WASHINGTON, May 6 — At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording that same day describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said in a report today.
The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center, in Ronkonkoma, on Long Island, where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as "the Bat Cave" and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events a few hours earlier.
But officials at the center never told higher-ups of the tape's existence, and it was later destroyed by an F.A.A. official described in the report as a quality-assurance manager there. That manager crushed the cassette in his hand, shredded the tape and dropped the pieces into different trash cans around the building, according to a report made public today by the inspector general of the Transportation Department.
The tape had been made under an agreement with the union that it would be destroyed after it was superseded by written statements from the controllers, according to the inspector general's report. But the quality-assurance manager asserted that making the tape had itself been a violation of accident procedures at the Federal Aviation Administration, the report said.
The inspector general, Kenneth M. Mead, said that the officials' keeping the existence of the tape a secret and the decision by one to destroy it had not served "the interests of the F.A.A., the department or the public" and could foster suspicions among the public.
Mr. Mead had been asked by Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who is chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, to look into how well the aviation agency had cooperated with what is widely known as the 9/11 commission, a bipartisan, independent panel investigating the terror attacks.
On the tape, the controllers, some of whom had spoken by radio to people on the planes and some who had tracked the aircraft on radar, gave statements of 5 to 10 minutes each, according to the report.
The tape's value was not clear, Mr. Mead said, because no one was sure what was on it, although the written statements given later by five of the controllers were broadly consistent with "sketchy" notes taken at the time by people in the Bat Cave. (The sixth controller who spoke on the tape did not give a written statement, apparently because that controller had not spoken to either of the planes or observed it on radar.)
One of the central questions about the events of that morning is how the F.A.A. responded to emerging clues that four planes had been hijacked. A tape made within hours of the events, as well as written statements given later, could help establish that.
A spokesman for the 9/11 commission, Al Felzenberg, said that Mr. Mead's report was "meticulous" and "came through the efforts of a very conscientious senator." He said the commission would not comment now on the content of the report but that it "does speak to some of the issues we're interested in."
The tape was made because the manager of the center believed that the standard post-crash procedure would be too slow for an event of the magnitude of 9/11. After an accident or other significant incident, according to officials of the union and the F.A.A., the controllers involved are relieved of duty and often go home; eventually they review the radar tapes and voice transmissions and give a written statement of what they had seen, heard and done.
People in the Ronkonkoma center at midday on Sept. 11 concluded that that procedure would take many hours, and that the controllers' shift was ending and after a traumatic morning, they wanted to go home.
The center manager's idea was to have the tape available overnight, in case the F.B.I. wanted something before the controllers returned to work the next day, according to people involved.
"It was never meant as a permanent record," said Mark DiPalmo, the president of the local chapter of the National Air Traffic Controllers Association, who made the deal with the center manager.
He said the session was informal, and that sometimes more than one person at a time was speaking. "We sat everyone in a room, went around the room, said, `What do you remember?" Mr. DiPalmo said in an interview.
Mr. Mead's report said that it was conceivable that without that deal, the tape would not have been made at all.
The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to F.A.A. policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers "were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping" because of the stress of the day, Mr. Mead reported.
Neither the center manager nor the quality-assurance manager disclosed the tape's existence to their superiors at the F.A.A. region that covers New York, nor to the agency's Washington headquarters, according to the report, which identified none of the officials or controllers by name.
Other tapes were preserved, including conversations on the radio frequencies used by the planes that day, and the radar tapes. In addition, the controllers later made written statements to the F.A.A., per standard procedure, and in this case, to the F.B.I. as well.
The quality-assurance manager destroyed the tape between December 2001 and February, 2002. By that time, he and the center manager had received an e-mail message sent by the F.A.A. instructing officials to safeguard all records and adding, "If a question arises whether or not you should retain data, RETAIN IT."
The inspector general attributed the tape's destruction to "poor judgment."
"The destruction of evidence in the government's possession, in this case an audiotape particularly during times of a national crisis, has the effect of fostering an appearance that information is being withheld from the public," the inspector general's report said. "We do not ascribe motivations to the managers in this case of attempting to cover up, and we have no indication that there was anything on the tape that would lead anyone to conclude that they had something to hide or that the controllers did not carry out their duties."
The inspector general also noted that the official who destroyed the tape had no regrets or second thoughts: "The quality-assurance manager told us that if presented with similar circumstances, he would again take the same course of action."
Mr. Mead wrote that this attitude was "especially troubling" and that supervisors should take "appropriate administrative action."
Although the matter had been referred to the Justice Department, the Mead report added, prosecutors said they had found no basis for criminal charges.
An F.A.A. spokesman, Greg Martin, said that his agency had cooperated with the 9/11 commission and that that was how the tape's existence had become known at the agency's headquarters.
"We believe it would not have added in any way to the information contained in all of the other materials that have already been provided to the investigators and the members of the 9/11 commission," he said.
Nonetheless, Mr. Martin said that "we have taken appropriate disciplinary action" against the quality-assurance manager. For privacy reasons, he said, he could not say what those actions were or identify any of the employees involved.
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Destroyed WTC Evidence

