Reuters checks in with accounts of cell phone calls from hi-jacked planes!

Wednesday September 12, 6:57 AM

Pentagon crash jet hijacked with knives and cutters

By Mark Wilkinson

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The
hijackers who crashed an
American Airlines aircraft into the Pentagon on Tuesday as
part of a coordinated attack on the United States,
brandished knives and cardboard cutters to take over the
aircraft.

The information was revealed during two telephone calls
that Barbara Olson, wife of Solicitor General Ted Olson, made from aboard the aircraft
before the crash. Apparently the hijackers were not carrying firearms.

Barbara Olson, who was also a commentator for CNN, was one of the 64 people who
died in the crash of what is believed to be a Boeing 757.

A total of 266 people were reported to have died in four coordinated air crashes across
the Northeast.

Olson made two calls to inform her husband that the airplane, believed to be flying from
Washington's Dulles Airport to Los Angeles, had been hijacked.

She told him that the hijackers, armed with knives and cardboard cutters, herded the
passengers and crew, including the pilot, toward the back of the plane.

Ted Olson was said by CNN to have immediately called the command center at the
Justice Department to inform them of the hijacking. The Department, unaware of the
developments, told Olson they would investigate.

Olson told her husband that there was more than one hijacker, but made no additional
comments.

"What should I tell the pilots to do?" CNN reported Olson as asking her husband.

The airliner crashed into the Pentagon, just outside Washington, D.C., on Tuesday
morning, setting the nerve center of U.S. defence on fire and gutting a large portion of the
structure.

This was one of four air crashes involved in the attack, compared by many to the
Japanese strike on Pearl Harbor during World War II, which spread terror across New
York City and the nation's capital.

Around 9:00 a.m. (1300 GMT), two airliners were flown into the World Trade Center's
Twin Towers, at the very heart of New York City's financial district, opening a large gash
toward the top of the 110-story towers.

Only minutes later, the coordinated attack continued, when the commercial jet Olson was
aboard was crashed on the Pentagon. A fourth jet went down in western Pennsylvania.

No death toll was immediately available but officials feared the number could run into the
thousands, as 40,000 people worked in the Trade Center.

One passenger on the aircraft that crashed outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, locked
himself in one of the plane's bathrooms and called 911 from his cell phone to report the
hijacking.

President George W. Bush set off from the headquarters of the Strategic Air Command
outside of Omaha, Nebraska to return to Washington on Tuesday afternoon, while the
Federal Aviation Administration for the first time in history ordered all airplanes across to
country grounded until at least noon EDT (1600 GMT) on Wednesday.