America’s spirit is alive

“These people were realizing the insanity of what was happening. They were coping with that and were acting, when they had absolutely no time, so I think that this was a message to the world: that America’s spirit was still alive and fighting.” These are the words from one of the relatives of flight 93 passengers, which crashed in USA’s Pennsylvania on September 11.

The relatives of those, who died as a result of those acts of terrorism, were given a possibility to listen to the record of flight recorders, which fixed the fight on board the seized plane. The passengers did not obey the terrorists’ demands, and were trying to show resistance.

The special closed meeting was arranged yesterday in one of the hotels of Princeton, NJ. About 50 people remembered their horrible experiences that they had to go through on the tragic day of September 11th. They made up with the idea of their relatives’ death only after they listened to the tape.

The FBI director finally made a decision to give a permission to expose the tape for the relatives, despite countless protests from United Airlines pilots and aviation specialists. They believed that such a decision would create a precedent (the laws allow to expose only the decoding of black boxes nowadays), and making such records public could result in the increase of claims against pilots and airlines.

Vice-president of United Airlines, Hank Krakowski, said that they always had tough restrictions regarding the use of emergency records: “The present decision is unprecedented. Furthermore, we all worry about the emotional consequences of this, when relatives will listen to the tape.”

However, FBI believes that it goes about a special case. The relatives of flight 93 passengers are forbidden to say anything pertaining to the contents of the tape, since the recordings are going to be used in the process against Zacarias Mussaui, who was charged with cooperation with terrorists.

Sergey Yugov PRAVDA.Ru

Translated by Dmitry Sudakov