“People had I-beams [steel joists] through them, and things like that.”
“A woman’s severed hand. You could still see the engagement ring on her finger … The constant smell of burnt flesh.”
“The body of a young woman … her child underneath … an arm they found, a woman’s, and when they pried open her fingers they found inside the fist of a baby.”
“You couldn’t walk more than a few feet in some areas without encountering body parts.”
The charnel house that was the Trade Center would over time yield up 21,744 separate human remains. Chief medical examiner Dr. Charles Hirsch, whose task it would be to collect and identify them, was based on First Avenue, only two miles from the Trade Center. He and aides had rushed to a nearby site early on 9/11, to prepare a temporary morgue, and several of them had been injured by flying debris. Those still able to work then initiated the necessary, macabre process that—as this book goes to press—continues still.
Remains were brought to Dr. Hirsch’s headquarters as they were found. They were analyzed, borne to a white tent nearby. There, a prayer was spoken over them. Then they were stored in refrigerated trailers pending identification. The operation would eventually require the installation of sixteen trailers.
To Hirsch, it came as no surprise that there should be so few complete bodies and so many thousands of body fragments. “If reinforced concrete was rendered into dust,” he said, “it wasn’t much of a mystery as to what would happen to people.”
More remains would be found as the years passed—some as late as 2009—atop the damaged Deutsche Bank building, in manholes, under a service road at Ground Zero. An assortment of remains, from a complete cadaver dressed in a suit to tiny bone fragments, was found at a landfill on Staten Island, destination of the half million tons of debris removed from the site. The landfill’s name, the name it had had since the late 1940s, was Fresh Kills.
Within ten months of 9/11, science and detective work would identify 1,229 of those killed. In the years since, 401 more victims have been identified. It has been an unparalleled forensic achievement. Even so, 1,122 men and women—41 percent of the total who died—remain unidentified. The families of more than a thousand people cannot bury their loved ones.
THERE IS ANOTHER REASON, though, that the true death toll will long remain elusive. Listen again to the voices of those who endured 9/11 on the streets and in the buildings of New York City.
“I see this fifty-, sixty-story dust rolling down the block.” “The ambulances looked like they were covered with gray snow … so thick you couldn’t see a sharp edge from a smooth edge.” “People were just full of dust … looked like zombies.”
“Nobody could breathe. Everything was stuck in their throats and their eyes, mouths, faces, and everything.” “Everybody’s coughing, breathing in mouthfuls of shit.”
“Our face-pieces were on, because the probie [trainee firefighter] was having trouble with chest pains, having difficulty breathing.” “My lungs were filling up with this stuff. I don’t know what it was. I thought I was going to die.” “The sergeant asked me, ‘You think we could die from this stuff?’ I’m like, ‘Right now? No. But eventually? Yes.’ ”
Less than an hour after the second strike, a Fire Department operator had logged a phone call from a woman on Duane Street, near the Trade Center. At 9:59 the dispatcher noted:
FC—CONCERN ABOUT THE RESPIRATORY EFFECT OF THOSE PARTICLES
The person calling about the “particles” must have come across as a fusspot, her call a mere nuisance. Who had time to think, then, about the bits and pieces falling from the towers and wafting on the breeze? The material spewed out by the towers, however, did have significance—a significance that increased greatly once the towers had fallen and the walls of dust had roared up the canyons of Lower Manhattan.
“Dust” covers many evils. 9/11’s dust contained: asbestos (tests after the attacks showed hazardous asbestos levels at sites up to seven blocks from Ground Zero), lead, glass fibers, dioxin, PCBs, and PAHs (potentially carcinogenic chemical compounds) and toxins from perhaps fifty thousand vaporized computers.
New York firefighters had reason, historically, to fear such pollutants. “We lost quite a few firemen back in the seventies in a telephone building fire,” remembered Salvatore Torcivia. “They were exposed to PCBs when all the transformers in that building burned and they didn’t have the proper equipment to protect themselves. Numerous guys died the first year from cancer. Over the next five to twenty years, all the guys from that job died. The majority went within the first ten years.”
Torcivia worked at Ground Zero every day for two weeks. “There’s gonna be a lot of people sick from this,” he forecast later,
and not just firemen. I wasn’t wearing a mask the whole time … They issued us these paper masks used for painting, but they don’t stop anything … From day one, everyone was complaining of the cough and the sore throats … The second day or third day I was getting told by private test groups at the site that the contaminants in the air were off the charts. They were so high they couldn’t register them. But we were also being told by the city and the state that everything was within the range where it’s not gonna harm anyone. That just wasn’t so.
The firefighter coughed as he talked, a cough that seemed to come from deep inside his chest. He had begun having problems within a month of 9/11.
Going on the normal runs, we noticed that a lot of us were getting winded more easily … On regular walk-ups, where I never had a problem before, I thought I was gonna have a heart attack. I couldn’t catch my breath … I went to the Fire Department surgeon … They found out that I’ve dropped around 40 to 45 percent of my breathing capacity since the last time I was tested … I went to see a specialist. He explained to me that all the stuff that got into my body down at Ground Zero—I didn’t just inhale it into my lungs and bronchial tubes—I ingested it … And everything working together is keeping it constantly inflamed and infected … There’s four to five hundred guys with breathing problems.
Salvatore Torcivia’s problems were far from unusual. A 2007 study by the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and the New York City Fire Department noted a huge increase in the number of firefighters suffering from the lung ailment sarcoidosis. Some two thousand firefighters had at that point reportedly been treated for serious respiratory ailments.
“The World Trade Center dust,” the college’s Dr. David Prezant has noted, “is a combination of the most dense, intense particulate matter [first responders] were ever exposed to in an urban environment.”
The respiratory ailments have continued to increase, affecting not only firefighters but policemen, emergency medical personnel, and those who worked on the rubble removed from Ground Zero.
Many have succumbed to their illnesses. In a landmark decision in 2007, the New York medical examiner ruled that the 9/11 dust cloud contributed to the death as early as five months afterward of a young attorney from sarcoidosis. As in the case of all victims of the attacks, the cause of her death was registered as homicide.
According to figures published in late 2008 by the New York congressional delegation, 16,000 9/11 responders and 2,700 people who lived near Ground Zero were at that time “sick and under treatment.”
Reports in 2009 suggested that some 479 people, from different walks of life, had died from illnesses that may be attributable to the condition of the air during and after the 9/11 attacks. One by one, news reports show, others continue to die.
In late 2010, when deaths from illness among first responders had risen to 664—many of them from causes suspected to be related to 9/11—Congress acknowledged the gravity of the problem.
The James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, named for a New York policeman who had died of pulmonary fibrosis at thirty-four, earmarked $4.2 billion to address the health needs of the long-term victims of 9/11.
“We will never forget the selfless courage demonstrated by the firefighters, police off
icers, and the first responders who risked their lives to save others,” said President Obama when he signed the act. Back in September 2001, concern about the possible dangers of exposure to toxic dust and fumes had been swept aside. The Environmental Protection Agency declared after two days that initial tests were “very reassuring.” Five days later, Assistant Secretary of Labor John Henshaw said it was “safe to go back to work in New York’s financial district.” The Stock Exchange reopened on September 17, with EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman reassuring New Yorkers the next day that their air was “safe to breathe.”
There had been pressure from the start, from the very top, to get the financial district up and running. At a National Security Council meeting not twelve hours after the attacks, according to counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke, President Bush said, “I want the economy back, open for business right away, banks, the stock market, everything tomorrow.”
Those who knew the situation on the ground knew that opening the next day was an impossible fantasy. The President, however, had been removed from the realities.
AFTER HASTILY LEAVING Sarasota airport in Florida, at 9:55 on the morning of 9/11, Bush had spent the rest of the day aboard Air Force One, with brief stops at two U.S. military bases. “The President is being evacuated,” press secretary Ari Fleischer told reporters on the plane, “for his safety and the safety of the country.”
Key civil and military aides were at Bush’s side, but circumstances wreaked havoc with the concept of round-the-clock presidential grasp of the levers of power. For all his power and all the modern technology at his disposal, it is not evident that the President had much influence—if any—on the government’s reaction to the day’s events.
Accounts conflict mightily as to whether communications aboard Air Force One functioned well or appallingly badly. Bush spoke with Dick Cheney around the time of takeoff, but it is far from clear with whom, and how usefully, he spoke once the plane was airborne. In interviews conducted for the first anniversary of 9/11, chief of staff Andy Card repeatedly emphasized how efficiently the President had been able to communicate with the Vice President, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, and the military.
Bush himself, though, said it proved difficult—time and again—to get through to Cheney. He recalled pounding his desk on the plane, shouting, “This is inexcusable! Get me the Vice President!” He “could not remain in contact with people,” he was to say, “because the phones on Air Force One were cutting in and out.” In Washington, senior aide Karen Hughes experienced the same difficulty getting through to the presidential plane. “The military operator came back to me and in—in a voice that sounded very shaken—said, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry. We can’t reach Air Force One.’ ”
Given such contradictions, there is no way of knowing how Bush and Cheney or Bush and anyone else actually interacted that day. That issue, as will be seen, is central to the crucial matter of how the military responded to the hijackings.
Reporters traveling with the President watched the collapse of the towers on flickering television screens. At about 10:30, after the second tower fell, word came from the White House of a “credible,” anonymous phone threat to “Angel,” the insiders’ word for Air Force One. Tension rose accordingly. Armed guards were posted at the cockpit door, and agents checked the identification of almost everyone on board. Reporters were told not to use their cell phones. F-16 fighters were soon to begin escorting Air Force One, and did so for the rest of the day. One escort plane flew so close, the President’s press office would state, that Bush saluted through the window—and the F-16 pilot dipped a wing in reply. The warning of a threat to “Angel” had been just a baseless scare, but made a good story.
