Dover Drama

Elisabeth Bumiller in yesterday's New York Times [Air Force Officials Discussed Burial at Sea for Remains From Pentagon Attack,] on the escalating controversy over the disposition of 9/11 victim's remains in a landfill, reports that Defense Department documents released that day offer

...the latest disclosures about problems at the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the entry point for the nation’s war dead. The papers show how officials at Dover struggled over what to do with small, unidentified biological remains that were mixed in with rubble from the Pentagon. In the end, without telling the victims' families, they determined that the remains — some 1,321 portions in all — should be treated like medical waste.

This description, however, misstates the case entirely. The separating out of human remains from the rubble occurred at the Pentagon crash site. It is another sort of unmixing that is addressed later on in the article:

But at a news conference on Friday, Jo Ann Rooney, an acting under secretary of defense, offered a more telling, if graphic, description of the kind of remains that were burned and sent to a landfill. She said they were small portions that laboratory analysis judged as "biological," although not necessarily human. "It could have been something from someone's lunch," she said.

This description confounds matters unduly, as it could have been biological remains from someone's lunch once contained in someone's stomach. The real task at Dover was like that of murder investigations everywhere, when a fingernail clipping, or single strand of hair or drop of blood, provides the scientific evidence that ties a killer to his victim, although the job of untying a killer from a victim seems too large for Dover:

Ms. Rooney also said it was impossible to determine if the remains had been mixed in with those from the terrorists who crashed United Flight 77 into the Pentagon.

At a press conference in late February, Ret. Gen. John Abizaid said it was impossible to determine how many 9/11 victims went through the Dover mortuary:



Pentagon: Some 9-11 Remains Went to Landfill, AP Video, 1:48 minutes,

Question: It says, "This policy began shortly after September 11, 2001, when several portions of remains from the Pentagon attack and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site could not be tested or identified. These cremated portions were then placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor...the contractor then transported these containers and incinerated them...then it said the residual material was disposed of in a landfill." Is that referring specifically to September 11th victims, and do you know how extensive this was? 

Abizaid: No, I don't know how extensive it was, and it only was those victims that went through the Port Mortuary.

Question: And how many of those were there, do you know?

Abizaid: I don't know.

Question: And is there a way to find out?

Abizaid: I don't know that there's a way to find out. What you need to understand, the reason that we put that comment in there, is that there is a starting point for understanding how this happened, in other words, while I understand how sensational the notion is, there was a point where people considered going to the crematorium, and in some states its law, that that is the final disposition of the fallen, and, so that it goes from what many have considered the final disposition, which we don't agree with by the way, we think the final disposition needs to be the final resting place, and we believe if, that in 9/11 you can trace back the origins for why what happened happened---we only have records that really go back...the air force only has records, that we know of, that only go back, back...this is anecdotal evidence, that was told to us by the people that we interviewed. END OF TAPE

For Abizaid's edification, there were 125 civilian and military victims at the Pentagon, with 64 victims on Flight 77, which crashed into the it; with 41 victims on Flight 93 downed in Shanksville, PA, all of whose remains were sent to Dover---mixed in with lunch and the biological material of nine hijackers.

In the report of the independent investigation which Abizaid headed, is the statement that some remains, "later identified" as being from victims, were included in the rubble, victim, perpetrator and lunch admixture sent to the landfill.

Prior to 2008, portions of remains that could neither be tested nor identified, and portions of remains later identified that the PADD [Person Authorized to Direct Disposition] requested not to be notified of (requesting that they be appropriately disposed of) were cremated under contract at a civilian crematory and returned to DPM [Dover Port Mortuary]. This policy began shortly after September 11, 2001, when several portions of remains from the Pentagon attack and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site could not be tested or identified. page 26

Since the change in policy, which first sent remains to a civilian crematory, was specific to the victims of 9/11, the reference to "portions of remains later identified" must refer to families who had already received remains and conducted burial services, often highly publicized affairs, who would be hard pressed, both practically and symbolically speaking, to deal with any additional matter on their own. Service members killed overseas in isolated engagements would come to Dover in single shipments, even if a commingling of body tissue occurred in multiple fatality events, the remains which "could not be tested or identified" were not likely to be transported, let alone be "later identified."

Notwithstanding, in December, 2011, officials tried just this as a contention:

Air Force officials “said the procedure was limited to fragments or portions of body parts that were unable to be identified at first or were later recovered from the battlefield, and which family members had said could be disposed of by the military,” the Post reported. The procedure was stopped in 2008, and since then the remains of cremated soldiers have been placed in urns and buried at sea.

The report is very exacting as it attempts to "de-conflict accountability issues" between the Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operation and the Air Force Medical Examiner System, yet the responsibility for sending 9/11 victims remains to a landfill is attributed to a non-specific "assumption on the part of DPM [Dover Port Mortuary]"

These cremated portions were then placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor. Per the biomedical waste contract at that time, the contractor then transported these containers and incinerated them. The assumption on the part of DPM [Dover Port Mortuary] was that after final incineration nothing remained. page 26

The same inexact designation is used to describe the personnel who identified the problem:

A DPM management query found that there was some residual material following incineration and that the contractor was disposing of it in a landfill. The landfill disposition was not disclosed in the contractual disposal agreement. This practice ceased in 2008, and a new policy was in place by 2009; under the new policy such portions of remains are now cremated and retired at sea. page 26

It would seem to me to be a waste of taxpayer money to cremate already cremated remains, especially if the cremated remains, even if impurely sifted out from food particles and bad guys, had a highly charged, universal symbolic value. Such disposal seems more akin to an intentional destruction of evidence.

The high standards of military accountability were compromised at Dover in both the receiving of remains as well as in the remain's disposal:

...all Air Force personnel deployed to support mortuary operations also support AFMES operations. This arrangement perpetuated a system that is contrary to industry standards for medical examiners, mortuaries, and funeral homes. As part of the corrective actions the new alignment will replace AFMAO with AFMES personnel for receipt and initial processing of remains, thereby eliminating the seam. page 45

When the ceremonial "Old Guard" regiment, whose normal duties include firing the 21-gun salutes at Arlington cemetery, were delegated to assist the F.B.I. in the recovery of body parts at the Pentagon, the public was told that decision would both ensure the chain of custody, as well as honor their fallen comrades, the two requirements which were not met on the other end.

Under revised protocols designed to ensure accountability

Once remains are received into the care of AFMAO, they are assigned a "Dover number" for tracking purposes, and they are cared for and prepared for interment or inurnment, according to the wishes of the PADD. page 45

If AFMES [Air Force Medical Examiner System] determines that remains are incomplete, the PADD must sign a Disposition of Remains Election Statement. page 46

It is unknown how many families would elect to have "subsequent portions" of their loved one's remains remain at Dover but the issue is addressed in the report:

A crematory was installed at DPM in fall 2009 for cremation of subsequent portions, thereby eliminating the need for contracts with external entities. [pages 45 & 46]

Is the new crematory a tiny one? A Feb. 28, McClatchy article covering this same report, says

The panel also recommended that the military no longer perform full-body cremations. "We think that it's a bad idea for the Department of Defense to be in the cremation business," Abizaid said.

Dover got by without a crematory before the change in policy was put in place in September, 2001, probably because the issue of "subsequent portions," of any unclaimed tissue, hadn't come up.

Statistics are incomplete as to the number of family members who "chose not to be notified or take possession" of remains "subsequently identified," but in those cases, the PADD should really be called the PWWTHM [Person Who Washed Their Hands of the Matter.]

In December 2008, the DPM director recommended to the CJMAB that the Services implement a more fitting option for disposition of unidentified portions of remains that were subsequently identified and for which the PADD chose not to be notified or take possession.
page 46

Even with trillions of unaudited dollars at their disposal, the military can still shoot itself in the foot:

Although AFMAO [Air Force Mortuary Affairs Operation] was state-of-the-art at the time it was built, improvements are required in the air ventilation system. Efforts are under way to increase airflow while decreasing formaldehyde air concentrations. Currently, morticians are required to wear respirators while embalming remainspage 46

The Dover Port Mortuary Independent Review Subcommittee, Final Report -- February 2012, summarizes a narrative thus:

As noted previously, until 2008, portions of remains that could neither be tested nor identified, or for which the PADD [Person Authorized to Direct Disposition] asked not to receive notification of, were cremated under contract at a civilian crematory and returned to DPM [Dover Port Mortuary], then placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor. Per the biomedical waste contract at that time, the contractor then transported these containers and incinerated them. The assumption on the part of DPM was that after final incineration nothing remained. Press reports that followed the release of the OSC [Office of Special Counsel] review found that there was some residual material following incineration and that it was being disposed of in landfills. The landfill disposition was not disclosed in the biomedical waste disposal agreement. page 46 

In December 2008, the DPM director recommended to the CJMAB [Central Joint Mortuary Affairs Board] that the Services implement a more fitting option for disposition of unidentified portions of remains that were subsequently identified and for which the PADD chose not to be notified or take possession. CJMAB recommended adoption of retirement-at-sea as policy for the disposition of those unidentified/untestable portions or those identified portions of remains where the PADD chose not to be notified or take possession. In April 2009 new policy guidance was issued. Initially the Department of the Navy developed the retirement-at-sea process. page 46

How the report could limit the issue at hand to just "portions of remains that could neither be tested nor identified, or for which the PADD asked not to receive notification of," is forgetful of reporting done as recently as November 9, 2011, [Washington Post, Remains of war dead dumped in landfill, By Craig Whitlock and Greg Jaffe,]

Gari-Lynn Smith said she believed that Dover officials would treat the remains with respect. The deceased soldier’s parents declined to comment. 

In April, Trevor Dean, a senior official at the Dover mortuary, informed her in a letter that some of her husband’s body parts were cremated and dumped in a landfill in King George County. In the letter, Dean listed her husband’s first name incorrectly, an oversight that Smith saw as yet another sign of disregard for her spouse.

February 28, 2012, McClatchy Newspapers, Pentagon: Some 9/11 victims' remains dumped in landfill, by Nancy A. Youssef,

WASHINGTON — Some cremated remains of people who were killed in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were disposed of in a landfill, the Pentagon revealed Tuesday, tracing the problems with the handling of remains at Dover Air Force Base back more than a decade.

