9-11-26 - 9am - The Empty Sky on September 11th

0:00Why you deal with listening to Armstrong and getting on demand? We're not boring. Lot of news is boring. And tedious. And depressing. And makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey, I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. About something about a comedic tone. What? We have a winner? Yes. Listen to Armstrong and Getty on demand on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series, Fault Line Haditha, tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players and you offer immunity to four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to Fault Line Haditha on the iHeart Radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00So there's a golfer in your life and a birthday or a holiday. You've done the balls, you've done the glove, you've done the polo they said they liked and never wore. Here's the one they'll actually use every single round, a Bushnell Rangefinder. It's what nearly every tour pro carries. The brand golfer's asked for by name and if they don't have one yet, it's the thing they've been quietly wanting. Bushnell makes it easy. Rangefinders for the serious player. Watches for the one who wants the yardage on their wrist. A speaker that reads distances out loud and plays their music for the one who's mostly there for the cart ride. Plus get 30 day returns so there's no pressure. BushnellGolf.com. BushnellGolf. Know the number. Some rounds are about the score. Some rounds are about the cart, the crew, and the playlist. The Bushnell Wingman does both. It's a speaker that sticks to your cart with a magnet, plays your music all 18, and reads you the distance to the green

2:00at the push of a button. Front, center, back, on courses everywhere, right out of the box. Loud enough for the group, smart enough for the golfer. It's the gift for the golfer who has everything. Or the golfer who just wants a better Saturday. BushnellGolf.com. BushnellGolf. Know the number. One number can save your round, so when the pressure's on, don't guess. BushnellGolf gives serious golfers the confidence to pull the right club with rangefinders, GPS devices, and launch monitors trusted by 98.1% of pros. From the tour V7 shift to the Pro X3 plus and launch pro, BushnellGolf is built for precision you can feel on every shot. Shop direct at BushnellGolf for the widest selection, exclusive offers, and free shipping. When the pressure's on, trust the number trusted by the pros. BushnellGolf.

3:23I was in Big Sky, Montana, ironically giving a speech to a group of lawyers that dealt in disaster and government contracts and FEMA and everything else about the role of FEMA in acuterism. That was my scheduled speech for that morning about 9 o'clock mountain time, which we're obviously with at 11 o'clock Eastern time. It was primary day in New York City. The polls had opened at 6 a.m., and people were being ordinary. They were voting on their way to work. They had bought coffee somewhere, the bodega or a cart. They were complaining about the ballot. There was a controversy about the ballot 25 years ago. They wrote the elevators up. On the top floors of the North Tower, there's a restaurant, was a restaurant called Windows on the World. They were serving breakfast to a technology conference.

4:24The sky over the east coast of that morning was so clear, so beautiful. Pilots have a name for it. Severe clear. Visibility that went on forever. So here's what I want to do with just this hour. And I want to be completely upfront with you about it. I want to set aside almost everything this day became. The politics, the arguments, the acronyms, the conspiracies, we'll get to a piece of that near the end, because I think we owe the day an honest accounting. And frankly, I've got a personal debt in that accounting that I intend to pay. But the hour belongs to the people everywhere who were simply going to work 25 years ago on Tuesday, September 11, 2001.

5:28Canter Fitzgerald, the bond firm, you've heard about them. They occupied floors 101 through 105 of the North Tower. Bond traders are the kind of people that get to work early. That firm lost 658 people that morning, every desk, every phone, every framed picture of every kid. Above them, the restaurant lost 73 employees. Cooks, waiters, banquet staff, a lot of them, immigrants, working to break the shift. People who cross the ocean to get to the safest country on earth. The Fire Department of New York, the FDNY, lost 343 firefighters. The NYPD, the police department, lost 23. The Port Authority, police, lost 37. The worst single day for any police force in American history. At the Pentagon, 184, in a field in Pennsylvania 40,

6:33by half past 10, this morning 25 years ago, 2977 human beings gone. The youngest, two years old. Her name was Christine Hanson. She was on the second plane with her mom and her dad, and she was going to Disneyland. One report said, and we can't confirm any of this, that a plane may have hit one of the two towers of the World Trade Center. But again, you're seeing the live pictures here. We have no further details than that. We don't know anything about what they have concluded happened there this morning. We're going to find out, and of course, make sure that everybody knows on the air. These are of course the two twin trade center buildings that are down at the foot of Matt Happen that they really are the decons of New York. It was there that there was the explosion a couple of years ago, brought about by terrorists with that's all gone through the courts.

7:35But this, we don't know anything about anything that has happened here, other than the fact that there's obviously been a major incident there. And we're going to go to a special report now for maybe some news. Listen to those voices. That is the sound of a nation that still assumed the best. Maybe a small plane. They described it as a horrific incident, a freak thing. For 17 minutes, that is what America believed, because that is the kind of thing that America believed about the world. At 903 in the morning on live television, the second plane hit the South Tower and that America that I just described ended on camera. The clock that morning is worth saying out loud plainly, because the whole thing took less time than this radio program. 846, American flight 11, the North Tower. 903, United 175, the South Tower.

8:40937, the American 77 into the West Wall of the Pentagon. 959, the South Tower came down in about 10 seconds. 1003, United 93 into the ground at Shanksville, Pennsylvania. 1028, the North Tower falls. 102 minutes beginning to end. An hour and 42 minutes to take 2977 lives and change every life that watched. And while it happened, the people inside the towers and the people on the planes did something that investigators later heard on every answering machine, every tape, every recorded line. They called home. And here's what you learn from those calls. Almost nobody called to talk about the man who did what had just happened. Almost nobody

9:43called for vengeance. They called simply to say, I love you. Take care of the kids. I love you. Tell my mom I love her with minutes to live. Americans reach for the phone to distribute love. Now remember that when we get to the end of this hour because it really does matter. Let's go to Florida. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America. I, unfortunately, we'll be going back to Washington after my remarks. Secretary of Rod Pays and Lieutenant Governor will take the podium to discuss education. I do want to thank the folks here at the Booker Elementary School for their hospitality. But today we've had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center and an apparent terrorist attack on our

10:51country. And they're from that. By late morning, Norm Manetta, Secretary of Transportation, had gone down into the presidential emergency operations center, the Peeock, the bunker under the White House. And after consulting with the situation room, Air Force One, Cheney, Norm Manetta ordered the FAA to do something that had never been done. It ordered every civilian plane over the United States of America out of the sky. Thousands of aircraft told the land right now. Not in 15 minute right now. Wherever you are, find an airport and you get down. Wherever now happen to be, you land. And within just a couple of hours, they had transcontinental flights, settled in runways in Gander, Newfoundland, and Grand Forks North Dakota. And then the sky, the busiest sky on the entire planet,

11:53went silent. People who lived under flight paths can remember walking outside that afternoon. And hearing something they had never heard, nothing. A continent quiet. The only contrails you could see belonged to the fighter jets. I'm going to tell you about that empty sky. Because through a set of circumstances that I never earned, I saw it in a way that almost no one else alive saw it. And now I want to get out of the way for a moment. In September 2001, I was the General Council of FEMA, the Federal Government's Disaster Agency, which means that on the one morning in modern history when America suffered its worst catastrophe, I was precisely where you might not expect the Federal Disaster Agency's senior leadership to be. Two thousand miles away. Big sky Montana. At a conference, you may laugh. After many years, we kind of laughed about it too.

12:58I was there to give a presentation that day. No, all kidding aside, on the role of FEMA in Accentorism. Now, my flip phone rang early. My deputy chief of staff back at headquarters told me to turn on the TV, a plane that hit the World Trade Center. I turned on CNN, and while I stood there in a hotel room in Big Sky Montana, I watched the second plane fly into the second power. Live. The director, the FEMA director, was down the hall. Memoravs the General Council at the time. Within just minutes, our phones were buzzing from Air Force One from the situation room, and we were trying to get across a country that was locking itself down and coming to a standstill while we moved. The drive from Big Sky to the airport in Boseman was the worst of it. No radio signal worth anything. No cell, the cell

13:59circuits jam solid. The director and his general council driving through the mountains and an information blackout while America was attacked, feeling about as useful as a piece of furniture. Now, when we got to the Boseman airport, the military offered us a couple of choices. And one of them, I promised you that this is absolutely true. One of them was an F-16. Now, the image of just one of us flipping a coin is who's going to go. Who's not going to go? It was kind of funny. But the image of the FEMA director at the time who's kind of built like a Buick, wedging into a fighter jet, a state with me for 25 years. In some dates, the only funny thing that morning slept behind. We ruled that because we didn't know what size flight suit. We didn't need just one of us. We needed both of us. So instead, we took a C-135, we fueling tanker instead because it could keep its engines running while we boarded. And that's exactly what happened. The C-135 landed in Boseman,

15:02the side door opened, the rope, ladder dropped down, and the leadership, six of us, climbed the rope ladder and got onto the C-130 day, that day. Now, over the middle of the country, I wrote in a journal that I kept in all those years. I want to read you a few lines of it, exactly as I wrote them, because I don't trust 25-year-old memories, mine or anybody else's, but the page doesn't move. Here's what I wrote at 37,000 feet on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. A young kid on board took me into lower bay of the aircraft where he maneuvers the boom to refuel other planes. He let me lay in the trough where he works the boom and opened the outer latch so I could look out on the earth below as we flew at 37,000 feet. It was quite a sight, albeit under bizarre and frightening circumstances. That is all I wrote about it. That is it.

