The Eleventh Day_ The History and Legacy of 9_11 - Anthony Summers [52]
The friend, a close friend, had been fellow flight attendant Renee May, who on 9/11 got through by phone from Flight 77 to alert authorities to the hijacking. To Carter, who knew all the crew members killed that day, the loss was personal. “I saw pieces of our American Airlines 757,” she said. “If anyone thinks the plane did not go in there, then what happened to all my friends and where did all those body parts come from? Every crew member’s body was found.”
A random check supports this. Renee May’s ashes were divided between her parents, who scattered them on the sea off San Diego, and her fiancé on the East Coast. Fellow flight attendants, married couple Kenneth and Jennifer Lewis, were interred in Virginia. Another colleague, Michele Heidenberger, was buried in Maryland. Their captain, Charles Burlingame, lies in Arlington Cemetery.
Such facts, in the view of the authors, render the claims voiced by the skeptics outrageous, cruel insults to the memory of the dead. Human remains were painstakingly collected and identified for all but five of Flight 77’s sixty-four passengers and crew, and for all of the 125 people killed at the Pentagon. Have the “no-planers” seen the horrific photographs of bodies and body parts at the Pentagon, as carbonized and petrified in death as the victims of the eruption that destroyed Pompeii? No retrieval of human remains was more poignant than that of one of the children on board.
“A stillness fell over the recovery workers as a child’s pajamas were pulled from the debris,” recalled Lieutenant Colonel William Lee, a chaplain. A Barbie doll was pulled out next, followed by the foot of a child—probably part of the torn remains of eight-year-old Zoe Falkenberg, who had been traveling on the plane with her parents and little sister, Dana. Dana, aged three, was one of the five victims for whom remains were not identified.
In light of such realities, Griffin’s musings—along with those of others, such as Professor Dewdney and a woman named Laura Knight-Jadczyk, who runs an Internet site called “The Cassiopaean Experiment”—might be thought to sink to the level of obscenity. The professor expressed doubt that “the bodies of the crew and passengers were really found in the Pentagon wreckage. “For all we know,” he opined, “human remains from two different sites could have been combined by FBI and military personnel.”
So it goes, in the face of all the evidence. Griffin, Dewdney, and Knight-Jadczyk have insisted for years that phone calls reportedly made from the hijacked planes—including Flight 77—are fabrications. His research, Dewdney wrote, showed that technologically, “cell phone calls alleged to have been made by passengers were essentially impossible” in 2001.
The suggestion is that the two conversations said to have been conducted from Flight 77—by flight attendant Renee May to her mother and by Barbara Olson to her husband, Theodore, the solicitor general—are official concoctions.
The issue of whether it was possible to make cell phone calls from airliners at the time turns out to be irrelevant. Detailed AT&T records now available make it clear that Mrs. Olson and May used seatback phones, not cell phones.
In a fatuous, callous account, Knight-Jadczyk suggests that Barbara Olson did not die on Flight 77, but may “have had a little plastic surgery and is waiting for Ted on that nice Caribbean island they have always wanted to retire to.”
Theologian Griffin, who likes to write and talk about “voice transformers” and “voice morphing,” techniques of flawlessly imitating voices that he thinks may have been used by the authorities on 9/11, does not emerge as having any consideration for the bereaved. Theodore Olson’s account of having received calls from his wife on the morning of 9/11, he alleged, was only a claim.
“Either Ted Olson lied