A report by a panel that was tasked with reviewing procedures at Dover described "gross mismanagement" at the mortuary in Delaware where the nation's war dead arrive, including the mishandling of remains from an unknown number of victims of the 9/11 attacks on the Pentagon and hijacked United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Shanksville, Pa.

Remains that couldn't be identified or tested were cremated, the report said, and "then placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor." Asked to provide further details, retired Gen. John Abizaid, who led the panel, testily said, "You'll have to ask the question elsewhere."

The panel was formed after revelations last fall that similar practices had been followed for some of the unidentified remains of American war dead. Pentagon officials said Tuesday's report was the first time they'd learned of the improper disposal of the remains of 9/11 victims.

The U.S. military has said the handling of its war dead is a sacred responsibility, but the panel's report found that Pentagon leadership "failed to recognize and address repeated issues that violated the standard of care." It made 20 recommendations for improving practices at Dover, including more training for mortuary workers and appointing a general to be responsible for it.

The report detailed several cases of mishandled remains or personal effects at the base. In 2006, the partial remains of four Navy personnel who'd died in a training plane crash were cremated and disposed of in a landfill. In January 2008, a Marine's widow received a $25,000 payout for "mental anguish" when her husband's personal effects were disposed of accidentally.

The panel also recommended that the military no longer perform full-body cremations. "We think that it's a bad idea for the Department of Defense to be in the cremation business," Abizaid said.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, the bodies of at least 6,000 fallen troops from Iraq and Afghanistan have been transported to Dover Air Force Base.

Investigations into Dover began after whistleblowers reported mishandling of the remains of troops who'd been killed in the wars. The Air Force conducted an 18-month probe, concluding last fall that the partial remains of 274 service members had been incinerated and disposed of in a landfill from 2003 to 2008, when the Air Force said it had made reforms.

Last year, an investigation by the Office of Special Counsel, an independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency, found "a pattern of the Air Force's failure to acknowledge culpability" for mishandled and lost remains. Earlier this year, a second Office of Special Counsel report revealed that some mortuary employees had retaliated against whistleblowers by suspending them from work.

After the Air Force and Office of Special Counsel findings, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta appointed Abizaid to lead the independent review.

Panetta, Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, who's the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the senior leadership of the Army and Air Force were briefed about the report Monday, officials said. Panetta ordered Dempsey to implement Abizaid's recommendations.

The Pentagon has disciplined three senior officials so far. Tuesday's report didn't say whether further disciplinary action was necessary, and no top officials signaled that more penalties were coming.

ON THE WEB

Dover Port Mortuary Independent Review Subcommittee report

December 31, 2001, Esquire Magazine, What I've Learned: Michael Wright,
11:00 PM,  By Cal Fussman,

At 8:48 on the morning of September 11, Michael Wright was a thirty-year-old account executive working on the eighty-first floor of the World Trade Center. Two hours later, he was something else. The story of his escape is the fastest 3,863 words you will ever read.

Up to that day, I'd had a Brady Bunch, cookie-cutter, beautiful life. I now know what it's like to have a 110-story building that's been hit by a 767 come down on my head. For better or for worse, it's part of my life. There are things I never thought I'd know that I now know.

It was as mundane a morning as you can imagine. Tuesdays are usually the days I go out to see clients and make sales calls. I get to my office at a quarter to eight, eat a bran muffin, drink a cup of coffee, and get my head straight for the day. I was actually in a good mood. A couple of us were yukking it up in the men's room. We'd just started sharing the eighty-first floor of 1 World Trade Center with Bank of America, and they'd put up a sign telling everyone to keep the bathroom clean. "Look at this," one of us said. "They move in and now they're giving us shit." It was about quarter to nine.

All of a sudden, there was the shift of an earthquake. People ask, "Did you hear a boom?" No. The way I can best describe it is that every joint in the building jolted. You ever been in a big old house when a gust of wind comes through and you hear all the posts creak? Picture that creaking being not a matter of inches but of feet. We all got knocked off balance. One guy burst out of a stall buttoning up his pants, saying, "What the fuck?" The flex caused the marble walls in the bathroom to crack.

You're thinking, Gas main. It was so percussive, so close. I opened the bathroom door, looked outside, and saw fire.

There was screaming. One of my coworkers, Alicia, was trapped in the women's room next door. The doorjamb had folded in on itself and sealed the door shut. This guy Art and another guy started kicking the shit out of the door, and they finally got her out.

There was a huge crack in the floor of the hallway that was about half a football field long, and the elevator bank by my office was completely blown out. If I'd walked over, I could've looked all the way down. Chunks of material that had been part of the wall were in flames all over the floor. Smoke was everywhere.

I knew where the stairs were because a couple of guys from my office used to smoke butts there. I started screaming, "Out! Out! Out!" The managers were trying to keep people calm and orderly, and here I was screaming, "The stairs! The stairs!"

We got to the stairwell, and people were in various states. Some were in shock; some were crying. We started filing down in two rows, fire-drill style. I'd left my cell phone at my desk, but my coworkers had theirs. I tried my wife twenty times but couldn't get through. Jenny had gone up to Boston with her mother and grandmother and was staying with my family. Our son was with her. Ben's six months old. It was impossible to reach them.

The thing that kept us calm on the stairs was the thought that what happened couldn't possibly happen. The building could not come down. After a while, as we made our way down, we started to lighten up. Yeah, we knew something bad had happened, but a fire doesn't worry you as much when you're thirty floors below it. I even made an off-color joke to my buddy Ryan. The intent was for only Ryan to hear, but things quieted down just as I said it, so everyone heard. I said, "Ryan, hold me."

He said, "Mike...I didn't know."

I said, "Well, we're all going to die, might as well tell you."

Some people were laughing, but not the guy in front of me. "I really think you should keep that humor down!" he said. I felt lousy. In hindsight, he may have known more than I did. Even though I'd seen physical damage, what I can't stress enough is how naive I was at that point.

Some floors we'd cruise down; others we'd wait for ten minutes. People were speculating, "Was it a bomb?" But we were all getting out. I didn't think I was going to die.

At the fortieth floor, we started coming in contact with firemen. They were saying, "C'mon, down you go! Don't worry, it's safe below." Most of them were stone-faced. Looking back, there were some frightened firemen.

When we got below the thirtieth floor, they started to bring down injured people from flights above. There was a guy with the back of his shirt burned off, a little burn on his shoulder. One woman had severe burns on her face.

We got down to the twentieth floor and a fireman said, "Does anyone know CPR?" I'm no longer certified, but I know it from college. That was ten years ago. You wouldn't want me on an EMT team, but if it comes down to saving somebody, I know how.

So me and this other guy volunteer. We helped this one heavy, older man who came down huffing and puffing, and we kept our eyes out for anyone else. "Do you need help? Do you need help?" Nobody needed help. The stairway became wide-open. It was time to go. The other guy took off in front of me. We were going pretty fast.

Have you ever been to the World Trade Center? There's a mezzanine level, then you go downstairs, which is subterranean, into this big mall. Our stairwell exited out onto that mezzanine level. At that point, I could look out across the plaza at 2 World Trade Center. That's when I realized the gravity of what had happened. I saw dead bodies everywhere, and none that I saw were intact. It was hard to tell how many. Fifty maybe? I scanned for a second and then focused on the head of a young woman with some meat on it. I remember my hand coming up in front of my face to block the sight. Then I took off. As I ran, people were coming out of another stairwell. I stopped and said, "Don't look outside! Don't look outside!" The windows were stained with blood. Someone who'd jumped had fallen very close to the building.

It felt like my head was going to blow up.

I made it to the stairwell and got down. The mall was in bad shape. It must have been from chunks of the plane coming down. Windows were smashed. Sprinklers were on.

I saw Alicia, the coworker who'd been trapped in the bathroom. She'd seen what I'd seen in the plaza and was traumatized. She was crying and moving slowly. I put my arm around her. Then there was another woman -- same thing. I put my arm around the two of them, saying, "C'mon. We gotta go. We gotta go."

We were moving through the mall toward the escalator that would take us back up to street level and out to Church Street. There were some emergency workers giving us the "head this way" sign. I think they were trying to get us as far away from the fire as possible and out toward Church Street and the Millenium Hilton hotel.

I got to the bottom of the escalator, and that's when I heard what sounded like a crack. That was the beginning of it. I ran to the top of the escalator as fast as I could and looked east, out toward Church Street at the Millenium hotel. The windows of the hotel are like a mirror, and in the reflection I saw Tower Two coming down.

How do you describe the sound of a 110-story building coming down directly above you? It sounded like what it was: a deafening tidal wave of building material coming down on my head. It appeared to be falling on the street directly where I was headed.

I turned to run back into the building. It was the instinctual thing to do. You're thinking, If you stay outside, you're running into it. If you go inside, it might not land there. So I turned and ran into the building, down into the mall, and that's when it hit. I dove to the ground, screaming at the top of my lungs, "Oh, no! Oh, no! Jenny and Ben! Jenny and Ben!" It wasn't a very creative response, but it was the only thing I could say. I was gonna die.

The explosion was extreme, the noise impossible to describe. I started crying. It's hard for me to imagine now that when I was on the ground awaiting my doom, hearing that noise, thousands of people were dying. That noise is a noise thousands of people heard when they died.

When it hit, everything went instantly black. You know how a little kid packs a pail of sand at the beach? That's what it was like in my mouth, my nose, my ears, my eyes -- everything packed with debris. I spat it out. I puked, mostly out of horror. I felt myself: Am I intact? Can I move? I was all there. There was moaning. People were hurt and crying all around me.

Then I had my second reckoning with death. I'm alive, yeah. But I'm trapped beneath whatever fell on top of me and this place is filled with smoke and dust. This is how I'm gonna die -- and this was worse. Because I was going to be cognizant of my death. I was going to be trapped in a hole and it was going to fill with smoke and they were going to find me like one of those guys buried in Pompeii.

I sat there thinking of my wife and son again. It wasn't like seeing the photos of Jenny and Ben that I had on my desk, though. The images I had were of them without me. Images of knowing that I'd never touch them again. As I sat there, thinking of them, I suddenly got this presence of mind: I gotta try to survive.

I tore off my shirt and wrapped it around my mouth and nose to keep some of the smoke out. I started crawling. It was absolutely pitch-black. I had no idea where I was crawling to, but I had to keep trying. It's haunting to think about it now.

