Listen: 9/11, WTC and the Lies That Keep on Killing

The Adams administration still refuses to release vital municipal records that could shed more light on the lies of 9/11.

By Bob Hennelly

In the days after the 9/11 attack, the US EPA lied and said the air was safe to breathe in lower Manhattan. 24 years later, more people have now died from the toxic air in lower Manhattan than the 3,000 that died as a result of the attack.

Thursday Sept. 11, 2025 WBAI Pacifica presented this public affairs special as we remembered the dead and resolved to help the living that need our support to keep on living. WBAI was located at 120 Wall Street at the time.

We remember.

In this special you will hear from former WBAI News Director Jose Santiago, who was there on that day and in the months that followed. Jose, along with the entire WBAI team, working out of 120 Wall Street, just blocks away from the World Trade Center site, reported with the clarity and integrity that the unfolding events required.

It's work that stands the test of time.

Unlike the corporate news media, WBAI Pacifica was one place the community's well-founded environmental concerns were raised.

Three days after the 9/11 attack, former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, told reporters that “the good news continues to be that air samples we have taken have all been at levels that cause us no concern.”

Two years after 9/11, a review by the EPA Inspector General found the EPA “did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement,” as “air monitoring data was lacking for several pollutants of concern.”

Moreover, the OIG learned that it was President George W. Bush’s White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) that heavily edited the EPA press releases “to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.”

Even though samples taken indicated asbestos levels in Lower Manhattan were between double and triple EPA’s limit, the CEQ downplayed the readings as just “slightly above” the limit, the EPA IG found.

And when the EPA’s Inspector General tried to identify who had actually written the misleading press statements, they “were unable to identify any EPA official who claimed ownership” because investigators were told by the EPA Chief of Staff that “the ownership was joint ownership between EPA and the White House” and “final approval came from the White House.”

“She also told us that other considerations, such as the desire to reopen Wall Street and national security concerns, were considered when preparing EPA’s early press releases,” according to the EPA’s Inspector General.

Generational Fallout

Today, tens of thousands of people are afflicted with multiple ailments. In the years since, in addition to often struggling with PTSD, they have had to navigate bureaucracies that can be non-responsive and sometimes even abusive. And then there is our confiscatory healthcare system that can burn months and even years in delayed treatments these sometimes terminally ill folks just don’t have.

A common feeling among this 9/11 WTC cohort is that the system designed to “help” them is dominated by red tape that seems likely to hasten their demise. Like the veterans who were ordered to charge into atmospheric atomic testing or were exposed to Agent Orange during Vietnam, our system is at best ambivalent about their plight and sometimes downright hostile.

In 2023, the New York Times reported that the World Trade Center Health Program had confirmed 4,610 program participants had died since the attack “although the program does not collect information on cause of death,” adding that “some health officials believe many died from Sept. 11-related illnesses — and that the toll is in fact higher, given the likelihood that many people have died who were not enrolled in the program and did not know their illness was Sept. 11-related.”

In the several months since President Trump’s second term, the unions that represent first responders as well as 9/11 WTC advocacy groups have sounded the alarm about cuts to the life-sustaining 9/11 WTC Health Program.

“When the Trump administration started on January 21, the WTCHP had 93 staff—well below its authorized head count of 138—along with support staff from the CDC for grants, contracts and human resources,” according to Ben Chevat, with 9/11 Health Watch. “It was supposed to increase its staff after it had gained 10,000 new members in calendar 2024, with an estimated 10,000 new members joining this year seeking medical monitoring and treatment for 9/11 illnesses, including over 60 different cancers.”

According to 9/11 Health Watch, during Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure the WTCHP now only has 80 staff, since so many took the Trump administration buyout.

“The communications ban/hiatus has been preventing the program from responding to issues raised by the 9/11 community,” 9/11 Health Watch reports. “Its ability to do surveillance for new emerging conditions is severely restricted. It has prevented the Program’s 9/11 Responder and Survivor Steering committees from meeting. The Responder Steering Committee includes 9/11 responders and doctors and has met every month since 9/11 to work on the health issues facing the 9/11 community until Secretary Kennedy took over.”

In the first hour of this week’s special WBAI broadcast we interview filmmaker Bridget Gormley about “Dust — The Lingering Legacy of 9/11.” Bridget lost her father, FDNY Firefighter Billy Gormley, who died at 53 as a consequence of his 9/11 WTC exposure. That exchange is followed by an all-female panel that frankly discusses the gender healthcare disparities that exist in the 9/11 WTC Health Program that are being addressed many years later.

We hear from Firefighter Regina Wilson, then president of the Vulcan Society; Retired FDNY EMT Marianne Pizzitola, president of the New York City Organization of Public Service Retirees; and Lila Nordstrum, author of “Some Kids Left Behind” and former student at Stuyvesant High School, adjacent to the World Trade Center.

In this radio screening of Bridget's film you will hear the voices of Juan Gonzalez, currently the co-host of Democracy Now. From his position as a columnist for the New York Daily News at that time, Gonzalez had to fight internally to get his newspaper to report on the very real environmental risks present throughout lower Manhattan, information that the corporate news media, along with the Giuliani administration, worked hard to suppress.

You will also hear from Rep. Jerry Nadler, who at the time sounded the alarm that was ignored by the political power structure that had resolved that the continuity of Wall Street trumped whatever health issues first responders and civilians would face in the years and decades ahead.

To this day, the City of New York and the Adams administration refuse to release the municipal records from that period.

In hour two we also hear from Val Velazquez-Stetz, retired Jersey City Police Officer and 9/11 Outreach Director at Barasch & McGarry, as well as Joel Kupferman with the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project and Anne Marie Principe, 9/11 survivor, small business owner, and founder of Affinity Health Care Advocates.

This two-hour radio documentary would not have been possible without the sustaining sponsorship from Michael Barsch and the Barsch & McCarry Law firm as well as unions representing three million households.

Listen to the entire show below: