none of which I had ever read or even heard of. We immensely enjoyed a three-day scientific-philosophical meeting on the Darwinian-evolutionary view of life that had been organized by Griffin’s sage mentor, the sweet-tempered but razor sharp, Jimmy Carter-sounding, octogenarian professor emeritus and director, John B. Cobb, Jr. The results of this fascinating meeting have since been published (Cobb, ed. 2008).
Response to Questions Evoked by My Fifth Estate Interview
On November 27, 2009, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Fifth Estate program aired a show entitled “9/11: The Unofficial Story,”1 for which I, along with a few other members of the 9/11 Truth Movement, was interviewed. In the most important part of my interview, I pointed out that, according to the FBI’s report on phone calls from the airliners provided in 2006 for the Moussaoui trial, Barbara Olson’s only call from Flight 77 was “unconnected” and hence lasted “0 seconds.” Although this Fifth Estate program showed only a brief portion of my discussion of alleged phone calls from the 9/11 airliners, its website subsequently made available a 22-minute video containing this discussion.2
Shortly thereafter, a portion of this video, under the title “David Ray Griffin on the 9/11 Cell Phone Calls: Exclusive CBC Interview,” was posted on You Tube,3 after which it was posted on 911 Blogger.4 This latter posting resulted in considerable discussion, during which some claims contradicting my position were made. In this essay, I respond to the most important of these claims, namely:
1. The FBI has not admitted that cell phone calls from high-altitude airliners on 9/11 were impossible.
2. There is no evidence that some of the reported 9/11 phone calls were faked.
3. American Airlines’ Boeing 757s, and hence its Flight 77, had onboard phones.
4. The FBI’s report on phone calls from the 9/11 airliners did not undermine Ted Olson’s report about receiving phone calls from his wife.
The four sections of this essay will respond to these four claims in order.
Excellent interview with Dr. Griffin. He especially notes how the FBI itself admits that there was only one connection attempt made from Barbara Olson, which lasted “zero seconds,” not to mention that Ted kept changing his story, first saying she called him on a seatback phone, then cell phone, then seatback again. And given that out of all the supposed 9/11 phone calls, Olson is the only passenger to mention “boxcutters,” the FBI’s admission is an intriguing one indeed.
Reflections on a Recent Evaluation of Dr. David Ray Griffin
The cover story of the September 24, 2009, issue of The New Statesman, the venerable left-leaning British magazine, was entitled “The 50 People who Matter Today.”(1) Any such list, necessarily reflecting the bias and limited awareness of the editors, would surely contain choices that readers would find surprising.
That is true of this list – which includes families as well as individuals. A good number of names are, to be sure, ones that would be contained in most such lists created by British, Canadian, or American political commentators, such as the Obamas, the Murdochs, Vladimir Putin, Osama bin Laden, Angela Merkel, Bill and Melinda Gates, Warren Buffett, Pope Benedict XVI, and Gordon Brown. But about half of the names reflected choices that I, and probably most other readers, found surprising. One of these choices, however, is beyond surprising – it is astounding. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by Brian 