I saw a light go on. I can't say I was happy, because I was horrified, but that light was hope.

Luckily, I was buried with a fireman. I got over to him and stuck to this guy like a sticky burr on a bear's ass. He was frazzled, but he had it a lot more together than I did. I was like, "What are we gonna do?" You can't imagine the ability to have rational thought at that point. I was purely in survival mode. It wasn't like, The smoke is traveling this way, so I'll go that way to the fresh air. It's whatever presents itself.

The fireman looked like a big Irish guy. Big, bushy mustache. He had an axe. He was looking at a wall, and it looked solid, but when he wiped his hand on it, it was glass, a glass wall looking into a Borders bookstore. There was a door right next to it. He smashed the door and it spread open.

Everyone gravitated to the light. Now there was a bunch of us. People were screaming. We got into Borders, went upstairs, and got through the doors heading outside. The dust was so thick, there was barely any light.

At this point, I still had no idea what was going on. I didn't know if we were being bombed or what. I didn't know if this was over or if it was just beginning.

I took off into the cloud. I crossed Church Street, and some light started coming in, and I could see a little bit. I saw a woman standing there, horrified, crying, lost. I stopped and said, "Are you okay? Are you okay?" She couldn't speak. I kept going.

I went along Vesey Street, using it as a guide. It started clearing up more and more, and I got to an intersection that was completely empty. That's where I saw one of the weirdest things -- a cameraman near a van with the NBC peacock on it, doubled over with his camera, crying.

I was all disoriented. I saw a turned-over bagel cart, and I grabbed a couple of Snapples. I used one to rinse out my mouth and wash my face. I drank some of the other. Then I started running again. It was chaos.

Even though I'd been around these streets a million times, I was completely lost. I looked up and saw my building, 1 World Trade Center, in flames. I looked for the other tower because I always use the two buildings as my North Star. I couldn't see it. I stood there thinking, It doesn't make sense. At that angle, it was apparent how devastating it all was. I looked up and said, "Hundreds of people died today." I was trying to come to terms with it -- to intellectualize it. My wife's family is Jewish, and her grandparents talk about the Holocaust and the ability of humans to be cruel and kill one another. This is a part of a pattern of human behavior, I told myself. And I just happen to be very close to this one.

Maybe it seems an odd reaction in hindsight. But I was just trying to grab on to something, some sort of logic or justification, rather than let it all overwhelm me. I was raised Irish-Catholic, and I consider myself a spiritual person. I did thank God for getting me out of there for my kid. But I also tend to be a pretty logical thinker. I'm alive because I managed to find a space that had enough support structure that it didn't collapse on me. I'm alive because the psycho in the plane decided to hit at this angle as opposed to that angle. I'm alive because I went down this stairwell instead of that stairwell. I can say that now. But at that moment, I was just trying to give myself some sanity.

I was still running when I heard another huge sound. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the other tower -- my tower -- coming down. A cop on the street saw me and said, "Buddy, are you okay?" It was obvious that he was spooked by looking at me. Aside from being caked with dust, I had blood all over me that wasn't mine. He was trying to help, but I could tell he was shocked by what he was seeing.

I was looking for a pay phone to call my wife, but every one I passed was packed. My wife never entertained for a minute that I could be alive. She had turned on the TV and said, "Eighty-first floor. Both buildings collapsed. There's not a prayer." It was difficult for her to look at Ben because she was having all these feelings. "Should I be grateful that I have him? Is he going to be a reminder of Mike every time I look at him?" At the time, these thoughts just go through your head.

Finally, I got to a pay phone where there was a woman just kind of looking up. I shoved her out of the way. I guess it was kind of harsh, but I had to get in touch with my family. I dialed Boston and a recording said, "Six dollars and twenty-five cents, please." So I pulled out a quarter and called my brother at NYU. I got his voice mail. "I'm alive! I'm alive! Call Jenny! Let everyone know I'm alive!" It was 10:34.

I started running toward where my brother Chris worked at NYU. I'm the last of six in my family. The two oldest are girls, the four youngest, boys. Chris is the second oldest above me. The classic older brother. The one who'd put you down and give you noogies. He probably would have had the best view of the whole thing going on. But he'd left his office, thinking, My brother is dead. He walked home to Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge, unable to look back.

On my way to NYU, I met this guy - -a stranger named Gary -- who had a cell phone. He tried and tried and couldn't get through to Boston. I said, "I gotta get to NYU" and left him. But he kept calling Boston and eventually got through to my family. At that point, four of my five siblings were at the house. My wife's father was on his way from New York with a black suit in the car.

The people at NYU took me in. They were great. I said, "I don't need anything. Just call my family." They kept on trying to get through. They couldn't, they couldn't. Finally, they got through.

I said, "Jenny, it's me." And there was a moan. It was this voice I'd never heard before in my life. And I was saying, "I'm alive. I'm alive. I love you. I love you. I love you." We cried and cried. Then the phone went dead.

At that point, I went into the bathroom to clean myself off, and suddenly I couldn't open my eyes anymore. They were swollen. I knew I wasn't blind, but if I opened my eyes toward any amount of light there was intense, intense pain. I didn't feel this while I was running. It seemed to happen as soon as I was safe and the adrenaline came out of me.

At the NYU health center, the doctors said, "Yeah, your eyes are scratched to shit." They put drops in them, but they needed more sophisticated equipment to see what was going on. I wound up having 147 fiberglass splinters taken out of my eyes.

Chris came back from Brooklyn to pick me up, and I held on to him and hugged him. Later, he said, "You know, Michael, this is why I stuffed you in sleeping bags and beat on you all those years as a kid. Just to toughen you up for something like this."

When we got back to my place, I collapsed and it all hit me. I cried like I've never cried in my life. I finally let loose, and it felt better. My brother helped me pack, and we got to Westchester, where my wife and family had gone. Jenny came running to the door. I can remember hearing the dum, dum, dum, dum, dum of her footsteps.

My mother was there. My dad. My father-in-law. They all hugged me. Then they gave me my son. I could tell by the noises he was making that he was happy. I hugged him and sort of started the healing process there.

Later, I went to Maine to sit by the ocean for a few days and get my head together. I saw all of my old friends. It was amazing. Everyone I know in my life has called me to tell me they love me. It's like having your funeral without having to die.

For a while right after, I wondered,

How the hell am I going to work again? How am I going to give a damn about selling someone a T-1 line? I had a list of people who were going to be my business for the next year, hundreds of people, all on my desk -- blown up. For the life of me, I can't dredge up those names. That will cost me a quarter of my income, maybe more. You know what? Who cares? I'm alive and I'm here. A big deal has gone to big deal.

I lost a friend in 2 World Trade Center. He was one of those guys you liked as soon as you met him. Howard Boulton. Beautiful person. His baby was born three months ahead of mine. He was on the eighty-fourth floor and I was on the eighty-first. The last conversation he had with his wife was by telephone. He told her, "Something happened to 1 World Trade Center. It's very bad. I don't think Michael Wright is okay. I'm coming home." I like to think Howard wasn't scared like I wasn't scared in the stairwell. I like to think that he heard a rumble like I heard a rumble and then he was gone.

I went to his funeral. To see his wife and his baby -- it would have made you sad even if you didn't know him. But it was much more loaded for me. Here was a perfect reflection of what could've been.

One of the hardest things I had to deal with up to this point -- and still do -- is that my brother Brian, who's one year older than me, has cancer. He and I are practically twins. He has germ-cell cancer in his chest. He recently told me that the good news is they can go in and get it. But the bad news is they might have to take a lung with it. Before September 11, maybe the fact that he was going to lose a lung might have thrown me for a loop. But I found out I love my brother for my brother. I don't love him to run up mountains at a brisk pace with me. My reaction was: Thank God they can get it.

Luckily, I've been well equipped to deal with this. I have a family that's unbelievably close and supportive and a lot of friends. I've been to therapy, and I can do the whole checklist: Do you have a sense of fear and not know where it's coming from? Yup. Can you no longer take pleasure in things you once took pleasure in? Yup. Claustrophobic? Yup. I have nightmares. I jump when I hear a siren. But it's the smell that haunts me. Talk to anyone who was within ten blocks of it and they'll tell you that. I had vaporized people packed up my nose, in my mouth and ears. For weeks, I was picking stuff out of my ears.

I've been giving myself the space to be a little freaky for a while. I don't think this is going to turn me into Rambo or motivate me to go out and sleep with nineteen-year-old girls. Yeah, it's gonna bug me for a while. I'm gonna have some scars on my brain. But I don't think it's going to affect me long term.

I don't wonder, Why me? Some people say, "You made it out; you're destined for great things." Great, I tell them. I made it out, now why not put a little pressure on me while you're at it.

In the reflection of the hotel windows across the street, I saw Tower Two coming down. I dove to the ground and started crying. The explosion was extreme, the noise impossible to describe. That noise is a noise thousands of people heard when they died.

Read more: http://web.archive.org/web/20091020005015/http://www.esquire.com/features/what-ive-learned/ESQ0102-JAN_WTC_rev#ixzz1qT7xDb3x

---

Below, the same article, reposted at Free Republic, misleadingly titled, with two dates, just not the actual one the online version of the article has as its date. (or was this supplied privately two day in advance?) And with both the [sole]author's first and last names being spelled WRONG.[It is not a "co-authored" piece on the Esquire website.] Also, examine PackerBoy's use of obfuscating capitalization during his transcription process. And why call it an interview? Other than the lead paragraph, it's a first-person dramatization. Free Republic's only contribution were thread comments that allude to this as being one of the first extended survivor's narratives to be published in the media.


Riveting WTC Survivor Story (My title)

Esquire Magazine | January 2002 | Michael Wright & Carl Nussman 

Posted on Sat Dec 29 2001 11:31:04 GMT-0500 (Eastern Standard Time) by PackerBoy

.At 8:48 on the morning of September 11, MICHAEL WRIGHT was a thirty-year-old account executive working on the eighty-first floor of the World Trade Center.

Two hours later; he was something else. The story of his escape is the fastest 3,863 words you will ever read.

