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| Newly Released Trade Center Transcripts Provide Real-Time Narrative to Sept. 11 Attacks |
| 2003-08-29 |
As Fred says, "never forgive, never forget.""World Trade Center . . . repeat, we have something . . . going into the top of the World Trade Center!"These are the voices, raw, unfiltered, of police officers and civilians at the World Trade Center on the final morning of its existence. Under a court order, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey late today released roughly 1,800 pages of transcripts, covering about 260 hours of recorded telephone calls and radio transmissions made in the immediate aftermath of the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. The new transcripts, based on reel-to-reel tapes recovered from the wreckage of 5 World Trade Center weeks after two aircraft flew into the towers, provide a vivid, chaotic, real-time narrative of what happened that morning. Confusion is epidemic. There are repeated rumors that rockets have been fired from the Woolworth Building. Someone claims terrorists with explosives are fleeing through New Jersey in a Ford van with New York tags. People are in shock. Several callers to police, unaware of what is happening, report burglar alarms going off in the towers. In the initial moments, almost everyone struggles to comprehend the dimensions of the catastrophe. MALE: Yo, I’ve got dozens of bodies, people just jumping from the top of the building onto . . . in front of One World Trade.A man calls his daughter: His fate is unknown. A police officer barks into his radio: "We need water . . . burning jet fuel on five-one."A young man answering the phone at a police desk near the ground floor is nonchalant about a plane hitting the building. "It will affect new paperwork. . . . Only the paperwork," he says.Seconds later, the second plane hits and, with the shock wave passing through the structure, he changes his tune: "Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa -- that didn’t feel good." Previous accounts of events inside the buildings have largely come from survivors and family members of victims, who recounted telephone calls from those trapped inside. Some who died also managed to send numerous e-mails and leave messages on answering machines. A 78-minute transcript of Fire Department transmissions also has been made public. Yet many family members say they still don’t know exactly what happened to their loved ones, some of whom vanished after making fleeting farewell phone calls. The transcripts released today won’t solve most of those remaining mysteries, but they do present a sizable and often harrowing addition to the historical record of Sept. 11, 2001. The material is largely from police radio transmissions and civilian phone calls. The calls were not to 911, but to Port Authority police lines at several locations in New York and New Jersey. The Port Authority has its own police force, and lost 37 officers, which the agency says was the worst single-day loss of any police force in U.S. history. More than half of those officers are identifiable on the tapes. "It shows people performing their duties very professionally and very heroically on a day of unimaginable horror," said Greg Trevor, a Port Authority spokesman and survivor of the attack. "We always knew in our hearts that these people were heroes to the end. Now we know for sure." The first plane hit the North Tower at 8:46 a.m. Not for another 16 minutes would the second plane slam into the South Tower. But in some cases, people in the South Tower were told to remain in place rather than evacuate. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m., followed by the collapse of the North Tower at 10:28 a.m. MAN ON 92ND FLOOR: We need to know if we need to get out of here, because we know there’s an explosion, I don’t know what building.After a bit of cross talk, he asks again: MAN: Should we stay or should we go?It is unclear in the transcripts if those people survived. Shortly after the second plane hit, Port Authority police received a call from a Port Authority official. "I’m on the 64th floor . . . in Tower One. . . . I’ve got about 20 people here with me. . . . What do you suggest?"A little more than an hour later, the official calls again. "I’m in the Trade Center, Tower One. I’m with the Port Authority and we are on the 64th floor. The smoke is getting kind of bad, so we are going to . . . we are contemplating going down the stairway. Does that make sense?"But it’s too late. The tower collapses. Trevor, the Port Authority spokesman, pointed out tonight that he and his colleagues on the 68th floor of the North Tower were told to evacuate almost immediately, and any incorrect guidance to others was due to the confusion and uncertainty of the moment. Many of the transcripts capture the staccato utterances of gasping police officers trying to cope with a rapidly disintegrating situation. Here and there, almost hidden in the cross talk, individual stories play out. One is that of a stoic carpenter, identified in the transcripts only as "MALE 103," a contract employee with a Port Authority radio. The agency declined to identify him tonight, but said that his family had received counseling after reading the transcript. MALE 103: Structure fire one-o-three open up! . . .For what appears to be several minutes, he continues to transmit. He says the heat is increasing. MALE 103: Structural fire, 103. . . . Need immediate purge.Nothing more is heard from him. Higher up yet, people are suffocating at Windows on the World. A woman tells police, "The situation on 106 is rapidly getting worse. . . . We . . . we have . . . the fresh air is going down fast! I’m not exaggerating."The documents had been sought in a lawsuit filed by the New York Times, and a New Jersey judge last Friday ordered the agency to release the transcripts. The Port Authority chose not to appeal the ruling, but pleaded with the news media to withhold gruesome and gratuitous details "that do nothing to further this discussion." The Port Authority contacted family members of some victims so they could review the sensitive material before it was made public. "As a family member, you can’t imagine the horror of finding your loved one’s last words," said Carie Lemack, whose mother, Judy Larocque, was on American Airlines Flight 11 and was killed when it hit the North Tower. "What is the reason for releasing these tapes? If it’s safety, that’s fantastic. But if it’s entertainment, then we’re very concerned." Liz Alderman’s son, Peter, had been attending a conference at Windows on the World atop the North Tower. His last communication to his family was an e-mail sent on his BlackBerry at 9:25 a.m. He wrote, "We’re stuck. The room is filling with smoke. I’m scared." His mother notes that his writing was coherent, not panic-stricken. She assumes he lived a while longer. "The most important facts I’ll never know. I don’t know how long Peter lived, how he died, and whether he suffered," she says. She doesn’t believe that the transcripts will change that, but she is glad they are public. "Every time we can put a human face on this," she says, "it no longer is just a mass murder." With every respect to Ms. Alderman and all the other victims, it most certainly was mass murder. Never forgive, never forget. