Fog, Fiction and the Flight 11 Phone Calls

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 41

This is really a pressure point. Here we are, in 2007, in the New York Times, and Mike Low says clearly that Sara gave her childhood home phone number to Amy Sweeney "to make a hasty call to a friend to report the hijacking." Here's the quote:

Quote:

Still, the grief of the survivors is powerful. Mr. Low, the self-made owner of a small limestone mining company in Batesville, Ark., sometimes wears a silver and lapis lazuli ring he gave to his daughter that was found in the wreckage.

While waiting for his case to get to court, he has learned from F.B.I. records that his daughter gave her childhood home phone number to another flight attendant to make a hasty call to a friend to report the hijacking.

Sara Low had just moved to a new apartment, and her father imagines that in the stress of the hijacking, she gave the flight attendant, Amy Sweeney, the only number she could remember, one that reached back to her childhood in Arkansas.

https://archive.li/o/nMVG9/www.nytim...ted=print&_r=0

Well that's certainly not correct. Amy Sweeney did not have Sara Low's childhood phone number. She didn't phone it, and it wasn't the number on the card, which was the current Low family residence in Batesville. And Amy Sweeney couldn't be the one making the four unconnected calls as she was down the plane making one of her connected calls when one of those four were made.

So in bringing up the matter of this childhood number, Mike Low can only be referring here to the unconnected calls, which were not made by Amy Sweeney. Why does he get this wrong? Have the FBI told him this?

Quote:

March 28, 2013
Mr. John Pistole
TSA Administrator
Washington, D. C.
Dear Mr. Pistole,
My name is Mike Low. I am the father of Sara Elizabeth Low, American Airlines Flight Attendant on Flight 11, September 11, 2001. My family and I want to lend our support to APFA and the Coalition of Flight Attendant Unions and express our feelings about your decision to allow knives back on commercial aircraft. We are astounded by the lack of understanding and thoughtlessness that this terrible decision reflects.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, our Sara Elizabeth was working business class on American Airlines Flight 11 out of Boston. She had to have witnessed in part or all, the stabbing of flight attendants and the murder of a passenger and the pilots, all by knives. Sara spent the last 30 minutes of her life performing her duties amidst that carnage. We know she gave Amy Sweeney our phone number (as verified by the FBI) to charge the calls made to American Airlines employee Michael Woodward, that led to the identification of the hijackers. We have the FBI phone records and Michael Woodward’s deposition that told of her activities during the final 30 minutes.

https://archive.li/o/nMVG9/nokniveso...ves-on-planes/

Certainly by the time he was wriring this noknives letter, March 28 2013, he knew that the Amy Sweeney calls were charged to his current home number, not the childhood one.

So something very odd going on here. Mike Low has the black binders. Perhaps he will find this thread on google and make a comment. He would be very welcome to do so of course. The questions are really about this childhood number: does he believe that the four unconnected calls were made by Sara to this childhood number? Why did he state that the childhood number was given to Amy Sweeney in 2007? Would he correct that 2007 statement now if he had the chance?

more info: it was known as early as 2004 at least that Amy Sweeney had used a calling card given to her by Sara Low:

Quote:

The young blond mother of two had secreted herself in the next-to-last passenger row and used an AirFone card, given to her by another flight attendant, Sara Low, to call the airline’s flight-services office at Boston’s Logan airport.

Read more at https://archive.li/o/nMVG9/observer....3ixzz38shrPeC3

Follow us: @newyorkobserver on Twitter | newyorkobserver on Facebook

another comment: I'm really trying to understand what Mike Low was saying in 2007. Here is the quote again:

Quote:

While waiting for his case to get to court, he has learned from F.B.I. records that his daughter gave her childhood home phone number to another flight attendant to make a hasty call to a friend to report the hijacking.

Sara Low had just moved to a new apartment, and her father imagines that in the stress of the hijacking, she gave the flight attendant, Amy Sweeney, the only number she could remember, one that reached back to her childhood in Arkansas.

I'm trying to see if perhaps Mrs Nix read this and misunderstood it to say that Sara Low had called her childhood number, as I cannot find any other confirmation of this online. Is it possible that Mike Low was saying something else, that this "childhood phone number" is the same one as now? That the Batesville address is the same as the childhood home? Well, no, that doesn't seem right because the reason she gave that number to Sweeney was not to call, but to use as the phonecard billing number. So there was no need then for Mike Low to talk about the stress of the hijacking, as if she had made an error. She made no error in giving the phonecard to Amy. It worked fine. So Mike Low does appear to be somehow playing pea and thimble here. It looks like he is mixing up Sara phoning the old number, and giving the card with the current number to Amy.

Did Sara Low make those four calls? Were they to an old childhood number? And how was she paying for these calls?

[Update] ok here we go. Mike Low's home in Batesville Arkansas is located at 120 Triangle Lane.
Quote:

Facts
Lot: 163 sqft
Single Family
Built in 1992
Cooling: Central
Last sold: Oct 1991 for $55,000

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/12...90848459_zpid/

It was built in 1992 on land purchased in October 1991.

This means that this could not be the childhood home of Sara Low, who would have been 18 when the family moved in here.

So that means that this "childhood home" that Mike Low is referring to must be a different home to 120 Triangle lane. So the phone number of the childhood home was not the phone number of 120 Triangle Lane. (Damn: unless they took it with them? Does that happen?)

That possibility aside, it seems that Mike Low is referring to a phone number from before 1991. It seems that Mrs Nix has understood all this correctly, and that Sara Low was the one making those unconnected calls to the childhood home, which was not 120 Triangle Lane.

----

Quote:

which allowed the 32-year-old mother of two to pretend to be a passenger and use an AirFone

Thanks Clive. What's going on here is they are scrambling to account for how the call was made. In other versions, they have Amy Sweeney sitting in a spare passenger seat to make her calls. This is what they mean by pretending to be a passenger: not hiding her flight attendants uniform, but sitting in a passenger seat discreetly to access a phone.

They had to do this because by this time the whole idea of cell phones on the plane was becoming impossible to maintain. So they couldn't claim that Sweeney was calling from a cell phone. When they decided to release the call records this painted them into a corner, because the calls are shown as coming from an Airphone.

The problem is, I think, though it's difficult to really nail down this point, that there were no Airphones fitted to the jump seats where the flight attendants sit for landing and take off. So they couldn't claim Amy Sweeney was in a jump seat if she was calling on an Airphone: she had to be sitting in a passenger seat, or "pretending" to be a passenger.

Then they got themselves into more of a muddle when the tapes were released of the Ong call where she (eventually) concedes, after multiple queries, that she is sitting in her jump seat! So now you won't hear them today saying that Amy was pretending to be a passenger, or that she slipped into a passenger seat to make the call. They just don't say where the call was made from.

The elephant in the room, or the elephant in the jumbo jet, is that if the Airphones were all working, then there was nothing to prevent any of the 81 passengers from making calls to their loved ones. Yet none did. This is flatly impossible to believe, especially considering that the passengers from first and business class had been evacuated to coach, and people had been stabbed. Obviously the passengers in coach knew that something was going on. The smell of mace in the air might also have been a clue. So the idea that with blood and mace and chaos in the air, not one of the 81 passengers decided to place a call home to say goodbye, is obviously impossible.

But the calls were not placed from cell phones, nor were they placed from Airphones installed in the passengers seats, nor were they made from Airphones installed in the jump seats (even if these existed, which I don't think so): they were made by somehow plugging into external port 4 on the Claircom box, as discussed earlier in this thread. )

As to the hijackers permitting contact between the flight attendants: remember that there were no hijackers in the main cabin. They had no idea where they had gone, and the best Ong could do was guess that they had gone into the pilot's cabin. All five of them. Seems like a pretty dumb plan to me. With five guys, firstly you are not all going to squeeze into the pilot's cabin, especially after killing the captain and having to deal with blood and bodies and so forth. Secondly, much better idea to have three of the guys going into the pilot's cabin, and two remaining behind in the body of the plane to keep passengers under control. Or 2 in the cabin, and 3 in the plane. But the idea of just leaving the passengers to do whatever they wanted is obviously not something that Bruce Willis would have signed off on, obviously, because then someone would have tried to take back the plane. See Flight 93.

So we are led to believe that the 81 passengers and remaining flight attendants simply did not have the bottle to smash their way into the cockpit to take back the plane. Come on 'Merica, you can do better than that.

Finally, the idea of not remembering your home phone number under stress. Yes, it happens. But not 4 times. And not when you neeed to be placing a call to the authorities rather than to mum and dad. And not when you have no method of paying for the call except a phonecard which has the home number printed on it that you can't remember.

The take-home point from all of this analysis is that it is impossible to conceive that highly trained, spunky Sara Low could have acted so randomly as to attempt to call her childhood home number 4 times during this crisis. To suggest this, in my view, is to disrespect Sara Low. Obviously, she, or anyone, would do much better than that in a genuine real world situation. The conclusion is inescapable: this was not a genuine real world situation. It was a drill, a storyboard situation.

I suggest the possibility that in the drill she was required to place some calls, and she deliberately chose what she knew to be an old out-of-date number rather than disturbing her parents with a false scenario. Such a scenario restores honor to Sara Low, and doesn't require the suggestion that she faded badly under pressure, just when she needed to be on point.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 42

In compiling the list of the ten calls from flight 11 in the previous post, I noticed something that had not occurred to me before. Actually I can hardly believe that I had overlooked it all this time. I realised that there was one too many connected calls from Amy Sweeney.

She is listed as having three connected calls: at 8:25:20 for 107 seconds; then at 8:29:25 for 43 seconds; finally for the third time at 8:32:39 for 793 seconds.

The second call, at 8:29 is the one that Evie Nunez answers. The third call, at 8:32, is the one that Jim Sayer answers, and passes to Michael Woodward when he gets back from gate 32. But what about that first call, the one at 8:25:20 which lasts for 107 seconds?



I've never stopped and thought about that call before, but when I tried to make sense of the complete list of calls I realised: this does not correspond with any call of Amy Sweeney's that is described elsewhere.

Comparing the graphic to the call records released yields a fascinating discrepancy, and shows why it has remained overlooked. Here they are:







I've always assumed that the first of those three electronic billing records represented one of the calls that didn't get connected, because the duration time is shown as 0 seconds. The other two records show 43 seconds and 793 seconds respectively, which are the Nunez and Sayer/Woodward calls.

But in fact, that first record which appears to show duration of 0 seconds is a connected call. On the Moussai trial graphic shown above it is listed as lasting for 107 seconds. If you look closely at the billing record, and do a bit of googling, what seems to have happened is that the confirmation "handshake" confirming that the call has been answered, has failed to go through. This is the item shown on the billing record as "Answer Supervision".

Quote:

ANSWER SUPERVISION (AS)
An electrical signal fed back up the line by the local
telephone company at the distant end of a long distance call
to indicate positively the call has been answered by the
called party. Tells billing equipment to start timing the
call.

http://www.telephonetribute.com/glostele.htm#a

Let's just put together how these billing records work, by comparing the second and third records with the corresponding government trial exhibit. Take the second call. It is given on the exhibit as starting at 8:29:25. Then on the billing record is is shown as billing starting at 6:29:59, corresponding to 8:29:59. So the billing starts kicking in 24 seconds after the call starts. Then, the "Answer Supervision" occurs 8 seconds later at 6:30:07, which shows that the party at the other end of the line has indeed picked up the call. Then the call continues until it ends at Event Time 6:30:42, which is 43 seconds after the start of billing, and the time given by the trial graphic.

Comparing all this to the first call, it seems that the call went through, and was active for 107 seconds, but for some reason the Answer Supervision didn't register. Reading up on this online, sometimes this can happen. The whole purpose of Answer Supervision is to trigger billing. If it can't be proved by the electronic signal that the call was answered, then it can't be billed. So this is why duration shows 0: it doesn't necessarily mean that the call wasn't connected, but it means that the confirmation signal for this wasn't received, so that it was the call was not billed. I may be wrong on this, as I have no real clue, but it seems to be what is suggested by the way this stuff apparently works. Correct me someone who knows.

