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Families subject to horror recordings during Moussaoui trial { April 12 2006 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-041206moussa_lat,0,2717225.story?coll=la-home-headlineshttp://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-041206moussa_lat,0,2717225.story?coll=la-home-headlines
From the Los Angeles Times
Jury Hears Cockpit Recording of Doomed Flight 93
By Richard A. Serrano
Times Staff Writer
2:51 PM PDT, April 12, 2006
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The government completed its case against Zacarias Moussaoui today with its single most chilling piece of evidence — the cockpit voice recording from Flight 93 as terrorists overwhelmed the pilots, slashed their throats and praised Allah before crashing the jet far short of their target in the nation's capital.
The recording, 32 minutes of terror, begins with the terrorists forcing the two pilots at knifepoint to give up the cockpit. Dragged outside the cockpit onto the flight deck, the pilots can be heard begging for their lives. "I don't want to die!" one shouts.
When the pilots are dead or dying, one of the hijackers proclaims, "Everything is fine. I finished."
With the flight controls now in the hands of terrorist Ziad Jarrah, he says in broken English that the 38 passengers and flight attendants must remain calm.
"We have a bomb aboard," he warns them. "...And we have our demands."
For the next 20 minutes the plane, originally headed west to San Francisco, turns back east and begins a sharp trajectory toward Washington. According to Al Qaeda leaders, it was meant for the U.S. Capitol building.
But as a small group of passengers slowly rises up against the hijackers, the terrorists violently rock the plane back and forth, hoping to knock them off balance as they try to rush the cockpit. They consider cutting off the oxygen in the cabin, anything to stop them.
Then, three minutes after 10 in the morning on Sept. 11, 2001, passengers seem to break through the cockpit door, fighting with the hijackers in a futile effort to take back the throttle. "Go! Go!" they encourage one another. "Move! Move!"
But now the terrorists flip the plane upside down. They spin it downward. In its final plunge, a haunting epithet from the hijackers, shouted over and over: "Allah is the greatest! Allah is the greatest!"
United Airlines Flight 93 had taken off about 80 minutes earlier from Newark, N.J. On board were the two pilots, 33 passengers and five flight attendants. Sitting among them were Jarrah and three "muscle" hijackers.
By the time they breached the cockpit, two other hijacked planes had slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. In Washington, the Pentagon was about to be hit by a third plane.
In seeking the death penalty for Moussaoui, an Al Qaeda-trained operative learning to fly in this country, prosecutors showed the jury photos of the cockpit voice recorder. The red-and-white device was cracked but intact, embedded with much of the rest of the plane debris and human body parts strewn along a line of trees near the strip-mining community of Shanksville, Pa.
On Tuesday, the jury heard recordings of two ground control tapes. There, the pilots were heard screaming "Mayday!" four times, and then telling the terrorists breaking through the cockpit door to "Get out of here! Get out of here!" The cockpit voice recorder picked up from there.
Prosecutors brought to the witness stand James Cash, a National Transportation and Safety Board official, to explain how a small, open microphone sits in an overhead panel above the captain's seat. It is constantly running on a solid state memory loop, he said, recording 30 minutes at a time.
Prosecutors also wanted the jurors to feel they were inside the plane. So they displayed a computer image on television monitors throughout the courtroom. The images included the plane's altitude measurements and a small image of the plane itself, rocking back and forth whenever terrorists jerked on the throttle to keep the passengers at bay.
The entire 32 minutes was played. It picked up where the Mayday tapes left off. It began at 9:31:57 in the morning:
"Ladies and gentlemen," says the first voice, apparently the pilot hijacker Jarrah. "Here the captain, please sit down keep remaining seating. We have a bomb on board. So sit."
He is followed by shouts apparently aimed at the pilots as the three muscle hijackers force them onto the floor of the flight deck just outside the cockpit.
"Don't move. Shut up....Come on, come....Sit, sit, sit down."
In Arabic a muscleman yells: "That's it! That's it! That's it!" and then in English, "Down! Down!"
An air traffic controller interjects from somewhere on the ground, obviously confused over what he is hearing. His alarm is picked up on the cockpit voice recording. "We just, we didn't get it clear," he says. "Is that United 93 calling?"
