From Vietnam to 9/11, America keeps abandoning its heroes

On Sept. 11 I was working for Pacifica Network News. WBAI Radio, 99.5 FM, is one of the network’s flagship stations. At the time, it was located at 120 Wall Street — just blocks away from the World Trade Center. Back then, filing remotely required an ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) line, and I was able to file from my home in New Jersey that day, and over the days and sleepless nights that followed.

As the descendant of Welsh coal miners singing as angels with black lung, I avoided the smoldering pile that was left by the terrorist attack. Like my colleague, former Daily News columnist Juan Gonzalez, I never trusted then-Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Todd Whitman when she proclaimed the air in lower Manhattan was “safe to breathe.” As a 2003 EPA inspector general report documented, that fraudulent “all clear” from Whitman was traced back to the Bush White House that wanted Wall Street open at any price.

But the betrayal of first responders can be traced before the 2001 second attack on the Twin Towers.

As has been well documented by the International Association of Firefighters, on the day of the attack, scores of firefighters died because they did not hear the order to evacuate the towers. Rudy Giuliani’s mayoral administration had botched the upgrade process for new radios, so on that fateful day, firefighters were working with the very analog radios that had failed them during the World Trade Center attack eight years before. In fact, seven years later, bus loads of FDNY widows and grieving family members would shadow Giuliani’s presidential campaign.

On 9/11, 343 firefighters died in the fire and collapse. Since then 600 retired and active firefighters have died thanks to the toxic air and the EPA lie, reinforced by New York State and New York City officials, that the air was “safe to breathe.” What the officials told the world to do was to come shop” and support lower Manhattan to show the terrorists that the city — and America — had resolve. Incredibly, the “back to normal” stage managers sent close to 20,000 school kids back into schools located in the toxic zone. Nothing says “nothing to see here” more than photos of the kiddies back at school.

While close to 3,000 died in the terrorist attacks, close to 9,000 have died in the two-and-a-half decades since, most likely from one of the dozens of ailments that lingering cloud has caused. As with the U.S. government after Vietnam, when it denied Agent Orange was a problem, the City of New York for years denied claims from first responders that they were sick because of their exposure to the air in lower Manhattan.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg actually said that NYPD Detective James Zadroga, who had worked sorting for human remains at the Fresh Kills Landfill, and died a few years later, was not a hero but died because he was a drug addict. Of course, once an independent coroner from New Jersey confirmed what Zadroga and his family had said all along, Bloomberg apologized. 

In the quarter of a century since the attacks, through several city administrations, officials have refused to release the municipal files that show what the city knew and when it knew it. But this week, in a refreshing break with the past, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has started to release these documents on a universally available portal.

The day of the attack, my WBAI colleagues, led by Jose Santiago, the news director, fearlessly charged to the scene along with the police, firefighters and EMTs as civilians raced in the opposite direction away from the toxic cloud the fire and collapse had generated, which would linger for many months. WBAI was able to continue broadcasting that day because, unlike other broadcasters that had their transmitter atop the World Trade Center, our transmitter was way uptown on the Empire State Building. 

We recently recovered the air checks from that day, the actual tapes of the broadcast. On Sunday we will be rebroadcasting just some of what was broadcast that day for the first time since the Twin Towers fell and knocked the world off its axis, giving the U.S. cover to go on a global killing spree to “fight terror.”

WBAI is a non-profit community-informed and run radio station. Most of our producers volunteer. At 71, I am the general manager, my first management job. Under New York State’s 9/11 Notice Act, it’s my job to try and find all the people that worked or volunteered at the station and let them know about the Victims Compensation Fund and the 9/11 WTC Health Program. It’s sobering and painful work because people have died or are ailing.

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To date, just 145,000 of the first responders and survivors are enrolled in the World Trade Center Health Program, which has both extended life and the quality of that life for program participants. Experts estimated that close to 400,000 people remain at risk from a myriad of life altering ailments.

For several years, I worked for the Chief Leader, also located in lower Manhattan, which has covered civil service since 1897. It was there I encountered the stories about government workers being ordered back to their desks by the Giuliani administration in the hot zone. These were not first responders, but they kept the city running by doing things like making sure hungry people got their food stamps.

Under the health program, first responders, including reporters are fast tracked for health screening. Survivors, including tens of thousands of residents, non-emergency civil servants, commuters and students, have to display symptoms first. And with the latency of some of these Ground Zero cancers, that amounts to a death sentence.

Because the first responder cohort is so overwhelmingly male, it was only recently that female reproductive cancers were recognized as 9/11-related.

On its face, it was medically unethical to create a caste system for access to life-saving care based on your job title. But once we identified this massive risk to human beings, we owed it to cover them all — particularly 9/11’s children, who are only guilty of believing their parents when they said that the air was “safe to breathe.”