But if this is what happened, then it means there is an entire 107 second phone call from Amy Sweeney to Boston Flight Services which is otherwise not mentioned. No one is said to have answered such a call. There is no description of such a call in any of the interviews. So this is weird. Perhaps she called a voicemail line, or otherwise got caught up in some kind of answering machine loop. Perhaps it's a glitch. Without any further information, it's not really possible to take this any further.

With that last loose end out of the way, we are now in a position to lay out a detailed scenario for the drill, one that answers nearly all of the questions that have been raised by this thread.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 43

(Contributions from another forum poster follow)
By SnakeDoctor Nov 6 2014

Hello. I’m new to this forum. LoopDLoop’s magnificent examination of the Flight 11 calls has spurred me to look at the existing documents carefully. I agree wholeheartedly with Loop’s conclusion that both the Ong and Sweeney calls were faked, and that the most likely explanation is that the two women were taking part in what they though was an exercise.

I’d like to jump into this conversation and discuss what I think is evidence that Ong took part in a second call, which was similar to, but in some important ways different from, the call from which we have heard a four-minute excerpt. Either that, or Craig Marquis completely fabricated a story about it—which may indeed be all there is to this, but I’m seeking people’s input on how best to interpret the evidence.

I’ve got a lot to cover, so I’m breaking it up into multiple posts. Hopefully by the end, we’ll either have gotten somewhere with all of this, or else I’ll at least be able to cross off this line of inquiry and move on to something else.

Background

I’m going to refer to three relevant documents:

1. A transcript of a call between Nydia Gonzales, the operations manager at the American Airlines Raleigh reservation center—you’ll recall that she was on the line with Betty Ong, Vanessa Minter, and Winston Sadler—and Craig Marquis, who was manager on duty at the AA Operations Center in Fort Worth Dallas: https://archive.li/o/t2TLj/www.scrib...on-Transcripts
2. An FBI 302 (an agent’s written report) of an interview with Marquis on September 11, 2001: https://archive.li/o/t2TLj/www.scrib...ntire-Contents (pdf pages 49-51)
3. A story from the Wall Street Journal from October 15, 2001, that quotes Marquis: https://archive.li/o/t2TLj/www.wtcli...ohn_Olssen.pdf (pdf pages 6-16)

As Loop has discussed, Ong’s call has only come down to us in a four-minute excerpt, which he has shown was apparently altered between September 11 and 12 (go back to the beginning of this thread if you haven’t read all of it—it’s mind-blowing stuff). This was based on two somewhat different transcripts for what was purportedly the same call.



Nydia Gonzalez (above), at the Raleigh Reservation Center, joined that call in progress and pretty much took it over from that point forward, though Minter and Sadler appear to have stayed on the line. Gonzalez also called Craig Marquis, manager on duty at the Fort Worth Dallas Operations Center, while on the line with Ong.



During this concurrent call, Gonzalez went back and forth between Ong (above left) and Marquis (above right, in a 2012 photo), presumably with a phone in each hand, until Ong’s call was lost. So the Gonzalez/Marquis call gives us Gonzales’ half of the rest of her conversation with Ong and was apparently recorded in full, since we have what seems like a full transcript of it here (pdf pages 7-22). It lasts approximately 24 minutes, from about 8:20 to 8:44. Here is the first page of that transcript:



If you read through this transcript, you will see that Marquis is never linked to Betty Ong through the phone system, and he never talks to her directly. That’s crucial. Everything he learns about Betty he gets second-hand from Gonzalez, albeit in pretty much real time. We don’t know what the acoustical situation was between Gonzalez’s two phones, so we can’t rule out the possibility that Marquis might have overheard some sound from Ong coming across the two handsets (or a handset and a headset, or whatever). But he never speaks directly to Ong—that much is clear.

Why is this important? Because Marquis will tell both the FBI and the Wall Street Journal that he talked directly to Betty Ong.

What Marquis told the FBI

First I’m going to look at the FBI document, which is an FBI 302 detailing an interview with Marquis on September 11, 2001. The full document can be read here (pdf pages 49-51), and here’s the first page:



The problem with a 302 is that it is a couple of steps removed from what actually happened. What we have is a summary written (I think) by the FBI agent who interviewed the eyewitness or participant or whatever. So we have to be cautious about building interpretations on, say, specific word choices or information that isn’t included. Still, I think that we can generally operate on the assumption that the FBI agent has more or less attempted to faithfully record the key information from the interview, though it’s certainly useful when we can corroborate things with other sources.

Having said that, what we see with this 302 is, I believe, a description of a call that differs in some significant respects from the call recorded in the Gonzalez/Marquis transcript. The most important difference is this: Marquis was claiming that he spoke directly to Betty Ong. In my opinion, it’s difficult to read this summary any other way. While we should, as I’ve said, give lots of wiggle room for the author’s wording choices, everything in this document implies a direct conversation between Marquis and Ong.

Let’s look at the first substantive statement:

Quote:

On September 11, 2001, at approximately 7:25 a.m. Central Standard Time, MARQUIS received a telephone call from the number 3 flight attendant on board Flight 11, identified by the crew manifest as B.A. ONG

“MARQUIS received a telephone call from . . . ONG.” That’s pretty straightforward. Not “Marquis received a telephone call from Nydia Gonzalez, who had Betty Ong on the line,” or whatever. Just a call from Ong. Now, we do get some clarification right after that: “This telephone call was initially received by NIDIA GONZALES.” That much matches the transcript, but the third sentence gets us back to the core problem by giving us the actual process by which Marquis’ apparent connection to Ong was established:

Quote:

The call was transferred to central dispatch in Fort Worth, Texas, because there was a disturbance on board and the flight crew was not able to contact the cockpit.

So if we rearrange the information to reflect the apparent chronological order of events, it seems that Ong called Gonzalez, and then Gonzalez transferred the call to Marquis (that is, connected it to him through the phone system).

Now, this little tidbit about the transfer is itself bizarre, as other researchers have pointed out (see for example, Hijacking America's Mind on 9/11: Counterfeiting Evidence by Elias Davidsson, which is really an excellent work that covers a lot of ground). That’s because years later, Marquis will change this part of his story. In his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Marquis will claim that he asked Gonzalez to transfer Ong’s call to him, but she was unable to do so. The real kicker is that neither version is true, according to the Gonzalez/Marquis transcript: Marquis never asks for the call to be transferred, and Gonzalez never gives any indication that she is trying (successfully or not) to transfer the call.

But let’s get back to my main point here: Marquis told the FBI that he talked directly with Betty Ong. We have other phrases like “ONG then informed MARQUIS” and, near the end, “MARQUIS thought that his telephone conversation with ONG was recorded,” which also imply the direct connection unambiguously. There are no statements that contradict this impression—not that I can see anyway.

What Marquis told the Wall Street Journal

Could the FBI interviewer have simply misunderstood Marquis? I might think that a possibility, except that we have a second source that implies a direct connection between the two people—namely, the Wall Street Journal article, which appeared on October 15, 2001. The full article can be found here, but here are the relevant portions:

Quote:

Then, at 7:27 a.m. CDT, Craig Marquis got an emergency phone call.

Mr. Marquis, manager-on-duty at American's sprawling System Operations Control center in Fort Worth, Texas, heard a reservations supervisor explain that an airborne flight attendant, hysterical with fear, was on the phone and needed to talk to the operations center. In the background, Mr. Marquis could hear the flight attendant shrieking and gasping for air.

"She said two flight attendants had been stabbed, one was on oxygen. A passenger had his throat slashed and looked dead, and they had gotten into the cockpit," Mr. Marquis recalls.

In 22 years at American's operations center, Mr. Marquis has made split-second, multimillion-dollar decisions to cancel flights during storms, separate threats from hoaxes and set in motion the airline's response to a crash. But none of that could have prepared him for the morning of Sept. 11, when all he and other American and United Airlines officials could do was listen and watch as the systems they control spun gruesomely out of control.

"I felt so helpless," says Mr. Marquis. "I was along for the ride."

[………………….]

Sitting in the middle of a horseshoe of desks surrounded by screens, phones and computers when his hotline began blinking, Mr. Marquis didn't have time to imagine the unimaginable that was about to take place. Calm and quick-thinking, he told others in the operations center of the call he'd just received from a woman who identified herself as Betty Ong, an attendant aboard Flight 11, a Boeing 767 wide-body that had left Boston 30 minutes earlier. Fearing a hoax, he called up her personnel record and asked her to verify her employee number and nickname.

She did. This was real.

"Is there a doctor on board?" Mr. Marquis remembers asking.

"No. No doctor," Ms. Ong said.

The plane had been headed to Los Angeles, but it turned south over Albany, N.Y., and began flying erratically, most likely when hijackers were killing the plane's two pilots. FAA air-traffic controllers told American's operation center that they could hear arguing over the plane's radio. Ms. Ong, screaming but still coherent, said the four hijackers had come from first-class seats 2A, 2B, 9A and 9B. The fatally injured passenger was in 10B. The hijackers had hit people with some sort of spray that made her eyes burn. She was having trouble breathing, Mr. Marquis recalls her saying.

"Is the plane descending?" Mr. Marquis asked.

"We're starting to descend," Ms. Ong said. "We're starting to descend."

Air-traffic controllers couldn't get a response to frantic voice and text messages to the cockpit. Hijackers had turned off the plane's transponder, which identifies an airplane among hundreds of other blips on a radar, but Mr. Marquis had an aide tell the FAA that American had confirmed a hijacking.

"They're going to New York!" Mr. Marquis remembers shouting out. "Call Newark and JFK and tell them to expect a hijacking," he ordered, assuming the hijackers would land the plane. "In my wildest dreams, I was not thinking the plane was going to run into a building." Mr. Marquis says.

Though the article is less explicit than the 302 on this point, the overall impression here is that Marquis was talking to Ong directly. The author speaks of “the call he'd just received from a woman who identified herself as Betty Ong” and that he “asked her to verify her employee number and nickname.” And then there are the two brief exchanges, the one about the doctor and the one about the plane descending. The idea that the call initially came from someone else starts the episode here, but as in the 302, Gonzalez drops out thereafter.

Now, there may be various reasons to doubt the accuracy of both the 302 and the article, and I plan to address some. On the other hand, there are also additional discrepancies among these two documents and the Gonzalez/Marquis transcript that I think deserve some attention. But let me just hammer this point in: two separate documents from unconnected authors (one of which, the 302, didn’t become public until years later), both based on interviews with Craig Marquis conducted very soon after the event, pretty strongly imply that he claimed to have spoken to Betty Ong. I think it’s safe to say that whatever else they may or may not mean, the two documents corroborate each other on this point.

All of this flat-out contradicts the Gonzalez/Marquis transcript (not to mention the 302 of Gonzalez’s FBI interview). The significance is that, as I’ve suggested, if Craig Marquis talked directly to Betty Ong, he did it on a different phone call; we would need to assume that, for some reason, he referred to that version in the FBI interview and the Journal interview. It would had to have been a different call because the Gonzalez/Marquis transcript purports to be the full call, from Marquis picking up the phone to Gonzalez losing contact with Ong.

Now that’s a big “if,” for a number of reasons, and what I’ve given so far does not in itself make the case. But bear with me: in future posts, I’m going to try to walk through the additional evidence, objections, and ways in which a second call might explain some other weirdness. This post is already running long, so I’ll take a break here and continue on in the next post. In the meantime, I’ll welcome your feedback on this material.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 44

Continued... [Post by SnakeDoctor, 14 Jan 2015]

It has taken me far longer than I’d intended to get back to this post, but I’d like to continue now by looking a bit more closely at the FBI 302 that I referenced in my first post, and some differences from the transcript version of the Marquis/Gonzalez call and, to a lesser extent, the Wall Street Journal article.

In that first post, I put forth and attempted to support a central idea: Craig Marquis told both the FBI and the Wall Street Journal that he spoke directly to Betty Ong, despite the fact that the now-available transcript of his phone call shows that he never did. This is for me the main reason for wondering if a second call (or multiple additional calls), distinct from the one reflected in the transcript and the recording excerpts, may have taken place. But I believe there’s more evidence worth considering.

