This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re beginning today’s show looking at new calls for the city of New York to release all files related to toxins released in the air when the World Trade Center twin towers collapsed in the 9/11 attack almost 25 years ago. The headline on Thursday’s New York Daily News front page reads “Ground Zero Memo Shocker: City Lawyers Worried About Toxins Just After Attack, But Stayed Silent.” Today’s cover of the Daily News reads, “Release All 9/11 Docs.”
Well, our own Juan González closely covered this issue for the Daily News and Democracy Now! beginning just after the 9/11 attacks and wrote about it in his book Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse.
Juan, as I read these stories and the uncovered memo, I could only think about your groundbreaking reporting from ground zero at the time, when everyone from the president to the New Jersey governor to the mayor at the time, Giuliani, said it’s safe to go back to work.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, Amy, and it really saddens me that 25 years later, what I tried to warn about in the series of articles that I wrote about the dangers, the health dangers, in the future for people who were living in or working at ground zero have proven to be true. You know, that period of time was one of the toughest in my career, because there were so many people who were basically attacking my reporting. Christie Todd Whitman herself, then the EPA administrator, wrote an op-ed piece in the Daily News blasting me. Kathryn Wylde, who was then the head of the Partnership for New York City, the big business group of New York, accused me of engaging in Halloween pranks. And City Hall, the Giuliani administration, blasted me to my editors. And even my own editors then said, “Look, you got to take it easy. You can’t back this stuff up.” And I remember telling Ed Kosner, the editor-in-chief of the Daily News at that time, I said, “Ed, I don’t want, 20 years later, that thousands of people will be dying as a result of the fact that we didn’t warn them about the dangers.” And sure enough, now more people have died as a result of illnesses contracted after the collapse of the World Trade Center than died on that day.
And I just wanted to read quickly a little section that I wrote in the introduction to my book on this whole issue, which, I think, puts it in context. I wrote back then, “The early blanket assurances that” — and again, this was written within weeks of the collapse of the World Trade Center. “The early blanket assurances that government officials issued were a grave mistake, and their continued defense of those assurances in the face of widespread public skepticism was inexcusable. Thousands of people may end up paying for that deception through unnecessary illness or premature death in the decades to come. In their rush to return New York City and Wall Street to business as usual, those shortsighted officials unwittingly paved the way for a second wave of victims from the World Trade Center tragedy.
“In scrutinizing the government response to the collapse, I am not suggesting that there was some secret conspiracy to hide the facts or that anyone intentionally set out to mislead the people of New York. But I have no doubt that some officials saw what they wanted to see, and irresponsibly chose to minimize or dismiss any post-collapse environmental threat. They did so for any number of reasons, or combination of them — out of ignorance, in response to political pressures from superiors, or because they underestimated environmental threats from toxic releases, something that is all too common in the history of such disasters. Once ordinary citizens questioned their assurances, however, those officials closed ranks, dissembled, hid important information, and refused to listen or alter their policies. My aim here is to outline key lessons of this saga for the general public so that this kind of deception is not repeated, should another catastrophe occur in the future.”
And now we are finding that they actually knew a lot more about the potential dangers than even I realized, because their own lawyers were telling them, “Look, we could be facing an onslaught of lawsuits as a result of our failure to provide people adequate information about the dangers that they faced.” So, it’s really a sad day in terms of New York City government to realize that it’s taken this long to uncover the facts.
AMY GOODMAN: You know, I said New Jersey governor. It was Christie Todd Whitman, who had been New Jersey governor, who, as you said, became EPA administrator and was assuring everyone everything was safe. And we’re going to move on, but, Juan, you should have won a Pulitzer Prize for your reporting. The Daily News would go on to win a Pulitzer Prize, but your editor at the time was forced out because of what you were saying at that time.
I encourage people to check out this new documentary about Democracy Now!, Steal This Story, Please!, because there’s a whole section on Juan’s reporting on the toxins at ground zero and what people faced. I’m headed to Santa Barbara today for the International Film Festival there, where Steal This Story will play tonight and tomorrow and has just won the Social Justice Award there.
Juan, congratulations on your reporting, although what you were reporting on is continuing to play out today and is truly an extremely sad story about local officials right up to the president not protecting their own citizens and residents.