WHAT I'VE LEARNED - JANUARY 2002 - ESQUIRE MAGAZINE - INTERVIEWED BY CARL NUSSMAN

UP TO THAT DAY, I’d had a Brady Bunch, cookie-cutter, beautiful life. I now know what it’s like to have a 110-story building that’s been hit by a 767 come down on my head. For better or for worse, it’s part of my life. There are things I never thought I’d know that I now know.

It was as mundane a morning as you can imagine. Tuesdays are usually the days I go out to see clients and make sales calls. I get to my office at a quarter to eight, eat a bran muffin, drink a cup of coffee, and get my head straight for the day.

I was actually in a good mood. A couple of us were yukking it up in the men’s room. We’d just started sharing the eighty-first floor of 1 World Trade Center with Bank of America, and they’d put up a sign telling everyone to keep the bathroom clean. "Look at this," one of us said. "They move in and now they’re giving us shit." It was about quarter to nine.

All of a sudden, there was the shift of an earthquake. People ask, "Did you hear a boom?" No. The way I can best describe it is that every joint in the building jolted. You ever been in a big old house when a gust of wind comes through and you hear all the posts creak? Picture that creaking being not a matter of inches but of feet. We all got knocked off balance. One guy burst out of a stall buttoning up his pants, saying, "What the fuck?" The flex caused the marble walls in the bathroom to crack.

You’re thinking, Gas main. It was so percussive, so close. I opened the bathroom door, looked outside, and saw fire.

There was screaming. One of my coworkers, Alicia, was trapped in the women’s room next door. The doorjamb had folded in on itself and sealed the door shut. This guy Art and another guy started kicking the shit out of the door, and they finally got her out.

There was a huge crack in the floor of the hallway that was about half a football field long, and the elevator bank by my office was completely blown out. If I’d walked over, I could’ve looked all the way down. Chunks of material that had been part of the wall were in flames all over the floor. Smoke was everywhere.

I knew where the stairs were because a couple of guys from my office used to smoke butts there. I started screaming, "Out! Out! Out!" The managers were trying to keep people calm and orderly, and here I was screaming, "The stairs! The stairs!"

We got to the stairwell, and people were in various states. Some were in shock; some were crying. We started filing down in two rows, fire-drill style. I’d left my cell phone at my desk, but my coworkers had theirs. I tried my wife twenty times but couldn’t get through. Jenny had gone up to Boston with her mother and grandmother and was staying with my family. Our son was with her. Ben’s six months old. It was impossible to reach them.

The thing that kept us calm on the stairs was the thought that what happened couldn’t possibly happen. The building could not come down. After a while, as we made our way down, we started to lighten up. Yeah, we knew something bad had happened, but a fire doesn’t worry you as much when you’re thirty floors below it. I even made an off-color joke to my buddy Ryan. The intent was for only Ryan to hear, but things quieted down just as I said it, so everyone heard. I said, "Ryan, hold me."

He said, "Mike . . . I didn't know."

I said, "Well, we're all going to die, might as well tell you."

Some people were laughing, but not the guy in front of me. "I really think you should keep that humor down!" he said. I felt lousy. In hindsight, he may have known more than I did. Even though I’d seen physical damage, what I can’t stress enough is how naïve I was at that point.

Some floors we’d cruise down; others we’d wait for ten minutes. People were speculating, "Was it a bomb?" But we were all getting out. I didn’t think I was going to die.

At the fortieth floor, we started coming in contact with firemen. They were saying, "C’mon, down you go! Don’t worry it’s safe below." Most of them were stone-faced. Looking back, there were some frightened firemen.

When we got below the thirtieth floor, they started to bring down injured people from flights above. There was a guy with the back of his shirt burned off, a little burn on his shoulder. One woman had severe burns on her face.

We got down to the twentieth floor and a fireman said, "Does anyone know CPR?" I’m no longer certified, but I know it from college. That was ten years ago. You wouldn’t want me on an EMT team, but if it comes down to saving somebody, I know how.

So me and this other guy volunteer. We helped this one heavy older man who came down huffing and puffing, and we kept our eyes out for anyone else. "Do you need help? Do you need help?" Nobody needed help. The stairway became wide open. It was time to go. The other guy took off in front of me. We were going pretty fast.

Have you ever been to the World Trade Center? There's a mezzanine level, then you go downstairs, which is subterranean, into this big mall. Our stairwell exited out onto that mezzanine level. At that point, I could look out across the plaza at 2 World Trade Center. That's when I realized the gravity of what had happened. I saw dead bodies everywhere, and none that I saw were intact. It was hard to tell how many. Fifty maybe? I scanned for a second and then focused on the head of a young woman with some meat on it. I remember my hand coming up in front of my face to block the sight. Then I took off. As I ran, people were coming out of another stairwell. I stopped and said, "Don't look outside! Don't look outside!" The windows were stained with blood. Someone who'd jumped had fallen very close to the building.

It felt like my head was going to blow up.

I made it to the stairwell and got down. The mall was in bad shape. It must have been from chunks of the plane coming down. Windows were smashed. Sprinklers were on.

I saw Alicia, the coworker who'd been trapped in the bathroom. She'd seen what I’d seen in the plaza and was traumatized. She was crying and moving slowly. I put my arm around her. Then there was another woman—same thing. I put my arm around the two of them, saying, "C'mon. We gotta go. We gotta go."

We were moving through the mall toward the escalator that would take us back up to street level and out to Church Street. There were some emergency workers giving us the "head this way" sign. I think they were trying to get us as far away from the fire as possible and out toward Church Street and the Millenium Hilton hotel.

I got to the bottom of the escalator, and that's when I heard what sounded like a crack. That was the beginning of it. I ran to the top of the escalator as fast as I could and looked east, out toward Church Street at the Millenium hotel. The windows of the hotel are like a mirror, and in the reflection I saw Tower Two coming down.

How do you describe the sound of a 110-story building coming down directly above you? It sounded like what it was: a deafening tidal wave of building material coming down on my head. It appeared to be falling on the street directly where I was headed.

I turned to run back into the building. It was the instinctual thing to do. You’re thinking, if you stay outside, you’re running into it. If you go inside, it might not land there. So I turned and ran into the building, down into the mall, and that’s when it hit. I dove to the ground, screaming at the top of my lungs, "Oh, no! Oh, no! Jenny and Ben! Jenny and Ben!" It wasn’t a very creative response, but it was the only thing I could say. I was gonna die.

The explosion was extreme, the noise impossible to describe. I started crying. It’s hard for me to imagine now that when I was on the ground awaiting my doom, hearing that noise, thousands of people were dying. That noise is a noise thousands of people heard when they died.

When it hit, everything went instantly black. You know how a little kid packs a pail of sand at the beach? That’s what it was like in my mouth, my nose, my ears, my eyes—everything packed with debris. I spat it out. I puked, mostly out of horror. I felt myself. Am I intact? Can I move? I was all there. There was moaning. People were hurt and crying all around me.

Then I had my second reckoning with death. I’m alive, yeah. But I’m trapped beneath whatever fell on top of me and this place is filled with smoke and dust. This is how I’m gonna die—and this was worse. Because I was going to be cognizant of my death. I was going to be trapped in a hole and it was going to fill with smoke and they were going to find me like one of those guys buried in Pompeii.

I sat there thinking of my wife and son again. It wasn’t like seeing the photos of Jenny and Ben that I had on my desk, though. The images I had were of them without me. Images of knowing that I’d never touch them again. MI sat there, thinking of them, I suddenly got this presence of mind: I gotta try to survive.

I tore off my shirt and wrapped it around my mouth and nose to keep some of the smoke out. I started crawling. It was absolutely pitch-black. I had no idea where I was crawling to, but I had to keep trying. It’s haunting to think about it now.

I saw a light go on. I can’t say I was happy, because I was horrified, but that light was hope.

Luckily, I was buried with a fireman. I got over to him and stuck to this guy like a sticky burr on a bear’s ass. He was frazzled, but he had it a lot more together than I did. I was like, "What are we gonna do?" You can’t imagine the ability to have rational thought at that point. I was purely in survival mode. It wasn’t like, The smoke is traveling this way, so I’ll go that way to the fresh air. It’s whatever presents itself.

The fireman looked like a big Irish guy. Big, bushy mustache. He had an axe. He was looking at a wall, and it looked solid, but when he wiped his hand on it, it was glass, a glass wall looking into a Borders bookstore. There was a door right next to it. He smashed the door and it spread open.

Everyone gravitated to the light. Now there was a bunch of us. People were screaming. We got into Borders, went upstairs, and got through the doors heading outside. The dust was so thick, there was barely any light.

At this point, I still had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know if we were being bombed or what. I didn’t know if this was over or if it was just beginning.

I took off into the cloud. I crossed Church Street, and some light started coming in, and I could see a little bit. I saw a woman standing there, horrified, crying, lost. I stopped and said, "Are you okay? Are you okay?" She couldn’t speak. I kept going.

I went along Vesey Street, using it as a guide. It started clearing up more and more, and I got to an intersection that was completely empty. That’s where I saw one of the weirdest things—a cameraman near a van with the NBC peacock on it doubled over with his camera, crying.

I was all disoriented. I saw a turned-over bagel cart, and I grabbed a couple of Snapples. I used one to rinse out my mouth and wash my face. I drank some of the other. Then I started running again. It was chaos.

Even though I'd been around these streets a million times, I was completely lost. I looked up and saw my building, 1 World Trade Center, in flames. I looked for the other tower because I always use the two buildings as my North Star. I couldn’t see it. I stood there thinking, It doesn't make sense. At that angle, it was apparent how devastating it all was. I looked up and said, "Hundreds of people died today." I was trying to come to terms with it-—to intellectualize it. My wife's family is Jewish, and her grandparents talk about the Holocaust and the ability of humans to be cruel and kill one another. This is a part of a pattern of human behavior, I told myself. And I just happen to be very close to this one.

Maybe it seems an odd reaction in hindsight. But I was just trying to grab on to something, some sort of logic or justification, rather than let it all overwhelm me. I was raised Irish-Catholic, and I consider myself a spiritual person. I did thank God for getting me out of there for my kid. But I also tend to be a pretty logical thinker. I'm alive because I managed to find a space that had enough support structure that it didn’t collapse on me. I'm alive because the psycho in the plane decided to hit at this angle as opposed to that angle. I’m alive because I went down this stairwell instead of that stairwell. I can say that now. But at that moment, I was just trying to give myself some sanity.

