Ghoulish Garbage. In an exercise of spectacular excess, the New York Fire Department has released 15 hours of recordings of radio transmissions and 500 oral histories about the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center in response to a Freedom of Information lawsuit by The New York Times and survivors of WTC victims. This hideous display of ghoulish delite with tragedy is far in excess of the stated purpose of the suit.

A group of victims' families who have become advocates for reforming building codes and emergency response had eagerly awaited the release of the records in hopes they would challenge the notion that many firefighters in the north tower heard, but chose to ignore, an evacuation message issued after the south tower collapsed.

Some city officials, including former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, have suggested some firefighters ignored the mayday call in acts of personal heroism. But the group of families has sought to lay blame on the city for providing firefighters with faulty radios.

That issue was resolved by a few key testimonies from firefiters on the scene like this one:

Another firefighter who was in the north tower, Paul Bessler, recalled seeing a fellow firefighter going up the stairs as though he was "on a mission."

"Just at that point, my radio came clear as day, 'Imminent collapse. This was a terrorist attack. Evacuate."'

End of discussion. If that was the legal issue, it could have been resolved with the release of only a few key passages. The vast amount of data released is pointlessly excessive. It serves no legitimate purpose but is utterly ugly in its ghoulishness. What kind of beast wants to read or hear such things? It's like a horror flick for the demented, who need real horror — fictional horror won't do.
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I am disgusted.
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I live about 16 miles from Downtown Manhattan and do not need to be reminded of that day. I happened to have to go to the hospital that very day for a serious accident I had had two days earlier but the severity of which I didn't yet know until my mother and sister insisted I couldn't just tuf it out to see if things got better. We couldn't go to the nearest hospital, UMDNJ, because it was receiving ambulances and medevac helicopters from Manhattan, so had to drive to a small Catholic hospital several miles beyond. As we rounded a bend of South Orange Avenue near UMDNJ, we could see a huge brown cloud of smoke across the horizon floating above the miniature Manhattan skyline, and a medevac helicopter landing on the roof of UMDNJ.
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As I was admitted to Saint James, a television in the waiting room showed the disaster a scant 11 or so miles from that hospital, and the male Filipino nurse at the admissions computer remarked that no matter how bad my situation might be, he was sure I was glad to be here rather than there. How right he was.
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I don't understand this ugly impulse in some people to relive nitemarish events from the past, to delve into them in vivid detail. I don't "get" the fascination with the "Holocaust" or Gulag or Pearl Harbor or the aftermath of Hiroshima. Let it go. Take the lessons, release the rest.
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It is extremely unhealthy to replay past nitemares. We don't need the tapes, we don't need the transcripts, we don't need the oral histories after the fact. Those memories have seared themselves into the brains of the people who saw the horror and wish they could forget it. Why would anyone go out of his way to sear horrifying images into a brain that had escaped them?
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(The current U.S. military death toll in Iraq, according to the website "Iraq Coalition Casualties", is 1,847.)
- posted by L. Craig Schoonmaker @ 8:21 PM