In Arabic comes this answer: "Jassim....In the name of Allah, the most merciful, the most compassionate."
Now there is more noise from the flight deck. It is all in English, a mixture of musclemen and the two United Airlines pilots.
"No," pleads a pilot. "No, no, no, no."
"Go ahead, lie down. Lie down. Down, down, down."
"Please, please, please...Please, please, don't hurt me....Oh God."
There follow more demands.
"Down, down, down. Sit down. Shut up."
Then a pilot: "I don't want to die." And from the pilot again, or the other pilot: "I don't want to die. I don't want to die."
The pilots are not heard from again. Instead, in Arabic, someone yells, "That's it! Go back! That's it! Everything is fine. I finished."
Many of the passengers and flight attendants, aware now that the plane has been commandeered, start reaching for phones. In calls to emergency numbers and loved ones, they report that it appears that the pilots' throats have been cut, that they are dead or gravely wounded on the floor upfront.
Some say the hijackers are armed with small knives. They say the men are wearing red bandanas. They say one professes to have a bomb strapped around his waist.
The cockpit voice recorder picks up again. It is now 9:39:11.
"Ah," says a man, apparently Jarrah, speaking in English to the passengers. "Here's the captain. I would like to tell you all to remain seated. We have a bomb aboard, and we are going back to the airport, and we have our demands. So, please remain quiet."
Ground control has heard this too. "United 93. I understand you have a bomb on board. Go ahead." Other ground controllers break in, calling from Cleveland.
The terrorists, talking with each other in Arabic, consider bringing a pilot who might still be alive back into the cockpit, to talk to ground control.
It now appears the hijackers, too, are growing confused and frightened. "In the name of Allah!" shouts one. "In the name of Allah. I bear witness that there is no other God, but Allah."
They consider moving all three of the muscle hijackers into the cockpit with Jarrah to keep it secure from the passengers. They debate using an "ax ... so everyone will be scared."
Outside the cockpit door, someone says in Arabic, "Is there something?" "A fight?"
"Yeah?"
Then, "Let's go guys. Allah is greatest. Allah is greatest. Oh guys. Allah is greatest."
The time is 9:58:41. There are sounds of "ugh," of shoving and fighting.
Terrorists are shouting for the passengers to "stay back." They cry, "Oh Allah! Oh Allah! Oh the most gracious!"
A small band of male passengers is nearing. They shout, "In the cockpit! In the cockpit!"
A hijacker shouts back to Jarrah. "They want to get in there. Hold, hold from the inside. Hold from the inside. Hold."
There is a fight over the cockpit door.
"Hold the door."
"Stop him."
The passengers are almost there, the voices louder. "Let's get them!" someone screams.
In the cockpit, Jarrah and another hijacker debate in Arabic whether it is time to ditch the plane.
"Shall we finish it off?
"No. Not yet."
"When they all come, we finish it off."
Now the passengers seem almost upon them. "In the cockpit. If we don't, we'll die."
At 10:00:42, Jarrah begins to roll the plane. Another terrorist tells "Saeed" — an apparent reference to hijacker Saeed al-Ghambi — to go "up, down. Up, down" in the cockpit.
Perhaps he is helping Jarrah rock the jet. Or Jarrah has risen up to help hold shut the cockpit door, and has left Ghambi alone at the controls.
Four times they shout in Arabic: "Cut off the oxygen!"
The passengers are almost there. "Go! Go! ... Move! Move!"
One hijacker tells another, "Down, down. Pull it down. Pull it down." It appears he means the throttle, to crash the plane.
Another hijacker, perhaps Jarrah trying to get back at the controls, shouts, "Hey! Hey! Give it to me. Give it to me."
Five shouts rise up in Arabic: "Allah is the greatest!"
In English someone cries, "No!"
His cry is drowned by four more shouts, louder now: "Allah is the greatest!" The time is 10:03:09. The tape goes dead.
After the tape was aired, the courtroom fell silent; the jury sat back in their seats. A few more government witnesses testified, and then the prosecution rested its case.
Their last item of evidence was a giant poster board carrying tiny, teardrop-size photos of each of the 2,972 killed that day.
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