I was still running when I heard another huge sound. I didn't know it at the time, but it was the other tower—my tower—coming down. A cop on the street saw me and said, "Buddy, are you okay?" It was obvious that he was spooked by looking at me. Aside from being caked with dust, I had blood all over me that wasn't mine. He was trying to help, but I could tell he was shocked by what he was seeing.

I was looking for a pay phone to call my wife, but every one I passed was packed. My wife never entertained for a minute that I could be alive. She had turned on the TV and said, "Eighty-first floor. Both buildings collapsed. There’s not a prayer." It was difficult for her to look at Ben because she was having all these feelings. "Should I be grateful that I have him? Is he going to be a reminder of Mike every time I look at him?" At the time, these thoughts just go through your head.

Finally, I got to a pay phone where there was a woman just kind of looking up. I shoved her out of the way. I guess it was kind of harsh, but I had to get in touch with my family. I dialed Boston and a recording said, "Six dollars and twenty-five cents, please." So I pulled out a quarter and called my brother at NYU. I got his voice mail. "I'm alive! I'm alive! Call Jenny! Let everyone know I'm alive!" It was 10:34.

I started running toward where my brother Chris worked at NYU. I'm the last of six in my family. The two oldest are girls, the four youngest, boys. Chris is the second oldest above me. The classic older brother. The one who'd put you down and give you noogies. He probably would have had the best view of the whole thing going on. But he'd left his office, thinking My brother is dead. He walked home to Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge, unable to look back.

On my way to NYU, I met this guy—-a stranger named Gary-—who had a cell phone. He tried and tried and couldn't get through to Boston. I said, "I gotta get to NYU" and left him. But he kept calling Boston and eventually got through to my family. At that point, four of my five siblings were at the house. My wife's father was on his way from New York with a black suit in the car.

The people at NYU took me in. They were great. I said, "I don't need anything. Just call my family." They kept on trying to get through. They couldn't; they couldn't. Finally, they got through.

I said, "Jenny, it's me." And there was a moan. It was this voice I'd never heard before in my life. And I was saying, "I'm alive. I'm alive. I love you. I love you. I love you." We cried and cried. Then the phone went dead.

At that point, I went into the bathroom to clean myself off, and suddenly I couldn't open my eyes anymore. They were swollen. I knew I wasn't blind, but if I opened my eyes toward any amount of light there was intense, intense pain. I didn't feel this while I was running. It seemed to happen as soon as I was safe and the adrenaline came out of me.

At the NYU health center, the doctors said, "Yeah, your eyes are scratched to shit." They put drops in them, but they needed more sophisticated equipment to see what was going on. I wound up having 147 fiberglass splinters taken out of my eyes.

Chris came back from Brooklyn to pick me up, and I held on to him and hugged hint. Later, he said, "You know, Michael, this is why I stuffed you in sleeping bags and beat on you all those years as a kid. Just to toughen you up for something like this."

When we got back to my place, I collapsed and it all hit me. I cried like I've never cried in my life. I finally let loose, and it felt better. My brother helped me pack, and we got to Westchester, where my wife and family had gone. Jenny came running to the door. I can remember hearing the dum, dum, dum, dum, dum of her footsteps.

My mother was there. My dad. My father-in-law. They all hugged me. Then they gave me my son. I could tell by the noises he was making that he was happy. I hugged him and sort of started the healing process there.

Later, I went to Maine to sit by the ocean for a few days and get my head together. I saw all of my old friends. It was amazing. Everyone I know in my life has called me to tell me they love me. It's like having your funeral without having to die.

For a while right after, I wondered, how the hell am I going to work again? How am I going to give a damn about selling someone a T-1 line? I had a list of people who were going to be my business for the next year, hundreds of people, all on my desk—-blown up. For the life of me, I can't dredge up those names. That will cost me a quarter of my income, maybe more. You know what? Who cares? I'm alive and I’m here. A big deal has gone to big deal.

I lost a friend in 2 World Trade Center. He was one of those guys you liked as soon as you met him. Howard Boulton. Beautiful person. His baby was born three months ahead of mine. He was on the eighty-fourth floor and I was on the eighty-first. The last conversation he had with his wife was by telephone. He told her, "Something happened to 1 Worid Trade Center. It's very bad. I don't think Michael Wright is okay. I'm coming home." I like to think Howard wasn't scared like I wasn't scared in the stairwell. I like to think that he heard a rumble like I heard a rumble and then he was gone.

I went to his funeral. To see his wife and his baby-—it would have made you sad even if you didn't know him. But it was much more loaded for me. Here was a perfect reflection of what could've been.

One of the hardest things I had to deal with up to this point-—and still do-—is that my brother Brian, who's one year older than me, has cancer. He and I are practically twins. He has germ-cell cancer in his chest. He recently told me that the good news is they can go in and get it. But the bad news is they might have to take a lung with it. Before September 11, maybe the fact that he was going to lose a lung might have thrown me for a loop. But I found out I love my brother for my brother. I don't love him to run up mountains at a brisk pace with me. My reaction was: Thank God they can get it.

Luckily, I've been well equipped to deal with this. I have a family that's unbelievably close and supportive and a lot of friends. I've been to therapy, and I can do the whole checklist: Do you have a sense of fear and not know where it's coming from? Yup. Can you no longer take pleasure in things you once took pleasure in? Yup. Claustrophobic? Yup. I have nightmares. I jump when I hear a siren. But it's the smell that haunts me. Talk to anyone who was within ten blocks of it and they'll tell you that, I had vaporized people packed up my nose, in my mouth and ears. For weeks, I was picking stuff out of my ears.

I've been giving myself the space to be a little freaky for a while, I don't think this is going to turn me into Rambo or motivate me to go out and sleep with nineteen-year-old girls. Yeah, it's gonna bug me for a while. I'm gonna have some scars on my brain. But I don't think it's going to affect me long term.

I don’t wonder, Why me? Some people say, "You made it out; you’re destined for great things." Great, I tell them. I made it out, now why not put a little pressure on me while you’re at it.

---

January 6, 2006, ABC News, 20/20, Book Excerpt: 'The Cell',

Excerpted from The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It © 2002 John Miller Enterprises Ltd. and Michael Stone. Courtesy Hyperion Books.

About 8:45 Michael Wright visited the men's room, located near the elevator bank at the center of the 81st floor of the North Tower. On his way out he ran into a coworker, Arturo Gonzalez, and stopped briefly to chat with him. Suddenly the building shuddered and Wright heard a crash—a screeching, metal-on-metal jolt—and was thrown back against the wall.

The lights blinked and for a moment, the whole building seemed to teeter. Wright waited for the room to settle and adjusted his vision. Everything had changed. The marble facade on the opposite wall was shattered and a huge crack had opened up in the drywall behind. The floor had buckled and Gonzalez was propped up against the broken vanity. The sinks themselves had moved out from the wall. "What the fuck was that?" Wright asked. "Holy shit," Gonzalez intoned.

Smoke threaded through the air between them.

They headed out to the hallway, where the devastation was horrendous. Chunks of roof were falling, the facing wall was ripped open and the elevator doors to their right had blown out. The whole building, Wright realized, had shifted on its foundation. Every joining surface was awry; every hinge was twisted or bent. A crater had opened in the floor ahead of him exposing wires, pipes, girders and beams at least ten floors below. Acrid smoke poured out of the elevator shafts.

Wright's instinct was to get the hell out of there, but instead he turned back toward his office to check on his coworkers. As he ran past the elevators, he heard screaming from the ladies' room. The jamb above the door had caved, trapping whoever was inside. Gonzalez and another colleague began kicking down the door.

Wright's 30 or so officemates were pouring out into the hall. Some were calm, others terrified or in tears. He directed them to the stairwell. Flaming chunks of material were falling around them and Wright could smell burning fuel, though he had no idea where it was coming from.

John O'Neill, the World Trade Center's 49-year-old chief of security, dashed out of his South Tower office to assess the situation. A brusque, larger-than-life New York character, O'Neill had spent all but a few days of his professional life at the FBI, the last eight years as one of its top counterterrorism officials. Ironically, he'd retired from the Bureau two weeks before in order to take what friends called a cushy private-sector job, and former colleagues still regarded him as the nation's most knowledgeable counterterrorist. Only the night before, over dinner with friends, he'd expressed a fear that New York was ripe for an attack like the one he now found himself in the midst of. He made a quick damage inspection, placed a call on his cell phone, and then sprinted back inside to help coordinate the rescue effort.

Joe Lhota, Rudy Giuliani's chief of staff, felt the explosion in his office at City Hall almost a half mile from the World Trade Center. He dashed out onto the steps, saw the flames engulfing the tower and called Giuliani at the Peninsula. An aide answered the phone. "Tell the mayor a plane has hit the Trade Center," Lhota said.

Back downtown at One Police Plaza, anxious aides pounded on Bernie Kerik's bathroom door. The 46-year-old bullet-shaped police commissioner had worked out earlier in the vest-pocket gym attached to his office and was taking advantage of a break in his busy schedule to shower and change. He answered the door wearing nothing but a towel, a beardful of shaving cream, and a "this better be good" expression.

"A plane just hit the World Trade towers," several staffers said at once. "All right, relax. Calm down," Kerik said, noting the worry in their faces. He was thinking small aircraft, an accident.

"You don't understand, Boss," John Picciano, his chief aide, said. "You can see it from the window. It's enormous."

Kerik realized that every phone on the floor was ringing.

Still wrapped in a towel, he followed Picciano through the outer office to a conference room at the southwest corner of the building and looked out at the Trade Center. Then he ran back to his office to call the mayor, who was already headed downtown, and got dressed.

He was out of the building within four minutes, at the scene in eight. Pulling up in his black four-door Chrysler at the corner of Vesey and West Broadway, he saw people jumping out of windows 90, 100 stories up, one after another. For the first time in his 25-year law enforcement career, he felt totally helpless.

More than a thousand miles away, at American's operations center in Fort Worth, top executives were experiencing similar feelings. With the assistance of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the center's technicians had finally managed to isolate Flight 11's radar image on Aircraft Situation Display—a big-screen tracking device used for just such emergencies—and stunned officials watched as the blips approached New York, froze and then vanished. Still no one knew what had happened. Even when a ramp supervisor called from Kennedy Airport several minutes later to report that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center, they couldn't believe that it was Flight 11.

