AMY GOODMAN: Despite official assurances after 9/11 that the air near the collapsed twin towers was safe, newly released records show health officials were still detecting asbestos up to half a mile from the site 10 months later. Over 170,000 pages of air quality reports, contamination data and internal city correspondence sat in 68 boxes in a city office for more than 20 years. City officials claim they were only found last year. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has ordered the material to be posted to a public online portal in time to commemorate this week’s 25th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Mamdani’s office budgeted some $34 million as the administration in the coming months plans to review, redact and publish more previously unreleased documents linked to the environmental and health hazards in the aftermath of 9/11.

In the weeks and months that followed the attacks, former New York City Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg, as well as other city officials, reassured residents and workers it was safe to return to the area surrounding ground zero, concealing the dangers of lingering toxins in the air after the collapse of the twin towers. Today, more people are believed to have died from cancer, respiratory and other illnesses due to exposure to the toxins than the nearly 3,000 people killed on September 11th, 2001.

The historic release of the documents comes as part of litigation brought by the advocacy group 9/11 Health Watch, which sued New York City to force the publication of the records.

Before we’re joined by a roundtable of guests, including a former firefighter and an EMT, including the union leader Sara Nelson and Bob Hennelly, the reporter, I want to turn to this clip from the award-winning documentary Steal This Story, Please! about Democracy Now! It’s directed by Tia Lessin and Carl Deal. We go back to Democracy Now! 25 years ago. The broadcast was on air when news of the attack broke. Our firehouse studio was located in Chinatown, not far from the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The clip also looks at our very own Juan González’s outstanding reporting on 9/11 and the toxic nightmare on the ground.

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.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I was actually there the day of the attack, covering it for the newspaper, as well as Democracy Now! All of Lower Manhattan turned dark in the middle of a cloudless sunny day.

AMY GOODMAN: You are listening to Ground Zero … The War and Peace Report. We’re broadcasting just blocks from what used to be the towers of the World Trade Center. This weekend, not much luck with finding anyone alive in the rubble. … We spent last week, since the attacks, here, because we were afraid we would not be able to come in to broadcast if we ever left the site. We are in the evacuation zone.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That whole area was off-limits after the attack, but Amy managed to keep producing the show.

AMY GOODMAN: Military — [coughing] — there’s a lot of smoke around here. [coughing]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: There were so many toxic chemicals in those buildings, all pulverized and burning at ground zero for months.

PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH: This nation stands with the good people of New York City and New Jersey and Connecticut.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: It was George Bush who personally ordered the reopening of the Financial District within a week of the attacks, sending hundreds of thousands people back to work into that toxic area.

RICHARD GRASSO: Ladies and gentlemen, our heroes will now open the marketplace.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: There was a concerted effort of the business community, the national leaders and the local leaders to quell the idea that there were problems at ground zero.

MAYOR RUDY GIULIANI: The air quality is safe and acceptable.

CHRISTINE TODD WHITMAN: Everything we’re getting back from the sampling that we’re doing is below background levels.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And the press bought the official narrative.

FOX 5 REPORTER: Tests conducted by the EPA say once again no hazardous substances have been detected in the air.

MAN ON THE STREET: If the mayor say it’s OK, then I believe him: It’s OK.

AMY GOODMAN: Co-host Juan González has a cover story in today’s Daily News. He says toxic chemicals and metals are being released into the environment around Lower Manhattan — dioxins, PCBs, benzene, lead.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: No one else was following the story, and all the government officials were denying what I was saying. My editor was removed just because he continued to defend me. They buried me back in the back pages of the paper. But I continued reporting the story. And at Democracy Now!, we continued to get information into the hands of the public.

No one tested the dust clouds that came down on tens of thousands of people, so no one can say what the impact of such a massive dose of …

The only thing that I was wrong about was that it didn’t take 20 years for people to start dying. It only took five years.

