 Welcome to everyone to John Jay College. My name is Glenn Corbett. I'm the Director of the Academy for Critical Incident Analysis, which is one of the two centers sponsoring or one of the three centers actually sponsoring today's event. We've got an action filled day ahead of us for everyone coming that we'll be seeing up here on the podium or excuse me on the panels as we move through the day. But first what I like to do is just go over some logistical issues for everyone. For those of you who like to use the restrooms, they're right out here right when you came in at the registration desk. Just go a little bit further. The ladies' room is on this side. The men's room is on the opposite side. As far as food goes, we will have a morning break between the two panels. We'll have lunch provided here. It will be in the back of the room. And then we're going to have another break with some refreshments in the afternoon. So please feel free during those breaks to go up and take what you like. And like I said, we'll make it through the day. I'd also just want to point out that if you haven't been here before, John Jay is still in this expansion mode. So this is actually a fairly new building you're in right now. We actually have a building across the street where Charles and my office are located. So John Jay, for those who haven't been here before, is CUNY's Public Safety College. We deal with fire science, of course, where Charles and I come from, but also, of course, police science, forensic science, corrections, and a whole new slew of liberal arts majors that we put on board. So John Jay is a center for a lot of these issues. So back, probably even back to 9-11 itself, Charles and I had numerous conversations about access to information, and again, both of us being directors of various centers, and the need to sort of get access to information for research purposes. So we've talked about this a lot, and so those discussions have culminated into today's event. It's our hope that today you'll hear the perspectives from four distinct groups. You're going to hear from first the family members who have a direct connection to, in this case, September 11th and also the station nightclub fire up in Rhode Island. You'll hear from media folks later on who, of course, have an interest in getting access information. You'll also hear from the legal eagles that will be here this afternoon talking about the issues that they confront both as the recipients or the attempted recipients of information, also the providers or the holders of information. And then you'll also hear from sort of the emergency responder researcher angle, the folks that actually are perhaps in some cases most interested in a lot of the technical details of a disaster or a major event, as well as those who are conducting research and would like to understand what happened, of course, with the ultimate goal of improving responses in the future. So that's kind of the scheme of why we're brought all these folks together to sort of get everybody in the room at the same time to talk about these things. The hope is at the end of today that we'll have some ideas about how we can sort of manage the information that folks need to get, the folks that have it, and sort of come up with a system perhaps or some suggestions for a system that might work better than where it is right now, because obviously I think everyone in the room understands there's absolutely no consistency anywhere in this country as to how information is released after a major disaster, or some kind of major event. In some cases that information is made available almost immediately, in some cases it takes years and years through court action to actually make it available. So our hope is again with all the constituents perhaps and the stakeholders I guess is the proper word of folks that are interested in this, that maybe we can perhaps get some germinate some ideas on how this might work better than it is right now. So I'll bring up Charles to talk about today and get our first panel off on a good foot. So Charles, thank you. Thank you, Glenn. I'm Charles Jennings. I'm director of the Christian Reagan-Hardt Center for Emergency Response Studies here at the college. Because we have some people who have not been to a center event before, our center is named for Sally Reagan-Hardt's son, Christian, a probationary firefighter with the FDNY who was lost on 9-11. And our center actually came into being in 2008 thanks to an earmark from then Senator Clinton. Unfortunately earmarks became a dirty word. And so we've been able to flourish working with a mix of research projects and contract work. And so on behalf of the center and our National Advisory Board, some of whom are represented in the panels today, we're really delighted to be able to work together with the Academy for Critical Incident Analysis to help organize this event. And as Glenn said, it's something that we've been discussing for years and it really is so nice to see not only Ikea and the Reagan-Hardt Center coming together, but the support from all the other constituents here at the college and within CUNY who have kind of rallied behind this idea of convening a group to discuss these issues related to release of 9-11 recordings and the host of other materials that are coming out there that are already out there. So I want to first welcome our attendees and panelists to our knowledge. This is the first event of its kind. And the only one that's bringing together these really critical perspectives on this challenging question. And remarkably when we assembled the panel, it was primarily Glenn and I with some assistance from our colleagues, but it came together pretty quickly. And why is that? Well, part of the reason is that we're really centrally involved in a lot of issues and a lot of events that are going on. And so in many ways, I think the ability to get everybody together and convene them here at the college is a testament to the mission of the college and the salience of the centers and the people that we have been working with over the years that we were able to get everyone here that you're going to see today. It really is a kind of a one-of-a-kind group of talent that you have here. Glenn already talked about the college. And so I'll just say a brief infomercial that I think one of the things that I think everybody who's affiliated with the college is very proud of is the fact that we are, we may not be the best funded, we may not get all the credit, but we are very much central to advancing ideas that help to shape the practice of public safety, not just in New York, but across the country and to some degree the world. And we do it in a really unique spirit of partnership with our colleagues as we'll see today as I talk about some of those people who are going to be here. I'm not going to introduce the panelists. They'll be introduced later. You have their biographies in your programs and they really are remarkable. Each of them individually and collectively, it's unprecedented to have them here. I want to thank our moderators, Chuck Strozier, who's been a longtime friend and collaborator with the center and whose own center on terrorism is having a great event this afternoon, starting shortly before our event ends. I have Matt Apuzo, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist discussing his book, Enemies Within, which talks about Islamic surveillance and counterterrorism efforts in the NYPD. That's going to be in Room L2.84 and I cannot explain how to get there, but it's downstairs and that's the best I can do. Danelle Harvan, who's a founding board member of the Reagan-Hard Center and our newest member of the full-time faculty. He'll be moderating a panel. Steve Handelman, who's director of John Jay Center on Media Crime and Justice and a great supporter of our efforts. And Steve Gorlich, who will serve as our closer today and will reflect on the day's proceedings. Steve's a great friend of the center. He's came to us through IKEA, but he's been very quick to recognize the synergies between our two centers. He's a delight to work with and he very much lives in the space that we're exploring here today and we're happy that he could be here and was willing to play the role that he's going to be playing. So, just a quick note on rules of engagement before we get started. The intent is that we will have the panels. The panels will take questions posed by the moderators. At the end of that process, there'll be a brief period in which we'll take questions from the audience at each panel. The ideas at the afternoon, at the end, we've allotted basically an open question and answer session in which we're hopefully going to take the benefit of hearing all four panels and have a free flow and dialogue. And Steve Gorlich is going to be helping manage that. The other issue is that we have to remember to be respectful. You know, we have a great emotion. There's great differences of opinion, perhaps, around some of these incidents. We have family members here present who have suffered loss directly in these incidents. And I'm sure many of you have your own connections. And so we mustn't lose sight of that. And we're not here to advance any particular agenda. We're not here to relitigate any past events. We are here to learn from the panel's experience and apply it to this context of release of public records around large-scale events and emergencies. Just a brief note, hopefully everybody picked up on it. Thankfully, our college office of marketing pointed this out to us midstream, as this event is not restricted to 9-11. When we say 9-1, that means 9-1-1, not 9-11. We will be talking about 9-11 as part of this event, but it's going to be more broad-ranging. And so before we start, I just wanted to observe a brief moment of reflection and silence to really kind of solemnize the topic we're dealing with today that for so many people deals with death, loss. And a moment of silence to remember the loss, to support the families, and to hopefully support the public officials and the attorneys and all those involved in making the difficult decisions around release of this information, that they may do it in the public interest and that we may advance our practice on account of it. Okay, thank you. All right, without further delay, I'm going to introduce Chuck Schrozier, who will introduce his panel. You have his formal bio, so I will just go ad hoc. Chuck has been a great supporter of the work at the center. He's a colleague here at the college and we've worked together really hand in glove on a number of initiatives over the years. His Center on Terrorism was really the first institutional response at John Jay following 9-11, and I'm happy to say has been very successful running a certificate program, a graduate certificate program. And he's done a number of curricular initiatives. He remains very active in this field, publishing. His most recent book was Until the Fire Stop Burning, which talks about the experiences of 9-11. And so with that, I will turn it over to Chuck. Thank you, Charles. It's an honor to be here and all the good work that the Reagan-Hart Center has done and the critical incident analysis of John Jay. I gather my centers, not I gather, I know, we're certainly an enthusiastic co-sponsor of this event. So I want to say just a little sort of framing some of the issues that the panel will be addressing and then introduce our panel. So it seems to me that the 9-11 recordings are a special meaning for survivors and family members of 9-11 and other disasters. It constitutes not alone, but it's part of the fabric of historical memory. And that memory inevitably changes over time. And one of the things that I think survivors and family members have experienced in a relationship certainly to 9-11 is the evolution of its meaning and its context, new knowledge, new ideas, changes over time. I know I've talked certainly with Sally a lot about this, the significance of the 10th anniversary. But within that evolving process of historical memory from first lines almost entirely within the hands and the hearts of the families, of survivors and family members, as it expands out to the public at large, to historians, to curators of museums as museums and memorials are built, the nature of that memory changes so that the insertion of something like the 9-11 recordings evokes new meanings in that process of historical memory. In that context, it seems to me we need to recognize as citizens the special wisdom of the survivor. I think in general that's true. The survivor carries in his or her heart and in her mind the deepest meaning of a disaster and what it means for us, for the culture and for our future. I teach courses on terrorism endlessly. I've always felt a certain ethical obligation to begin all my courses on terrorism with a revisiting of 9-11 from within the experience of the survivors of 9-11. Again, it's both an ethical obligation but I think a conceptual one that one can learn most deeply about the meaning of these disasters by an empathetic extension of one's own experience into as best one can what people have the knowledge that they've gained from surviving and having loved ones die. It's a process that is not, I think this process, this larger question of 9-11 recordings needs to be considered from the perspective of survivors and family members of whether or not that is traumatic. I was on a panel up at Columbia last week and there were some early statistics are out about the visitations to the museum at ground zero. And 70% of the visitors is the early statistics but they're pretty meaningful. It's been open for long enough to have the statistics be meaningful. 