ABSTRACT
Public approval of a powerful sort has enveloped the actions of passengers on the United Airlines ight above Pennsylvania on 9/11. At the cost of their lives, they took on Al Qaeda “musclemen,” whose aim was crashing the ying bomb into the Capitol building in Washington, D.C. In a moment of crisis, these Americans-who had never met before-deliberated brie y, banded together, and charged down the aisle. ese citizens thrust aside every natural and normal fear-and decades of past counsel by security personnel and airlines to comply quietly with hijackers’ demands. ey saved lives in Washington and also preserved an iconic and monumental building in the Capitol. On 9/11 these few became the newest “Minute Men”—worthy descendants of men with muskets at Concord and Lexington. In his book on sabotage and terrorism, David Tucker notes that two further Al Qaeda terrorists came to the same fate-being shoved to the oor by other passengers-in acts that later ended suicide air bombing dreams of Richard Reid and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.1