To transfer or not to transfer . . .

Let’s look at that 302 again. Here it is:





As I have noted, the author presents Marquis as saying that “the call was transferred to central dispatch in Fort Worth, Texas.” The problem? It wasn’t transferred, nor did Nydia Gonzalez attempt to transfer the call, as Marquis would later tell the 9/11 Commission. In the transcript, there is no discussion whatsoever between Gonzalez and Marquis regarding transferring the call. It just doesn’t happen.

One could suggest that by writing “the call was transferred to central dispatch,” the author of the 302 simply meant that Gonzalez called in to the SOC. Perhaps, but I don’t buy that, for a couple of reasons. For one thing, there’s the stuff I argued in my first post—namely, it’s hard to read either the 302 as indicating anything other than a direct conversation between the two, which (had it happened) would indeed have necessitated a transfer through the phone system.

Also, Marquis later amends his story in 2003 to say that Marquis asked Gonzalez to transfer the call, but she was unable to do so. Here is the summary of his testimony to the 9/11 Commission as presented in a Memorandum for the Record dated November 19, 2003: “She [Gonzalez] was on the phone with a Flight Attendant (Betty Ong) onboard the flight, and Marquis wanted the call to be transferred to him, but Ms. Gonzalez was unable to do so.” Here “transferred” means precisely what we would expect it to mean: “connected through the phone system,” not just “routed to him,” as in Gonzalez’s call was routed to Marquis at the SOC.

To me, this is a huge deal. Had the issue of the transfer never come up again, then I might be more amenable to saying, “Yeah, the 302 author just meant that Gonzalez’s call was routed over to Marquis.” But this business of a conversation about a transfer that Marquis comes up with two years later just adds another layer of bull**** on top of things. If he had merely meant that Gonzalez’s call was routed to him, he’d have no reason to talk about this inability to have the call transferred. Remember, if the transcript represents the real call, this exchange is a pure fabrication on Marquis’ part.

To be fair, a conversation of that sort does take place between two other people at around the same time. Ray Howland, who appears to be in the SOC with Marquis, speaks with Nancy Wyatt at Boston Flight Services. Up in Boston, Wyatt is in the room with Michael Woodward, who is talking to Amy Sweeney, the other flight attendant on Flight 11 to place a high-weirdness phone call to people on the ground. In the call transcripts, the following interchange takes place:

Quote:

RAY HOWLAND: Can you conference them [the flight attendants] in with us?
NANCY WYATT: I have no idea how to do that. If you can help me out.

Instead, Wyatt reads aloud Woodward’s notes on what Amy has told him. I suppose it’s sort of possible, if we stand on our heads and squint, to imagine that Marquis might have overheard this exchange and conflated it in his mind with his own conversation. But even that unlikely explanation would only cover his much later claim that a transfer was requested but did not happen (and he seems to explicitly tell the Commission that Gonzalez was the one who said she couldn’t transfer the call, not somebody from Boston Flight Services who was on the line with an entirely different flight attendant). And it seems odd that he would make that mistake two years later when he didn’t make it on the day of the event. Anyway, that does not explain why Marquis told the FBI on 9/11 that the call was transferred to central dispatch in Texas.

So this is all very fishy. In a subsequent post, I want to consider this business of the transferred/unable-to-transfer/never-tried-to-transfer call. For now, there’s plenty more to note about the 302.

A different sequence of events?

Most strikingly, Marquis gives additional details that do not match up with what transpires in either or both of the other two versions. Consider this statement: “The call was transferred to central dispatch in Fort Worth, Texas, because there was a disturbance on board and the flight crew was not able to contact the cockpit. ONG wanted central dispatch to contact the cockpit.” This initial contact between Marquis and Ong differs considerably from the Wall Street Journal article. That version begins with Gonzalez (unnamed in the article and referred to as a reservations supervisor) telling Marquis the following:

Quote:

An airborne flight attendant, hysterical with fear, was on the phone and needed to talk to the operations center. In the background, Mr. Marquis could hear the flight attendant shrieking and gasping for air.

That strikes me as radically different in tone from “a disturbance” on the plane, and Ong wanting central dispatch to “contact the cockpit.” (By “tone” I mean the intensity of the events on the plane, if you will, not the actual writing style; we would expect the writing style to be drier and more fact-based in a 302 than a newspaper article, as indeed it is.)

But it’s not just a matter of tone. I think the 302 implies that (a) Betty was not yet aware that the plane had been hijacked, and (b) no one had been stabbed yet. This is somewhat speculative: as I said in my first post, the 302 is a summary, not a transcript. We are at the mercy of the FBI agent who is writing up the account based on his or her interview notes. So we have to be careful about pinning too much meaning on specific word choices, because those may not be the words the interviewee used (unless quotation marks are present, which in this case they are not).

Nonetheless, I think that, just as the overall sense of the 302 is that Marquis talked directly to Ong, so too the overall sense is of a sequence of events. That sense is reinforced by keywords that signal a sequence (then, by this time, after). And that’s logical: I would think that an FBI agent conducting an interview would attempt to present the facts more or less in the order they actually happened, as told by the interviewee.

So the 302 starts with something that sounds relatively mild: a disturbance and a request to contact the cockpit. Then we get this:

Quote:

During this telephone call, ONG reported that there was a passenger on board who was armed with a knife.

Still no mention of stabbing, just a guy with a knife, so Marquis talks about the hijacker’s identity and recalls that he wondered if it was a Swiss army knife because those were allowed on planes. I think that characterization is kind of important. It feels rather moderate by comparison: Some guy pulls out his Swiss army knife and starts waving it around. A potentially serious matter, yes, but not quite panic material. That tone of the action changes with the next piece of information:

Quote:

ONG then informed MARQUIS that the passenger in seat 9B, DAVID LEWIN [sic], had been fatally stabbed and that the number 1 flight attendant, K.A. MARTIN MARTIN [sic], AA employee number 307280, had been stabbed as well. [my emphasis]

Now they’re finally in the sh*t, right? A passenger stabbed to death and a flight attendant stabbed.

OK, so we really have no way of knowing if the FBI agent misrepresented Marquis’ account, either by accident or on purpose, or how compressed the time frame is supposed to be. But if we take it at face value, with due allowance for the conventions of the genre, so to speak, we get a sense of a situation escalating in severity, even if that happens rather quickly. First the flight attendants can’t get through to the cockpit, then a passenger pulls out a knife, then some people get stabbed.

I don’t mean to push this business of sequence too far. I just want to make a point of how different this seems from the Journal piece, which starts right off with a hysterical and shrieking Betty Ong. It also differs from the transcript. As you’ll remember, that version starts not with Betty shrieking, but with Gonzalez talking about “the pilot . . . everyone” having been stabbed. That too is a rather intense piece of information, however blasé Marquis’ response may be.

Different events entirely?

OK, so let’s move on. Next the 302 tells us, “In addition to these injuries, there were two men trying to gain access to the cockpit, and by this time, all passengers had been removed from first class.” Again we note a phrase that signals a sequence: “by this time.” But the bombshell here is the phrase “there were two men trying to gain access to the cockpit.” Trying to gain access to the cockpit. That’s a remarkable statement. Nowhere else in the Betty Ong transcripts or reports is there a clear indication that her call began before the hijackers had breached the cockpit, nor any suggestion of an attempt to breach the cockpit being in progress during the call.

Now, to be fair, there’s a ton of vagueness in all of the reports in terms of when and how the cockpit gets breached, and trying to work out a sequence of events from the direct recording of Ong herself is more or less hopeless. My favorite gem from Betty is this: “I think the guys are up there. They might have gone there, jammed their way up there, or something. Nobody can call the cockpit. We can't even get inside.” What the hell is this poor woman talking about?

But I digress. The fact remains that the comment in the 302 is the only statement anywhere (to my knowledge) that directly references the Flight 11 cockpit breach in progress. Incidentally, this also brings to mind the very bizarre report by GTE phone rep Lisa Jefferson in her first FBI interview regarding her conversation with Todd “Let’s Roll” Beamer on Flight 93. She said he spoke to her for seven minutes while the hijackers were “preparing to take control of the flight.” (See her 302 here and Elias Davidsson’s discussion in Hijacking America’s Mind on 9/11, p. 188 following.) I don’t know what to make of this similarity.

I want to stress that this business about the men trying to enter the cockpit is very important. For one thing, no reference to this is made in the transcript. The first reference in the Marquis/Gonzalez transcript to hijackers actually in the cockpit is about three minutes in, where Gonzalez, presumably overheard by Marquis, confirms with Ong the following: “You’re saying that the guys that are doing the stabbing they’re in the cockpit?” In the cockpit, not trying to enter it.

There’s also the fact that Ong would have had no reason to make such a statement by the time she was talking to Marquis (through Gonzalez or directly). She had already established that she thought the “guys” had breached the cockpit. Her Crazytown dialogue, “They might have gone there, jammed their way up there, or something”—that’s from the part of the call where her voice was recorded, that magic four minutes which preceded Gonzalez’s call to Marquis. In other words, Ong already knew, or at least suspected, that the hijackers were in the cockpit before Marquis even got on the line.

Where, then, would Marquis even get the idea that the cockpit breach hadn’t happened yet or was in progress during the call?

Naturally, it gets even weirder: “After the men gained access to the cockpit, ONG could hear loud arguing from the cockpit area.” Again there’s the sequence—“After the men gained access”—but more important is the claim that Ong could hear arguing from the cockpit area. That’s a big deal because nowhere else, to my knowledge, is there any mention of arguing, from the cockpit area or anywhere else. We certainly don’t get anything like that from the Gonzalez/Marquis transcript. So, like the mention of hijackers preparing to enter the cockpit, this is completely new information, unique to the 302.

How many “guys”?

As several researchers have pointed out, the number of hijackers is one of the biggest problems for the official story of Flight 11 (and the other flights, for that matter). LoopDLoop did a nice job early in this thread of charting the shifting seat numbers in different source documents and pointing out discrepancies in the numbers. I’m breaking no new ground, then, by reminding readers that neither of our two callers from Flight 11, Betty Ong and Amy Sweeney, spoke of five hijackers as reported in the official story. And despite supposedly being right next to each other as they made their redundant calls, they couldn’t agree on how many hijackers there were or what seats they were sitting in.

But here’s the thing: Betty Ong apparently couldn’t agree with herself on the number either, or so Craig Marquis would have it. While the 302 doesn’t actually total up the number of hijackers, it gives the clear sense that there were at least three. Here’s what it says about the guy with the knife:

Quote:

During this telephone call, ONG reported that there was a passenger on board who was armed with a knife. This passenger was seated in 10B and was identified as TOM ELSUQANI phonetic. [. . .] ONG then informed MARQUIS that the passenger in seat 9B, DAVID LEWIN, had been fatally stabbed and that the number 1 flight attendant, K.A. MARTIN MARTIN, [. . .] had been stabbed as well. [. . .] Besides these two individuals, the number 5 flight attendant, B. ARESTEGUI, AA employee number 167762, had been superficially wounded by the passenger with the knife.

Immediately after this paragraph about the “passenger with the knife” (singular), we get the following:

Quote:

In addition to these injuries, there were two men trying to gain access to the cockpit, and by this time, all passengers had been removed from first class. After the men gained access to the cockpit. ONG could hear loud arguing from the cockpit area.

“In addition to these injuries, there were two men. . .” Once again, we can say nothing with absolute certainty, but to me, this document clearly implies that the two men trying to breach the cockpit were different from the man wielding the knife. That means there were at least three hijackers in total. It just seems logical to me that if the author understood that there were only two men in total, he or she would write something like “ELSUQANI and another man” or “the passenger with the knife and a second passenger,” or whatever. I mean, this is an FBI agent—not a reporter for a high school newspaper—and the interview relates to the most significant national event in decades. It’s hard for me to imagine the author would be so sloppy as to get the number of hijackers wrong. That’s a crucial piece of information.