70% of the visitors are Americans, 30% are foreigners. Of that 70%, 15% are New Yorkers. So it's a very small number and I think what it reflects is great hesitation on the part of New Yorkers to be re-traumatized. I don't know if you've been to the museum but it's a deep immersion into 9-11 that really is just an extension of the memorial among its other issues about it. So I think this larger context to consider the issue of what it means to release the 9-11 recordings for any disaster, for any kind of experience where people die, people suffer, where there is this lingering suffering that can be re-evolved and made traumatic, re-traumatized for people needs to certainly be considered. It's not maybe it's not a definitive consideration but it certainly needs to be considered and what really does it mean. And I think our panel is uniquely qualified to address some of these general issues both from within their personal experience and whatever else they would have to say about the issues of this conference. Sally Schumbacher, who is Sally Reganhardt, I'm sorry, Sally Schumbacher was an old friend of mine for many years ago. Sally Reganhardt is an equally dear friend, known for many years, many of you probably know her, she lost her son as Charles noted, and has been really instrumental in this at John Jay in the Reganhardt Center, which has taken real leadership I think as Charles said in trying to think through issues of public safety for the city and really for the nation. We also have Dave Kane, we were talking earlier that the fear is that one repeats oneself endlessly, he's a radio host and he says he said everything he knows at least four times, but we haven't heard him so we're looking forward to it. And he lost his son Nicholas in the station nightclub fire. And then Marine and Alcintura, Alexander Centura is retired deputy chief of the fire department, 40 years of service, my goodness, you've been to a lot of fires. And Marine, his wife is a retired staff developer at the Department of Education, and as it says in the program they lost their son, their only son, Christopher, on 9-11. So let's, I've asked the panel to talk each person, to talk five or ten minutes, and their own personal and conceptual reflections, and then we can have discussion in general of some of the issues that this panel addresses. So why don't we take the order and that it's in the program and start with Sally Regenhardt. Thank you Chuck. I'm going to begin by saying that after 9-11 there were so many issues that the 9-11 families had to deal with, other of course than the loss of their children and their loved ones. But today is about the 9-11 tapes and my part is to talk about the 9-11 tapes and to talk about why we engage in the advocacy that we did. After 9-11 there seemed to have been a concerted effort to suppress so many aspects of what happened that day. There was certainly a concerted effort really ranging from the federal government, to the state of New York, to the city of New York, and the Port Authority to really not disclose the true horror of what happened, to not disclose the lack of emergency preparation, the lack of emergency planning, the lack of a unified command structure between the police department and the fire department, and certainly to suppress the horror that the people experienced in those buildings, the confusion, the direction, the lack of direction, and in some cases the wrong directions that people were given, the desperate efforts of people in that building. And it's really emotional for me to think, and I'm talking about the civilians now, to save themselves and to try to save other people. After 9-11 we were sort of bombarded with this extreme patriotism and the people who were really responsible for the failures of 9-11, which is the lack of preparedness planning, the lack of qualified commissioners, and the lack of an integrated command structure in this city, those were the people who worked hardest to suppress the truth about what really happened, because it was so horrible. And really it had ramifications, not only in New York City, but going across the country and to the federal government. So part of this effort was the suppression of the 9-11 tapes and transmissions. Now we had the good fortune, our organization, in those days we were working under the Skyscraper Safety Campaign Organization. And as the years went by it morphed into 9-11 parents and families of firefighters and World Trade Center victims, but in those days we had the good fortune of meeting the wonderful, wonderful civil rights attorney Norman Siegel. And we appealed to him shortly after 9-11 when we couldn't get anywhere with other attorneys and cost prohibitive and so on and so forth. In those days the Victim Compensation Fund was not, I don't know, they weren't in business yet. So we were ordinary people who certainly could not afford the massive amounts of money that people really need to have to achieve justice. We met Norman Siegel and he began to work with us. And in August of 2002, Norman called me and he told me that the New York Times is engaged in a freedom of information lawsuit against the City of New York and the New York City Fire Department in order to get the 9-11 tapes and transmissions. And maybe some people are thinking, well why would the families of the victims really want to get those tapes and transmissions? And the reason is we all believed that if we are ignorant of the sins of the past and the failures of the past, we're doomed to repeat it. And as long as the system could keep everything suppressed then we'd never learn anything from it. I'd never learn how could this have happened to the City of New York? How could it have happened in the tallest and largest buildings in the world designed to hold the largest amount of people in the world? Each of those buildings were designed to hold 25,000 people. Of course they were not fully occupied and so on. And also I wanted to know how on earth could 343 firefighters and dozens of police officers and EMS, how could these people have been massacred in a needless and brutal death that could have been and should have been avoided? That is what propelled our group largely of parents and also families of firefighters and World Trade Center victims. We had civilians also. That's what propelled us to join in with the New York Times and to go to court. In August 2002, Norman Siegel represented the Skyscraper Safety Campaign and