Flight 93 Tapes To Be Played in Moussaoui Sentencing Trial

The Washington Post perpetuates the "lets roll" myth today with the following questionable assertion:

The cockpit voice recording from the flight on which passengers wrested control from hijackers Sept. 11, 2001, will be played publicly for the first time at the sentencing trial of al-Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, a judge ruled yesterday.

U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema also ordered that the tape be made available to the public after the jury hears it in court unless family members of Flight 93 victims file a written objection by Tuesday.

The families will refuse to allow these tapes to be made public for one important reason.

The tapes do not contain any evidence that the passengers made it into the barracaded cockpit. This information leaked out when the families were allowed to hear the tapes and were sworn to secrecy about their content.

Also, the families of the victims of 9-11 are being given unusually great deference in this case.

Under federal law, family members of those killed or injured Sept. 11 also are considered victims, entitling them to such rights as being notified of developments in the case.

That's really a stretch, considering the family of a victim to officially be a victim too. As many as 40 of these "victims" are going to be allowed to testify in the sentencing trial.

Until the past 15 years, victims rarely testified in criminal cases. A series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions said their testimony would violate the constitutional rights of the defendant. But a 1991 Supreme Court decision reversed the prohibition. A victims rights movement that had been building since the 1960s gained more steam, and victim impact testimony is today a regular part of federal death penalty cases...

To find family members and Sept. 11 survivors to testify against Moussaoui, prosecutors mounted a massive outreach. They compiled a database of more than 8,000 Sept. 11 victims, talked to nearly all of them by phone and have regularly alerted them to developments in the case. They traveled across the country to interview more than 1,000 people in person.

The "victim impact project" created a historical record of the attacks, officials have said, and cast prosecutors and FBI agents in the unusual roles of therapists and grief counselors. Prosecutors and agents cried during interviews, talked to family members late into the night and helped them with such things as arranging quick security clearances when family members wanted to visit the victims' memorial at the Pentagon.

The government has a highly vested interest in keeping the official narrative of the events of 9-11 afloat. That's why they are coddling the families so effusively.

Some defense lawyers call the effort excessive. "It is entirely fitting that victim survivors be heard in the criminal justice system, but a criminal trial is not an occasion for national grief and mourning," said David Bruck, a death penalty expert who heads the Virginia Capital Case Clearinghouse at Washington and Lee University. "We need to separate national catharsis from the criminal justice system, otherwise we have the justice of the mob."

It is interesting that the government decided to feature Flight 93 instead of any of the other ill-fated flights of that day.

The "lets roll" bullshittery plays it's important role in the scenario that must be accepted if the established story is to be believed.

The bigger reason to showcase the "heroic passengers" is to continue the cover-up of the shootdown of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania.