-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: September 12, 2007 2:41:03 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Ted Olson and 9-11 -- and Jonathan Pollard
Ted Olson
http://badsam.us/columns/Faces%20of%209-11%20-%20Ted%20Olson/
Background:
Ted Olson once told a congressional investigation that it is for
him "easy to imagine an infinite number of situations where
government officials might quite legitimately have reasons to give
false information out."
Long before he became an advocate of officially sanctioned
government lying, Theodore Bevry Olson was born on a later infamous
day, September 11, in 1940. The tragic events of his 61st birthday
would also claim the life of his third wife, neoconservative
political commentator and Clinton basher Barbara Olson.
Originally from Chicago, as a young man, Ted Olson took Horace
Greeley's famous advice and went west, where he attended University
of the Pacific and law school at University of California at Berkeley.
After law school, Olson joined the Los Angeles offices of law firm
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP. He then served as an Assistant
Attorney General in the Reagan administration and re-entered
private practice as a partner in the Washington, D.C. offices of
Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP.
Joining the "vast right-wing conspiracy":
Ted Olson's career as a battling Republican lawyer really began the
day he stood next to James Watt as the interior secretary defiantly
declared executive privilege.
That was in October 1981, a few months after President Reagan had
named Olson assistant attorney general for the Office of Legal
Counsel. Watt had been subpoenaed by Michigan Rep. John Dingell,
the Democratic chairman of the subcommittee assigned to look into
environmental cleanup efforts, to provide Dingell's subcommittee
with documents relating to that work. Watt had deemed these papers
"enforcement sensitive" -- that is, making them public, he said,
would compromise the department's ability to enforce cleanup laws.
The storm broke on Dec. 5, 1985, when the Judiciary Committee
issued its final report. In scathing language, it recommended that
Attorney General Edwin Meese seek appointment of an independent
counsel to investigate possible criminal conduct it found,
including possible perjury and obstruction of justice. And it was
clear that much of the focus was on Ted Olson.
Over the next four months, the matter would be reviewed by the
career prosecutors in the Department of Justice's Public Integrity
Section. They released their findings in April 1986, and identified
cases of misconduct by four Reagan administration officials: Edward
Schmults, Theodore Olson, Carol Dinkins and Deputy White House
Counsel Richard Hauser.
Olson was targeted for a perjury investigation for his
congressional testimony on the executive-privilege assertion and
the withholding of documents.
Olson turned up in some interesting places during his career. He
worked with Ken Starr before and during the Whitewater
investigation, and was implicated in the "Arkansas Project",
funneling money to the private investigation of Bill Clinton in the
90's.
With Robert Bork, Olson coached the lawyers for Paula Jones before
their own appearance at the Supreme Court. Among Olson's clients
was Ronald Reagan, whom he continued to represent as a private
attorney during the Iran-Contra investigation.
Through the Bush and Clinton years, when Starr served as Solicitor
General himself and then as the Whitewater Independent Counsel,
Olson remained one of Starr's closest personal friends and
political associates.
Both Olson and Starr were part of a tight-knit network of
conservative lawyers associated with right-wing legal foundations
and "think tanks." They both sat on the Legal Advisory Councils of
two such groups: the National Legal Center for the Public Interest
and the Washington Legal Foundation - both of which were bankrolled
by Richard Mellon Scaife.
Before Ted Olson served as a member of George W. Bush's inner
circle and as the Bush Administration Solicitor General, Olson
served as a defense attorney for Jonathan Pollard. Pollard was a
civilian Naval intelligence analyst who was convicted of spying for
Israel.
Bush connections:
Olson represented the Bush-Cheney campaign in the Florida election
case before the Supreme Court in 2000. Aside from the five Supreme
Court justices who voted in his favor, there may be no one to whom
Bush owed his victory more than Olson.
He was nominated to the Office of Solicitor General by President
Bush on February 14, 2001, confirmed by the United States Senate on
May 24, 2001, and took office on June 11, 2001.
Prior to President Bush's nomination of D.C. Circuit Court of
Appeals Judge John Roberts, Olson was considered a potential
nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States to fill Sandra
Day O'Connor's post. Following the withdrawal of Harriet Miers'
nomination for that post, and prior to the nomination of Third
Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Samuel Alito, Olson's name was again
mentioned as a possible nominee.
Olson was an insider's insider among the neo-conservative Christian
right-wingers who proliferated in the early days of the GW Bush
administration. He and his wife were high-fliers who often
entertained the party's leading lights in their suburban mansion.
September 11th:
Olson's third wife, Barbara K. Olson, was a passenger on the
hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon
on September 11, 2001.
Ted Olson can be connected to the 9-11 plot by virtue of his
account of telephone conversations with his wife. He has told
several implausible stories and differing versions of what happened
on that day.
Olson has spoken several times about the calls from his wife
Barbara on Flight 77. In his own words:
"She [Barbara] had trouble getting through, because she wasn't
using her cell phone - she was using the phone in the passengers'
seats. I guess she didn't have her purse, because she was calling
collect, and she was trying to get through to the Department of
Justice, which is never very easy. … She wanted to know 'What can I
tell the pilot? What can I do? How can I stop this?' "
Though the American Airlines Boeing 757 was equipped with
telephones at each seat, they were not the kind where you can
simply pick up the handset and get an operator. On American
Airlines there was at that time a telephone setup charge of $2.50
which could only be paid by credit card, then a charge of several
dollars per minute of airtime thereafter. The setup charge was the
crucial element. Without paying it in advance by swiping a credit
card you could not even access the network. There was not even a
dial tone until the credit card was approved electronically.