six other families of 9-11 victims in this Freedom of Information lawsuit. In 2003, the court ruled against us and Mr. Siegel brought a foil case before the Appellate Division on our behalf along with the New York Times. In January of 2004, the families won a partial foil victim in one of the lower courts. But we wanted the full truth. We wanted the full story. We wanted to know what really happened, where the failures took place and why they took place. So to that end, Norman Siegel and the New York Times went to the New York State Court of Appeals. And I have to tell you, they say a lot of things about Albany and they're not always complimentary. But going to the New York State Court of Appeals that day and we gathered so many of our family members, they ranged from middle-aged people, younger people, some people had to bring their children. There were elderly people with walkers and canes and we packed that courtroom, that beautiful, impressive courtroom that was so stunning. And Norman Siegel and the attorney for the New York Times argued that case. I never felt more involved in the court system of this wonderful country and in trying to get justice. Well, the good news and the bad news. The good news is finally we won a victory. The bad news is that it was just a partial victory. But we won the right to the tapes and transmissions and oral histories of the firefighters and EMS who were there that day. However, the court ruled against us regarding the people who were calling in. So that we only were able to get the fire department and EMS talking back and forth, calling and reporting and so on. But still, the chaos, the confusion, the frustration, the lack of coordination and lack of planning that the highest levels of people in the city failed to provide for their uniform services. That was clear as a bell. So in that way, it was a victory. It was not a complete victory. But it took four years sitting in various courts, four years of people's lives, not just going to court, planning, having press conferences, meeting with the attorney, getting strategy. I'm so proud of the family members here and the family members in the audience and all the other family members. They did it for one reason. They did it for their children and their loved ones who were massacred. And they did it for the people who would come after them. We never wanted to see another human being or another uniformed service or civilian die a needless and brutal death that could have been and should have been avoided. That's why we did it. And that's the end for now. My name is Dave Cain. My son, Nikki, was the youngest victim of the station nightclub fire in Westboro, Rhode Island. Now, in case you're not familiar with that fire was the fourth largest nightclub fire in the country's history. Imagine that in Rhode Island. Nikki was 18. Nikki's a writer, a composer, a singer, an actor, a comedian. He wrote, he's a playwright. A year before he passed, he wrote a play called They Walk Among Us. The play is about teenagers who die and come back as angels. And I got a feeling with me today. I'm here at the request of Sally and Glenn because when I first got the call, I thought, well, I'm not sure there's much I can bring to the table on this because it is so impacted with the 9-11 incident. But the more I was exposed to it, the more I thought about it. The more I talked to the people about it, I realized that there's so many parallels, not just with the 9-11 tapes, but with the whole deal that goes on with our elected and appointed safety officials and muckamucks who do not do their job. To give you a background on the station nightclub, my son is a musician, as I mentioned, and his band was supposed to open for the lead band, Great White, on Friday night. So my son went on Thursday to check out the room. When that building was built, it was a P. Brillo, it was a restaurant, had 60 people, was the occupancy, 60 people. On the night my son passed, there were 410 people in the room because a fire marshal went in at three different times, about two months before the fire, and raised the occupancy each time. The fire marshal did not, told the investigators he did not see the foam. They had put up some soundproofing foam because the neighbors were complaining about the noise from the band. So they put up this cheap, what they thought was soundproofing foam. And it was this foam that ignited after Great White set off fireworks inside this cheese box. And the foam was so flammable and so quickly that the toxins from this material killed 100 people like that, seriously injured 200 more. And the reason I give you this background is because the fire marshal, when interviewed by the state police, said, well, I was concerned about a door that they had behind the stage that didn't open out. It opened in. So he made them change it so it opened out. And then allegedly he went back and found out that they had put it back so it opened in again. But he never saw the foam. He didn't say anything, which would be fine except for the fact that the foam was covering the door he was upset about. In the civil suits, the attorneys for the owners of the club, the didarians, proffered that she was going to call this firefighter to the stand. And a deal was made. And one didarian brother went to prison for a brief time. The other didarian did not. There's a young boy who worked for the band whose job it was to punch the button to set off the fireworks. This kid did time. This fine young man did time and these other jabronis did nothing. And when I tried to get this fire marshal on the stand, when I tried to get somebody to go after this, I dealt with the FBI. I dealt with the U.S. Attorney's office. I did battle with the Attorney General in the state, of course. And ran to a lot of blocking because in that incident, like in this incident we talk about now, the 911 tape, it's all about covering your ass. It's all about, I don't want this tape. My mic just shut off. You know, I told you, I was going to need more than 10 minutes to do my bio and you're at 45. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to say cover. This is about the only thing I can see, and maybe I'm as myopic as I look and sound, but the only thing I can see here is that these are people who are in jobs that we depend upon, that we look to, that we hope for, will be done properly, and instead what happens is they worry about keeping their pension. And so this whole conversation about the public not having the right to know, now listen, I've been a talk radio host for 40 years. You know, I mean, I've offended everybody you can imagine. I had the answers to everything, especially stuff I knew nothing about. But I can tell you that my experience with this and the reason I was so vocal after the fire was because I could see this is another continuation of you're not having the right to know everything. I have the right to be exposed to or get the exposure to every single moment of my son's life. By the way, if you look up the station nightclub fire, you can see the 60 minutes video of my son. The camera takes a picture of the stage. You see on stage left, you see the fire begin and start to rage immediately. And the camera pans left and you can see my son Nikki standing right there in front of Ty Longley, the bass player. Moments before he passes and they were all gone within moments. So what we need to do here is to understand, people need to understand that we have a right to know, to hear, to see. We may want to have the opportunity not to listen to it. In our state, of course, like here, thousands and thousands of broadcast hours watching my son every time that camera pans, hearing about it, seeing about it. You can change the channel if you don't want it. I understand it. I appreciate it. But we need to know every single moment of what happened, who screwed up, and how, as Sally said, we find out how not to do it again. That is the most important of all of this. My son, you know, Rhode Island passed the most Ricanian laws you can imagine after this. I mean, you couldn't light a cigarette in New Jersey if you were coming to Rhode Island. I mean, it was ridiculous numbers. Rhode Island did not die so that a firefighter who's nice guy, good man, who's overweight and is getting $150 to stand in a high school auditorium to watch a dance recital. That's not why we didn't need new laws in Rhode Island. We needed someone to enforce the laws that we had. They were plenty good. But when you do what the fire marshal did in the nightclub, which is to go in and be encouraged to raise occupancy because the owners of the club weren't making enough money, couldn't pay their rent. And so he gets encouraged, however that was. And he figured the new occupancy, now listen to this, I don't know if you understand this, when you go to a restaurant and you sit down in tables, they allow you a certain number of people if there are table and chairs. If you're standing room, they allow you more people because they give you more, a little less space each person and they give you more people. And if you're standing waiting for a table, you get even more of a space allotted. This fire marshal made the new occupancy, the new capacity of that restaurant based on waiting room as if everybody was waiting for a table. It is funny, isn't it? I mean, it's so ludicrous that you do indeed laugh. You can't imagine that somebody would allow this to pass, but they did because this guy is now in Florida on vacation. And he has a permanent, he has a pension. And you know why he has a pension? Because he was under stress. And do you know why he was under stress? Because the people in Rhode Island hate his guts. Now that's a strong statement to make, and I apologize if I sound too militant, but that's exactly what happened. And having been a broadcaster, I can tell you that people generally do not know how very important it is that they know every single aspect of what has happened. No matter what it is, no matter how unpleasant. In Rhode Island, we had a parole board who was deciding whether to release the didarian that went to prison early. They decided to release him early and did not give us the opportunity to go speak. And their excuse was they didn't want to put us through that. Like I'm going to live it again. Like I've ever stopped living it. Like there was a moment in my life when I've ever stopped thinking about it. I mean, these are the kinds of things that happen. They want to protect us. Excuse me. Protect me from somebody who wants to protect me. That's right. Hi. My name is Maureen Santora. And I'm simply the mother of a firefighter who died on September 11th. And so my remarks are going to be focused just on that. And I will mention several things that happened as a result of that horrific event. My son was 23. He was a probationary firefighter. He had wanted to be a firefighter his entire life. So this was his dream job. We were very proud that he became a firefighter. I will speak, you know, about the technical aspects of his job and the fire department. And he was in the fire department for 40 years. But for me, I was Christopher's mother. He went to work on the 10th, on the evening of the 10th. And he never came home. And I never could say goodbye. And I was never able to say, I love you one last time. When he left for work, I said, have a good tour, son, and I'll see you tomorrow. And those are my last words to my son. Now, when this kind of a horrific event occurs to anybody, you have many decisions that you can make. You can either shrivel up and crawl into a corner and never move again. You can decide that you're going to work hard to heal. You can become an activist. You can try to get as much information as you possibly can about why this happened. And those are the decisions that Al and I made that we needed to know. We needed to know how our son was one of 343 firefighters who died. And only 23 police officers died. And 37 Port Authority police officers died. The numbers were just not in sync with each other. And so Al being in the fire department requested hearing of the FDMY tapes. Now, he'll speak, you know, in great detail about that. But we were invited to go down to the Metro Tech on a very, very snowy night. We called to make sure that they were going to allow us in the building. And we were one of three family members who were down there that night. And they had on a screen the audio written version, which was squelch, squelch, squelch, squelch. Repeatedly, thousands and thousands of times. And every once in a while, you would hear a word. The fire department didn't know how to react to Al. The chief at the time was Chief Cassano. He kept coming over to Al to try and explain, you know, how these tapes were in such terrible shape. When Al asked where were all the tapes, Chief Cassano was not able to answer him. And I understood immediately, I didn't need an authority to tell me that the tapes indicated that the radios did not work. I knew that immediately. You could not hear more than 20 words on this tape in the course of about an hour and a half. And so we went home on that snowy night. And Sally and I had met, you know, as I consider that my gift from my son to meet these extraordinary people. Eileen is another one who we met. Eileen's son was in the same firehouse as Christopher. And we began to come together because we were interested in finding out what happened. How in the city of New