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #16 Mr. Davis, What a bullshit response. We already have "enough" troops in Iraq. We only have to use them correctly. |
| Posted by: Uncle Joe 2003-8-29 11:15:56 PM |
| #15 Tora Bora for the hell of it, Mark IV. I do believe though that if I was in the Forbidden City, looking over war plans with Taiwan, I'd be a shitload more adventerous knowing the Americans lose 3000 people without a nuclear counterresponse. |
| Posted by: Brian 2003-8-29 8:32:43 PM |
| #14 9/11 warranted a lot of things, a tactical NUKE strike wasn't one of them. I believe the calculus and the formulas for when and how to justify a first strike exist. I think NK, Iran and Syria are all more lilely candidates for first strike. But remember we must maintain the double standard (we can have'em they can't) so we clearly use them with far more discretion. Remember the benefits of using the nukes must outweight the economic shockwave induced. |
| Posted by: J.H. 2003-8-29 3:42:03 PM |
| #13 There was certainly no first strike tactical plan in the 70s. We gamed it over and over from Fulda to the Rhine... tac nukes were only occasionally gamed, and then we only responded to Russki first-use. With 5:1 Soviet tank superiority we planned conventional defense-in-depth, with air power as the equalizer. Sometimes it worked. Nukes always worked out better for the Soviets, once they got introduced. Brian, I seem to remember this came up before... just whom should GWB have nuked? Your whole nuclear credibility argument is very weak, IMO. If nothing else, it shows that the US is one of the better choices, if you have to have nuclear states. The US was not in peril of its national existence, and I don't think there is much doubt in anyone's mind about our willingness to use nuclear weapons in that unlikely event. I would like every jihadi, and every coy little millionaire jihadi financier, drawn and quartered and fed to hogs. But I don't understand how incinerating foreign capitals would have helped the WTC/Pentagon victims or the US, at all. It would also have lowered the standards for atomic warfare by all parties, which would be a highly stupid thing to do. |
| Posted by: Mark IV 2003-8-29 2:47:11 PM |
| #12 Chuck, I think it was the preferred, if not reflex, response, given the overwhelming strength of the soviet ground forces compared with those the west could muster. It was the only chance of stopping the Ruskies rolling to the Atlantic within in a fortnight. |
| Posted by: Bulldog 2003-8-29 1:36:09 PM |
| #11 Bulldog, the Pentagon has plans for everything. The issue is, would Ike have authorized first use of nukes to repel a Soviet invasion? Would any President? Mr. Davis, I advocate a few nukes, 500 =/-, all sizes and shapes, just for any emergency. Maintaining an arsenal of the size that we currently have is hard to justify. But we should have some, top-of-the-line, current science nukes. If nothing more than to impress the wogs. |
| Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2003-8-29 1:26:32 PM |
| #10 Bulldog, That was true in the old days when we had a Strategic Air Command too. Today Mr. Simmins is correct. Nukes are an expensive and useless albatross around our neck that deprive usable weapons systems and troops of adequate funding. The sooner we figure this out and deal with it, the sooner we'll have enough troops for Iraq. |
| Posted by: Mr. Davis 2003-8-29 12:18:46 PM |
| #9 I don't have a reference to hand, but I thought the pentagon intended to use tactical nukes first, should soviet troops have invaded western Europe back in the fifties. |
| Posted by: Bulldog 2003-8-29 12:15:20 PM |
| #8 Brian, I don't believe that any United States government has ever intended to use nuclear weapons. The only stated reason to use them is the use of WMD on us. I believe that this is a gun we have never intended to draw from its holster. I think it's a consensus, Packs and Donks, no use of nukes for any reason, unless we're hit with WMD. Even then, the definition of WMD will become very fluid. |
| Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2003-8-29 11:52:51 AM |
| #7 Chuck, I disagree. If 3000 die and it doesn't elicit a nuclear response, what will it take? That macabre game is probably now being played in Riyadh and a War Academy outside of Beijing. Bush may have introduced a credibility gap into the use of the American nuclear arsenal. |
| Posted by: Brian 2003-8-29 11:20:46 AM |
| #6 I'll admit that I occasionally find it necessary to visit one of the websites that contain graphic images of people falling from the towers... not pleasant, but it renews my ire supply. |
| Posted by: snellenr 2003-8-29 9:21:23 AM |
| #5 I try to be a rational person. But God bless George Bush. On that day, if I were President... the old phrase "Kill 'em all, let God sort them out" would have been so tempting. |
| Posted by: Chuck Simmins 2003-8-29 8:52:32 AM |
| #4 It brings it all back again, and my resolve remains firm. The animals who did this need to be put down permanently, |
| Posted by: Douglas De Bono 2003-8-29 8:06:08 AM |
| #3 Show no mercy where none was shown. Give them no quarter as none will be given us. Wipe them out. |
| Posted by: Anon1 2003-8-29 3:34:40 AM |
| #2 Joe -- you're right, I did mis-read it. Thanks. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2003-8-29 2:40:39 AM |
| #1 Steve, I think Ms. Alderman agrees with you; she is saying it is not "just" a mass murder. This is why we need to exterminate the militant Islamic extremists, especially those who may have WMD'S, or we'll have another 9/11, or worse. |
| Posted by: Uncle Joe 2003-8-29 1:17:34 AM |