Behind-the-Scenes:
Ground Zero Written By Gail Swanson
Tiny
distances meant the difference between life and death. Rescue workers,
disoriented by the force of the collapse and choking on asbestos and
air-borne debris, crawled blindly in the midday darkness to what they
hoped was safety. Told in the first person, these are some of their
stories—of recovery, of loss, of the hope that fueled them, and of the
powerful sense of togetherness and fellowship that began that morning and
grew over the next several months. The
book is dedicated to the memory of the 343 firefighters who died that day,
and to all of those who perished at Ground Zero. As the authors note, that
toll includes 37 Port Authority Police Officers, 23 NYPD Officers, six
Emergency Medical staff, three court officers, one Secret Service agent
and one FBI agent. ORDER TODAY Journalists: A limited number of copies are available gratis to print and broadcast journalists. Please send your name and relevant details to Bryan Sacks with "Journalist" in the subject line, and include your mailing address. All other orders: Please send $20 via Paypal to the account linked below. (You will be asked to fill in a form with name and address.) You do not need a Paypal account. A credit card will also suffice. The $20 book price includes Priority Mail Shipping within the United States.
All proceeds go to the book authors and to defray promotional expenses. The Summer of Truth website gets nothing out of this deal - other than the pleasure of promoting a great book and helping to reveal an important story.
|
By Bryan Sacks and
Nicholas Levis
Amid the enormous detail of loss, sorrow and recovery conveyed in "Behind-the-Scenes: Ground Zero," a New York City firefighter reveals that at least three of the four black boxes from Flights 11 and 175 were found by "Federal Agents" at the former World Trade Center site, during the clean-up efforts from September 2001 to March 2002. At the time of the disaster, Nicholas DeMasi was a firefighter at Engine Company 261 in Queens. (The firehouse was shut down in 2003, after a century of operation.) In the weeks that followed 9/11, he joined an all-terrain vehicle crew (ATV Unit) at Ground Zero. In "Behind-the-Scenes," he describes his experience as follows: "If you needed anything, go ask the ATV Guy, they're the gopher guys." On page 108 comes the revelation: "At one point I was assigned to take Federal Agents around the site to search for the black boxes from the planes. We were getting ready to go out. My ATV was parked at the top of the stairs at the Brooks Brothers entrance area. We loaded up about a million dollars worth of equipment and strapped it into the ATV. When we got into the ATV to take off, the agent accidentally pushed me forward. The ATV was already in reverse, and my foot went down on the gas pedal. We went down the stairs in reverse. Fortunately, everything was okay. There were a total of four black boxes. We found three." DeMasi's statement was committed to print in August 2003 and concerns an event that likely happened before January 2002. It has gone unnoticed by the media until now, and is flatly contradicted by the Kean Commission's supposedly exhaustive findings. The only statement on the status of the Ground Zero black boxes in the 9/11 Commission Report is buried in footnote 76 to Chapter 1, but it is definitive: "The CVRs and FDRs from American 11 and United 175 were not found..." As if to leave no doubt about what is meant - that not even a trace of the total of four cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders from the two aircraft remained - the same sentence adds: "...and the CVR from American Flight 77 was badly burned and not recoverable." DeMasi
did not return phone messages to a number of investigators who reached out to
him, and has not spoken out beyond his comments in "Behind-the-Scenes." He is obviously not seeking attention - why
else drop his bombshell in this off-hand way, in a passage that almost no
one has noticed? - and we have no interest in putting him on the spot. Given
his commitment to the recovery effort at Ground Zero and the detail
he provides, his account has an immediate, prima facie credibility. |
|
NEWSWIRE Porter Goss orders CIA Inspector General to sanitize report assigning individual blame for 9/11 (Archive of article from NY Times, 11/2) ELECTION
DAY TERROR DRILLS - CHENEY IN COMMAND? by Michael Kane Analysis: "Osama" Video Points to LIHOP! ENGLISH
TRANSLATION OF BIN LADIN'S OCT. 31 SPEECH, The latest statement by "Osama Bin Laden" (whether or not it is really him) raises the question of why there was no air defense response to the Sept. 11 hijackings. Is it really him? As usual, "Osama" has a new look, once again different from the "Osamas" of previous videos. As usual, when the video was made and how it was received by Al Jazeera is unclear. He says he devised the original plan for 9/11 together with Mohamed Atta. Well, that settles any question about who authored the attacks. However, he also says the idea was to complete the attacks in 20 minutes. The conspirators feared that otherwise, the hijacked flights would be intercepted by U.S. jet fighters. But the actual attacks on Sept.
