The Bones of 9/11


In New York today, we have a burial drama worthy of Greek tragedy going on. Five years after 9/11, the bones of the dead are still turning up at Ground Zero.

It’s a tenet of every major world religion, basic to the foundation of Western civilization, that we give a proper burial to the dead. “It is the dead/Not the living, who make the longest demands/We die forever,” says Antigone, in Sophocles’ play.

Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, buries her dead brother, Polyneices, whose body has been left to rot on the battlefield by order of the tyrant Creon. The play is an exploration of the responsibility of the individual against the state, individual conscience versus the rule of law, divine law versus human law. In 1944 “Antigone” was remade by Jean Anouilh as a protest of the Nazi occupation of France.

This week, over 200 pieces of human remains resurfaced at the World Trade Center site.

Can you imagine how it would feel to know that the flesh of your loved one was left to rot outside, in inclement weather, food for the birds and vermin, after he or she had died such an unimaginably horrible death?

But Mayor Michael Bloomberg offered no apology to the victims’ families, who have been traumatized over and over by these intermittent discoveries; he only defended the original excavation. His office said that stopping the rebuilding efforts would not be necessary, despite the outcry from the families.

President Bush—who can often be seen capitalizing on the memory of 9/11 dead to further his political aims—had nothing to say on the subject.

The media asked no tough questions as to why the bones have appeared, accepting the official story that they had simply been “missed" in the cleanup.

But the dead tell tales. The bones of the 9/11 victims may provide the key to finding out exactly how and why the Towers fell.

A “pancake collapse,” as described by the government’s official story, would have the Towers and their contents falling downward in a heap, not exploding outward.

And yet bones are turning up all over the place, as if they were literally thrown from the Towers.

Last year, bones were found on the top of the Deutsche Bank Building, blocks away from the WTC (in fact, 700 body parts were found there).

“That is simply unacceptable,” wrote Norman Siegel, a lawyer for the W.T.C. Families for a Proper Burial, in a letter to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation dated July 28, 2006. “The families fear that the current recovery process is inadequate and negligently performed. They have called publicly for an independent evaluation of the manner in which the work is being done.”

How did bones get on top of that building? And how did more wind up on the block between Liberty and Cedar Streets, and at Fiterman Hall, north of Ground Zero, where they appeared this week?

One possible explanation is that the Towers fell as the result of a controlled demolition. Strike it from your mind, if you can, that this is a "conspiracy theory," and ask yourself if it is not a logical explanation, given the evidence.

As painful as it might be to consider, the families of the victims should call for the testing of the bones for remnants of explosives.

We're not talking about a couple of bodies here. We're talking about over a thousand people. To date, the chief medical examiner of the site has been unable to identify the remains of 1,151 of the 2,749 victims of 9/11.

1,151 bodies, just vanished. (Including, by the way, the bodies of the 19 alleged hijackers, which were never found.)

How is this possible?

But first of all: Why did the excavation stop before all the victims had been identified?

One possible theory is greed; the city wanted construction to move forward quickly. “They really just wanted us out of there,” retired Police Lt. John McArdle, who worked on the cleanup of Ground Zero, told the A.P.

“It went from a rescue to a recovery to a construction project," McArdle said. "There came a point in time when they said, ‘We gotta try to wrap this up,’ and they tried to expedite it as much as possible; and they jumped the gun, and now you have all of these families hurt and they're finding all these body parts."

“The desire was driven by one thing, and that was, ‘Get it done,’” another New York city official, who asked not to be named, told the A.P. “Many a time, the issue was raised about how fast it was going and things were being missed.”

But greed alone can't explain the lightning speed of the cleanup at Ground Zero. There was too much protocol ignored, too many rules broken in the process.

Although it was a crime scene—a mass murder—it was never treated as such. The goal seemed to be, as Lt. McArdle said, to “wrap this up”—and as a consequence, vital information pertaining to the attacks was lost, along with the remains of human beings.

For the first time in aviation history, the FAA did not perform its usual painstaking reconstruction of the crashed airliners. And the shoebox-sized, indestructible black boxes of the planes [recording devices from the cockpit] were never recovered.

By April of 2002, 185,000 tons of steel had been removed from the site. FEMA estimated that 350,000 tons were shipped to various countries in the Far East.

In all, 1.2 million tons of evidence from the wreckage of the World Trade Center were dumped at the toxic Fresh Kills Landfill. But only 156 fragments were retained as evidence.

From a forensic perspective, I can't think of any argument for this that makes any sense, and no explanation has been provided.

A prominent player in the cleanup operation was the Bechtel Corporation, the largest engineering company in the United States. Bechtel is a huge contributor to the Republican party (and to a lesser extent the Democratic party) which has had close ties to the Nixon, Reagan, George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush administrations. It also has strong ties to the Saudi Royal Family, having built much of Saudi Arabia.

Riley P. Bechtel, its CEO, is the 50th richest person in the U.S. and the 127th richest in the world. In February 2003, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to the Export Council, which advises the White House on international trade issues (he served for one year).

George P. Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan, is a former president and director of Bechtel. He also serves on the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq.

After the U.S. invasion, Bechtel landed a $680-million dollar contract to rebuild Iraq.

This was the company overseeing the “safety" of the cleanup of the WTC. So we might ask Bechtel, in addition to the New York mayor and the president: just how did all those human remains go missing?

Said one 24-hour shift fireman at the scene, a week after the attacks: “You have ten-story buildings that leave more debris than these two 100-story towers. Where the fuck is everything? Why aren’t we finding more bodies? Cause it’s all vaporized—turned to dust. We’re breathing people in that dust.”

Could the bodies have been reduced to powder by the fires raging inside the buildings?

The answer is no. The fires weren’t hot enough for total cremation beyond positive identification, according to many reports. Remember all the poor souls standing on windowsills, ready to jump?; if the fires had been hot enough to cremate human bodies, those people would have been unable to retain that pose for even a moment.

So how could a thousand-plus bodies have been reduced to powder? Again, a controlled demolition becomes, not a conspiracy theory, but a logical possibility that should be investigated.

“What makes this an exceptionally delicate issue,” said the New York Times, “is that more than 40 percent of the victims’ family members are still awaiting word, five years later, that something of their relatives has been recovered…

“Family members have called for the involvement of the Joint P.O.W.-M.I.A. Accounting Command, which recovers and identifies service members who have been killed in action.”

Let's pray that someone honors their demands. “Isn’t a man’s right to burial decreed by divine justice?” Antigone asks of Creon. “I don’t consider your pronouncements so important that they can just overrule the unwritten laws of heaven.”