Please see the entire article for numerous witness accounts. Great article, spread far and wide...

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20060118104223192

-David Ray Griffin

“There was just an explosion [in the south tower]. It seemed like on television [when] they blow up these buildings. It seemed like it was going all the way around like a belt, all these explosions.”--Firefighter Richard Banaciski

“I saw a flash flash flash [at] the lower level of the building. You know like when they demolish a building?”--Assistant Fire Commissioner Stephen Gregory

“[I]t was [like a] professional demolition where they set the charges on certain floors and then you hear 'Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop'."--Paramedic Daniel Rivera

The above quotations come from a collection of 9/11 oral histories that, although recorded by the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) at the end of 2001, were publicly released only on August 12, 2005. Prior to that date, very few Americans knew the content of these accounts or even the fact that they existed.

Why have we not known about them until recently? Part of the answer is that the city of New York would not release them until it was forced to do so. Early in 2002, the New York Times requested copies under the freedom of information act, but Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration refused. So the Times, joined by several families of 9/11 victims, filed suit. After a long process, the city was finally ordered by the New York Court of Appeals to release the records (with some exceptions and redactions allowed). Included were oral histories, in interview form, provided by 503 firefighters and medical workers.1 (Emergency Medical Services had become a division within the Fire Department.2) The Times then made these oral histories publicly available.3

Once the content of these testimonies is examined, it is easy to see why persons concerned to protect the official story about 9/11 would try to keep them hidden. By suggesting that explosions were occurring in the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, they pose a challenge to the official account of 9/11, according to which the towers were caused to collapse solely by the impact of the airplanes and the resulting fires.

In any case, now that the oral histories have finally been released, it is time for Americans and the world in general to see what these brave men and women reported about that fateful day. If this information forces a reevaluation of the official story about 9/11, better now than later.

That said, it must be added that although these oral histories are of great significance, they do not contain the first reports of explosions in the Twin Towers. Such reports---from firefighters, reporters, and people who had worked in the towers---started becoming available right after 9/11.
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But why did we have to wait for this court-ordered release to learn about these testimonies? Should not they have been discussed in The 9/11 Commission Report, which was issued over a year earlier? This Report, we are told in the preface, sought “to provide the fullest possible account of the events surrounding 9/11.” Why does it not include any of the testimony in the 9/11 oral histories suggestive of controlled demolition?

The answer cannot be that the Commission did not know about these oral histories. Although “[t]he city also initially refused access to the records to investigators from . . . the 9/11 Commission,” Jim Dwyer of the New York Times tells us, it “relented when legal action was threatened.”56 So the Commission could have discussed the testimonies about explosions in the oral histories. It also, in order to help educate the public, could have called some of the firefighters and medical workers to repeat their testimony during one of the Commission’s public hearings. But it did not.

Why, we may wonder, have the firefighters and medical workers not been speaking out? At least part of the reason may be suggested by a statement made by Auxiliary Lieutenant Fireman Paul Isaac. Having said that “there were definitely bombs in those buildings,” Isaac added that “many other firemen know there were bombs in the buildings, but they’re afraid for their jobs to admit it because the ‘higher-ups’ forbid discussion of this fact.”57
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