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After 4 years, new 9/11 revelations
Call it closure of a sort - at least for some. On the fourth anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed thousands and felled this city's most prominent buildings, what turned out to be the final minutes of life for many of the firefighters at the front lines of emergency rescue efforts are clearer than they were.

The firefighters had 29 minutes to get out of the World Trade Center or die. Inside the north tower, though, almost none of them realized how urgent it had become to leave.

They had no idea that less than 200 feet, or 60 meters, away, the south tower had already collapsed in a life-crushing, earth-shaking heap. Nor did the firefighters know that their commanders on the street, and police helicopter pilots in the sky, were warning that the north tower was on the edge of the same fate.

Until last month, the extent of their isolation from critical information in the final 29 minutes had officially been a secret. For three and a half years, Mayor Michael Bloomberg refused to release the Fire Department's oral histories of Sept. 11, 2001. Under court order, however, 12,000 pages were made public in August.

On close review, those accounts give a bleaker version of events than either Bloomberg or former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani presented to the 9/11 Commission. Both had said that many of the firefighters who perished in the north tower realized the terrible danger of the moment but chose to stay in the building to rescue civilians.

They made no mention of what one oral history after another starkly relates: that firefighters in the building said they were "clueless" and knew "absolutely nothing" about the reality of the gathering crisis. In stairwells or resting on floors, they could not see what had happened or hear clearly stated warnings....