What Became of the Physical Evidence of the WTC Attack

Ground Zero was sealed off and mopped up with astonishing speed. Somephotographs of it survive in spite of authorities' efforts to prevent documentation of the crime scene.
Virtually none of the physical evidence of the horrific crime of the September 11th attack on Lower Manhattan survives. Had the towers remained standing, much of the evidence of the attack's first installment -- the aircraft impacts -- would have survived the disaster (if not subsequent handling by the authorities). Even though the planes were largely shredded on impact, forensic analysis could have confirmed whether they had really being piloted by the alleged hijackers, for example.
The "collapses", however, assured that the aircraft remains would be degraded beyond recognition; or at least that no one would expect investigators to recover them. It also made more plausible the official story that the black boxes were destroyed or damaged too badly to yield data.
The "collapses" created their own evidence: The pile of twisted steel columns and girders at Ground Zero held the clues to what were, based on the official explanation, the three largest and least understood structural failures in history. Since no steel frame high-rise building had ever been leveled by any cause other than controlled demolition or severe earthquakes, the total collapses of Buildings 1, 2, and 7 of the World Trade Center would seem to warrant the most painstaking forensic analysis. Instead the structural steel was removed and recycled with astonishing speed, while volunteer investigators were hampered by red tape and access restrictions.

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Aircraft Remains

Destruction of the Aircraft Remains at the WTC Site

The jetliners that impacted the North and South Towers became almost entirely embedded within them. No large parts visibly bounced off, and only a few parts emerged from the other side. The condition of the aircraft remains in the intervals between their impacting the building and its collapsing has been the subject of some speculation. The pattern of damage to the towers' exterior walls indicates that in both cases, the fuselage, engines, and wing roots punched through, and the wing tips were shredded by the grating of meter-spaced columns. Subsequent damage to the jets was determined by their different impact trajectories. The jetliner that hit the North Tower approached on a relatively centered trajectory perpendicular to the northeast wall, so that the parts that made it through the wall without being ripped up directly impacted the building's core. The jetliner that hit the South Tower approached on a similar trajectory relative to the southwest wall, but then swerved at the last second, so that it hit the right half of the wall at a rightward angle of about 20 degrees, allowing the fuselage and at least one engine to avoid the core.

Remains Exiting the Towers

One of the few, if only, official documents detailing the remains of the aircraft is FEMA's World Trade Center Building Performance Study . It documents some aircraft parts that passed entirely through the buildings, landing some distance away. FEMA reported the following parts were recovered from Flight 175:
  • Part of the fuselage on the roof of Building 5
  • A piece of landing gear on a building three blocks north of the WTC
  • An engine on Church Street three blocks north of the WTC

Piece of Flight 175 fuselage
Piece of Flight 11 landing gear
FEMA reported the following parts were recovered from Flight 11:
  • a piece of landing gear on West Street five blocks south of the WTC
  • life jackets and portions of seats on the roof of the Bankers Trust building
To this list we might add the passport of one of the alleged hijackers of the flight.
In addition to the aircraft remains documented in FEMA's report, there exist several photographs of jet engine parts, apparently from Flight 175, taken by pedestrians.
That these remains (excluding the passport) passed through the buildings is consistent with the fact that landing gear and engines are the densest parts of jetliners, and that having missed the core, the fuselage of Flight 175 had enough momentum for some of it to make it out of the tower by punching through the east corner of the tower's wall.

Remains Trapped in the Towers

The majority of Flight 175 and the vast majority of Flight 11 remains were trapped in the towers and therefore suffered the same fate as the towers when they collapsed. FEMA's report is silent on what became of the aircraft "debris" that remained within the towers. Since whatever destroyed the towers converted nearly all the concrete to sub-100-micron powder, shredded the steel frame, and cremated most of the victims trapped inside, it is not surprising that it would leave little in the way of recognizable remains of the aircraft.
Even so, a recovery effort and investigation commensurate with the scale of the disaster would gather and catalog the aircraft remains with great care. This was apparently not done for the doomed aircraft just as it was not done for the collapsed buildings. The order of the day was to remove and recycle the evidence, not preserve and study it.