16:09I was tired, scared, we were all guessing wrongly, we were guessing wrongly about how many were dead, and I gave that entire moment three sentences. It took me years to really fully comprehend what I had seen. That young airman who would be in his mid-40s, probably today, whose name I never got, gave me a window seat over the United States on the single afternoon when the sky belonged to no one. I lay in the belly of that tanker and looked down at a country that could not see me. Every town, every ranch, every interstate down there was full of people learning the same news at the same moment, and above them the sky was empty all the way to both oceans, except for six of us on a C-135 and pilots and fighter jets flying all over the country as I listened them squawk their location clearing sector by sector.

17:14Now, that is the last you will hear about me for a while, because the hour is not mine, because here's what the country did next. That same evening before the dust had even settled in Lower Manhattan, members of Congress, both parties gathered on the steps of the US Capitol, a building that we would later learn was probably very likely spared only by what happened in an appenciling field. They made statements and then unplanned, unscripted, somebody started singing, hundreds of congressmen singing God bless America together. Now, the days after Americans stood in line for hours to give blood, so many of them that hospitals ran out of capacity to accept blood. Flag sold out coast to coast. In New York, the fences and the walls around the hospitals filled up with all those homemade flyers, missing. Have you seen, last seen on the 92nd floor? Please call. Those flyers stayed up for weeks, months, long past the hope,

18:19because taking them down was a step that nobody could bear to take. And at the site itself, the work started. We called it the pile. The fires inside it burned for roughly three months into December. And on and to that pile day after day climbed tens of thousands of human beings, firefighters and cops, yes, and why ironworkers operating engineers, welders, medics, cooks, chaplains, volunteers who drove in from every state that you can possibly name. They worked 12 hours shift in a cloud of pulverized concrete, glass fibers asbestos, benzene, and jet fuel. A lot of them, most of them worked with paper masks or no masks at all, in part because official Washington issued New York the air was safe to breathe. Oh, they actually did. That assurance, obviously, didn't hold up. And the people who breathed that air are the second half of this story.

19:21Three days in, the president stood on the wreckage. A shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. Someone opened the door and was the primary sugar. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, fault line Haditha, tells the story the United States government wants to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children in there. Can you tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over a hundred hours of secretly filmed video, the truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of murder at least and you offer immunity to the other four, you better be right about the fifth because if you're not, then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to fault line Haditha on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

20:2625 years ago, I've been in the army for about four years. I was in processing at Fort Hood, Texas, going through briefings. Red Cross lady came in, said a plane just hit the towers. It's a horrible accident. 45 minutes later, the next three percent. Another plane hit the towers, meaning a grizzled old sartan first class looked at each other. And they said it at the same time. We're going to war. Interesting way. Three days in as when the president stood on the wreckage with his arm around that retired firefighter named Bob Beckwith. And somebody in the crowd yelled, that we can't hear you.

21:39I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of the world hears you. And the people. And the people who knock these buildings down. Well, hear all of us. Now keep that. Keep that sound in your ear. The rescue workers cheering around that bullhorn, the men and women standing on the pile. Because the hardest fact of this anniversary, the fact almost nobody says plainly on the air, is what happened to the people doing that cheering. The dying that started at 846 that morning, 25 years ago, never actually stopped. It just slowed down.

22:41It moved indoors and it stopped making the news. On Wednesday, September 12, 2001, America believed it understood the math of its grief. The count would settle around near 3000. The families wouldn't mourn. The country would rebuild and the country would remember. That was the deal we thought we had. Nobody told us the number was still moving. Start with the NYFD because the math is the starkest in American history. That department lost 343 members of the day itself in September of 2023. 22 years later, the department announced that the number of its members who had died, who had since died, of World Trade Center illnesses, the cancers, the scarred lungs, trace to that dust had reached 343. The two lists were the same length. The battle had

23:42produced as many casualties after the ceasefire as during it. And the second list kept growing. It has now well passed 400 names. At the Memorial Wall at the FDNY headquarters in Brooklyn, Brooklyn, they hold a ceremony to add the new names. This past year, they added 39 more. Firefighters are still dying as of today at a rate of about three a month. The fire department of New York is still taking casualties from a battle that ended 25 years ago this morning. That was, you know, this brought things out. The federal government runs a program, the World Trade Center Health Program. Yes, I was part of what set that up. It's for responders and survivors whose illnesses trace directly to those exposures. As of this summer, that program covers more than a hundred forty five thousand people. And two-thirds of them are certified with at least one nine eleven related condition. More than 57,000 of them have been certified with cancer