The President worried aloud about having literally vanished into the blue. “The American people,” he reportedly said, “want to know where their dang President is.” It was decided that he would land at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana to make a television appearance. “Freedom itself,” Bush said in a two-minute taped address at 1:20 P.M., “was attacked this morning by a faceless coward. And freedom will be defended.” This was less than the reassurance he had wished to communicate, not least because the tape first hit the airwaves running backward.
Then the President was off again, this time heading for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Once aboard, in a conversation he did succeed in having with Cheney, Bush said: “We’re at war, Dick. We’re going to find out who did this and kick their ass.” And: “We’re not going to have any slap-on-the-wrist crap this time.”
A rear admiral at Offutt, the underground headquarters of U.S. Strategic Command, would say he thought the President “very much in control … concerned about what was happening … calm … articulate … presidential.” In mid-afternoon, Bush took part in a videoconference with National Security Council members in Washington—Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, CIA director Tenet, and FBI director Robert Mueller.
The President, however, was by now preoccupied with the thought that his continued absence from the capital made him look bad. The Secret Service was still advising him to stay away from Washington. His staff wanted him to address the nation again from Offutt. Bush, however, would apparently have none of it.
“I’m not going to do it from an Air Force base,” he reportedly said. “Not while folks are under the rubble.” And, in another account, “I don’t want a tin-horn terrorist to keep me out of Washington.” Press secretary Fleischer agreed that the President’s whereabouts was becoming “an increasingly difficult issue to deal with.”
Air Force One at last made the return trip to the capital. From the helicopter carrying him to the White House, Bush got his first glimpse of the reality of 9/11. There in the evening light was the Pentagon, partly veiled in black smoke, a deep gouge in its west side. “The mightiest building in the world is on fire,” Bush muttered, according to Fleischer. “That’s the twenty-first century war you’ve just witnessed.” Then he was down, landing on the South Lawn and walking back into the White House almost ten hours after the attacks had begun.
Political Washington had begun to show a brave face to the world. More than a hundred members of Congress had gathered on the steps of the Capitol in a display of unity. “We will stand together,” declared Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert—now back on the Hill—and he and colleagues broke into a chorus of “God Bless America.” An hour and a half later, once he was anchored back in the Oval Office, Bush delivered a four-minute address to the nation. It is said that he had an audience of eighty million people.
“Evil, despicable acts of terror,” the President said, “have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger.” Though he could not have known it, he ended by citing the same passage from the Twenty-third Psalm to which United 93 passenger Todd Beamer had turned in a moment of terror: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I fear no evil …”
The address also included something Bush had added himself just before going on air. “We will make no distinction,” he said, after assuring Americans that those behind the attacks would be brought to justice, “between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”
Afterward, in the underground bunker where Cheney and others had spent the day, Bush met with key officials—the group he was to call his “war council.” The words “al Qaeda” and “Osama bin Laden” had been on everyone’s lips for hours, and CIA director Tenet said al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan were essentially one and the same.
There was talk of reprisals and then, according to counterterrorism coordinator Clarke, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld came out with a remarkable comment. “You know,” he said, “we’ve got to do Iraq.”
PRESIDENT BUSH almost always went to bed early, and September 11 was no exception. He balked when the Secret Service asked him and the first lady to spend the night on a bed in the under
ground bunker, an old pullout couch. “The bed looked unappetizing,” he recalled, “so I said no.” The couple retired to their usual bedroom in the residence, only to be woken around 11:30 P.M. by a new security alert. “Incoming plane!” an agent told them. “We could be under attack. Come on. Right now!”
The President of the United States, he in T-shirt and running shorts and Mrs. Bush in her robe—with their dogs Barney and Spot—were rushed down to the basement to be confronted again by the unappetizing couch. The “incoming” plane, however, turned out to be merely a chartered airliner bringing FBI reinforcements from the West Coast. Back went the Bushes to their private quarters.
Two hundred and twenty-five miles away in New York City, in the glare of halogen lights, men worked on through the night in the tangle of steel and rubble that had once symbolized American prosperity. They were still looking hopefully for the living, and the hand of one more survivor—the last, as it turned out—would eventually appear through a hole to grasp that of a rescuer. It belonged to a young female clerk who had worked at the Trade Center and, though seriously injured, she was to recover.
That consolation aside, there would henceforth be only the dead, or fragments of the dead.
The pile at the scene of the attacks “heaved and groaned and constantly changed, was capable at any moment of killing again.” The air smelled of noxious chemicals, and strange flames shot out of the ground, purple, green, and yellow. Fires were to burn on, underground, for three months to come.
An American apocalypse, a catastrophe with consequences—in blood spilled and global political upheaval—that continue to this day.
PART II
DISTRUST AND DECEIT
TEN
ONE CONSEQUENCE, A NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON, is that countless citizens do not believe the story of September 11 as we have just told it.