Why is this important? Because throughout the transcript, Ong sticks to her guns about there being only two “guys.” Her seat numbers change, but the number of hijackers never does. Here are all the statements Gonzalez and Marquis make in the transcript about the number of hijackers; these excerpts are in the correct order, and italicized text indicates that Gonzalez is talking to Ong rather than Marquis:

• [ [Mark Comment: re 'italicized text': most Avalon themes automatically italicize the text for block-quotes (meaning all text is italicized). To get around this, switch to the 'Avalon Air' theme - it has this feature turned off (alternatively Avalon Sun)] ]

Quote:

NYDIA GONZALEZ: You're saying that the guys that are doing the stabbing they're in the cockpit? How many people are we talking about?

Two guys? Do you have a description of . . .

——————

NYDIA GONZALEZ: The flight attendant, Betty, is telling me that the guys . . . there's two men . . . are in the cockpit with the pilots and that the aircraft is flying erratically.

——————

CRAIG MARQUIS: These two passengers were from first class?
NYDIA GONZALEZ: Okay hold on.
Hey Betty, do you know any information as far as the gents . . . the men that are in the cockpit with the pilots, were they from first class?
They were sitting in 2A and B.
CRAIG MARQUIS: Okay.
NYDIA GONZALEZ: They are in the cockpit with the pilots.
CRAIG MARQUIS: Okay.

——————

CRAIG MARQUIS: Hey Mike, I got an incident going on here. Flight 11 (XXX) from Boston to LA (XXX). The number 3 flight attendant called and said that two male passengers onboard stabbed the number one . . .

——————

CRAIG MARQUIS: Right. The passengers were in seats 2A and 2B.

——————

CRAIG MARQUIS: Okay, let me tell you what's going on. The passengers in 2A and 2B, two male passengers, have broken into the cockpit stabbed the number one flight attendant.

——————

NYDIA GONZALEZ: Yes, I'm here Betty.
He's the one that’s in the . . . he's in the cockpit.
Okay, you said Tom Sukani (Satam Al Suqami)? Okay.
Okay and he was in I10B. Okay, okay, so he’s one of the persons that are in the cockpit.
And as far as weapons, all they have are just knives?
Okay.

——————

NYDIA GONZALEZ: Apparently one of the passengers that's in the cockpit the name that they got was Tom Al Zukani (Satam Al Suqami) and he was in 10B not 9A and B as they previously stated.

——————

CRAIG MARQUIS: So, so far we think that Tom Al Sukami (Satain Al Suqami) in 10B.
NYDIA GONZALEZ: 10B is in the cockpit with the pilots.
CRAIG MARQUIS: Okay, and who else?
NYDIA GONZALEZ: Betty, we don't have an idea as to who the other person might be in the cockpit with the pilots. You did mention there was . . . you did mention there was two guys in the cockpit with the pilots correct?
Okay. Do we know who the second passenger might be?

——————

CRAIG MARQUIS: No. She's still in the back. With two guys in the cockpit. The plane is being flown erratically.

——————

NYDIA GONZALEZ: I mean as far as far as the ... Okay. But as far as . . . Two guys that are in the cockpit with the pilot.

——————

CRAIG MARQUIS: Any other indication who the second person is?

NYDIA GONZALEZ: Hey Betty? Have you been able to try to find out who the other person the other passenger might be up in first class in the cockpit?
We know, we've got 10B, Tom Al Zukami (Salam Al Suqami).

——————

NYDIA GONZALEZ: Do we know who are the people in the cockpit? Okay.

——————

NYDIA GONZALEZ: She doesn't have any idea who the other passenger might be in first. Apparently they might have spread something so it's . . . they're having a hard time breathing or getting in that area.

There’s much we could say about these excerpts in support of points Loop and others have made, especially regarding Ong’s repetition of information and apparent reluctance to answer new questions. But all that aside, there is obviously no indication in the transcript that Ong spoke of a third hijacker, and the idea of two hijackers specifically is hammered home with remarkable consistency, considering the fluidity of so many other details. Just as it’s hard to imagine the FBI interviewer incorrectly conveying the number of hijackers, it’s hard to imagine Marquis conveying anything but a clear sense that there were two passengers—if he was truthfully recounting his recollection of the recorded version of the call, that is.

Oh, and one more thing: the Wall Street Journal article, apparently paraphrasing Marquis, has this to say about the number of passengers:

Quote:

Ms. Ong, screaming but still coherent, said the four hijackers had come from first-class seats 2A, 2B, 9A and 9B. [. . .] She was having trouble breathing, Mr. Marquis recalls her saying.

Not two, not three, but four hijackers. Whatever.

So how does it end?

The idea of the 9/11 phone calls getting cut off in the midst of dramatic events—a rapid descent toward water and buildings, a doomed effort to retake the plane, or even the moment of impact—is nearly as iconic as the phone calls themselves. Certainly, that’s what happens in the Marquis/Gonzalez transcript, as in any number of other accounts from the other planes. So it is surprising to find this statement in the Marquis 302:

Quote:

Soon after ONG hung up the telephone, MARQUIS received a call from ED DOOLEY [. . .]

Ong hung up the telephone. Really? Again, it’s risky to pin too much on specific phrases, but we’re not talking about a mere wording issue here. This isn’t about the difference between “Soon after the phone call was disconnected” and “Soon after Marquis lost the call,” or something like that. Rather, it’s a matter of content and accuracy, a matter of what actually happened. As I see it, no sane, intelligent person who understood that the call had been dropped would write of Ong hanging up the phone. The agency is all wrong. Ong didn’t end the call of her own volition, as far as anyone knows. It was ended for her by factors beyond her control, whether that was the plane’s impact or a dropped signal or something else. The FBI agent responsible for the 302 was surely fallible, but I doubt he or she was completely stupid either. If Marquis had told the agent that he or his people had lost the call, I think that would be the general sense conveyed by the 302.

Conclusion

So let’s summarize. The 302 contains the following discrepancies:

• Marquis says he talked directly to Ong. He says this also in the Journal article, but he never talks directly to her in the transcript.
• Ong talks about the hijackers trying to gain access to the cockpit—i.e., in the process of breaking in. The cockpit seems to already have been breached in the transcript version.
• Ong reports hearing loud arguing from the cockpit area, something that is mentioned nowhere else.
• The author of the 302 seems to state that there were at least three hijackers. The transcript has two, while the Journal article has four (and of course the official story has five).
• The author of the 302 says that Ong hung up the phone. The transcript clearly has the call getting dropped.

In addition, there are essentially three completely different versions of what Marquis was greeted with as he picked up the phone: Gonzalez’s bizarre remark about the pilot/everybody being stabbed (transcript), a hysterical Ong being overheard through Gonzalez’s line (Journal article), and Ong reporting a disturbance and an inability to contact the cockpit (302). And the 302 seems to imply a sequence of events that doesn’t match the transcript at all.

I realize that I may be putting a bit too much emphasis on the specific phrasing and arrangement of the 302. In other words, I might be doing precisely what I’m saying we shouldn’t do. But it’s a fuzzy line as to what is and isn’t reasonable to consider there. My impression from reading 302s of other participant interviews is that they tend not to differ from the transcript version to the same extent, or in the same ways, as Marquis’ 302. Actually, I might run through that kind of comparison in a subsequent post to see if that claim holds water.

In any case, I’m as much impressed by the overall sense of things as by any one piece of information. I think in the aggregate, these three roughly contemporaneous sources show a remarkable lack of agreement in describing Betty Ong’s phone call.

To me, the Journal article is the least important of the three documents because a newspaper writer’s shaping of a story to create a coherent and dramatic narrative can inject confusion into any historical event. Here, specifically, the piece is most useful for showing that the writer of the 302 wasn’t completely making up the bit about Marquis talking directly to Ong.

But the FBI 302, for all the potential fallibility of its author and interviewee and the possibility for misunderstanding between the two, should nonetheless be a more reliable account of what happened in a given event. When this document differs considerably from a transcript of a recording of the actual event—ostensibly an infallible record of fact—we have a problem.

I believe the evidence shows that for some reason Marquis initially described to the FBI a different phone call from the one that appears to have been recorded—whether or not it was a real call. In other words, it’s not just that he drops Gonzalez, the middleman, out of the equation; it’s the very substance of the call he describes that is the problem. In a subsequent post, I’ll consider the implications of this conclusion. And as always, I welcome feedback.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 45

Following contribution by member, 911conspiracyT
Posted 18 Sep 2016

For the below quote/excerpt, most if not all of these points have been made already in this thread, but in summary here's Elias Davidsson from Hijacking America's Mind on 9/11: Counterfeiting Evidence, 2013, pp. 162-164, the last of 34 pages on the Flight 11 phone calls.

Conflicting Reports of Ong and Sweeney

Some of the differences between Ong's and Sweeney's accounts may be attributed to the assumed fact that Ong was sitting at the back of the airliner while Sweeney was said to move about and would have been partly in proximity to the alleged hijackers. This might explain the difference in seat numbers of the "hijackers" given by Ong and Sweeney, the fact that Sweeney gave a summary description of the "hijackers" ("Middle Eastern males"), that she reported about their English language skills, and that she saw something resembling a bomb in their hands.

Other differences, however, cannot be attributed to their presumed locations within the aircraft:

- Ong complains repeatedly of mace and of difficulties in breathing. Yet, Sweeney -- who is apparently moving between the front and the rear of the aircraft -- does not mention mace or pepper-spray. This suggests that Ong reported a non-existing situation.

- Ong states (via Nydia Gonzalez) that the passengers from first class had been moved to coach, in part because of the difficulties in breathing. Sweeney does not mention such move. She would certainly have done so, had this occured.

- Sweeney mentioned (via Sayer and Woodward) that a doctor and nurse were treating a slashed passenger. Yet, according to Ong (via Nydia Gonzalez) there was no doctor on board.

- Ong mentions repeatedly that the plane flies "erratically." This is not mentioned by Sweeney. Sweeney, on the other hand, emphasizes that the aircraft is descending rapidly, whereas Ong only "thinks" it is descending, suggesting that this is not so obvious.

- Sweeney mentions the seat numbers of the alleged hijackers as 10B, 9D and 9G, whereas Ong mentions seat numbers 10B, 2A and 2B. Both of them mention the presence of no more than three "hijackers" on board, yet according to the official tally they were five.

Further anomalies

In addition to the conflicting reports, the testimonies of both Ong and Sweeney contain anomalies that undermine the credibility of their account:

- Neither Ong nor Sweeney explain or even suggest how the alleged hijackers broke into the cockpit. Even if they did not personally witness their entry into the cockpit, their entry must have been at least witnessed by first class passengers sitting in proximity. The following seven passengers in first class had the cockpit in their line of sight (See Seating Diagram): Carol Bouchard (3B), Carol Flyzik (3H), Laura Morabito (2D), Renee Newell (3A), David Retik (2H), Sonia Puopolo (3J), and Richard Ross (2J). Yet none of these passengers apparently told the flight attendants how the "hijackers," who allegedly wielded knives and a bomb, broke into the cockpit. We furthermore note that Ong and Sweeney did not appear curious about the manner by which the cockpit was allegedly broken into.

- Both Ong and Sweeney emphasized that coach passengers were unaware of the hijacking. Yet both reported that two flight attendants had been stabbed and a passenger in 9B, later identified as Daniel Lewin, had been murdered by a passenger from seat 10B. A person slashed with a knife does not die instantaneously. The victim's reactions and his heavy bleeding would have drawn the attention of all proximate passengers, such as those sitting in seat numbers 9A (Edmund Glazer), 11D (Carolyn Beug), and 11B (Christopher Mello) (See Seating Diagram). If not actually attempting to jump the attacker, these passengers would have immediately alerted the crew and their fellow passengers to the act of violence they had observed and urged people to neutralize the attacker. Yet, there is no evidence of any passengers trying to neutralize the attacker of Daniel Lewin or spreading the information around. This alleged unawareness of the coach passengers is furthermore puzzling in the light of Ong's repeated claims that mace or pepper-spray that made breathing difficult, even to her, sitting at the rear of the aircraft. The lack of awareness by passengers of a major crisis aboard the plane suggests that no such crisis took place.