Maybe Ted Olson made a mistake and Barbara managed to borrow a
credit card from a fellow passenger. But that explanation doesn't
work either, because if she did, why then would her call be made
collect? Remember, Ted said she called collect.
It is not now, and was not then possible to make a collect call
from a telephone aboard an airliner.
There has been no release of documents showing any such calls ever
were made - and they would have generated a paper trail with the
airline, the telephone company, the credit card account, and at the
Solicitor General's Office - which allegedly accepted collect calls
from Barbara Olson. There were no phone charges originating from
American Airlines 77 to the US Solicitor General. It would have
been impossible.
So, for whatever reason, the story that Barbara Olson called Ted is
false. Therefore, the US Solicitor General lied - whether
knowingly or not - to America and the world about his conversations
with his wife on September 11.
So, what did Ted and Barbara allegedly talk about?
According to Ted, she told him the hijackers were using box
cutters. That is the only source we have of such a description.
"She called from the plane while it was being hijacked," Theodore
Olson said. "I wish it wasn't so, but it is."
The two conversations each lasted about a minute, said Tim O'Brien,
a CNN reporter and friend of the Olsons. In the first call, Barbara
Olson told her husband, "Our plane is being hijacked." She
described how hijackers forced passengers and the flight's pilot to
the rear of the aircraft. She said nothing about the number of
hijackers or their nationality.
Olson's first call was cut off, and her husband says he immediately
called the Justice Department's command center, where he was told
officials knew nothing about the Flight 77 hijacking. Moments
later, his wife called again. And again, she wanted to know, "What
should I tell the pilot?"
But her second call was cut off, too.
Ted Olson first said that Barbara had used a cell phone, then he
said she was in the bathroom, then he said she forgot her purse and
had to borrow a credit card from someone to make an airphone call.
His story kept changing.
Here's what we can piece together from Ted Olson's own words to
reporters:
Ted Olson was in his Justice Department office watching WTC news on
television when his wife called. A few days later, he said, "She
told me that she had been herded to the back of the plane. She
mentioned that they had used knives and box cutters to hijack the
plane. She mentioned that the pilot had announced that the plane
had been hijacked." He told her that two planes had hit the WTC.
She felt nobody was taking charge. He didn't know if she was near
the pilots, but at one point she asked, "What shall I tell the
pilot? What can I tell the pilot to do?" Then she was cut off
without warning. Ted Olson's recollection of the call's timing was
extremely vague, saying it "must have been 9:15 or 9:30. Someone
would have to reconstruct the time for me." Other accounts placed
it around 9:25 a.m. The call was said to have lasted about a
minute. By some accounts, his message that planes had hit the WTC
came later, in a second phone call. In one account, Barbara Olson
called from inside a bathroom. In another account, she was near a
pilot, and in yet another she was near two pilots. Ted Olson's
account of how Barbara Olson made her calls was also conflicting.
Three days after 9/11, he said, "I found out later that she was
having, for some reason, to call collect and was having trouble
getting through. You know how it is to get through to a government
institution when you're calling collect." He said he didn't know
what kind of phone she used, but he "assumed that it must have been
on the airplane phone, and that she somehow didn't have access to
her credit cards. Otherwise, she would have used her cell phone and
called me." Why Barbara Olson would have needed access to her
credit cards to call him on her cell phone was not explained.
However, in another interview on the same day, he said that she
used a cell phone and that she may have been cut off "because the
signals from cell phones coming from airplanes don't work that
well." Six months later, he claimed she called collect "using the
phone in the passengers' seats." However, it was not possible to
call on seatback phones - collect or otherwise - without a credit
card, which would render making a collect call unnecessary. Many
other details were conflicting, and Olson faulted his memory and
said that he "tends to mix the two [calls] up because of the
emotion of the events."
Without the Olson calls, there would have been no witness testimony
in the hijack and destruction of the four aircraft that day.
Lookalike claims surfaced several days later on September 16 about
passenger Todd Beamer and others, but it is important to remember
that the Barbara Olson story was the only one on the television
news on September 11 and 12.
What would most Americans have been thinking about on September 12,
if CNN had not provided the fictitious Olson account? Would anyone
have believed the story about failed Cessna pilots with box cutters
taking over jetliners, then expertly piloting them with deadly
accuracy?
Conclusion:
If Ted Olson's story was true, it would not have changed so many
times. He would have merely checked his telephone records, and been
able to say exactly what time and from what number his wife called
him, and how long they spoke.
The Olson calls are something that ought to be investigated, but
they haven't been, and they won't be.
It's a horrible thought that Ted Olson might be an accessory
(before or after the fact) to his wife's murder, or to the greatest
crime in the history of the United States of America. But his story
(or stories) simply do not add up. They don't ring true, and the
question becomes: Why did he lie?
In October of 2006, Ted Olson married fellow attorney Lady Booth.
Guests at the wedding included Supreme Court Justice Anthony
Kennedy, Director of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, and other
Washington luminaries.
Since resigning as Solicitor General in 2004, Ted Olson continues
as a lobbyist and high powered attorney.
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