Meanwhile, air-traffic controllers back east were scrambling to make contact with two more rogue planes. Even before the first World Trade Center crash at 8:41, United's Flight 175 seemed to be in trouble. One of the pilots had radioed that he'd heard a suspicious transmission emanating from the cabin shortly after takeoff. "Someone keyed the [cabin] mike and said, ÔEveryone stay in their seats,'" the pilot told the controllers. Minutes later, the plane swerved off course and shut down communication.

Almost simultaneously, air-traffic controllers lost contact with a second American flight, AAL 77, a Boeing 757 en route from Washington's Dulles International Airport to Los Angeles with 58 passengers and 6 crew on board. At 8:56, just moments after the first World Trade Center crash, that plane doubled back toward Washington, shut off its transponder, and didn't answer repeated calls from a controller out of Indianapolis.

Airline executives were finding it impossible to keep abreast of developments in the air. Officials at United's operations center outside Chicago had just gotten news of the first Trade Center crash, when Doc Miles, the center's shift manager, received an alarming communication from United's maintenance department in San Francisco. Moments before, a mechanic had fielded a call from an attendant on Flight 175 saying the pilots had been killed, a flight attendant stabbed and the plane hijacked.

Miles questioned the report; it was an American Airlines jet that had been hijacked, he pointed out, not a United plane. But the mechanic confirmed that the call had come from United Flight 175 from Boston to LA and frantic efforts by a dispatcher to raise the cockpit were met with silence. Meanwhile, executives watching CNN on an overhead screen in United's crisis room saw a large, still unidentified aircraft crash into the Trade Center's South Tower.

I had just walked out of Good Morning America's Times Square studios and when I'd got to my car all hell had broken loose. My pager went off. My cell phone rang, and so did the car phone. I know from experience, this is never good news.

"A plane crashed into the World Trade Center," Kris Sebastian, the ABC News's national assignment manager, told me.

"I'm on my way," I said. I calculated the routes to the scene. I could get there in 12 to 15 minutes if I drove a smart, back-road route and ran some lights. But a network crew starting out from the office would take longer, and a satellite truck, which is what I would need to "go live," would take an hour to be ready for broadcast. I really wanted to go to the scene. That's what I had done my whole life. I was a "street guy." But I also realized that the news choppers would already be broadcasting live pictures from the scene. I could hear information pouring out of the police radio in my car. When I finally got to the corner of 44th Street and Eighth Avenue, I called the news desk and told them: Change of plans. I'm coming in and will help with live coverage from the set of the ABC News Desk.

Not much more than a minute later, police radio still in hand, I was sitting down next to Peter Jennings. We watched with astonishment as the second plane crashed into the other tower. Peter, never one to rush to conclusions—especially on the air—looked at me. "Whatever we thought this was, we now know what it is," I said. "This is a terrorist attack."

Back at the site, Kerik was patrolling the plaza's uptown boundary, making calls on his cell phone and shouting instructions at chief aide John Picciano to set up a command post a few blocks north, when he heard the explosion of the second crash. He looked up and saw a massive fireball shooting out of the South Tower straight at him. But he didn't see the plane itself, which had banked low across the harbor and slammed into the south side of the building. "How the hell did the fire leap from one tower to the other?" he wondered.

There was no time to figure out what happened. The crash was sending debris flying toward Kerik and his men. For a moment they stood transfixed, watching the deadly shrapnel make its descent. It looked like confetti, it was so high. Then someone yelled at them to get out of there and they took off up West Broadway.

As Kerik ducked around the corner into a garage on Barclay Street, someone told him that a United Airlines plane had hit the building. Instantly he realized they were being attacked by terrorists. He thought, "How many more planes are up there? What are the other targets?" He began calling for a mobilization and ordered his chief deputy commissioner to evacuate police headquarters, City Hall, the UN, and the Empire State Building.

Within minutes, Giuliani arrived at the corner of Barclay and West Broadway, and Kerik, joining him, reported that the city was under attack. "We've got to cut off the air space," Giuliani said.

Kerik relayed the order to Picciano, adding, "Get us some air support. We need F16s."

Picciano was looking at him like he was crazy. "What the fuck are you talking about?" he said.

Kerik realized how surreal the situation had become. He was a police commissioner, not a general in the army. Who the hell do you call to get an F16, anyway? Is there a number for that?

In fact, the FAA had already notified the Northeast Air Defense Sector in Rome, New York, at 8:40, about ten minutes after controllers began to suspect that they had a hijacking in progress. At 8:46, Otis Air National Guard Base near Falmouth, Massachusetts, had gotten a call from NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, and scrambled two F15s, 1977-vintage fighters equipped with heat-seeking missiles. The planes were dispatched immediately, and were airborne by 8:52, but they were still some 70 miles—eight minutes—away when the second plane, UAL 175, crashed into the Trade Center at 9:03.

By then, Michael Wright had fallen in with his coworkers on the stairs and was being joined by people from the floors above and below. They descended the narrow stairs slowly, two abreast.

Twenty floors down, the mood lightened. Wright heard tones of relief, trails of nervous laughter. "I don't care what time it is," someone said. "I'm going to get a drink at John Street [bar and grill]."

Conversation turned from what people had seen to what might have actually happened. Wright initially thought that a gas main had exploded; now people around him speculated it was a bomb. Nobody knew for sure. They'd been frantically trying their cell phones, but service was down. At length, a stranger with a BlackBerry, a wireless email device, informed them that a plane had crashed into their building and that the tower next door had also been hit.

Wright knew at once that terrorists had attacked them. One crash might be an accident, two had to be intentional. But he assumed they'd used small planes, Cessnas maybe-—the kind of light commuter craft he'd seen routinely winging past his office window.

Another 20 floors down, Wright's sense of relief turned to dread. Firefighters, rescue workers and police shouldered past him on their way upstairs. Most of them were stern-faced, but some were clearly frightened. Many of them, he realized later, had been about to die.

Arriving at the fire department's makeshift command post on West Street in the shadow of 1 World Trade Center, the mayor and the police commissioner witnessed a scene of almost unimaginable horror.Hundreds of office workers were streaming out of both towers under a rain of glass, steel and airplane and body parts; the air was choked with smoke and ash; the street awash in blood.

Surrounded by aides, Giuliani met briefly with the fire department's top commanders—Thomas Von Essen, the commissioner; Bill Feehan, his first deputy; Pete Ganci, the chief of department; and Deputy Chief Ray Downey. Giuliani listened to their plans to evacuate the buildings, while Kerik consulted with police. One familiar face on the scene belonged to John Coughlin, an Emergency Services Unit (ESU) sergeant who had once saved Kerik's daughter from choking.

About 9:40, Giuliani and Kerik, now joined by the fire commissioner and other top administration officials, trooped a few blocks north to set up a forward command post. "God bless you," the mayor said to Ganci on leaving.

"Thank you," Ganci said. "God bless you."

"Pray for us," Giuliani then said to Mychal Judge, the department chaplain, who was standing nearby.

"Don't worry," Judge told the mayor. "I always do."

Excerpted from The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It © 2002 John Miller Enterprises Ltd. and Michael Stone. Courtesy Hyperion Books.

---

Description

ABC's John Miller has been tracking this story since his coverage of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. He was the first American journalist to interview Osama bin Laden. He has a sophisticated knowledge of the structure and workings of bin Laden’s and other extremist organizations. And he has extensive sources within the federal and local law enforcement communities now conducting the investigation into the September 11 attacks. In The Cell, Miller and veteran crime reporter Michael Stone will narrate the behind-the-scenes story of this unfolding investigation. Following a handful of key agents and detectives, they will not only describe the step-by-step process of identifying and linking up suspects, but the politics and pressures, the magnitude and feel of the greatest manhunt in the history of the world.

Excerpts from the book...

CHAPTER 1SEPTEMBER 11 On the morning of September 11, 2001, Michael Wright, a 30-year-old sales executive, woke at 6:30. Stocky, with a broad Irish face and an easy manner, he rolled over to hug his wife, then remembered she'd gone with their four-month-old son to visit Michael's parents in Boston. With the place to himself, Wright thought about sleeping in, but heard his grandfather's voice barking at him from the grave: "Get your lazy butt to work."

Outside his apartment -- a brownstone floor-through facing Prospect Park in Brooklyn -- it was a brilliant end-of-summer day, bell-clear with a hint of coolness in the air. Wright was looking forward to work. He had two deals pending and with plans to buy his apartment, he was eager for the commissions. Showered and dressed, he made the subway commute into lower Manhattan in 20 minutes and exited on Broadway and Bey Street, two blocks due east of his office, a telecommunications equipment company headquartered in the World Trade Center.

Looking up, he marveled at the familiar Twin Towers massed against the sky. Sunlight glanced off the steel rails running up the buildings' sides, making them shine. But what really impressed Wright was their size, their head-snapping height, the sheer, unholy dimensions of their heavenly reach. They embodied, as no other buildings did, the economic muscle he wanted his company to project each time he handed out his business card or told someone where he worked. He walked briskly across the plaza and took the elevator to the 81st floor of the North Tower, getting to his desk by 7:45.

While Wright got started on paperwork, Mayor Rudy Giuliani was bullying midtown traffic in his official car, a white SUV familiarly known as the ice-cream van. He was headed for a breakfast meeting at the Peninsula Hotel on West 55th Street with his counsel, Dennison Young, then back uptown to the Richard R. Green School in Harlem to vote in the elections that would determine his successor. It was Primary Day in New York and the city's political nerves were twitching.

As Giuliani entered the Peninsula's starched dining room shortly after 8:00 A.M., American Airlines Flight 11 was making its ascent over Boston's Logan Airport. En route to Los Angeles, the wide-bodied jet carried 81 passengers and a crew of 11. About 10 minutes later, a second Boeing 767 took off for LA. This flight, UAL 175, carried 56 passengers and a crew of nine. Both flights departed without incident, and control tower workers were settling into their early-morning routines when at 8:14, the American plane failed to respond to an air-traffic controller's instruction to increase its altitude. The controller tried to raise the pilot on the radio, without success. Then at 8:28, he overheard a strange communication originating from the plane's cockpit. "We have some planes," an accented male voice announced. "Just stay quiet and you will be okay. We are returning to the airport. Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet."