- Sweeney claims that one of the hijackers spoke English well (or very well) and another spoke English badly or spoke no English. It follows from her statement that the hijacker who spoke English well (or very well), had said something intelligible that she had understood. Yet, in her reports to Nunez, Sayer and Woodward, she did not mention anything that this hijacker had said. This omission is surprising, for flight attendants are specificallly instructed to report hijackers' statements. Had she heard a "hijacker" say something, she would certainly have reported what he said. As we assume that Sweeney was a trained and conscientious flight attendant, this omission suggests that the hijackers said nothing, that the person who said something was no hijacker, or that the story of these hijackers was bogus.

- Listeners to Ong's and Sweeney's calls expressed their admiration for the professional calm displayed by these flight attendants while reporting these dreadful events. Keeping calm in a crisis situation is certainly admirable, but even professionals cannot hide their anxiety in the presence of existential threats, such as murders being committed in close proximity to them. It is one thing to report the heart failure of a passenger and another to report that one's colleague is being murdered a few feet away. Presuming that Ong and Sweeney possessed human empathy, as is typical of flight attendants, their sober reporting suggests that no one was actually being stabbed or murdered aboard the airplane.

- According to the official account, Ong's telephone call lasted 27 minutes. She sat all that time talking on the phone while colleagues and passengers were allegedly being murdered. It defies belief that a competent flight attendant would sit calmly and chat away in such circumstances. Such a person would be rushing to the help of the victims and try to calm frightened passengers. Presuming that Ong was a responsible, dedicated flight attendant and a loyal colleague, the only conclusion from her puzzling conduct is that she was not reporting real events.

- Neither Ong nor Sweeney mentioned the radical course change by the aircraft, reported in the official flight path of AA11, yet they knew the route by heart. They would have immediately noticed a radical change of course, had it occurred. The fact that they did not mention it suggests either that the aircraft did not make this turn, but continued according to its flight plan, or that they were not calling from an aircraft.

Concluding observations about the AA11 calls

Only two persons are known to have made phone calls "from flight AA11": Betty Ong and Madeline (Amy) Sweeney, both of them veteran flight attendants. In addition, air traffic controllers said they heard radio communications they attributed to the alleged suicide-pilot on flight AA11, that is, Mohamed Atta. These communications were not, however, forensically traced to a particular location. They could have emanated from anywhere.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 46

Reply by OP [loopDloop]

Thanks 911conspiracyT for your post, and for making the thread available as a standalone pdf. Also for posting some of Elias Davidsson's insights.

Most of them I would agree with. The last one however is not quite right...

Quote:

- Neither Ong nor Sweeney mentioned the radical course change by the aircraft, reported in the official flight path of AA11, yet they knew the route by heart. They would have immediately noticed a radical change of course, had it occurred. The fact that they did not mention it suggests either that the aircraft did not make this turn, but continued according to its flight plan, or that they were not calling from an aircraft.

If you look at the record of the call between Nydia Gonzalez and Craig Marquis, in which Nydia has another line open on which she is listening to Betty Ong's call at the Raleigh Reservation Center, there is an interesting exchange at the 16:00 minute mark of that call:



According to Gonzalez, Ong is saying that the plane is flying erratically, and then, at the 18:00 minute mark, there is this:



Here she goes on to say that the plane is now descending. So, according to Ong via Gonzalez, the plane starts making these moves around the 16:00 to 18:00 minute mark of the Marquis conversation. These timestamps are relative to the start of the Marquis-Gonzalez conversation, which began at around 8:22am approximately. If we add 16 minutes to this, we come to 8:38am, and 18 minutes brings us to 8:40am.

If we now consult my handy timeline guide to the phone calls, (which you can view here), you can see that the flight began to descend, according to the radar tracking, at around 8:37:30 am.

So, in fact, Ong does report the plane entering into its descent phase of the flight at pretty much the correct time. Sweeney's call, as noted by Woodward, also mentions rapid descent, towards the end of the call, but it is not possible to put an exact time on this. But it's broadly in the right timezone, and it confirms what Ong has reported.

So, actually, both Ong and Sweeney report the plane descending at what is near enough to the correct time as shown by the radar tracking.

So Davidsson's point is not quite accurate on this item. While it is true that neither of them mention the turn to the left when the plane changes direction to follow the Hudson River earlier in the flight but, as noted, they do broadly get the descent phase correct.

This is interesting I think, as it shows, that either the calls were being made from the object which was being tracked on radar, or, alternatively, the script was sufficiently well-written to have Ong and Sweeney describe the descent at the correct time.

In any case, it is very good to see this thread re-opened. As I keep hinting, I haven't quite finished yet, so this seems like a good moment for me to finally complete what I started. Over the next few days, I will go ahead and update the thread with some further remarks. The most important of these is to correct a couple of errors which I have made. Some of these are reasonably trivial, but one in particular is major. This relates to the original blogpost by rwarner which kicked off my whole interest in this topic. Basically I misunderstood what he was saying in that blogpost, and the misunderstanding turns out to be quite crucial.

So the first task will be to correct that information. In so doing, I think it is possible to finally be able to state definitively how those phone calls were made from flight 11. And with that sorted, we will then be in a position to draw some further firm conclusions about what was going on, who knew, and how it was set up. So it's time to wrap up this thread.

--------------------------------------

Quote:

Rwagner66 postulates that the originating number of the calls, 904-555-0004 (which is the same on both AA11 & AA77),informs us that “SOMETHING” was plugged into external port # 4 of the Claircom box, to enable the all-important tell-tale hijacking propaganda phone-calls to be connected to the outside world. I suspect loopDloop has now reached the conclusion that this “something” was not a headset in a predetermined location as he originally conjectured, but that it was the picocell rwagner66 described, which acted as an onboard cell phone base station, and facilitated otherwise improbable cell phone calls on these 2 particular flights.

Thanks for your contributions, Ruby Gray. Lots of good comments. In particular, you are exactly right with your conjecture above! I was in fact way off-base with the headset idea. Not sure where it came from, but it was completely wrong! In any case, as you state above, and as I finally realised: it's a picocell which is plugged into the Claircom box, not a headset. With this clarified, many pieces of the puzzle fall into place, as we will soon see.

But even with that misconception, as you also note above, it is possible to deduce two clear implications which flow from rwagner66's brilliant observation, :

Quote:

The obvious inference of this theory is, that there was deliberate manipulation aforethought of the Airphone system on the 2 planes AA11 and AA77, prior to 9-11, by highly skilled technicians with regular access to the aircraft. This work clearly could not have been carried out by itinerant Arab hijackers, but implicates home-grown plotters in high places.

Not only this, but it needs to be asked … WHY would Flight Attendants even attempt to make cellphone calls on their planes? They of all people, would have been cognizant of the fact that this would prove unsuccessful, in the normal scheme of things. It seems that they must have been prompted to “Just give it a go, anyway”.

I agree with you. If rwagner66 is correct, then this implies that (1) the calls must have been made from a pre-prepared location, and (2) the flight attendants who made the calls must have been pre-briefed. That's pretty much as far as I had taken it in this thread so far. Because I hadn't grasped the implications of the picocell, I had (mistakenly) thought that perhaps the calls were made from a pre-prepared location at Logan Airport. Now however, with the role of the picocell clarified, I realise that this cannot be the case, for very good reasons that I will soon present and discuss (some of which you have actually touched on in your posts above Ruby Gray!).

The time has come therefore to sort out the technical details of the picocell, and to grasp the full implications of rwagner's observations. Combining this information with the analysis arrived at so far in this thread will then allow us to take these conclusions about Flight 11 several steps further.

So, let's get to it, and finish this. Without further ado, I present:

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 47

Part II: Fog, Fiction and the Flight 11 Phone Calls
By loopDloop

Quote:

"Did I assume she was on a cell phone, is that correct?"

- AA head of security Larry Wansley in phone conversation 9/12/01 with reservations supervisor Lydia Gonzalez, who had talked to Betty Ong on AA 11.

Way back in mid-2012, I started writing a thread here at LRF called Fog Fiction and the Flight 11 Phone Calls.

I was inspired to do this by a fascinating blog post which had appeared at Let’s Roll from a one-time poster rwagner66.

I’ve been intrigued by the question of the 9/11 phone calls from literally the first week after it all happened back in 2001. How could they have been made? Were they real? What was really going on? rwagner66’s post provided some crucial clues and insights as to what might have happened. It seemed to me that this was a real breakthrough, and there was now an opportunity to make significant progress in unravelling the mystery of the calls. I decided to take another look at the topic.

I soon realised that part of the problem was the subject was just too big to get a handle on. There was too much information when you looked at all the calls from all the flights, and all the aspects that related to them. I decided on a new approach: I would restrict myself to just the Flight 11 calls. Further, I would throw away all my assumptions, beliefs, opinions, and start again with a clean slate. So I set out to read and review everything I could find which related specifically to those Flight 11 calls.

The result was the Fog Fiction thread. Frankly, if I may say so, I blew my own mind with what I discovered. The whole business was far stranger that I had imagined in the 11 years since 9/11.

And yet, for all the progress that I think I managed to make, ironically, I had made a fundamental error on which all my tentative conclusions were based. I had completely misunderstood the key technical points of rwagner66’s blog post. Well, perhaps “completely” is taking it a little too far: I did grasp the fundamental point that he had made, which was that the calls were made from a location which had been pre-prepared with the installation of equipment which made the cell calls possible.

But I had misunderstood the specific technical details, and as a result, my conclusions were off.

Eventually I realised that I had not really properly understood what rwagner66 had been saying in his blog post. So in late 2014, I decided to sort it out. I wanted to understand fully what he had discovered, and the best way to do that was to track him down and ask him. So I did. The result was a deeply fascinating conversation with a remarkable man. In the next post, I’m going to introduce him, and discuss the insights that he provided. When these results were combined with the fruits of my research for the original Fog Fiction thread, some very surprising and remarkable conclusions emerged. I realised that I was going to have to revisit my work, and correct and revise my original results.

It’s taken a while, but finally, here it is. The fog is lifting.

So now, without further ado, let’s meet rwagner66, the man who solved the puzzle of the 9/11 phone calls….

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 48

Meet Robert Wagner.



A fascinating guy. Here is his profile at Quora, where he was ranked a "Top Writer", with over 2,700 questions answered.

Quote:

Robert Wagner
Writes beautiful code
Retired software developer and manager, tournament racquetball player, options trader, bicycler, USMC recon scout, vegetarian cook, high school dropout.

And that's not the half of it. However, the first thing to clarify before we go any further is that, sadly, Robert Wagner passed away in mid-2015. So I was very glad indeed that I had the opportunity to have an extended email conversation with him in 2014.

The guy knows his stuff. He has a unique cv. First, he was a Marine as a young man, and actually participated in two separate false flag operations. You can follow his account of these here and here at Quora. Well worth a moment to read.

After he left the Marines, (USMC Reconnaissance), he went into IT and telephony. He was became IT manager at a national credit card company at age 23, and went on to spend a career in the tech side of big business and management. So here is a guy who was almost uniquely qualified to talk about the intersection of the military, false flags, telephones and computers. Just the kind of guy who could figure out how the phone calls were made.

And he did.

Here it is:
Quote:

American Airlines 757s were equipped with a system branded Air One that had two boxes: a front-end that handed seatback phones (collected card swipes) and a back-end that handled the air-to-ground link run by Claircom, which used terrestrial stations, not satellites. United Airlines had Verizon's similar Airphone system with seatback ph0nes functional. American had turned off the front-end boxes in late 2000 because they were phasing out seatback phones. Since seatback handsets were non-functional, why do we see calls coming through the system? The back-end box had multiple interface jacks for future expansion with things like WiFi. This call came through a box plugged into port 4. This is not speculation, the evidence above says so. That box could only have been a cellular base station called a picocell (aka microcell).

This detail is significant because it proves someone other than the hijackers was involved. That party was either spying on or assisting hijackers. The Claircom box and corresponding Verizon boxes were not accessible from passenger compartments. Someone installed picocells in four planes ahead of time.

