9/11 Transcripts, Read and Remember

The Fire Department on Friday released thousands of pages of oral histories recorded by firefighters about Sept. 11 and hours of radio transmissions, a vast mine of records that evoked anew the chaos and horror of the attack.

“Somebody yelled something was falling,” firefighter Maureen McArdle-Schulman recalled. “We didn’t know if it was desks coming out. It turned out it was people coming out, and they started coming out one after the other.”

“I felt like I was intruding on a sacrament,” she said. “They were choosing to die and I was watching them and shouldn’t have been.”

I read this and think…the intelligence wall that was created by 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick really does need to be explored and answered for. She needed to be seated before the committee, not on it, and made to account for this policy that prevented so much from being done.

Perhaps nothing could have been done to actually stop 9/11. But justice and history demand that we get the whole, complete and truthful story of what exactly caused the terrible breakdown in US Intelligence gathering and sharing prior to 9/11.