Jury Can Hear Part Of Flight 93 Tape

(AP)  The dramatic final moments of United Airlines Flight 93 that were captured on a cockpit voice recorder can be played for a jury at the first trial stemming from lawsuits filed after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, a judge ruled Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ruled that jurors can't listen to the entire tape but can hear portions that the hijacked passengers may have heard.

The relevant portions include a segment in which the voices of one or two of the apparent hijackers announce they have a bomb on board. He also said jurors could hear a 4-minute-long stretch of the sounds of passengers trying to force their way into the cockpit and retake the airplane.

The recording has never been publicly released, though it was played at the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui in Virginia, and relatives of the victims were allowed to hear it in private.

Phone calls to lawyers on both sides weren't returned after the ruling.

Forty passengers and crew members died when the hijacked plane crashed into a Pennsylvania field.

Flight 93, which was en route from Newark, N.J., to San Francisco, was the only one of the four planes hijacked Sept. 11, 2001, that did not reach its intended target, believed to be in Washington, D.C. Investigators believe the hijackers crashed the plane into a field near Shanksville, about 65 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, as passengers rushed the cockpit.

Lawyers for the victims' families have argued that it's important for jurors to hear the sounds of the frightening final moments in order to determine damages. The families have argued that the cockpit voice recording contains evidence of substantial pain, suffering, terror and emotional distress before the victims died.

Some 41 cases have been filed against airlines, plane manufacturers, security agencies and the owners of airports, blaming them for letting terrorists take control of planes.

Typically, a jury first determines liability in a case, and then it decides on damages.

But Hellerstein has scheduled the damages phase in six cases to begin on Sept. 24, before any liability has been determined.

He said he took this unusual step in the hopes that more cases might settle out of court once families of victims get a sense of how much money they are likely to get from a jury.

The first trial will assess damages owed to the family of Patrick Joseph Driscoll, a New Jersey man who was on Flight 93.

Thousands of Sept. 11 victims' families have turned to a victims' fund established by Congress, rather than seeking compensation in court.

The September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, which Congress set up after the attacks, has paid $6 billion to 2,880 families of those who died, representing 97 percent of the families, the judge said. The fund also has dispensed more than $1 billion to 2,680 injured victims.

[ladyjaneg]

In response to Gaye, with all due respect, those Muslim sites may have procliamed themselves as Muslim, but no real Muslim would be ''proud'' of this tragedy, or say the States had it coming, or whatever.Just so we''re clear.
Real Muslims are saddened by this event, knowing that thousands of lives were taken in a single morning. I''m not saying it doens''t happen everywhere, but it''s just as sad.

[lawandorder7]

get a life. how long can this go on? you would think aftre 6 years you would move on. this is getting sicking.

[abbe91]

"We once were a proud nation of working people, working for companies who thought their best asset was their employees, but now they only focus on the Profit side as beneficial to their Stockholders.
Posted by panhandlpete at 09:04 AM : Sep 13, 2007"

Once, GM was the American icon and a worker at GM could afford sending his kinds to university.
Now, the icon is WalMart ...
Bush got us a huge debt, for giving tax cuts to his friends and sustaining the Iraq occupation.
Who owns that debt ? China for a good part.
Debt must be repaid and it is repaid to China with good American jobs. Before Bush, poor people were poor, but thanks to Bush, the middle class is going to be left behind too.

Wouldn''t it be nice to blame it on illegal immigrants ?

[panhandlpete]

What made building 7 go down as if it was imploded? No credible answer offered. Who purchased the entire WTO complex just months earlier and had huge insurance policies? What about the FEMA unit reported to be placed in position the day before?

Sad that more than 3,000 lives were lost that day, but more than that number have been lost in Iraq. The two have been proven to have no direct connection. Could the first have been the catalyst needed to start the second so that the American people would support it, emotionally and financially?

Above and beyond those two events, the real war is waging right in our own backyard. Our constitution has been trampled, our lives are changed by the ''fear'' tactics propaganda espoused, and with the Southern Parisitic Invasion of illegal aliens and now Mexican truckers and super highways being built for their use......what is going to happen to the working middle class? We once were a proud nation of working people, working for companies who thought their best asset was their employees, but now they only focus on the Profit side as beneficial to their Stockholders.

[brianbwb-2009]

Why can they, (and we) not hear it all? What is the judge helping to hide?

[lorinkundert]

Anyone who doubts any possible Government role in 9/11 read the data here: http://www.journalof911studies.com/

[gaye5]

How can anyone say that the American government was the cause of all this horror and not Muslim terrorists..
I had read Muslims started web sites, saying that it was the fault of the American government and gave reasons why.. Although they were all started by the same Muslim group, they knew that people who read it would think that it must be true as it was coming from different sources or areas. They also sited the World trade center 7 as suspicious..
I gather that when the towers collapsed larger pieces of the twin towers had smashed parts of 7 World Trade and set whole clusters of floors ablaze. An hour later, the Fire Department was forced to abandon its efforts to save the building as it burned like a giant torch. It fell in the late afternoon.
I have read that an accelerator to the fire was the two huge diesel tanks in the World trade center 7 building. One tank sat on a steel-and-concrete pedestal on the second floor and held 6,000 gallons of diesel fuel. Another larger cache, four tanks containing a total of 36,000 gallons of diesel fuel, sat just below ground level in the loading dock. Diesel fuel in a situation like that would burn somewhat under 1,000 C. but structural steel begins to soften around 4250C and loses about half of its strength at 6500C. Like the WTC the combination of physical damage to the structure along with decreased strength from the sagging steel were more than simply 1 lower floor could take, once one floor buckled the rest has to come down.

[gunnerone2]

I would like to see the families sue the governments and orginizations that provided any help to the hijackers. Going after the source of their funding would make a larger impact and possibly affect future terror striks.