York with the kind of technology that we had, could you have this kind of abysmal situation where you heard a chief up on the 78th floor say, Bring the hose up, Scotty. I think we can get this fire under containment. He had no idea that the building had been hit. He had no idea that there was absolutely no way that he was ever going to get down. But he was marching up to the 78th floor and that was on the tape. It was the only clear thing that was on the tape. Okay, so we'll continue in our journey. I wanted to hear the 9-11 tapes. I wanted to know what the communication was between the people at Metro Tech in the building across the street and all of the people that called in on that day. I wanted to hear the tapes. We fought. We went to court. We argued. We were told at the 9-11 Commission by Rudolph Giuliano, who is then at the time, the revered mayor of the city of New York and of the nation, the nation's mayor, they kept saying, We heard that, well, you know, firefighters don't follow any rules. Even though they heard the word to evacuate, they decided not to. And many of us went nuts. Sally was dragged out of the proceedings. We went nuts. Because my son was the son of a deputy chief who had been in the fire department for 40 years. And his words to Christopher were, when he got on the job, be a good proby. Shut your mouth and do the job. And have no comment at all. And when he died, the fireman described my son, who was probably the most loquacious of all of my four children, as quiet and loving to do dishes, because Christopher never spoke. He had followed his father's orders of being quiet and following. So I knew that if he had gotten an order to get out on that day, Christopher would have followed whoever the executive commander was, whether it be the lieutenant, the captain. And we didn't know at the time who all the players were. And I knew Christopher would have followed. He would not have been the role to say, no, I'm going to stay and I'm going to, you know, remain in. Now we will continue on our journey. We kept fighting and we were finally eligible to go to a certain office. I think it was Norman's office. And we were allowed to hear the tapes in the office, the dispatches tapes in the office. We spent the better part of the day listening to the recordings. And as Sally said, we could not hear the other end. We only heard one side. We only heard the employees who were trying to comfort the people that were calling. And I cried. And I cried. And I cried because on those tapes was information that was clearly not only wrong, but it indicated that the dispatches had no idea that the buildings had been hit. They had no idea that the situation was serious. They had no idea that people's lives were in danger immediately. Not in an hour, not in two hours. There was no way that any fire department personnel would get up to any of those people. And they kept speaking on the tapes about, don't worry, somebody's coming up for you. Be calm, everything. And we knew for that to be an absolute lie. What bothered me and all of us that were activists at this point and fighters and outspoken, and you know, many of the officials didn't want to be around us, nor speak to us because we were the thorn in their side. And we were not going away. But what bothered me was that nobody, up until a few years ago, admitted that the FDNY tapes did not work. They finally had to admit it because information came out on a scientific manner and they proved that the 9-11 radios from 1993 were used and the ones that the city bought over a weekend did not work and were rescinded in March. But we got all that information later. As the mother of somebody who was horrifically murdered, and I have to tell you that I did not believe my son was there until November 2nd. I absolutely did not. I expected him to come home. I knew my son. I knew he was smart. I knew he was clever. I knew he knew the area. I knew he was very resilient. I knew that if there was a way to find his way out, he would have gotten out. So I couldn't accept the fact that my 23-year-old son had died until November 2nd when we went down from a memorial service and I said to my daughter, and I knew he was with us, I don't think he's coming out of here alive. That's how long it took me to process. And what concerns me about this entire journey that we have taken, and now we are talking years, is that not a single politician has ever said, I'm sorry, I let you down, I didn't do the right thing. We had gone to Oklahoma City several years after we began our fight. And Rudolph Giuliani was asked to comment with the mayor of Oklahoma City. In retrospect, would there have been anything other that you would have done knowing what you know now. And the mayor of Oklahoma City had a litany of things that he would have done. The mayor of New York City, now the former mayor of New York City, said, well, the 9-11 commission kind of said it all and we did everything we should have done. And I'll never forget that. I'll never forget that because he was remiss in a lot of areas. He was remiss in a lot of areas. And the comment that we don't want to disturb the families was more than ludicrous. It was insulting. It was demeaning. Did they really think that whatever information we would have gotten would be more traumatic than losing our children, or our wives, or our husbands, or our sons, or our daughters, or our children? Did they really, really think that any information they would have imparted on us would have been more traumatic than that? How insulting was that? Now, everybody gets a choice to choose whether or not they listen to the information that is provided. And we have family members that we know, Alan and I, who have never wanted to get any information. They don't want any information. They've never gone to the museum, they've never gone to the memorial, they've never gone to any meetings. They don't want to know. They are living in their lives the way they are comfortable living. I have no complaints about that. But for those of us that want as much information as we can, and we want as much understanding of how this event could have happened so it will help us in our journey to put the pieces together, I feel, as a citizen of the United States, and a citizen of New York City, that I have that might. And I will fight until my dying day to make sure that everybody is afforded the opportunity to get as much information that is available out there. Shame on the politicians for pretending that they understand how a person who has lost a son feels. Shame on all of them. Thank you very much. We're playing the switch to microphone. Good morning. My name is Al Santora. I'm the other half of Maureen Santora at this