"I met our first eyewitness, a Salomon Smith Barney employee, en route to work, who saw the first plane hit. "First thing I heard was an airplane really low. I looked up and I thought, there's no way it's going to miss that building. It was obviously intentional," he said. "You would see some debris flickering down, but then you could clearly see people in suits jumping from where the hole was."No name plant. His second eyewitness
"I could hear people screaming," a Morgan Stanley investment banker told me. "I could hear a man screaming at the top of his lungs, 'Help me!'"Since when is a job title an identification? The entire record is a synthetic fraud, and hear is one of the shibboleths exposing it. The first CNN news crew on the scene, Hirschkorn, "decided we would be a tape crew documenting what was happening, our pictures and sound to be used later as part of the historical record." But then look at the images accompanying this college magazine article---banal memorials to a thing unremembered.
Previously carrying the narrative water bucket in the 1993 WTC false-flag event, and the trials of the embassy bombings of 1998, Hirschkorn tells us his former rabbi's son died in the Cantor Fitzgerald offices but he doesn't give us a name.
P.S. Mr. Hirschkorn---there was no electrical wire component to the smell at Auschwitz.
Duke Magazine-Front-Line Journalism-Nov/Dec 2001 (archive.org cached copy. Original broke.)
(The pointless images of the memorial aftermath were taken by Duke alumni Greg Altman '95, and adds another name to the tribunal list.)
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| Video Witness By Phil Hirschkorn |
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or me and thousands of other New York City dwellers, the day began with the most fundamental exercise of our democracy: voting. It was primary day for candidates hoping to become the 108th mayor in the city's history. My assignment for CNN was to cover the leading Democrat, Mark Green, and the leading Republican, Michael Bloomberg, going to the polls.
We need a mayor who can bring all of this city together," Green said to reporters after casting his ballot in an Upper East Side school gym. It was 7:30 a.m. In half an hour, the first of two jetliners unwittingly targeting the World Trade Center would take off from Boston. The city was about to be brought together in a way no one had envisioned.
After capturing Bloomberg voting, videotaping the sparse turnout at a West Side polling place, and interviewing voters about their choices, I headed back to our bureau across from Penn Station with my crew. The nine a.m. show wanted the tape. About ten to nine, I called in, to be told of some sketchy report of a fire at the World Trade Center. Could I head straight downtown and check it out? I quickly handed off the tape to a colleague in the lobby and asked her to take it upstairs. It never aired.
Back in our Ford Explorer, all-news radio started reporting a plane had collided with the twin towers. We thought we were being sent to an accident, most likely a prop plane or Cessna brushing up against the indestructible buildings. Just two weeks earlier, a French daredevil had landed a parasail on the Statue of Liberty, hoping to bungee-jump from the lady's torch. Could this too have been a stunt? I knew the towers were built to withstand the impact of a 707. It would be hours before I learned the plane that crashed into the north tower was an American Airlines 767. While we were driving, a United Airlines passenger jet plane struck the south tower.
Heading downtown as quickly as possible, we had to pull over when we saw the gaping wound in the north tower. I remember thinking, that's going to take months to patch up; it had to be a commercial plane. As we arrived on the scene, parking outside Stuyvesant High School as far south as police would let us travel, both towers were on fire. We were the first CNN crew on site.
I immediately tried calling the Atlanta control room on my cell phone to offer live reports on what I was witnessing on the ground, but the attack had knocked out a huge Verizon switching station, and getting a call through was impossible. Our microwave truck was on site, but the antenna that received and relayed the signal was atop the World Trade Center's north tower, and it would be a while before we could transmit elsewhere. Silenced and frustrated, out of the live game, I decided we would be a tape crew documenting what was happening, our pictures and sound to be used later as part of the historical record.
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I instructed our cameraman to stay focused on the two towers, the flames, thinking that at some point the fire would be extinguished. We kept moving, trying to get as close to the towers as possible, moving south and east. The closest we got to the burning structures was Barclay Street, two blocks north of the WTC complex, a block behind the forty-seven-story WTC 7 building that housed the city's Office of Emergency Management, a $13-million, high-tech control center to coordinate responses to natural and man-made disasters. That building would be gone by the end of the day.
Rumors of a third incoming plane crackled on police radios. On the corner down the block from OEM, we saw what looked like plane debris--broken glass, foam, strips of metal--and stopped to tape it. There I met our first eyewitness, a Salomon Smith Barney employee, en route to work, who saw the first plane hit. "First thing I heard was an airplane really low. I looked up and I thought, there's no way it's going to miss that building. It was obviously intentional," he said. "You would see some debris flickering down, but then you could clearly see people in suits jumping from where the hole was."
