My Reply to Robbyn Swan's Response to My Review of "Eleventh Day"

[Dean]

To Ms. Swan,

I have read your review of my review of your book.  I welcome the dialogue on the subject of 9/11.

Your book, and your review, fail to hit the mark that I had expected for you and Anthony Summers.  Here are questionable comments you have made and my replies to them:

You state that “Hartwell claims, in the first instance, that we have not analyzed the work of  AK Dewdney on the use of cell phones on airplanes.”

What I actually said was that Summers and Swan say “nothing about his experiments in the use of cell phones on airplanes, which he called the ‘Project Achilles Report.’” 

Your book mentions in the footnotes Operation Pearl but not Project Achilles.  This project shows limited connections for cell phones at high altitudes, with most calls going incomplete, without voice or without connection.  Some calls connect, but last no more than one minute and most of these are at low altitudes. My comment “The report shows the difficulty of the use of cell phones on planes, especially at the levels the planes allegedly hijacked were flying at” is consistent with the conclusions of this project.

You also say that “Research reveals that almost all the calls made from the four flights were actually made not from cell phones, but from seatback phones.”  Your book (page 114) states that “Mrs. [Barbara] Olson used [a] seat back phone.”  Yet airphone records of four calls allegedly made by Barbara Olson show that there was no duration to any of them.

In your review, you say that “we confined ourselves to examining the evidence both for and against the possibility that World Trade Center 7 had been brought down by controlled demolition” as justification for not considering comments made by World Trade Center leaseholder Larry Silverstein.  But I view comments made by the owner of the property about how the property collapsed to be evidence worth considering.  In an ordinary case, if officials learned of a house burning down, they would want to talk to the owner immediately for ideas as to how it happened!  Yes, that may not be PROOF, but it is certainly evidence!

You state that “she [Lisa Jefferson] was afraid that it might mean losing the call [from Todd Beamer]” to record it.  But what consequence would come of that?  Beamer would simply have called again.                    

And finally, you mention that at the Pentagon, “it was after this impact that the debris arrived – to use Hartwell’s word –  on the Pentagon lawn.”  But this still does not help the chronology of events there, which are highly significant.  I still do not see disproval of the theory that plane pieces were planted.   You miss the point on page 112 when you speak of “…photographs [of the remains of aircraft] taken before removal by the FBI.”  This statement, even if factual, does not discount the possibility of planted evidence.

Yes, I am a “no-planer.”  The failure of even highly-regarded researchers like you and Mr. Summers to challenge my hypothesis only confirms my belief.

 

Dean Hartwell