- from the thread Why Do Conspiracy Theorists Disbelieve the Official Story. at Quora.

Picocells. Someone had installed picocells in the planes. These plugged into the existing "Claircom" box, which in normal use was installed to transmit the phone calls from the seat-back phone system to the outside world. A picocell provides cell phone coverage over a small area. With a picocell plugged into the external port #4 on the back of the Claircom box, this meant that cell phones inside the plane now had coverage!

And that is how the cell phone calls were made. Picocells were installed and plugged into the Claircom box. Now, anybody who knew this, or who pulled out their phone and switched it on, would see that they had mobile phone signal within the body of the aircraft, something which is not normally the case as you can check for yourself next time you fly.

I don't know where I got the idea that there was a headphone plugged into that external port #4 but I was way off base. So, anyway, now it's clear: the calls were made from cell phones, which were working because of the local signal provided by the picocell, which was plugged into the Claircom box, which then transmitted the call to the outside world into the cell phone network via ground stations.

The implications of this for the flight 11 story are huge.

But first, before we get to that, let's delve a little into the history of picocells, what they are, when they were invented, and the story of their roll-out. It's a fascinating tale which is highly relevant to 9/11....

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 49

Picocells: what exactly are these? From wikipedia:

Quote:

A picocell is a small cellular base station typically covering a small area, such as in-building (offices, shopping malls, train stations, stock exchanges, etc.), or more recently in-aircraft. In cellular networks, picocells are typically used to extend coverage to indoor areas where outdoor signals do not reach well, or to add network capacity in areas with very dense phone usage, such as train stations or stadiums. Picocells provide coverage and capacity in areas difficult or expensive to reach using the more traditional macrocell approach.

Pretty clear. If you have a small location which isn't getting good cell coverage, you install a picocell. Problem solved.

But now that's an interesting quote: "more recently in-aircraft". How recently exactly? You still can't make a cell phone call in the USA. That's about to change. But in Europe, it's been possible since 2008.

Quote:

https://archive.li/o/XyXR4/www.nytim...7cnd-cell.html

Europe Takes Step Toward In-Flight Cellphones
By STEPHEN CASTLE APRIL 7, 2008

The European Commission announced plans on Monday that will let airlines offer midair cellphone calls to passengers across the European Union, removing a major obstacle for companies that want to sell the service.
With the new regulations, the commission will unify cellular licensing requirements and technical standards to cover mobile phones as they cross multiple boundaries in the air.

That is likely to prompt a scramble among leading airlines to give their passengers access to in-flight calls on their own phones. Already, national regulators in Britain have said they were ready to grant licenses, and Air France, Ryanair and BMI are either holding trials or have plans to make an in-flight phone service available.

Still, a few more steps need to be completed — like rate-setting by mobile networks and installing equipment by airlines — before the skies are alive with the sound of ring tones at 10,000 feet and above.

Under the technology covered by the commission’s rules, passenger phones would be linked to onboard cellular networks that are then connected to the ground via satellite, while ensuring that transmission levels for incoming and outgoing calls are low enough to avoid affecting the safety of aircraft equipment. Passengers will be allowed to turn their phones on after the plane reaches 10,000 feet, when other electronic devices are permitted.

The move by Viviane Reding, the European commissioner responsible for telecommunications, would allocate space on the limited radio spectrum and ensure that licenses granted in one member state are recognized in all 27 countries in the group. That means that, for example, a plane registered in France or Spain would be able to offer mobile communication services to passengers while flying over Germany or Hungary without additional licensing.

...

The new standards will cover G.S.M. phones operating in the 1,800 megahertz frequency band, which are estimated to account for more than 90 percent of European air passengers, according to the commission.

The systems use an on-board base station in the plane called a picocell that communicates with passengers’ own phones. Though low power, the picocell creates a network area big enough to encompass the cabin of the plane.

The base station routes phone traffic to and from the plane to an orbiting satellite that connects to mobile networks on the ground. Meanwhile, a network control unit on the plane is used to ensure that mobile phones in the plane do not connect to any base stations on the ground.

So Europe has had this technology now for nearly a decade. But there is a small point to note in that article: it relates to GSM cell phones only. This is by far the most popular protocol for cell phone networks in Europe. In the USA however, most cell phone networks employ the CDMA protocol, developed by Qualcomm. So your standard US cell phone is not going to work on those European flights.

So what about in-flight picocells which work on CDMA protocol? We'll get to that in a moment. But first let's have a little more technical detail on the European system. Here is a very nice graphic for a start which shows how the system works:



Keep in mind that this is the European GSM system, but all of the elements are similar in the CDMA system which we will discuss in the next post, and which was (covertly) installed in the 9/11 planes. It shows the picocell, labelled as number1. Then it shows the GSM server, labelled 2, which is the equivalent of the "Claircom" box. From here the signal is sent to a satellite, which then relays it down to the ground station, and from there it is fed into the terrestrial network.

So the technology certainly exists, and is operational in Europe. But what about the USA?

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 50

Funny thing, the technology for CDMA cell phone picocells was deployed and tested in the USA some four years before the Europeans announced their plans with the GSM version. Here is a press release from Qualcomm in 2004:

Quote:

American Airlines and Qualcomm Complete Test Flight to Evaluate In-Cabin Mobile Phone Use

Proof-of-Concept Event Highlights Safe and Reliable Mobile Phone Technology Using CDMA on a Commercial Aircraft

JUL 15, 2004 FORT WORTH, TEXAS AND SAN DIEGO

Qualcomm Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM), pioneer and world leader of Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA) digital wireless technology, and American Airlines, the world’s largest carrier, today successfully demonstrated in-cabin voice communications using commercially available CDMA mobile phones on a commercial American Airlines aircraft. Through the use of an in-cabin third-generation (3G) “picocell” network, passengers on the test flight were able to place and receive calls as if they were on the ground.

The proof-of-concept demonstration flight originated out of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport. During the approximate two-hour flight, passengers were able to place and receive phone calls and text messages on their mobile phones. Passengers included members of the media and government representatives.

https://archive.li/o/XyXR4/https://w...e-cabin-mobile

Are you paying attention? Proof-of-concept for CDMA picocells in aircraft was carried out in an American Airlines aircraft in 2004. Well hmmmmm....



How long do you suppose they had been working on this? To answer that question, we can turn to an article published on an Israeli website around the same time. The following is reprinted in full, and deserves close attention.

Quote:

Israeli-developed airplane cell phone technology takes flight

By David Brinn DECEMBER 5, 2004, 11:00 PM

http://www.israel21c.org/israeli-dev...-takes-flight/

Dr. Irwin Jacobs, chairman and CEO of Qualcomm, speaks on his cell phone during an American Airlines flight originating out of the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.There are many inconveniences to air travel. But if you want to get someplace fast, you’ll put up with almost anything – the cramped seats, the big guy sitting next to you, the baby crying in front of you, and – the food.

But one of the biggest sacrifices – especially in today’s fast-paced environment – of not being able to use your cell phone, is quickly becoming history thanks to an Israeli-developed system which enables in-flight cell phone use.

American-based pioneer and world leader in CDMA technology, Qualcomm (Nasdaq: QCOM) and its subsidiary Qualcomm Israel teamed with American Airlines last summer to demonstrate satellite-based air-to-ground cellular service. And after two years of development by Qualcomm Israel, American and Qualcomm officials circled the West Texas skies this past summer making calls from their cell phones in a flight authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Communications Commission to test the technology’s safety and transmission quality.

Qualcomm, a world leader in digital wireless communications, successfully demonstrated in-cabin voice communications using commercially available CDMA mobile phones on a commercial American Airlines aircraft. Through the use of an in-cabin third-generation (3G) ‘picocell’ network, passengers on the test flight were able to place and receive calls as if they were on the ground.

“During the flight, we were able to support about 10 calls, as well as SMS text messages,” Qualcomm Israel’s Boaz Bryger told ISRAEL21c from the company’s Haifa offices. “We tried every combination – incoming and outgoing, from mobile to mobile, land to mobile, etc… The voice quality was good, and the system was stable.”

Bryger is the director of engineering at the company’s Israel headquarters and he headed the engineering team that was in charge of the pico cell project.

“The vast majority of the of the research and development was done in Israel while the business development was done at our headquarters in San Diego,” Bryger said.

The in flight demo was a combination of two QUALCOMM programs: the ‘Wireless Cabin’ R&D project that came out of QC Headquarters in San Diego, and has been active for two years specifically investigating aircraft interference, terrestrial interference and other factors; and the Israeli-office centric picocell project that had also been in development for about two years at the time of the demo, and has been the enabler for the “proof of concept” demonstration for the Wireless Cabin project.

Qualcomm’s Base Station Sytem uses a laptop computer-sized device called a “pico cell” inside the airplane to act like a small cellular tower which interacts with the cell phones on board. The signals are then beamed through a Globalstar satellite for distribution to ground networks.

In cellular phone networks, ‘pico cells’ are the smallest variation of radio cells. Pico cells are used in congested mobile phone areas, such as enterprises, city centers or at exhibition centers, replacing the larger micro cells or macro cells in these areas. The miniaturization of cell structures allows a great increase in the local capacity of mobile phone networks, and that, according to Bryger, is one of the keys for in flight cell phone communication

“Our pico cell program entailed coming up with a reference design for CDMA infrastructure with new attributes – basically dramatically reduced size and cost – which then enables the infrastructure to be deployed on airplanes for example,” he said.

CDMA stands for Code Division Multiple Access – a digital technology pioneered by Qualcomm that is the basis of the project’s success. It provides crystal clear voice quality in a new generation of wireless communications products and services. Using digital encoding “spread spectrum” radio frequency (RF) techniques, CDMA provides much better and cost effective voice quality, privacy, system capacity, and flexibility than other wireless technologies, along with enhanced services such as short messaging, e-mail and Internet access.

A small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station on the plane, that uses standard cellular communications, was connected to the worldwide terrestrial phone network by an air-to-ground Globalstar satellite link.

Bryger explained that the Israeli engineers succeeded in reducing the base station system which comprises of a Base-station Transceiver Sub-system (BTS) and a Base Station Controller (BSC) which controls the BTS – from the traditional size of a refrigerator to the size of a laptop, in order to make it functional in the small space of an airplane.

“The key attributes of the new reference design is the improved size – which influences the cost. The other key attribute is that the cellular infrastructure is implemented using internet technology. The interface between the BSC and the base station, and the cellular switch are all based on IP (internet protocol) standards. What we’ve developed is an IP-based wireless access network.”

“Pico cell technology has become a catchword – it’s really a semi-marketing name for the base station. It’s called pico to indicate that it’s extremely small. Cellular communication is all about cells being transmitted from a base station. Whenever you move the base station indoors, the potential space shrinks, thus the motivation to minimize the size of the base station,” he added.

Qualcomm Israel employs mostly software and hardware engineers. According to Bryger, about 90 percent of the engineers are graduates of the Technion, the prestigious Israeli university. With that clout behind it, Bryger was confident that the Israeli technology involved was up to par, and that the test flight was going to be successful.

“We had done a lot of testing over the previous two years, and the development process was fairly mature,” he said.

“It worked great,” Monte Ford, American Airlines’ chief information officer, and the special flight’s host told a press conference after landing. “I called the office. I called my wife. I called a friend in Paris. They all heard me great, and I could hear them loud and clear.”

According to USA Today, developers of the new technology say travelers will use their cell phones in flight if the price is right. And that right price is probably less than $1 a minute. Customers could pay by entering their credit card numbers when they place a call, or they could see the charges added to their monthly cell phone bills.

“The system, being IP based, makes it very flexible once you want to apply it to other moving scenarios – like cruise ships – or in remote rural areas,” said Bryger.

“Today, we’re in the process of commercializing the system. The technology is here, but there are many regulatory issues with the FAA. The ‘Wireless Cabin’ program team in San Diego has done a lot of engineering work and testing to prove that the system does not cause any interference to communications between the airplane and the flight control on the ground.”
Bryger estimates that the in-flight cell phone will be operable on planes within two years, and within a short time after that, will become a standard feature on all flights.