The flames after the initial explosions appeared to have receded inside WTC 1, but above where the plane had struck, you could see bright red, like coals on a campfire. Later, we would learn the jet-fuel heat exceeded 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
"I could hear people screaming," a Morgan Stanley investment banker told me. "I could hear a man screaming at the top of his lungs, 'Help me!'" He had skipped the complimentary breakfast preceding a nine o'clock seminar inside the north tower, instead emerging from the Vesey Street subway station right after the plane hit his meeting place at 8:48 a.m. Like so many people that morning, he had found that a run-of-the-mill decision to be later than usual to work, or to run an errand, had made the difference between life and death.
We proceeded east in search of a better vantage point. By 9:45 a.m., we were at the southern end of City Hall Park. The street was Park Row, the block of J&R Music World, where, I made a mental note, Mahmud Abouhalima stood on Feb. 26, 1993, as a bomb-laden Ryder truck left by his co-conspirators sat in the south tower's underground garage. On that day, Abouhalima saw a puff of smoke and waited for the first tower to tumble into the second.
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| photo: Greg Altman '95 |
But at this moment on September 11, forty-five minutes after the planes hit, no one expected the buildings to fall--not the hundreds of firemen and emergency workers still inside and not the hundreds of curious and concerned New Yorkers standing what seemed a safe distance on sidewalks watching the fire. And not us. Suddenly, about five minutes before ten, we heard what sounded like an explosion. Were there bombs inside the planes? No. It was the sound of acre-wide concrete floors dropping like pancakes, one on top of the other. The fire had melted the steel beams supporting the floors, and gravity took over. The building fell straight down. Our cameraman had been recording the whole time.
We were stunned. We were also in danger. A tidal wave of smoke headed toward us. It was a huge black-and-gray cloud like a volcano eruption. Cops were screaming, "Get back!" and running. Everyone started running, and so did we. We sprinted several blocks north, certain we would be covered in toxic dust. Luckily we had a few blocks' head start. The cloud petered out as we reached the lower Manhattan federal courthouse, where I had spent much of the year covering the embassy bombings trial--associates of Osama bin Laden being convicted for the 1998 truck bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
After the second tower collapsed an hour later, a strange silence ensued. There was little we could do, except look for and talk to survivors. Where were they working when the explosions occurred? How did they get out? Were they all right? The rescue effort was, in effect, over. With the exception of five firefighters pulled from the rubble the following day, no one would come out alive. Hastily set-up triage centers remained empty, unused ambulances lined up and down the block. People waited on line for hours to give blood, and did, though it proved unneeded.
Forced to retreat by police, all the CNN crews in the area congregated a few blocks below Canal Street along the West Side Highway, now a private road for emergency vehicles. I sneaked back to Stuyvesant to retrieve our car just blocks from Ground Zero. It was like a nuclear winter. All the vehicles, the streets, and sidewalks were deserted and covered with two to three inches of white ash. I could see the fire burning, as it would for days, the world's largest rubble pile doubling as the world's worst funeral pyre. The plume of smoke stretched for miles over Manhattan, a dark scar across what was otherwise a picture-perfect blue sky. My eyes would sting for two days. The smell would linger longer--a mix of burning electrical wires and what was undoubtedly burning flesh. Was this what it was like outside the gates of Auschwitz?
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A week later, I found myself in synagogue for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. In one section of responsive reading, the rabbi said, "When will redemption come?" The congregation answered, "When we master the violence that fills our world." Let's not hold our breath, I thought. The service highlight is the sounding of the shofar, a ram's horn turned musical instrument. Its burst of sound represents freedom and liberty ringing, and a call to the heavens on a day when humankind is supposedly judged and its fate is sealed. This year the shofar sounded too much like the sirens wailing around downtown New York.
Our rabbi broke the news at services that her predecessor, our family's rabbi for thirty years until his retirement, had lost his son in the World Trade Center attack--a father of two who had worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, the nation's leading U.S. Treasury bond trading firm that occupied the 101st through 105th floors of the north tower. Nearly 700 of the firm's employees, or one out of nine people killed in the WTC attack, worked there, all trapped when the first hijacked airliner turned into a missile. The firm's CEO, Howard Lutnick, is alive today because he chose to escort his son to his first day of kindergarten at Horace Mann, my alma mater, in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. One fellow HM alumnus perished in the trade center (and six fellow Duke alumni, I would discover) as did so many friends or relatives of friends. At a minimum, everyone in New York is two degrees of separation from the fatalities.
A month after the terrorist attack on my city, 80 percent of the towers' rubble was still there, with some buried metal beams still smoldering and the stench of death filling the air above lower Manhattan. On October 11, Mark Green won the Democratic runoff in the delayed mayoral election, but his path to City Hall was blocked by Bloomberg, who won an upset victory in November. The seemingly indispensable Giuliani will reluctantly relinquish power next January. Part of getting back to normal is restoring our democratic process interrupted with everything else on September 11. We have no choice but to look forward, as one meditation in my temple liturgy says:
We pause in terror before the human deed,
The cloud of annihilation, the concentrations of death,
The cruelly casual way of each to each.
But in the stillness of the hour, we find
our way from darkness to light.
Hirschkorn '89 is a news producer for CNN in New York
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