AMY GOODMAN: Search and rescue workers are experiencing a high level of respiratory illness. But it’s not only the rescue workers. Chronic coughs, upper respiratory infections, bronchitis, pneumonia, asthma are plaguing residents and students at ground zero.

AMY GOODMAN: That was a clip from the award-winning documentary about Democracy Now! called Steal This Story, Please!, which will be available on digital platforms in the United States in October.

I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González. Juan, you were on the ground reporting on 9/11, as people could just watch and hear. You also compiled your columns for the New York Daily News and went further in your book Fallout: The Environmental Consequences of the World Trade Center Collapse. We are speaking today in New York City on the day that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is releasing 170,000 pages of documents about what the city understood about the toxins at ground zero, something you were reporting from the beginning. I’m wondering if you could read what you were writing at that time, and then we’re going to go to a firefighter, a former EMT, a student at Stuyvesant High School that was right near ground zero, the union chief Sara Nelson and WBAI head Bob Hennelly, who’s been reporting on this 25 years later. But, Juan, your reporting was prescient.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, Amy. And it’s sad that it’s taken all this time for the city officials to finally release the documentation. But back then — and my small book on this came out as I compiled the columns only a few months after the attack, in April of 2002.

But I wrote back then: “Christie Whitman, Mayor Giuliani, and the other public officials should have told New Yorkers the truth from the start — that no one could guarantee the air around Ground Zero was safe because no one had ever confronted a disaster of such proportions. They should also have released all the raw data on government testing as soon as they had the results and made clear that safety levels for many of these toxins did not even exist.

“The early blanket assurances that government officials issued were a grave mistake, and their continued defense of those assurances in the face of widespread public skepticism was inexcusable. Thousands of people may end up paying for that deception through unnecessary illness or premature death in the decades to come. In their rush to return New York City and Wall Street to business as usual, these shortsighted officials unwittingly paved the way for a second wave of victims from the World Trade Center tragedy.

“In scrutinizing the government response to the collapse, I am not suggesting that there was some secret conspiracy to hide the facts or that anyone intentionally set out to mislead the people of New York. But I have no doubt that some officials saw what they wanted to see, and they irresponsibly chose to minimize or dismiss any post-collapse environmental threat.

“They did so for any number of reasons or combination of them: out of ignorance; in response to political pressures from superiors; or because they underestimated environmental threats from toxic releases, something that is all too common in the history of such disasters. Once ordinary citizens questioned their assurances, however, those officials closed ranks, dissembled, hid important information, and refused to listen or alter their policies.

“My aim here is to outline key lessons of this saga for the general public so that this kind of deception is not repeated should another catastrophe occur in the future.”

And unfortunately, now it’s taken 25 years for the officials to finally say, “Hey, let’s release the information that we had at the time, and let the public judge whether we acted appropriately.” And it’s unfortunate that Mayor Giuliani, perhaps the chief architect of all of this deception and dissembling, is still trying to make public statements in reference to the 9/11 tragedy.

AMY GOODMAN: And, Juan, the picture on the cover of your book Fallout says so much. Explain the irony.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, Giuliani was the one who assumed complete control, for months, of the site and would not allow federal safety regulations, EPA safety regulations to be implemented, because he kept insisting that it was a disaster site and not a recovery situation, where everyone working at the site, the thousands of people working at the site, would have had to follow safety precautions for themselves. And his insistence on being the center of everything in that in the days after 9/11, I think, was a key factor in why so many people ended up getting sick and and, unfortunately, dying afterwards.

AMY GOODMAN: And it’s a picture of him wearing a mask. And talk about Mayor Giuliani today when it comes to 9/11 health.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yes, and the irony of it all is that he was claiming the air was safe back then, and now he’s claiming that he has been sickened as a result of exposure to toxins at the ground zero site. And several other members of his administration at the time also have claimed that they were sickened at the time, yet they were telling everyone that the air was safe.