Moments before, an American Airlines reservations supervisor had received a call from Betty Ong, a flight attendant on Flight 11, describing a hijacking in progress. The supervisor had patched the call through to Craig Marquis, the veteran manager-on-duty at American's operations center in Fort Worth, Texas. Nearly hysterical, Ong told him that two flight attendants had been stabbed and that one was dead and one was on oxygen.

About the Author


John Miller covers legal news stories from criminal investigations to civil lawsuits, contributing reports for all of the network’s news programs, including World News Tonight With Peter Jennings, 20/20 and Good Morning America. An Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist and one of the most widely recognized reporters covering crime and legal issues, Miller most recently served as the deputy police commissioner of the New York City Police Department for public affairs. Before that he was a correspondent for WNBC-TV, New York, as well as various NBC broadcasts, including NBC Nightly News and The Today show. In May of 1998, as part of an ABCNEWS investigation into terrorism, Miller traveled to the mountains of Afghanistan for a rare interview with Osama bin Laden in which he threatened to launch attacks on U.S. civilians. Two months later, according to the US government, bin Laden bombed two U.S. embassies in East Africa, killing 250 people. Miller went on to do a series of reports on the unfolding investigation of bin Laden’s alleged role in the attacks. Miller lives in NYC.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Miller_(journalist)

What a total tool John Miller is. And in the sentence: "Miller traveled to the mountains of Afghanistan for a rare interview with Osama bin Laden in which he threatened to launch attacks on U.S. civilians." Who is threatening Americans? Miller or Osama?

---

January Magazine,

In New York City, a handful of veteran FBI agents, police officers and investigative journalists had known for years that a terrorist event on the scale of 9/11 was likely. Ironically, one of the men who had been most aware of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden had recently left the FBI, where he had been following the movements of bin Laden and Al Qaeda, to become Chief of Security at the World Trade Center. John O'Neill died on that awful day. The FBI's O'Neill, along with Neil Herman, Kenny Maxwell, reporter John Miller and very few others, had been on Bin Laden's trail for years. To them, he had long been considered the most dangerous man on the planet.

In The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It, John Miller, an award-winning journalist and co-anchor of ABC's 20/20, along with veteran reporters Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell, takes readers back more than ten years to the birth of the terrorist cell that later metastasized into Al Qaeda's New York operation. This remarkable book offers a firsthand account of what it is to be a police officer, an FBI agent or a reporter obsessed with a case few people will take seriously. The Cell also contains a first-person account of Miller's face-to-face meeting with bin Laden and provides the first full-length treatment to piece together what led up to the events of 9/11, Ultimately delivering the disturbing answer to the question: Why, with all the information the intelligence community had, was no one able to stop the September 11 attacks?

---

GoogleBooks, The Cell, Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It, by John J. Miller,


PROLOGUE

September 11, 2001, started out as such a nice day -- no, a beautiful day. Then it all turned.

ABC News/Good Morning America, 9:05 A.M.

DON DAHLER Well, we see -- it appears that there is more and more fire and smoke enveloping the very top of the building, and as fire crews are descending on this area, it -- it does not appear that there's any kind of an effort up there yet. Now remember -- Oh, my God! 

DIANE SAWYER Oh my God! Oh my God!

CHARLES GIBSON That looks like a second plane has just hit ...

How many times have you heard someone say, "Well, things will never be the same." It is rarely true. Things always go back to being the same. But not this time. Before the day was out many of my friends were dead. Many had just barely escaped. Many of them were badly hurt. Many who got out without even a scrape will be emotionally scarred for years if not forever. Many of them don't even know it yet, or just won't admit it.

Things will never be the same.

I have been a crime reporter since I was a teenager. I have seen or heard everything that a crime reporter could. Or so I thought, until September 11, 2001. I was listening to the citywide radio frequency of the NYPD when I heard Joe Esposito, the NYPD chief, yell into his radio: "Car 3 to Central, advise the Pentagon New York City is under attack!" Been around a long time. Hadn't heard that one before.

I sat with Peter Jennings at the anchor desk in New York watching the flames when a plume of white smoke appeared where the South Tower had stood.

DON DAHLER The second building that was hit by the plane has just completely collapsed. The entire building has just collapsed . . . it folded down on itself and it's not there anymore. 

PETER JENNINGS We are talking about massive casualties here at the moment and we have -- whoo -- that is extraordinary. 

DON DAHLER There is panic on the streets. There are people screaming and running from the site. The gigantic plume of smoke has reached me and I'm probably a quarter of a mile north of there.

By the time the Towers collapsed in a cloud of metal and dust and humanity, I knew this was the work of bin Laden. No one told me. No one had to. It had been a long time coming. I was part of the small club, regarded by many as alarmists, who had been predicting a major attack on U.S. soil since just before the millennium. Even so, I never imagined this result. Nor, do I think, did anyone else.

Things will never be the same.

Those of us who had studied terrorism in general or bin Laden in particular knew that the most reliable way to predict future behavior was to examine past behavior. Truck-bombs, murders, yes -- even airplane hijackings. But no one had ever used a huge jetliner as a projectile -- a missile -- against a skyscraper before. No one had ever committed mass murder on this scale in a set of coordinated acts of terrorism in a single day. Not until September 11, 2001. That was the day my crime story turned into a war. Or had it been one all along?

We all asked, how could this have happened, how could we not have known, why were we not prepared? This book will answer many of those questions. No doubt years will be spent parsing every memo and intelligence report to see what little clues might have been missed. We will deal with that in this story too. But if there is any true value to this narrative, it is not the little picture of the single clue passed over; it is the big picture to stand back from, to appreciate its shape and detail.

How did this happen to us? To find the answers we had to go back more than a decade and follow the thread forward to September 11, 2001. As we did, a recurring pattern emerged. It raises questions: Was the FBI fully up to the job of countering terrorists? What about the CIA? Was terrorism a priority in the Bush White House or in Ashcroft's Justice Department prior to September 11, 2001?

This is not a book about how the FBI agents or the CIA's officers on the front lines screwed up. Quite the contrary. Successful cases and captures were made. A number of horrific terrorist plots were disrupted. We found in almost every case that the cops, agents and spies who followed their instincts were usually in the right place and on the right trail. But we found a recurring pattern. Over and over again the investigators were waved off the right trail. The reasons ranged from risk-averse bosses to bureaucratic resigned to ensure that the left hand would never know what the right hand was doing.

What struck us was the remarkable stories of those investigators. What we learned is that for more than a decade, the very system they worked for seemed to conspire against them as often as it supported them.

In many ways it seems like America was the sleeping giant. Every time the terrorism alarm went off, the giant stirred to consciousness, hit the snooze button and went back to sleep. Each time it sounded the alarm was a little louder. The Kahane murder, the World Trade Center bombing, the plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels, the East Africa embassy bombings, the USS Cole attack.

In 1998, I sat with Osama bin Laden in a hut in Afghanistan as he told me he was declaring war on America. His words at the time may have sounded hyperbolic, but read them now.

"We are sure of our victory. Our battle with the Americans is larger than our battle with the Russians. We predict a black day for America and the end of the United States."

From the moment bin Laden declared war on America, one of his frustrations seemed to be that he couldn't get America to declare war back. Not until the loudest and bloodiest alarm sounded on September 11 did the giant finally awake. |August 2002

Copyright © 2002 John Miller Enterprises Ltd. and Michael Stone

John Miller is an Emmy Award-winning broadcast journalist and co-host of ABC's 20/20 with Barbara Walters, and one of the few Western reporters ever to have interviewed Osama bin Laden. He lives in New York City. This is his first book.

Michael Stone is a veteran journalist who has covered many of New York's most notorious stories, including John Gotti, Robert Chambers and the Central Park jogger assault, and is the author of Gangbusters. He lives in New York City.

Chris Mitchell is a senior editor at The Week. His previous collaboration, Jack Maple's The Crime Fighter, inspired the television drama The District.

---

Sujo John Videos & Transcripts

---

By God's Grace: Surviving 9/11 from the 81st Floor
Jean and Dan Potter live a quiet life surrounded by woods and wildlife in Northeastern Pennsylvania. It's a stark contrast to 10 years ago living in a Manhattan apartment just a few blocks from the World Trade Center. Jean worked on the 81st floor of the first tower hit, on the morning of 9/11. [North Tower]
1:15 In the twenties, we start seeing firemen, which gave us all a sense of relief. One of whom was Vinny Giammona, who was my husband's lieutenant at Ladder 5. And I grabbed his arm, and I said, "Vinny, be safe." And I'll never forget that look on his face day. It would have been his 40th birthday. And he left behind a wife and four children, four little girls, who are now grown, but...I'll never forget that look on his face.

1:44  Lieutenant Vinny Giammona was one of 343 New York firefighters whop died that dark day. Jean's husband Dan, a firefighter at the time, knew 60 of them. When the terrorists struck, he was on Staten Island, but quickly raced to Manhattan to make sure that Jean was safe, not knowing that she made it out of the North Tower before it collapsed. It wasn't until he was a block or two away that he realized the magnitude of the situation.

2:00 Different sized body parts, and there's big pieces, and there's small pieces...it's all over the place

Dan arrived at Ground Zero to help, and had to take cover when the South Tower collapsed, and later the North Tower.

It sounded like a freight train, you know, maybe a hundred times more, and you figure, with that amount of noise, and you know it's coming down around you--it's just a matter of time.

Debris and concrete pelted Dan.

---

Refined by Fire: The Brian Birdwell Story, 3:39 minutes,
Thirty-five minutes after the second hijacked plane struck the World Trade Center, an American Airlines 757 slammed into the Pentagon. One hundred eighty nine people lost their lives in that attack and many more were injured. One of the most seriously injured was Army Lt. Col. Brian Birdwell, whose story is nothing short of amazing.

---

Malayalam Testimony of Sujo John - Story of a man who escaped from World Trade Centre, 1:06:41 minutes,
Our Jesus Lives presents - Story of Sujo John
Uploaded by Myworld4jesus on Jan 20, 2012
‎"Distributing living bread to the dying world" www.ourjesuslives.org
Sujo John September 11 - Story of a man who escaped from World Trade Centre.