11 took almost two hours. The Pentagon was hit about one hour and 15
minutes after the first hijacking began. Why weren't the planes
intercepted - as "Osama" says he and Atta had feared? Of course, Bush's
actions do not suffice to explain why the U.S. Air Force failed to follow
standard operating procedures in reacting to the
ongoing hijackings. Perhaps the intent of the video
producers was simply to associate valid criticisms of the Bush
administration with the hated figure of America's greatest enemy. For an alternative analysis suggesting that the
release of the video (given the convenient timing) was in fact intended to
support the Bush-Cheney campaign - despite the suggestion of LIHOP - see the always brilliant Michel
Chossudovsky, "Intelligence
Asset Osama Supports Bush Reelection" (Oct 31)
Thursday, Oct 28: JUSTICE FOR 9/11
Eminem video
attacks Bush 9/11 behavior, cites New York Post headline: "BUSH
KNEW" (Oct 25) ANNOUNCEMENTS
Go to the home page for details on all coming events: FEATURES
"THE DOLLAR
CRISIS AND 9/11
TRUTH"
(May 04 but
timely!)
Summer of Truth
To John O'Neill and Paul Wellstone |
Consider this CBS News story from February 2002:
The
effort to better understand the events of the day isn’t being made
easier by the fact that the voice and data recorders aboard the two
hijacked jetliners that hit the twin towers haven't been recovered. The
four devices - and all the clues they would hold - have failed to turn up
in the 1.25 million tons of steel, concrete and other material taken from
ground zero. If DeMasi's story is true, then there will be others at Ground Zero who heard about or may have even witnessed the recovery of the black boxes, such as the "Federal Agents" he mentions. As DeMasi describes it, the search for the black boxes was not undertaken in secret; presumably word of the discovery spread quickly among the rescue workers on the site, and the news was only later suppressed. A trail demonstrating the truth of his statements would almost certainly exist. There may even be pictures or video of the successful recovery of the boxes, and documents confirming it. Recall that FEMA and OSHA continuously monitored the entire site with fixed and mobile video cameras, and that firefighters at Ground Zero were often in real-time radio contact with their headquarters to provide continuing updates of the recovery effort. Were these conversations recorded or transcribed? It is also possible, of course, that someone may have taken footage of the recovery with their own minicam. The 9/11 Commission had a staff of more than 60 persons, a budget of $15 million, and 20 months in which to explore every possible avenue of research into the events and aftermath of September 11. "Behind-the-Scenes" is one of a handful of books containing first-hand accounts by Ground Zero rescue workers. Yet the Commission seems to have entirely missed DeMasi's revelation. Since September 11 the government has extended its power to suppress information it believes may jeopardize national security. The Administration has claimed great latitude in the use of this power, as in the case of its bizarre "retroactive classification" of facts that FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds had already revealed (and after her most serious charges had received independent confirmation). Now as well, we can find no plausible argument that merely revealing the discovery of black boxes at Ground Zero could present a security threat worthy of classification and providing false accounts to the public. For the moment, then, we are left with questions: Will enough journalists and public officials be willing to pursue this story, wherever it leads, until the full truth is revealed? If the black boxes were recovered, was this information made available to the 9/11 Commission? Was the data on the black boxes retrieved? If the story is true and the government has been lying, then the 9/11 Commission Report repeated that lie, whether intentionally or out of ignorance. What else is being hidden from us? And why should we lend credence to other statements in the 9/11 Commission report?
|