So then, instead of worrying about your cramped seat and the screaming baby, you’ll have to deal with rows of cell phone communicators. But won’t it be nice to know that a call home is only a touch away, even when you’re a thousand miles away and a mile high?

Quite a few eye-opening statements in there. Firstly, the technology was developed in Israel. Good for them. We will come back to that point.

Secondly, there is this highly relevant snippet: "A small in-cabin CDMA cellular base station on the plane, that uses standard cellular communications, was connected to the worldwide terrestrial phone network by an air-to-ground Globalstar satellite link."

Notice that. The signal goes from the Claircom box in the plane to a satellite, before being bounced down to the ground station. This is the same basic architecture as shown in the graphic in the previous post for the Air France system. This is interesting for two reasons right now: First, it highlights a minor mis-statement in Robert Wagner's Quora post where he said "and a back-end that handled the air-to-ground link run by Claircom, which used terrestrial stations, not satellites. " I think he meant terrestrial stations via satellites, but too late to check with him now.

More importantly in the overall picture, it answers a question which has been posed in only the last day or two on the original Fog Fiction thread. This is getting slightly ahead of the story, so we will come back to this point, but those of you following the discussion on the other thread might pick up on what I am suggesting here....

But the most revealing aspect of this article about the tests of the Qualcomm system on the American Airlines aircraft is the timeline. Let's pull those quotes out and line them up. Remember, the article was written in December 2004. The tests took place "last summer" which would be summer 2004. This was "after two years of development". That would take us back to summer 2002. How accurate would that figure be? Well, there is one more clue:

Quote:

the Israeli-office centric picocell project that had also been in development for about two years at the time of the demo, and has been the enabler for the “proof of concept” demonstration for the Wireless Cabin project.

Well fancy that. "About two years". I'm going to go right out on a limb here and call them out on that one. They didn't start working on this picocell project in Israel in summer 2002. It was "about two years", meaning "we will admit to two years but actually it was a bit longer but if we made it any longer that would bring the date back to, oh, say, the year before, 2001. But we don't want anyone thinking too hard about the idea of Israeli high-technology companies working on picocells in aircraft in conjunction with American Airlines back in 2001 because that might give people some dangerous ideas. So let's call it "about two years"."

Quote:

“We had done a lot of testing over the previous two years, and the development process was fairly mature,” he said.

They were working on this prior to 9/11. Simple as that.

The fog is starting to lift alright.

Quote:

"Did I assume she was on a cell phone, is that correct?"

- AA head of security Larry Wansley in phone conversation 9/12/01 with reservations supervisor Lydia Gonzalez, who had talked to Betty Ong on AA 11.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 51

In retrospect, it seems now blindingly obvious. Of course there must have been picocells installed. That's the only way to make cell phone calls work on an in-flight aircraft. The wonder is that it took as long as it did for someone, Robert Wagner in this case, to figure it out.

Remember how it used to go back in the heady days of 2003-2003-2004: the cell phone calls were "impossible", therefore they could not have happened, they must have been faked, or the flights must not have existed yada yada yada? Remember when Professor Dewdney hired a plane in Canada for test flights to actually see if a cell phone would work at 10,000, 20,000, 30,000 feet? Of course, it didn't. That whole cell phone thing threw us all off course for more than a decade. It's time to rewind.

Picocells. That's the only way to make a cell phone call from a plane. Ok, fair enough, the technology was not in the public domain back then in 2001 for picocells in aircraft. But now we know it, we can plug this result back into all of the other evidence that has been built up, and, I suggest, make some significant breakthroughs.

Because the key point is this: someone had to have installed those picocells in the planes. Who? And why?

I admit that I was also trying too hard to make the cell phone story fit the narrative of flight 11 not existing on 9/11, like the famous NTSB data which shows that the wheels did not move. And then there was the whole business of the empty plane at the gate. So, I got a bit ahead of myself and assumed that this picocell business, though I didn't fully understand it, must have been set up in some secret room at Logan Airport. But I was wrong, and this can be proven now.

Congratulations to new forum member Ruby Gray who also figured this bit out: the cell phone electronic records which were released show a bunch of different ground station ID's from the different calls, and even from the same calls at different times. This definitively rules out the possibility that the calls could have been made from a fixed location. (I hear people already saying, maybe the electronic records were faked, which point I will address in a moment).

Ruby Gray tracked down the location of the Ground Station ID's from the records for flight 77 from hand-written notes helpfully left on the cell phone record receipts by the FBI. You can read about this in the first Fog thread on this page.

But in the case of the flight 11 Ground Station IDs, there are no such handwritten notes. So, unfortunately it is not possible to work out which geographic locations these correspond to. I have searched high and low on the internet in vain for a list of these Ground Station ID's because obviously it would be extremely valuable information. What do you know, it doesn't appear to be anywhere available. Perhaps, do you suppose, it has been scrubbed? Whatever, it's not available.

So this means we cannot track the ground station locations that the flight 11 phone calls were routed through. That would potentially be very interesting as it might show if the flight went off-route, or was diverted. It would be tricky, as there are satellites involved also so it's hard to be sure of the relationship between plane and satellite and ground station, but it doesn't matter. We don't have the ID's so we can't go down that route.

What we can say for sure is that the calls were made from a moving location, as the Ground Station IDs change, which rules out my half-baked theory in the first part of this thread. The calls were not made from Logan Airport. This opens back up the issue of the NTSB data and the empty plane, but that's ok. I'm tracking the phone calls wherever they lead and let the chips fall where they may. (For completeness, it's still possible I suppose that they disembarked everyone after the doors closed and put people on other flights, or something, leaving the empty plane at Gate 32. I don't know. But whatever: those flight 11 calls were made from a moving, flying location, so it may as well have been "flight 11". Let's not get bogged down on this point for now....The calls weren't made from a room at Logan Airport is the point.)

So before we move on: could the electronic records have been faked? Well. Sure. Anything can be faked. But they weren't. If they had been, they would have taken care to get the phone numbers sorted out so that it didn't reveal the existence of the picocell plugged into external port 4 on the Claircom box. Perhaps someone screwed up? Look: if you want to go down that route, then absolutely every piece of evidence could been faked, so where do you stop. Does New York even exist? You tell me it does, maybe you're lying how do I know? See what I mean. If everything is faked then we can know nothing. So basically if you think the cell phone records were faked, best to just stop reading. For the rest of us, let's keep going. The cell phone records were released, and were real, and tell a fascinating story.

So now let's move forward and look at what this new information does to the narrative which has been uncovered in part I of this thread. Let's discuss who could have installed those picocells in the comms compartment of the various aircraft. Who would have had access? Who could have planned this and got the necessary clearances? Who would have had to be in-the-loop?

Then let's look at the other implications of the picocells. How would the flight crews have known that cell phone use was possible? And why did they even bother to go to the trouble of installing these picocells anyway?

And we also need to have a look at the Israeli connection too.....

So plenty still to work through....

Quote:

"Did I assume she was on a cell phone, is that correct?"

- AA head of security Larry Wansley in phone conversation 9/12/01 with reservations supervisor Lydia Gonzalez, who had talked to Betty Ong on AA 11.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 52

The Ground Station ID tells us that the source of the phone calls was moving, so, (presuming the electronic records are not fake), we can conclude that they were made on cell phones, from inside a moving plane which had been set up in advance with a picocell installed.

So now let's start joining the dots.

The picocell was a research prototype developed by Qualcomm Israel engineers out of Technion University. Later after another two years of development, this technology was announced as market-ready, though here we are 12 years later and the roll-out has not begun in the USA.

The picocell must have been installed by Qualcomm engineers in the US. This must have been done in preparation for the 9/11 event. The next question is: were American Airlines aware of this? Was it done with their covert co-operation, or was the equipment installed under their noses in their aircraft without them knowing?



They knew.

Quote:

"Did I assume she was on a cell phone, is that correct?"

- AA head of security Larry Wansley in phone conversation 9/12/01 with reservations supervisor Lydia Gonzalez, who had talked to Betty Ong on AA 11.

Recall from part I that this is the head of security for American Airlines, Larry Wansley, ex-FBI (if not still Undercover FBI), from a transcript of a recorded phone call with Lydia Gonzalez, in which the Betty Ong call is played (looped, and edited...).

Of all people, Larry Wansley, head of security, knew full well that cell phones would not work on aircraft at 30,000 feet. So this is a slip-up. He blurted out what he knew: "Did I assume she was on a cell phone?". Yes Larry, you obviously did assume she was on a cell phone. Which tells us unequivocally that Larry Wansley was in-the-loop.

He knew the picocell had been installed, and that's why he knew, or assumed, that the calls were made on cell phones, otherwise a complete impossibility.

Now we will come back to Larry Wansley and his movements that morning in a later post in light of the conclusion that he knew, for sure, about the pre-installation of the picocell in Flight 11. Also I do have to correct another (*cough*) error I made on that topic in Part I. But for now I want to go to the flight attendants who made the calls, Betty Ong and Any Sweeney, and ask this basic question:

How did they know to use their cell phones?

They knew that cell phones didn't work on aircraft at 30,000 feet? So no matter what the circumstances were, why did it even occur to them to get out their phones and check for signal.

Obviously: they had been told that cell phones would work.

They must have been pre-briefed.

There is another technical detail in play here: because the seat-back system had been turned off in the plane, there was no billing system in place. Therefore, while the Claircom box was working, it was not possible to place a call through it to a number that required a payment. The only numbers that could be dialled were "0" and 1-800- numbers. This information came from Robert Wagner.

This is why Betty Ong phoned the 1-800 reservations number for AA, and Amy Sweeney used Sara Low's phone card, with its 1-800 number, to connect to AA Flight Services at Logan.

And again: this indicates that they must have been pre-briefed in order to have known this.

Now, who could have pre-briefed them? Who would have the authority to tell them to go ahead and use their cell phones as part of some planned event, and to dial 1-800 numbers? Obviously, it must have been some representative of American Airlines Security. They would not have taken instructions from anyone unconnected to the airline.

There is another clue that this is indeed what happened, and that is the frequent references to Flight 12 that were documented in Part I. This is indemnity. It is against air regulations for flight crew to have such contact with the outside world, and naturally they would be reluctant to do so without strict assurances that they were legally protected. Hence they were told to identify the flight as Flight 12, so that on recordings of the calls, it could be pointed out later, and this identified as the proof that they knew they were participating in some kind of authorised, simulated event, like a drill.

All this is fine, but do we have any evidence that such a briefing took place? Incredibly, we do. It is the witness of Wayne Kirk, from the cleaning crew, who maintained the aircraft that morning at Gate 32 before it boarded as Flight 11. Recall what he said in the FBI interview in the next few days after 9/11:



The crew were usually standing around but they were nowhere to be seen.

That's because they were off being pre-briefed by American Airlines security about what was about to happen on the Flight 11 today. It was not going to be a normal day....

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 53

[Answer to Ruby Gray 30 Jan 2017]

Hi Ruby,

Thanks for your questions.

As far as I am aware, the seat-back phone system in AA11 was still installed, but the front end, that is, the seat-back phones, had been turned off and were not working. The "picocell", the "Claircom" box, was also still installed, and was operational. If you have any firm, confirmed, information which suggests otherwise, please go ahead and post it here.

Further, none of the passengers attempted a call which strongly suggests that indeed there were no working seat-back phones in AA11. Furthermore, Betty Ong said she was calling from a jump-seat, which definitely did not have seat-back phones as flight attendants were forbidden by regulations from having unauthorised contact with the outside world during flight.

I would be very surprised to see clear, confirmed evidence that the seat-back phones were installed, otherwise, they would have been used, and there would not have been all the confusion as to how the calls were made.

If you have any information on this, please go ahead and post it.

I'll also comment on the Lynn Howland quotation above. Lynn Howland gets one of the Vanessa Minter Awards for Crappy Recollection of Critical Events During a Major Incident. She completely botched it. Firstly, that flight AA198, (which did indeed become AA11) according to every other witness and piece of information, arrived at 5:50am, not 6:50am. Howland is wrong. For sure. There simply wasn't time to turn the aircraft around if it had arrived at 6:50. Besides, the maintenance crews etc all reported working on that plane from 6:00 onwards. The captain arrived at 6:15am (according to the cleaning crew, though there is a discrepancy with Ogonowski's timeline). The captain did his checks and found a fault that required 45 minutes to be rectified before take-off. So definitely not 6:50am.

