While I appreciate the mind-numbing precision with which you all decided that the controllers have no responsibility in this, you are dead wrong.
We all respond to situations with our brains, not our rule books. When we speak of a helo that ditches and the CP does not blow the floats, because he read the book and it says that he should beg permission to do anything from the Captain, that CP is WRONG, because his passengers hired him to have a brain. Similarly, the passengers of that airliner rely on the brains of ATC to be better than one word thick in regards to maintaining the safety of the operations they control. If you ppruners think that one word wrong allows this to happen, you deserve to live and work in such a system. You passengers deserve more, however.
The pilots erred, of course, but so did the controllers, and you have not said anything about that. How about you guys drop the books and pick up some common sense?
Lets transpose this tale. You daughter stops to ask a policeman directions to the nearest gas station. He gives them to her, and then watches her drive up the exit of a motorway the wrong direction, but does nothing because it is, after all, her fault. Does he get off free, and she dies of her own fault?