On page 108 comes the revelation:
"At one point I was assigned to take Federal Agents around the site to search for the black boxes from the planes. We were getting ready to go out. My ATV was parked at the top of the stairs at the Brooks Brothers entrance area. We loaded up about a million dollars worth of equipment and strapped it into the ATV. When we got into the ATV to take off, the agent accidentally pushed me forward. The ATV was already in reverse, and my foot went down on the gas pedal. We went down the stairs in reverse. Fortunately, everything was okay. There were a total of four black boxes. We found three."
DeMasi's statement is flatly contradicted by the Kean Commission's supposedly exhaustive findings.
The only statement on the status of the Ground Zero black boxes in the 9/11 Commission Report is buried in footnote 76 to Chapter 1, but it is definitive: "The CVRs and FDRs from American 11 and United 175 were not found..." As if to leave no doubt about what is meant - that not even a trace of the total of four cockpit voice recorders and flight data recorders from the two aircraft remained - the same sentence adds: "...and the CVR from American Flight 77 was badly burned and not recoverable."
DeMasi did not return phone messages and has not spoken out beyond his comments in "Behind-the-Scenes." He is obviously not seeking attention - why else drop his bombshell in this off-hand way, in a passage that almost no one has noticed? Given his commitment to the recovery effort at Ground Zero and the detail he provides, his account has an immediate, prima facie credibility.
The collapses of the Twin Towers on 9/11 were devastating, but black boxes almost always withstand explosions, high-speed crashes into mountainsides, even missile strikes; they have been retrieved from the bottom of the ocean floor and in cases where planes were almost completely destroyed (as in the case of Flight 93 at Shanksville).
Consider this CBS News story from February 2002:
The effort to better understand the events of the day isn’t being made easier by the fact that the voice and data recorders aboard the two hijacked jetliners that hit the twin towers haven't been recovered. The four devices - and all the clues they would hold - have failed to turn up in the 1.25 million tons of steel, concrete and other material taken from ground zero.
"It's extremely rare that we don't get the recorders back. I can't recall another domestic case in which we did not recover the recorders," said Ted Lopatkiewicz, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board.
The sense of surprise conveyed by an NTSB spokesperson makes clear that the government's claim, that the devices where not recovered, is the one which needs further explanation, and which deserves scrutiny.
