New York City officials told people the air around Ground Zero was safe to breathe. They were lying, and they knew it, and they hid 68 boxes of documents proving it for a quarter of a century. On Tuesday, twenty-five years after the attacks, Mayor Zohran Mamdani released more than 170,000 pages of records that make the cover-up impossible to deny.
What the City Knew and When It Knew It
According to the BBC, asbestos was found "nearly everywhere" officials tested near Ground Zero in the weeks and months after the towers fell. Benzene levels continued to spike. The air was, in the words of a former FDNY emergency medical technician who spoke to the BBC, something you felt you "had to hold your breath" just to survive. She could feel the particles entering her nose and mouth. She knew it wasn't safe. City Hall knew it wasn't safe.
The documents show the city didn't formally recognize that downtown Manhattan's air was toxic until October 2001, a full month after the attacks. Jon Stewart, who has spent years fighting for first responders and appeared alongside Mamdani at Tuesday's press conference, put that timeline in terms no one could miss. "So to be fair to them," he said, dripping with sarcasm, "they only buried that information for 25 years."
Days after the attacks, both city and federal officials, including the EPA under Christine Todd Whitman, declared the air near the Twin Towers was safe. Whitman later apologized, saying the agency "did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had." The newly released documents suggest the city, at minimum, had strong reasons to know otherwise and chose not to say so.
The Harding Memo: A Cover-Up in Writing
The most damning single document in Tuesday's release is something called the Harding Memo. As Fox News reports, it was sent to Bob Harding, a deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani, in the aftermath of the attacks. The memo warned that the city could face as many as 35,000 legal claims from people harmed by its response.
The BBC reports the document specifically states the city could be sued because health advisories caused individuals "to return to the area too soon, causing toxic exposure or emotional harm." Read that again. A city official wrote, in plain language, that bad health guidance sent people back into a poison zone. That memo sat in a box for 25 years.
U.S. Rep. Jerry Nadler, speaking at Tuesday's press conference and quoted by Fox News, put it directly: "Now, we in the public know that City Hall, led by former Mayor Giuliani, predicted that thousands of responders and community members would face devastating long-term health consequences from these toxins." They predicted it. They documented it. They told the public the opposite.
68 Boxes They Said They Didn't Have
Here is the part that should make your blood run cold. The BBC reports that city officials found those 68 boxes of Department of Environmental Protection files just last year. Before that, officials had said they did not have them. They didn't have them, until suddenly they did, until a lawsuit forced the question hard enough that the boxes materialized.
The document release resolves a lawsuit brought by advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch, which sued the city to obtain the records. Mamdani's administration committed more than $34 million to build a public portal where these and future documents will be freely accessible, according to both Fox News and the BBC. More records, including correspondence from Giuliani's office and documents related to 7 World Trade Center, are set to be released over the coming year.
"Administration after administration has ignored those calling for answers and clarity," Mamdani said at the press conference, standing next to Stewart. "We will do no such thing."
The Death Toll That Keeps Growing
The reason any of this matters, beyond the raw political outrage of a government lying to its own people, is the body count. As US health officials confirmed at Tuesday's press conference and as Axios reports, more New York City Fire Department members have now died of 9/11-related illnesses than the 343 who were killed in the attacks themselves. More people have died from breathing that air than from the collapse of the buildings.
Thousands of survivors, first responders, and Lower Manhattan residents have developed cancers and other serious illnesses from inhaling the toxic dust and smoke. Stewart described what was in that air with the specificity of someone who has spent years forcing Congress to pay attention: "There was poison in the air and on the ground and in the window sills and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes. And it stayed there for months."
Mamdani framed the release in terms that don't leave much room for interpretation. "People got sick because the leaders they trusted lied and told them they were safe to breathe in toxic air," he said. That is the mayor of New York City, standing at City Hall, saying his predecessors killed people with a lie.
The Dingo Take
Twenty-five years. Let that number do its work. For twenty-five years, families buried people. First responders fought insurance companies and Congress and their own failing bodies. Advocates begged for documents that a city government claimed it simply did not possess. And all along, there were 68 boxes sitting somewhere in the city's filing system with the proof that officials knew, wrote it down, and decided the liability exposure was more important than telling the truth.
Rudy Giuliani spent the years after 9/11 building a brand on being America's Mayor, the steady hand in the rubble, the man who was there. He cashed that brand in for decades of speaking fees, a presidential run, and eventually a front-row seat to Donald Trump's political operation. The Harding Memo doesn't ask you to revisit that mythology. It destroys it on its own. His administration documented, in writing, that people were being sent back into a toxic zone and that the lawsuits would come. Then they kept it quiet.
What Mamdani did Tuesday is exactly what local government is supposed to do and almost never does: he picked up the mess his predecessors left, stopped pretending it wasn't there, and handed it to the public. That shouldn't be remarkable. It is. And the fact that it took a lawsuit, an advocacy group, and a quarter century of pressure to get 68 boxes of files to see daylight is a verdict on every administration that looked the other way. New Yorkers deserved this truth in 2001. The people who got cancer deserved it. The 343 firefighters who survived the attacks only to die slowly in the years that followed deserved it most of all.
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