Zacarias Moussaoui is lucky the jurors at his sentencing trial weren't allowed to see the movie "United 93" the day before reaching a verdict. If they had, rather than handing him life in prison, it is likely that one or more of the jurors would have come out of the box to deliver the death sentence himself....

--Daniel Henninger on The Wall Street Journal's editorial page

Yeah, right, Daniel. Because the jurors actually have no idea what really happened on 9/11:

Jurors in the sentencing trial of Zacarias Moussaoui on Wednesday listened to the final, chaotic minutes aboard Flight 93, the United Airlines plane that crashed in a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, 2001.

The sounds of panic and violence were captured by the plane's cockpit recorder, which was recovered from the wreckage.

...The hijackers' initial announcement is followed by sounds of a struggle, and it is difficult to decipher what is occurring. The hijackers appear to be wrestling with and perhaps beating the pilot and co-pilot, saying "go ahead, lie down."

A voice is heard from the cockpit, possibly that of a flight crew member, saying, "Please, please don't hurt me... Oh God!" A crew member appears to be groaning, and says, "I don't want to die." After that, there are sounds that seem like cries of pain.

Sounds of a struggle continue in the cockpit for a few minutes. At 9:37 a.m., a hijacker says in Arabic, "Everything is fine. I finished." ...

No idea whatsoever:

They were the desperate moments, just before the south tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. on Sept. 11, and Kevin Cosgrove of West Islip was trapped on the 105th floor in the northwest corner of the building, grimly determined but losing hope.

"Lady, there's two of us in this office," he told a 911 operator, in one of two tapes of emergency calls from inside the towers played publicly for the first time yesterday at Zacarias Moussaoui's death-penalty trial in federal court here. "We're not ready to die but it's getting bad."

... "It's black, it's arid ... How the hell are you going to get my ass down? I need oxygen."

Then, a moment later, at precisely 9:59, TV screens around the country showed the start of the skyscraper's slow implosion. The image was displayed on courtroom video monitors as it began to disintegrate from the top down. "Oh God!" screamed Cosgrove from the inside. "Oh ... " The call ended abruptly....

In addition to Cosgrove, jurors yesterday also heard a haunting 911 tape from Melissa Doi, trapped on the south tower's burning 83rd floor. "It's very, very, very hot," she told the dispatcher. She saw only smoke, and couldn't find air. "I'm going to die, aren't I?" she said. "I'm going to die." The dispatcher told her to stay calm and say her prayers. "Please God," she cried. "It's so hot. I'm burning up."...

Not a clue:

The grandfather of the youngest victim of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, testifying at Zacarias Moussaoui's sentencing trial today, described watching on television as the plane carrying his son and granddaughter hit the World Trade Center.

C. Lee Hanson said that his son, Peter, was calling from the phone. "As we were talking he said, very softly, 'Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God!' " The 73-year-old Hanson was describing the moment before he watched the plane become the second to hit the Twin Towers on that fateful day.

A few minutes before, Hanson said, Peter had told him he thought the hijackers were going to crash the plane into a building, and his son told him, "Don't worry Dad, if it happens, it will be quick."...

The grandfather said that medical examiners asked him in the days after the attacks to retrieve DNA samples from the family home to identify remains. The grandfather said it was "probably one of the worst things I ever did in my life. I was picking hair out of hair brushes, putting toothbrushes into bags."

He said the only remains that were ever found was a bone of his son, a few inches long....

They're completely in the dark:

Jurors weighing the fate of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui were shown gruesome photographs Tuesday of bodies burned inside the Pentagon...

After a three-minute bench conference to argue with the defense over what could be shown, prosecutors displayed photos of a charred body on a blue stretcher, another charred body sitting upright inside a wrecked Pentagon office, several charred bodies piled together inside another destroyed office and a small torso covered with ash on a blue stretcher. The mostly intact bodies had barely discernible facial features....

Utterly unaware:

An Nguyen was 4 years old when his father, Khang Nguyen, was killed at the Pentagon . Prosecutors showed a picture of An standing at the Pentagon gates a few days after the attack, looking for his dad.

When An was told his dad was in heaven, An decided he wanted to become an astronaut, "so he can go into space and look for his daddy," she told the jury.

... One firefighter described how his friend and mentor died after he was hit by a falling body from one of the twin towers.

Another man described how his sister committed suicide a month after the attacks, grieving over her husband‘s death on American Airlines Flight 11, the first plane to hit the World Trade Center.

Chandra Kalahasthi read to the jury the suicide note written by his sister, Prasanna: "I want to be with my loving hubby."

One woman who shot video of the attack from her hotel described hearing "audio fireflies" -- a chirping that she later learned is emitted from firefighters‘ equipment when they are motionless for extended periods of time....

Shut the hell up, Henninger. You're an idiot. No one who wasn't involved in the carnage or linked to a victim could possibly know the pain caused that day as well as these jurors do -- and you know that.

Not that it isn't obvious what you're doing. You're trying to get moviegoers to go see United 93 this weekend rather than M:i:III. You assume that the more people who see the movie, the more people will vote Republican in November, and the more tax cuts the core Journal readership will get in the next two years.

Fine. You're just doing your job. But don't act as if you're the big expert on pain right now, just because you went to the movies.