Perhaps Howland got the time wrong and mis-remembered it? No. Because if the plane did arrive at 5:50am, as everyone else agrees except Howland, then she could not have seen Atta when she disembarked, as he didn't arrive at Logan until 6:45am. So Howland is just all over the place.

Now that Lynn Howland's memory is confirmed as full of holes, let's turn to the question of the gate. Every other source said it came into Gate 32. Howland is just wrong. She is remembering wrong, again. Note that this particular piece of information was not in the notes that she made at the time. It was Gate 32, not 33.

So Howland's information is crap and can be discarded.

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

POST 54

Before we get to looking again at Larry Wansley's movements on the morning of 9/11, there are a couple of other observations to make, in light of this working hypothesis, namely that:

1. the calls were made from a moving aircraft with cell phones via pre-installed picocells
2. the picocell was installed with the knowledge and approval of American Airlines security.
3. the flight attendants, and possibly some other AA staff, were pre-briefed that something would be happening on AA11 that morning.

Now, of course, we can be certain that American Airlines were not expecting a real-world hijacking. There is zero chance that the military guys who approached AA with the plan to install the picocells told them that what would happen is that the plane would be flown in to the WTC and everyone would die in a fiery crash. Obviously, that would not be a plan that AA would have signed off on.

So, we can assume that they were told that something else was going to happen, and the most likely scenario would be some kind of drill.

At this point, I want to speculate about something: could it be possible that Craig Marquis, who was on duty at the AA Operations Center, was in-the-loop on this drill scenario? Could he have also been pre-briefed by AA security that something unusual might be taking place on AA11 that morning?

I have no direct evidence of this either way, but if it was so, it would explain some aspects of the Marquis recordings which I have found slightly curious. Firstly, it always struck me as odd that Marquis spent so long at the beginning of the call with Nadia Gonzalez in establishing who she was. The transcript shows that this took something like a minute and a half, which is a very long time when there is a hijacking in place.

Of course, he had to get the details right, but I get the sense reading the transcript that he is taking his time, almost deliberately going out of his way to exaggerate and extend the amount of time he is taking to get her name and details correct. Then there is the strange business of keeping the whole incident quiet. He tells his dispatcher not to tell anyone. He quarantines her separately from the other dispatchers. None of this is impossible to imagine in a real scenario, but if you now imagine that Craig knew in advance, then perhaps his mode of dealing with the situation can be re-interpreted. Perhaps he was making sure that he was crossing the i's and dotting the t's, knowing that it was a drill and that the way he handled it would be scrutinized later. I wouldn't want to make too much of this point, but it just seem there is a lack of urgency in his approach which is hard to reconcile with a real world genuine drama. The families of the victims had this impression when they were finally played these tapes years afterwards. Recall the outrage, that AA had tried to keep the whole thing under wraps? I suggest that this might be better understood as the reaction to a drill that Marquis knew was about to happen.

But now I want to pose another question with a much broader scope.

Why did the perps bother to install the picocells?

Think about it. There is a lot to go wrong here. The picocells might be discovered. Things could have gone very wrong with the phone calls (and indeed perhaps they did, which might explain the looping of the tape). There was definitely a risk in installing the picocells that the entire plan might be exposed. So why bother? Why not just NOT install the picocells?

Well, imagine what would have happened. Clearly, the intention was for the world to believe the planes had been hijacked. If there had been no phone calls, (and keep in mind that there was no contact from the pilots, and no emergency squawk code), and the planes had simply been observed to have crashed into the WTC, then there would have been no communication from the plane to the outside world at all.

Under these circumstances, there would have been major speculation on what happened. The government would not have been able to present a narrative of crazed muslim hijackers, because how could they, or anyone have known?

People would have naturally suspected the possibility that the planes were electronically hijacked and remote controlled into their final destinations, and there would have been no evidence trail to suggest any other narrative.

So the phone calls were crucial. There had to be a way to get information from out of those planes to the outside world. It had to be carefully considered, and controlled, to shape the story as they wanted it told. Otherwise, the perps would not be able to control the narrative.

Therefore, the risks in installing the picocells, and letting some civilians in on the plans, were worth it. They really had no option. This might even be part of the reason why the seat-back phone systems had been decommissioned. The last thing they wanted was a whole bunch of passengers picking up the phone and describing to loved ones the truth of what was going on. Because this truth was not quite what they wanted us to hear....

So they took a risk. Installed the picocells. Put in place a cover-story of a drill. Briefed the minimum number of civilians who needed to know to pull this off. And set the plan in motion....

It's all getting a bit far-fetched, but at least this version sticks to the known facts, and seems to be accounting pretty well for the various reactions and odd facts of the day. So now, let's look again at Larry Wansley's movements that morning, and his interaction with the FBI, and see how the working hypothesis stacks up.


===============================

Mark Comment: This is about as far as The loopDloop material goes. (thank God, I'm ready to lie down for a while)

[Mark (Star Mariner)]

One final thing to tack onto the end of all this, and I think worth mentioning, is the mysterious phone-call of CeeCee Lyles to her husband. This is nothing to do with Flight 11; she was a Flight Attendant on the fourth plane to be so-called hijacked that day, Flight 93, the one that crashed in Shanksville.

At 9:47 she called her husband and left him a message saying the plane had been hijacked. This is a recording of that call:

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=4jYYRJbdiXc

Listen to the whispered words just before end.

Source: https://youtube.com/watch?v=D640vW3K0IA

Hard to be certain, but it sure sounds like she says, "It's a frame" -- off-script, we can assume, right before hanging up. When you apply the context of 'a frame', a frame-up -- being framed... if nothing else it's very interesting.

It's a Frame!

[THREAD NOW OPEN]

[RunningDeer]

Posted by Mark (Star Mariner) (here)
Mark Comment: This is about as far as The loopDloop material goes. (thank God, I'm ready to lie down for a while)

Holy mackerel!, Mark. Thank you.

Enjoy your rest.

[Mike]

Stellar thread Mark. Brilliant. I’m almost reluctant to post at all, the fear being I might spoil this work of art.

Excited to start digging into this! Thanks for such a great effort.

[Kryztian]

Thank you Mark for preserving this epic thread here on the forum. I finished the first 20 posts and this is indeed astounding research - hard to believe it has been out there for 12 years and most of us didn't know about it. So far, it is a gold mine of anomalies about American Airlines Flight 11 which just don't make sense, which one can add to the many other 911 anomalies out there.

The only other person I know of who delved into flight 11 and the messages of Betty Ong, and Amy Sweeney was Rebekkah Roth, and she didn't come up with nearly as much info on them as one finds here. It might be interesting to compare her interview and her material with the material in this thread. One of her best interviews was done by our very own Bill Ryan and there is a thread about it here: Bill Ryan's interview with REBEKAH ROTH, 11 September, 2015.

Looking forward to going into this matter more deeply.

[Tintin]

Kudos Mark! An extraordinary and phenomenal effort - thank you

Looks like I'll again have to update our 911 directory in the library.

Wow, a ton of high-quality material to wade through here, but it will be worth it.

For now, here's four minutes of the Betty Ong audio which I'd placed there quite some time ago. The sound is not terribly good at Betty's end but can be heard if you spend some time closely focusing on that:



A quick couple of things:

- interesting use of the 555 in the telephone numbers which is always used in TV shows (USA), and movies, whenever there's a need to in the script

For what ever it may be worth, from this post of mine, yesterday:

It's a factor that cemented in my mind fairly early on, through months of research, and from experience in music and film, that the idea that any actual passenger airliner was hijacked at all that day was a preposterous idea: really a piece of Hollywood-esque scripting, and nothing more than that. It would have been an absolute doddle to have several months before - maybe even as much as a year - have approached any casting agency with an outline for a movie plot involving hijacked aircraft, and recorded multiple voice-overs employing all sorts of actors in role doing their 'lines', to dub in at appropriate moments during the 'movie'. That happens all the time. No brainer really. This all gets tidied up in post (post-production). And this is what I think actually may have happened.

------------

Back to reading through here now..

[Jim_Duyer]

Mark - a really thorough and well assembled collection that certainly has matured with time and gives one pause.

I believe that I have two of your non-barking dogs.

As background, I worked for 24 years as a Risk-Manager and Insurance provider in the Property-Casualty arena, but I was also licensed to perfect coverage at Llyods, London, and I manuscripted agreements for hull and cargo coverage. Mostly in the marine field, but some in interstate carriage, and after all hulls on ships and hulls as in aircraft are no different as far as the coverage goes - just the hazards. I was also a commercial underwriter and arranged reinsurance coverage in substantial amounts. I say this so that you might understand the following:

In large corporations, such as AA or the other carriers, there are multiple departments with overlapping fields of interest. The head of security might select the phone system used to record calls, but he would have to run it past Legal, who would see if it met the statute of a reasonable and prudent provider of public transportation, he would have it approved by the Risk Management dept. and by the reinsurance group. This is for the purposes of the terms and conditions of large commercial liability coverage that are required to operate.

Now, my personal theory in regards to evil also comes into play here. Nothing that they do or have done or will do in future, is done without giving us a clue, and in some cases it amount to shoving it in our faces. Their favorite trick is to bury iconography or symbols inside of their evil, and second to that is to practice disingenuous methods.

By this I mean that they tell the "truth", but it is never the whole truth and nothing but the truth. For example, when they say that the new system shut off recording after four minutes - that may be true. But it's not the whole truth because Risk Management and Legal would never sign off on that limitation. So it probably does stop or did, after four minutes, "unless or until a button was pressed to override that limitation". See how they "told some of the truth and stuck it in our faces"?

Why? Well, they were able to have it quit recording, and if what was being said was legally harmful to them, liability wise, they could go to court and report it that way, with a straight face. Because imagine if some of the recording proved that the stews and crew stood by while the Israeli was murdered? Or that the passengers begged them to use the phone and to storm the cabin and the stews nixed the idea?

I don't believe anything other than a drone flew. And that the passengers were actors set up in advance, and that perhaps a few were killed, but not by the hijackers.

Dog number two. When they first spoke to the stews they asked them how many passengers were aboard. Why? They have the manifest - it's part of protocol required by the FAA, and they could certainly access it faster than the stews. But that's the lie that they shoved in our face again. Because when they followed this with a conversation with home office they used the same term. The wrong term.
Remains are flown in aircraft, and especially those going from one coast to the other. It's a sad part of life. But they give the family a ticket, with the deceased name on it, yet where the seat number would appear it simply says hold number one or hold A, etc. It's to save face and make it more human.
Now those count for tickets as well, but are easily marked on the computers as freight. This is because the hundreds of thousands of dollars liability for death or dismemberment that the FAA requires of the carriers is not required on these remains. So how do the FAA inspectors, the top brass at American Airlines, the top Security People and the people in the terminals and onboard refer to passengers? As Souls. How many souls on board, would be common.
It signifies the number that they will have to pass on to accounting. Accounting will need to take that sum of money and have it liquid, but not a penny more. The more you have liquid the less you have return on investment.
So they keep the figures as close as they can. But they need to inform the reinsurers and they need to have these funds available, so they count and speak of Souls. Freight gets counted along with the rest of the planes cargo, and that's a different department - the insurance or reinsurance dept that handles cargo. The hull could be covered by the manufacturer, since most of the planes themselves are leased long term and not purchased. (For tax purposes).

So, nobody said the word Souls on any of the pages you put up, at least none that I read - and that signifies that there really were no "passengers" as we think of it. There probably were 81 pieces of freight aboard, one for each occupied seat, since that would make the CSI people happy with the body count. Prisoners perhaps, who knows?

So that's two dogs and we probably have more. I for one don't buy the whole idea of a stew calling reservations in an emergency. They have to have a hotline, tollfree number on that system, if there was a system and it was all not just made up.

Jim