AMY GOODMAN: Memorials are being held today to mark 25 years since the 9/11 attacks on September 11, 2001. Moments of silence will be held to mark the time hijackers flew planes into each of the World Trade Center towers, when the twin towers collapsed, and when hijacked planes separately crashed into the Pentagon and in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The first plane hit the World Trade Center at 8:46 a.m. Two thousand nine hundred seventy-seven people were killed in the attacks, as far as we know. Nearly 10,000 more people have died from 9/11-related illnesses connected to the collapse of the twin towers.

Twenty-five years ago, Democracy Now! was broadcasting from the attic of DCTV, Downtown Community Television, in Chinatown, just blocks from ground zero. We were the closest national broadcast to the World Trade Center site. It was a beautiful blue-sky day. It was Primary Day here in New York. We were on the air when the first plane hit. This is a clip from — we were on the air when the second plane hit. The first plane hit a few minutes before the show. This is a clip from the documentary Steal This Story, Please!, featuring our initial radio coverage overlaid with archival video from that day.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m going to interrupt this taped conversation … Just a little while ago … we heard a loud … sonic boom-like crash … and we heard … sirens. Well, it appears that planes crashed into the upper floors of both World Trade Center towers minutes apart … We’re in Chinatown. We’re not far from the World Trade Center buildings. … [T]his is all unfolding as this broadcast takes place … Clouds of smoke … engulfing the World Trade Center.

AMY GOODMAN: That was 25 years ago today as Democracy Now! broadcast from DCTV, just blocks from ground zero. We spent hours on the air. At the time of the attacks, Democracy Now! co-host Juan González was a columnist at the New York Daily News.

Juan, you wrote a column that would appear the next day. It was headlined “A Horror to Last a Lifetime.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, Amy. And as you mentioned, this was a mayoral primary day in New York City, and I had actually been up early in the morning. I was already in Brooklyn at the polling places interviewing, interviewing voters in the mayoral primary, when we got news — when the news began to spread about the first plane and then the second plane hitting the trade center. And so, I sort of tried to head — leave the polling places and try to head to Lower Manhattan. But, of course, all the subways were shut down. All traffic on all the bridges into and out of Manhattan was shut down, and there was total gridlock and panic, really, in the streets of Brooklyn. But I eventually was able to run over the Brooklyn Bridge on foot. And as thousands of people were fleeing Manhattan, I think I was the only one heading in the opposite direction ’til I got downtown.

And as you know, covering a major catastrophe is a daunting task for those of us who are reporters. We don’t have the full information at first, or who or what caused it, the number of victims or the full extent of the damage. Yet we still have to inform the public of the little we know and what we’ve learned. So, I’m going to read the column that I wrote that — early that evening for the next day’s Daily News.

A block from the mountain of rubble that had once been the World Trade Center, Fire Chief Tom McCarthy stumbled toward a traffic divider and sat down to catch his breath.

The back of his uniform had been ripped away, his right arm was in a sling and his head was so covered with ash that his eyes seemed like tiny slits.

“Don’t move, Chief,” said a paramedic who rushed up to help. “We’ll get you to an ambulance and a hospital right away.”

“I’m okay,” McCarthy said, waving him off. “Take care of the guys in worse shape first.”

The medic started pouring water over McCarthy’s head and eyes to wash away the ash.

“Feels great,” the chief said, breaking into a smile. “I can see again!”

McCarthy and the men of Battalion 32 left their firehouse in Red Hook, Brooklyn, yesterday morning after the second plane crashed into the second tower at the World Trade Center.

“We were watching it on the TV,” he said, “then a few seconds later we felt the explosion all the way in Red Hook. That’s when I knew it was gonna be a long day.”

They arrived at the scene on West St. sometime after 9:30. McCarthy had just gotten instructions to deploy his men and was heading toward the burning towers when he heard yet another explosion about 20 stories high in 2 World Trade.

“The building started coming down, and everybody ran,” he said. “It was like being on the beach with this big wave coming at you.”

Only this wave was concrete and steel and glass.

McCarthy was hit and went down almost immediately.

“A piece of the Trade Center got me,” he said. “But it’s my guys I’m worried about.”

A few blocks away, another lucky and exhausted fireman — from Ladder Co. 113 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn — was taking off his boots and saying a few quiet thanks.

“I thought it was all over for a while,” said the firefighter.

“A bunch of us went into the lobby of the Marriott Hotel to rescue another trapped fireman when the whole building collapsed on us. We all grabbed onto a pillar in the middle of the lobby, and that’s the only thing that saved us.”

By early afternoon, word was already spreading that the number of missing firefighters and cops might make this the darkest day our city’s uniformed services had ever seen.

For Don Domenico, a Port Authority engineer who worked on the 88th floor of 1 World Trade Center, the day had started like so many others.

Domenico had reported to his job at his 7:30 starting time. He was busy at his desk when a “humongous explosion shook the building from above.”

The blast came from the first plane striking the building.

“The ceilings started collapsing, file cabinets tumbled over,” Domenico said.

“A bunch of us regrouped and headed for the stairs.”

They raced down smoke-filled staircases, passing injured and dazed people as they went.

“Just when I got outside and was crossing the plaza,” Domenico said, “I heard another explosion and saw glass and steel all over the place.”

He fell on a car hood and suddenly there was so much smoke and debris that he couldn’t see a few feet in front of him and could barely breathe.

He felt his way along a row of parked cars until he found a door that was unlocked, and he sought refuge inside the car. He rifled through the glove compartment of the car, found some tissues and started spitting out the thick black muck that had filled his lungs.

Raheem Turane, a customer service representative for Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield, was on the 20th floor of 1 World Trade Center talking on the telephone to a client when the first plane hit.

He looked out the window and saw “flames shooting down and people falling.”

He and the other employees scrambled for the exits and made it out safely. As the fire raged out of control, he headed toward the Brooklyn Bridge along with thousands of others, a river of people fleeing the chaos and terror of downtown Manhattan.

Turane was a third of the way across the bridge when he heard another explosion and turned back to look. Stunned, he watched one of the towers, this marvelous jewel, symbol of the world’s greatest city, collapse like a house of cards.

“As long as I live, I’ll never forget what I saw today,” he said.

In a few short hours, our nation had aged in ways impossible to measure. And all over town last night, thousands of grown men and women who had once thought themselves such hardened New Yorkers that nothing could shake them, managed to find their way home.

The lucky ones, those who survived without serious injury, held their children and loved ones tight in their arms. They took long, warm showers to wash the ashes from their bodies. And when they were alone in their beds, many saw the wave coming at them again, and they cried like frightened children at the horror they had witnessed.

And I think that is what so many people who went through that day — 

AMY GOODMAN: Juan — 

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: — will never forget, just the total way that, in a moment, life can change in ways that no one ever expected, and situations in a catastrophe like that changes people forever.

AMY GOODMAN: Juan, that was such a powerful column. And just for people to understand, that column, “A Horror to Last a Lifetime,” that you wrote for the New York Daily News, that appeared in the paper on September 12th, 2001, you’re not only writing this unbelievable column, but you’re living through it. And that’s your incredible talent. That is your remarkable journalistic ability that we started with this week, with your critical exposés of the toxic nightmare that would unfold at ground zero as workers were sent back, being told that the environment was safe. We’re going to link to your columns at democracynow.org.

And coming up, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Azmat Khan of the Center for Global Journalism and Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, both from Columbia University. They have just finished a two-day symposium at Columbia called “The Forever War and the First Amendment.” Back in a minute.

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AMY GOODMAN: “As the Days Go By.”