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Structural Steel

Destruction of the Towers' Steel Remains

The only constituents of the Twin Towers that survived the "collapses" in the form of recognizable pieces of any size were their metal parts, such as pieces of structural steel and aluminum cladding. 1   Virtually all the non-metallic parts of the towers and their contents were converted to microscopic dust particles or small unrecognizable fragments.
Building 7, though also reduced to a short pile of rubble, was not as thoroughly pulverized as the towers. Large sections of the building's perimeter wall could be seen on the rubble pile.
The surviving fragments of steel from the Twin Towers, most of them between 10 and 30 feet in length, and the larger remaining steel sections from Building 7, were essential to any serious investigation of the collapses. These catastrophic failures were at least as deserving of careful study as other rare events that are studied intensively, such as the aviation disasters investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Normally, great care is taken in preserving the evidence from structural failures and crime scenes.
No such effort was made to preserve the evidence of the unprecedented and unexplained collapses of skyscrapers WTC 1, WTC 2, and Building 7 in lower Manhattan -- easily the three largest and least understood structural failures in World history. Indeed the evidence was destroyed with remarkable speed and efficiency.

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Asbestos in the WTC

Towers' Destruction 'Solved' Asbestos Problem

The Twin Towers had large amounts of asbestos fireproofing which would have necessitated costly removal had they remained standing. The exact amount and distribution of the asbestos in the Towers remains unclear, like other details of the buildings' construction and history, but the evidence suggests that the cost of its removal may have rivaled the value of the buildings themselves.

Evidence of Asbestos

Two independent lines of evidence may help to establish the magnitude of the asbestos problem in the Twin Towers: analysis of samples of the dust from the Towers' collapses, and reports about the application and removal of asbestos in the buildings prior to their destruction.
A region of several square miles was blanketed by fine powder resulting from the explosive collapses of the Twin Towers. This powder, consisting of the pulverized remains of non-metallic components and contents of the Towers, contained significant percentages of asbestos. 1   An analysis of dust within three days of the attack found that some of the dust was four percent asbestos. 2   This asbestos release may be a public health time bomb, because thousands of people breathed dust from the collapses. It remains to be seen how many if them will become victims of the EPA's false assurances that the air was safe to breathe.
A report by the Arnold & Porter law firm provides some details on the asbestos application and removal.
The WTC Towers were built from 1968 to 1972. A slurry mixture of asbestos and cement was sprayed on as fireproofing material. But this practice was banned by the New York City Council in 1971. This halted the spraying, but not before hundreds of tons of the material had been applied. Some but not all of it was later removed in an abatement program.
While providing no quantitative data beyond that there were "hundreds of tons" of the asbestos-containing material, we note that the ban went into effect near the end of the Towers' construction, so we can assume that asbestos covered the steel skeletons through most of the height of each of the Towers.

The High Cost of Asbestos Abatement

Asbestos is a mineral, airborne fibers of which can cause severe and untreatable respiratory disease, with typical latencies of several decades. The recognition of the toxicity of asbestos has led to legislation for its survey and removal from structures. The removal is expensive because the removal operation must be quarantined and subject to rigorous decontamination procedures. Removal of asbestos used as structural fireproofing in steel framed high-rises is complicated by the fact that the fireproofing covers an intricate lattice of steel in the most difficult-to-access places.
Some sense of the cost of removing the asbestos from the Twin Towers can be obtained by the example of 55 Broad Street. The removal of asbestos in that building cost $70 million when it was empty. That was five times the cost of the building's construction 15 years before. 3  
Another example is the 60-story Montparnasse Tower in Paris. Experts estimate that the removal of asbestos from this building would take three years with full evacuation, and ten years if the building were to remain occupied during the operation. 4  
According to Eric Darton's 1999 book on the Twin Towers, the Port Authority had planned to pump $800,000 into the Twin Towers for a variety of improvements, the most costly of which was asbestos abatement (not removal). 5  
References

1. Is Ground Zero Safe? New study suggests more asbestos at disaster site than previously revealed, MSNBC News, 10/5/01 [cached]
2. Asbestos Dust Poses Threat to Rescue Crews, Boston Globe, 9/14/01 [cached]
3. Divided We Stand, Basic Books, 1999, page 208
4. Only skyscraper in Paris, popular with tourists, has dangerous asbestos levels, AP, 3/14/05 [cached]
5. Divided We Stand, Basic Books, 1999, page 212