City Releases 170,000 Pages of 9/11 Records ‘Discovered’ by Adams Administration During Carpet Installation

Zohran Mamdani’s office is releasing more than 170,000 pages of documents — almost literally tucked under the rug for decades — outlining air quality and environmental assessments that the New York City mayor says show carcinogens lingered for months in lower Manhattan after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.The records, available beginning Wednesday, include 68 boxes of documents the administration of Mayor Eric Adams, “discovered” last year during a remodel of Department of Environmental Protection offices. The contents, soon available in a searchable database, are central to settlement agreements Mr. Mamdani’s administration reached with advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch after more than two decades of petitions and lawsuits on behalf of individuals sickened by pollutants.“This is only the beginning,” Mr. Mamdani announced at a press conference Tuesday, promising the release of many more records that the watchdog group claims were deliberately withheld by administrations dating back to Rudy Giuliani.“Every administration has resisted this actively, the Adams administration just did it badly,” the executive director of 9/11 Health Watch, Ben Chevat, told reporters. Mr. Chevat said the documents now being released came out as a result of a City Council-backed Department of Investigation probe that compelled agencies to turn over records about the attack and its aftermath.“The reason why the Adams administration produced the 68 boxes was because once the City Council passed the DOI investigation, they sent out a missive to every agency [saying]: ‘Produce your documents,’ and then, three weeks later, the Adams administration informed the court that they found 68 boxes that they had lost because they had carpeting problems,” Mr. Chevat said.A third of the boxes dug up by the Adams administration were found in a storage facility at the Department of Environmental Protection’s Queen office that was being cleaned out so new carpet could be installed, The Daily News reported in May. The admission of their discovery came after a judge ordered agency officials to answer questions about their failure to produce the documents in response to the 9/11 Health Watch’s Freedom of Information Law requests.When asked whether the release of the documents could open the city up to new litigation, the city’s attorney, Steven Banks, pointed out that the city already faced lawsuits accusing officials of refusing to release them. Among the documents released Tuesday is the so-called “Harding memo,” in which officials from the Giuliani administration identified measures to limit the city’s liability for widespread toxin exposure just one month after the attack.“If you look at the Harding memo, they didn’t find out, they didn’t recognize that the air that everyone was breathing in downtown Manhattan was toxic until October of 2001,” said comedian Jon Stewart, a longtime advocate for 9/11 first responder compensation who spoke at Tuesday’s press conference. “So to be fair to them, they only buried that information for 25 years.” The document dump comes two days after Mr. Giuliani, who was named TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year and nicknamed “America’s mayor” for his show of leadership after the attacks, called for Mr. Mamdani to stay away from the city’s memorial marking the 25th anniversary of the tragedy. The mayor and others have argued that Mr. Mamdani tries to decouple the attack’s linkages to Islamic terrorists while his aide, Ramzi Kassem, represented an Al-Qaeda defendant in another case in 2014. Al Qaeda claimed responsibility for the 2001 attacks.“He doesn’t agree that September 11 was an Islamic terror attack on the United States of America,” Mr. Giuliani told Newsmax, adding that it “offends me that he’s coming.”Following Tuesday’s news conference, opponents to Mr. Mamdani’s attendance at Friday’s service submitted a petition with more 100,000 signatures to a member of Mr. Kassem’s staff, according to an X post by Councilwoman Joann Ariola. “The same Ramzi Kassem who defended a convicted al-Qaeda terrorist and is one of the reasons these families don’t want the mayor there in the first place. Mayor Mamdani, apparently, was too cowardly to come out and meet the families to receive the petition himself.”Along with the trove of documents, the city has agreed to take steps to increase enrollment in two federal programs for individuals with illnesses traceable to September 11, 2001, and to support a new research initiative to study the long-term health of people who were exposed to Lower Manhattan’s poisoned air as children, Mr. Chevat said Tuesday.Mr. Stewart acknowledged that earlier production of the records would not have cured any of the cancers linked to the asbestos and other pollutants released by the building collapses, but said it should “not have been the struggle that it was to get people to recognize that what they all knew.” For months, dust from the falling buildings and ash from the fires that burned for 100 days coated lower Manhattan. A former congresswoman, Carolyn Maloney, who authored the bills establishing the victim’s compensation fund and, later, making it permanent, said Tuesday that volunteers from “every congressional district” across the country traveled to New York to aid in cleanup efforts, exposing themselves to the toxins coating the city.To qualify for compensation from either the the World Trade Center Health Program or the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund, individuals or their survivors must establish that they were present in the contamination zone between September 11, 2001 and May 30, 2002. As part of its settlement agreement, the city is dedicating staff members in two departments to retrieve city records to prove presence.“I think that there’s going to be a lot to learn from these documents,” Mr. Mamdani said Tuesday. “I also think, beyond doing the right thing, beyond making it easier for New Yorkers to make clear their eligibility for this fund, it is also important that those who faced such sustained pushback for years finally be told by the city of New York: You were right. You were right to push. You were right to demand, and that the city is finally catching up to that.”Asked if Mr. Giuliani himself should not attend the memorial event in light of the new records release, the mayor demurred. “I think that the focus of memorial services should be on the New Yorkers who were killed that day, their families, survivors, the first responders. I don’t think it should be on politicians.”“This was multiple mayoral administrations refusing to release documents that New Yorkers were owed,” the mayor added when asked whether the previously unreleased records amounted to “a cover-up.”

City Releases 170,000 Pages of 9/11 Records ‘Discovered’ by Adams Administration During Carpet Installation

City Releases 170,000 Pages of 9/11 Records ‘Discovered’ by Adams Administration During Carpet Installation

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