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Why not release it?įinally, after seven months of political pressure, the FBI allowed United 93 relatives to listen to the CVR. “While we empathize with the grieving families,” assistant director John Collingwood wrote one widow, “we do not believe that the horror captured on the cockpit voice recording will console them in any way.” And yet, if the tape contained inspiring proof of the passenger revolt and its success, it would have been one hell of a lot more consoling than Tom Ridge’s oratory. Yet the FBI stonewalled victims’ relatives for months after 9/11. Releasing CVRs after a crash has long been standard practice pilots’ last, usually profane, utterances have become a cliche.
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The first indication that government officials were covering up the truth about United 93 came with their refusal to make public the cockpit voice recording (CVR). “Roll it” sounds less cinematic, and more like a book about cinematography.
#UNITED 93 SLUGLINE MOVIE#
(Theatrical release of the second “United 93” movie is scheduled to open April 28.) Lisa Beamer, widow of the passenger credited with the call-to-arms “let’s roll,” wrote a bestselling book by the same name, applied for a trademark on the expression, and is now working the Christianist lecture circuit.Īctually, the 9/11 Commission found, the evidence indicates that what Todd Beamer (or someone else) said was not “let’s roll,” but “roll it”–possibly referring to an airplane service cart the passengers may have wanted to use to break down the door into the cockpit. Best of all, it was marketable–by Hollywood and by a president willing to surf on a kind of heroism notably absent from his own life. The legend of Flight 93 had everything a nation caught with its pants down needed to feel better about itself: guts, heroism, self-sacrifice. One guy said, ‘Let’s roll.’ They took the plane into the ground.” Many of them told their loved ones goodbye. They learned the plane was going to be used as a weapon. Bush said: “People are flying across the country on an airplane, at least they thought they were. Calling the passenger revolt “the most vivid and sad symbol of them all,” George W. Ridge’s boss repeatedly used United 93 to close his standard stump speech. “The passengers and crew did whatever they humanly could–boil water, phone the authorities, and ultimately rush the cockpit to foil the attack.” “The terrorists were right to fear an uprising,” Ridge rhapsodized. “Faced with the most frightening circumstances one could possibly imagine,” he told grieving relatives of the passengers and crewmembers aboard the fourth plane hijacked on 9/11, “they met the challenge like citizen soldiers, like Americans.” He recited the now-familiar story of passengers learning by phone about the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, deciding to fight back and breaking into the cockpit–a heroic act that led to their own deaths while sparing countless others in Washington. On the first anniversary of the crash of United Airlines Flight 93, Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge delivered a speech at the site of the disaster in western Pennsylvania.