---

Twin Towers Testimony. 28:02 minutes,
Uploaded by reachout on Dec 30, 2010
Simply the Truth with Doug Harris and Sujo John Discussing The Twin Towers,
First broadcast on 2/8/2010

---

KMBC.com, [Kansas City, KS]
9/11 Survivor Shares Spirit Of Unity
Published on Sep 7, 2011 by kmbctv, Embedding disabled by request
A man who was in one of the World Trade Center towers on the morning of 9/11 said his experience that day was one of triumph over tragedy. KMBC 9's Bev Chapman reports.

John Paul Devito, survivor from the 87th floor, North Tower, he led 13 people from his office to safety

---

9/11 Survivor Shares his Story 9/26, 0:29
Uploaded by Hilltop Community Church on Sep 23, 2010
Sujo John narrowly escaped the collapse of the WTC on 9/11. He shared his compelling story on Sunday, Sept. 26th, 2010, at Hilltop Community Church in Richmond, CA.

---

9/11 survivor speaks to the Honor Academy interns, 1:35 minutes
Uploaded by HonorAcademy on Mar 20, 2012
www.honoracademy.com

Sujo John tells his story of surviving the crash of the twin towers. He also gives some advice to current Honor Academy's Christian interns. Ron Luce Introduces...

---

By God's Grace: Surviving 9/11 from the 81st Floor
Jean and Dan Potter live a quiet life in Pennsylvania. It's a stark contrast to 10 years ago living in a Manhattan apartment just a few blocks from the World Trade Center.

---

The 700 Club, Sujo John a 911 Survivor's Story. 5:52 minutes
Uploaded by Drblackinstien on May 7, 2010
Sujo John had barely begun his workday on the 81st floor of World Trade Center One when he heard a loud explosion. "This is American Flight 11 coast to coast from Boston to LA and it just came crashing into our tower," said Sujo John, a World Trade Center survivor.

Chareet
Sujo John
Account Executive
One World Trade Center,
Suite 8121
Tel: 212-894-2502
Fax 212-
Email: sjohn@npw.com




0:39 Sujo feared the worst for his pregnant wife. She worked in the second world trade tower. Sujo made frantic cell phone calls to her without success. Meanwhile, unknown to him, Sujo's wife arrived at Tower Two just moments after the second jet crashed into it. She was never allowed to enter into the building

0:58 When I visited them at their new home in Dallas, it was one of the first times that Mary has shared what she went through that day.

MARY: 1:05 We were standing right beneath the buildings, and I just, I was trying to call him on my cell phone, and I kept hitting the redial button, trying to reach him on my cell phone, and the cell phones were not working, the call would not go through. And while I was still standing there, the second plane came, and struck the second building. I thought, I was standing right under the buildings, and I felt the heat, and the debris falling all around me.

HOST: 1:29 Mary was hysterical. She spent all of that morning calling out to God to protect her husband, promising Him something in return.

MARY: 1:37 One of my prayers was, Lord, if you help him out of that building, if, if, if by some chance he's able to make it out, and you bring him through this, then, I'm ready, I'm ready to give up everything we have right now---our jobs and whatever else we have, and we'll go to a Third-World country, and we'll serve you for the rest of our lives

1:56 TAPE HOST:  Little did Mary know the impact her prayer would have later on. Sujo and thousands of others finally made it to the lowest level of Tower One. They crossed the mall that connected the two towers, and went through an exit in Tower Two, but their nightmare was far from over. In moments, Tower Two began to crumble to the ground. That forced Sujo to huddle against the wall with about 20 other people. Sujo says he was prompted to do something that he never done before.

LIVE INTERVIEW: HOST: That group of people, and you encouraged them to call on the name of Jesus. What was it like in that moment?

SUJO: I heard the Lord say, where are these people who are huddled with you going? And I started crying out Jesus, and I wasn't sure what I was to expect. Almost immediately, these people started calling out the name of the Lord with me. And imagine this: building going down, the tremendous roar of the building going down, but for me, what was etched in my mind was not really the roar of that building going down, but the cry of these people reaching out to the eternal God.

3:00 HOST: That experience caused Sujo to realize something in a way that he never had before

SUJO: That experience showed me that people are ready for God.

HOST: Meanwhile, Sujo was surrounded in darkness. He thought he had been buried alive as he pulled himself up. But those he had just stood with, had perished. Sujo was choking on ash, and blinded by debris. A flashlight drew him to an F.B.I. agent lying face down. A flashing red light from a crushed ambulance directed the two men to safety. Covered in white soot, they walked out of the debris together, saying the name of Jesus. But Sujo held out little hope that Mary was still alive.

SUJO: Trying to connect with my wife. I'm out of the debris, but I'm thinking, for sure my wife is dead. How am I going find out what's happened to her, and it was just so overwhelming, thinking about her, and thinking that she was dead, and the child she's carrying is dead, but then I got a phone call, a call on my cell phone. Cell phones weren't working all of that day, because they had, those towers had those communications equipment, but a call comes through, the first call that would come through that day. My cell phone rings, I pick up the phone, see my wife's caller ID, and I'm thinking, it's not her. It's someone else who's gotten a hold of her cell phone, and is trying to reach me with the news that, hey, your wife is dead, but when I picked up that call it is my wife, so it was just an incredible moment, learning that my wife is alive.

4:22 Today

---

Sujo John with Randy Robison, 10:02 minutes,
9/11 comes to life when you talk to Sujo. This is a great story, but there's so much more to his vision for ministry. I should have him back to ...
by jamesrrobison | 5 months ago | 18 views

---

Out of the Ashes - Sujo John, 46:25 minutes,
by trueseven | 5 months ago | 55 views

---

8:17
Sujo John: September 11, 2001... A Survivor's Story - CBN.com
He was inside of Tower 1 when the first plane hit. Now, nine years later, Sujo John spreads the Gospel of a God who saves... The Christian ...
by CBNonline | 1 year ago | 9,928 views
12:39
9-11, Ten Years Later: Sujo John - CBN.com
Sujo is a survivor of The World Trade Center terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. Hear is amazing testimony. The 700 Club www.cbn.com
by CBNonline | 6 months ago | 1,653 views
9:20
Testimony: Sujo John, 9/11 survivor
Find more videos like this at: www.premier.tv http "September 11th 2001 started off as a beautiful day... then everything changed forever." Sujo ...
HD by officialpremiertv | 2 months ago | 864 views
41:22
Sujo John's Testimony - Out of the Ashes
He was inside of Tower 1 when the first plane hit. Now years later, Sujo John spreads the Gospel of a God who saves.
by yourlivingmanna | 2 months ago | 1,103 views
5:52
Sujo John a 911 Survivor's Story.mp4
Sujo John had barely begun his workday on the 81st floor of World Trade Center One when he heard a loud explosion. "This is American Flight 11 ...
by Drblackinstien | 1 year ago | 4,384 views
8:40
TRANSLATE
Sujo John World Trade Center.mp4
Sujo John: 9/11 The survivor´s story Interview done in Finland 2006 by MixuMedia.
by Mixumedia | 1 year ago | 877 views
1:06:41
Malayalam Testimony of Sujo John - Story of a man who escaped from World Trade Centre
‎"Distributing living bread to the dying world" www.ourjesuslives.org Sujo John September 11 - Story of a man who escaped from World Trade Centre
by Myworld4jesus | 2 months ago | 453 views
10:02
Sujo John: Since 9/11 (LIFE Today)
A 9/11 survivor explains how God used the tragedy to redirect his life and his experiences since that fateful day.
HD by lifetodaytv | 6 months ago | 1,076 views
3:10
Sujo John Introduction
HD by sujojohnm | 1 year ago | 493 views
2:25
Sujo John 9-11 A Simple Prayer - CBN.com
Sujo John 9-11 A Simple Prayer, Sujo calls viewers to prayer and turn to God... The Christian Broadcasting Network CBN www.cbn.com
by theofficial700club | 7 months ago | 646 views

Sujo John: Surviving 9/11 (LIFE Today / James Robison)
A man who barely escaped the burning World Trade Center tells how 9/11 changed his life forever.
by lifetodaytv | 7 months ago | 855 views
46:10
Testimony of Sujo John - September 11/2001 A true Story of a man who escaped from World Trade Centre
"Distributing living bread to the dying world" www.ourjesuslives.org September 11/2001 A true Story of a man who escaped from World Trade Centre
by Myworld4jesus | 2 months ago | 217 views
9:47
Sujo John Ministries Introduction
HD by epiclifestyle | 1 year ago | 985 views

59:31
The 700 Club: September 10, 2010 - CBN.com
9/11 survivor Sujo John talks about his message of hope. A man is miraculously protected in a 45-foot fall. CBN News reports on hunger in America.. ...
by theofficial700club | 1 year ago | 344 views

9:12
Sujo John - 9 - 11 Survivor Pt 1
HD by vidstan | 6 months ago | 74 views

7:11
Sujo John - Edit 1
thoughts?
HD by TWUMCApprovalSystem | 6 months ago | 68 views

7:37
I am second - Overcoming Sept. 11th
. a truly amazing story! ... tjbird 18 ... "Sujo john" "sujo john testimony" "sujo john 9/11" "sujo john september 11" "sujo john jesus" jesus faith ...
HD by tjbird18 | 3 months ago | 177 views

9:33
I am Second - Sujo John
HD by iamsecondHQ | 7 months ago | 16,466 views



Out of the Ashes-Sujo John's Testimony
Out of the Ashes-Sujo John's Testimony
by Megapower1976 | 5 months ago | 22 views






41:22 minutes
Uploaded by yourlivingmanna on Jan 12, 2012
About yourlivingmanna
"This Ministry serves the multitudes of people those who are hurt, lost, broken and misled. We also focus on those who are after the truth with a great burden. Let the Living Manna have an opportunity to go in and grow within you so that you may see a constant change in your life by the power of Jesus Christ our Lord and Saviour."


I am Second - Sujo John, 9:33 minutes,
Uploaded by iamsecondHQ on Aug 29, 2011,


Sujo John's Testimony - Out of the Ashes, 41:22 minutes,
Uploaded by yourlivingmanna on Jan 12, 2012


9-11, Ten Years Later: Sujo John - CBN.com,, 12:39 minutes,
Uploaded by CBNonline on Sep 1, 2011


Sujo John: September 11, 2001...A Survivor's Story - CBN.com, 8:17 minutes,
Uploaded by CBNonline on Sep 10, 2010,