point. I'm a deputy chief. I was the chief of safety for 13 years in the New York City Fire Department. So I looked at things in a different perspective, but all of the things that you've heard from what Dave started to talk about, I was a student of mass casualties as a result of fire. I had studied not only urban fire situations, but also the wildland fires. I was fascinated by the complexity and the continuing screw-ups, so to speak, of people all over the country and all over the world for that matter, although I couldn't be as critical to the European and to the Far East because I didn't know their system as well, but certainly within the United States. And the things that were spoken about, about the blocked exits, go back to the Coconut Grove fire in Boston, and you can go back to 1941 or 1942. I don't remember the exact date at this point. And things that just occurred time and time again where you have these mass casualties as a result of fire. In the case of 9-11, these tapes that we were talking about that Sally first mentioned that Maureen has talked about, when we went down on that night, it was a snowy night, as Maureen said, and there were only a few of us in the room. And at that time Commissioner Scarpetta, who was the commissioner, fire department commissioner, who was another politician who knew nothing about fire, not a single thing. He probably wouldn't know which ended to match the strike. A nice man, but a bureaucrat. Sal Casano, on the other hand, at that point was, I think he was the chief of operations who was made the chief of department. I'm not sure what his role was exactly at that moment, but Nigro had retired, who was the chief of department, who had been appointed after Chief Gansi had died at 9-11. So there was a lot of shuffling of chairs, so to speak. Well, they started playing these tapes. And as Maureen said, they were inaudible. Half of the tape you couldn't hear, and they had blanked it out. They had typed it so you could read it on a screen, as you heard the so-called voices of these radios. And it was very difficult, first of all, to even make out what they were saying. And I kept looking over. Sal and Scarpetta was in the room with us. And as Maureen indicated, he came over to me several times, and I said, Sal, what is this? You know, what happened to the field comm units? In New York City Fire Department at that time, we had two field communications units. And God forbid, they should be down at any one time, meaning out of service. And he said, oh, they were out of service. And he's telling me this with a straight face, being the chief of safety, I was responsible for all investigations of mass casualties or deaths within the fire department. And I knew without a doubt that if at any one time, and that would be the first thing we'd go to the field comm and get the handy talky or the walky talkies, whatever you call them, we call them handy talkies, get those tapes so we could hear what was happening if a fellow was trapped or several people were trapped or things happened. Well, they were nonexistent. He had these fragmented tapes that didn't give you any information other than the fact that we heard a couple of people that we knew on the tapes, Ori O'Pama being one, he was a battalion chief, a marathon runner who got up to the 78th floor, I believe it was, 76, 78th floor, and Scotty Larkin, who, Alarsson, who I happened to know through my former driver. I never met him directly, another story, but in any event you could hear them communicating back and forth. And he had no idea, me at home at that morning or anyone else watching the TV had a better view of what was happening in those buildings than the fire department did. He had no idea what was above him. All he could see, he said he could see fire in the stairwell. If you can get me to line up here, we can put this out. He had no clue as to how much fire was above him. But they continued to march up. Well, that was about the only thing you could hear him going back and forth with Scotty, and it was the other Moses' son, Scotty Kapiko. Scotty Kapiko was the other Scotty from ladder six. And they were going back and forth, and they were clear, but they couldn't communicate to the lobby. And Maureen touched on, so let me just first finish this segment of it. We walked away that night knowing very little. Of course, those tapes were so bad. And he's telling me that the communications trucks were out of service. Both were out of service, so they didn't have good tapes. Okay, cover up number one. Maybe number 20, I don't know at this point, but, you know, we can't tell any families, as Maureen said. We don't want to upset the families. This would be too difficult. Lo and behold, later on, as Maureen already indicated, that the radios that they were using were the same radios we were using in 1993. And it didn't matter. They didn't work then. They bought in these new radios that they had tried to purchase overnight, so to speak. And they didn't work. A fellow in Queens, in a basement in a private dwelling, gave a May Day, he was trapped, and the people at the scene could not hear him. And these were the new digital radios that Motorola had provided. Firefighters coming into the scene two miles away could hear him on the radio, but people right at the scene could not hear him. Luckily, they got him, they got him out and he didn't die. But as soon as those radios, as soon as that was found out, they were pulled. The radios were pulled back and they reissued the old radios. So on 9-11, the fire department was still using the old radios that we had in service for 15 years, maybe 18 years, I have no idea exactly how long, for a long time. They were there while I was still there. I had retired in 2000. I know what we did. And before I was in safety, I was in charge of the research and development unit. And I did that for about seven years. Nothing was purchased by the fire department unless we had our hands on it, and never saw these radios. We never saw the radios. You hate to think that people would do things that someone might be injured or hurt as a result of, but sometimes you do things thinking, well, this is a shortcut. We can really, we can cut through all the red tape and we can get things done. It didn't happen with the radios. The radios that the firefighters used, they could not communicate with the police. Maureen indicated 23 police department personnel. Police officers died. None should have died. No firefighters should have died. However, the numbers are screaming out to you. Why the 343? And taking a step further, no firefighter should have died in the North Tower. Now remember, the South Tower came down first. The police knew and got everybody out. The firefighters did not get the word. 119 fire department personnel died in the North Tower. That should have never occurred. Now, we could not control the situation of the fire. We could not control what happened, but we certainly could have controlled the communications. We could not speak to the police. The police helicopter radioed that the building was leaning. He had radioed down. We have that information. We got that many years later. Wrap it up. Okay. Anyway, I can go on and on. The last thing I just want to mention, when we did hear the tapes at Norman's office many years later, a couple of years later, of the dispatcher's tapes, you have to remember that the dispatchers are in a windowless building in Brooklyn. Where are they today? They were in a windowless building in Brooklyn. Is the system improved? Try to find that out. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. It seems like the 9-11 and the Rhode Island fire stories is one of deceit lies, ass covering, abuse of power, and cover-ups. Those are unifying themes on the panel. We do have a few minutes for questions, and I think it would be appropriate to open it up to the audience. Please make your question brief, because we don't have a lot of time. Sally, you want to add to that? No, this one, Dave's, is good. Is my working? Okay. Hopefully we can straighten this out for later. Later on, you'll hear Norman Siegel who can speak tremendously about this, but basically, we only got the dispatchers and we did not receive the people crying for help and so on and calling in. We've discussed over the years going back to court for that, not because we want to horrify people, not because we want anyone to feel bad, but if we don't know what happened, we won't change it, and I must tell you, we have had some change. We have not had the changes that we should have had, and that's why the system doesn't want those tapes to be revealed. It does seem that all of you have made a very compelling argument to get the full tape. Were you going to ask something? Yeah. You need to speak louder. Maybe we should get there. We don't know. How many 911 calls are there that you haven't received from the victims or the civilians? I'm just going to talk about that. That's a very good question, and I hope that there's someone later on today who could answer that question. I don't know about Sandy, but that's a very, very good point, because as we know, there were terrible shortcomings and people died during Hurricane Sandy who never should have died either, so I hope that we could find that out. We don't know anything about that. David knows about the station nightclub, and we know about the 911 tapes, but that's a very excellent question, and I feel that that's why we're here today really. We feel that everything has to be disclosed. We can't let political correctness in different parts of this country or in different cities dictate what I call the stuff suits and the fat cats cannot make decisions that are guaranteed under the constitution of this country, and I'd like to explore that later as far as the Sandy tapes. Yeah. Among survivors, whether there was a significant number or percentage of surviving families who opposed efforts to disclose the 911 calls because they didn't think the public really should hear some of the conversations on those calls. Yes. Well, of course, as in any issue, there's going to be people on both sides. However, I can say to you that we sued the fire department, the city of New York, so that it was predominantly the firefighter families. Now, Dave had said that in his case, the officials said, oh, we don't want to make the families feel bad. The fire commissioner, Scopetta, actually testified that the city and the fire department did not want to disclose this because it would hurt the families and the families expressed that. That was an outright lie. And to prove that, after we received the tapes, every single one of the 343 families requested a copy of those tapes. And as Maureen said, of course, people aren't going to listen to them. I didn't listen to them except for, you know, certain times I did. But yes, of course, there were people that did not want it. As a matter of fact, during the Brujaha, because don't forget, it took four years of clashing and debating and having press conferences, a woman called me one night. I remember it so clearly. I was driving up Riverside Drive from a meeting in Norman Segal's office with the other families. And I was right by Grant's tomb and she called. I pulled over and she said to me, why are you trying to get these tapes? My husband died and I don't want to hear them. I want, I believe that my husband fell asleep that day. And that's what I want to believe. And you know what? I didn't answer. But what I thought in my mind was, Madam, if we continue to suppress these tapes in the future, we're going to have a lot more people falling asleep in a case like this. But yes, there were people who opposed, but the predominant amount of people felt that they should have been. I just want to add that Al and I are involved in a voices conference call, which we have been on for many, many years. And everybody is a civilian family, not a single person except for Al and I are civilian families. Many of them are from Kansas, Fitzgerald. And when this came about, there was some, as I mentioned, who didn't want, they had shriveled up, they had tremendous difficulty. But this was an avenue where they could speak because we were all parents, you know. And not a single one of them who would never have listened to the tapes, who did not want, they felt that we, who were fighting for this, had the right for these tapes. Would they have ever requested them? Probably not. So I cannot say that there is one person that I have met in my travels and we've been involved in several non-fire department groups. Anthony Gardner has a group, Voices is another. I don't know of one family member who objected to the access of the public getting these tapes. Wouldn't you say, Sally, in your brief presentation, you said if you don't want to listen to the tapes, you don't have to listen to the tapes. I mean, therefore it's not something, to have the knowledge available doesn't require that you have to avail yourself of it if in fact you don't feel you need to. Exactly. It's, you know, it's very painful but very eye-opening to listen to those tapes, very eye-opening. And hopefully we learned from them. That's what we wanted, to learn and have the system change. So we have to wind up and I think this is a wonderful panel on speaking truth to power and I hope it bears some fruit down the line. But let me close by hoping that Nicky, Christopher and Christian walk them on us.