24:47from nine eleven. And in the last twelve months alone, the program certified over 10,000 new cancers. 10,000 in year 25. Last year, 2025, that program received more new applications than an any year in history. Twenty-four years after the towers came down, the line of the sick got longer faster than ever before. Cancer is a patient. It waited out the news cycle. It waited out two decades of politics and it's arriving right now in time. And the program has members in all 50 states, but understand why. The pile drew help from everywhere. And when they finished, they went home, which means there are men and women fighting nine eleven cancers today in Texas, Florida, Ohio, and yes, right here in Colorado. Your neighbor that might have the FDNY sticker list truck may have earned it in the worst possible way. Some of the people listening right now

25:53carry a certification card from that program. If that is you, this hour is for you. And this city sees you. And then there are the families. And estimated 3,000 children lost a parent that morning. Do the math in 25 years. Those children are grown now in their late 20s, 30s and 40s. They have walked to their college graduations, down wedding aisles, into delivery rooms, every one of those days carrying an empty chair. Each September at the Memorial in New York, just like this morning, the reading of the names takes about four hours and more, more the readers or grandchildren. Kids reading the name of a grandfather they know from photographs and maybe one saved voicemail. The bells this morning told at 846 903 937 959 1003 and 1028. There were six bells, four hours of names, 25 years and counting. So the honest count of this day is not 2,977.

26:56The honest count is 2,977 plus a second toll that is still being taken. One diagnosis at a time in every state in this country. The hardest part for me of this hour, the question of what this country built in answer to all that dying, what building that cost us and why me of all people cannot be allowed to dodge that question. Let me tell you what America built in answer to that morning 25 years ago. Let me do it plainly. No applause, no smears, because it deserves neither. We fought two wars that ran to combine three decades in cost over 7000 American lives by the count kept at Brown University. Left tens of thousands more wounded in body and mind. We tore up the federal organization chart and bolstered 22 stupid agencies into a brand new department of Homeland Security. We created the TSA and put grandmother's new body scanners.

27:58We built watch lists. We passed the Patriot Act in six weeks, nearly unanimously. And years later, we found out our own government had been warehousing records of American phone calls in bulk. We armor the cockpit doors. The one thing I think we should have done. We taught an entire generation of kids that you take your shoes off at the airport, a ritual we performed for about two decades and only recently retired. Some of it worked. Honestly, be out some of it may have worked. No hijacked airliner has been turned into a weapon over this country in 25 years. The cockpit doors held. The intelligence walls that let 19 guys hide in plain sight came down and the passengers changed forever. Every would be hijacked or since has had to price in a cabin full of people who know how the story ends and they're not going to sit still for it. Those are the real achievements bought and paid for and the people who built

29:00them deserve the credit. But there's a cost column. You know my history. I spent, you know, almost six years of my life inside the machinery, this country built in answer to that morning. It's at the White House sit room and the weeks have to be attacked. I carried the credentials of the new department we created. I fought bitter fights inside it, some of which I won, some of which I lost and I wrote memos about what we were getting wrong that men more important to me did not read or ran in ignored. And I actually helped build parts of it with my own hands. So when I tell you the ledger has a cost column, understand that some of the checks in that column carry, carry my name. I'm not throwing stones at that building from across the street because I lived in that building. History demands the accounting anyway. Now here's the accounting. The man who attacked us that morning could knock down buildings. They could kill almost 3,000 of us. What they could never do with every box cutter on every fanatic on earth was make America a more fearful, more suspicious,

30:04more closed country. Only we could do that to ourselves. And in ways small and large, we applied them. We are more watched, more searched, more listed, and more afraid of one another than the country. Those people woke up in on that clear Tuesday morning, 25 years ago. 25 years is long enough to say that outland on the radio and long enough to start deliberately taking some of it back. Because the target that morning was never really the steel in the glass. The target was our openness. The buildings were just how they reached it. It's good to the field in Pennsylvania. The United Flight 93 left Newark late that morning, delayed on the runway bound for San Francisco. 40 passengers in crew plus four hijackers. Because of the delay, something happened to board that plane that happened nowhere else. The people on it found out all the air phones and their cell phones what that morning already meant. Their families were telling them about the towers. So the 40 knew what

31:09the men in the cockpit intended and they knew what the destination was. The plane had turned. It was pointed at DC just minutes away by air. Investigators believed the target was the capital. The same building whose steps filled with singing members of Congress that evening. Now put yourself in seat 27 of that airplane. A shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. Someone opened the door and was the primary sugar. Is it possible you could do that and then suppress the number? A new podcast series, fault-line Haditha tells the story the United States government wants to keep buried. How can you not know? There were women and children in there. You can tell us here that you don't know what happened that day? Based on thousands of pages of previously classified documents and over a hundred hours of secretly filmed video. The truth about one of the most infamous crimes in Marine Corps history can finally be told. If you've got five players and one of them is guilty of

32:11murder at least and you offer immunity to the other four you better be right about the fifth because if you're not then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to fault-line Haditha on the My Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael 25 years ago I was eight sitting on a couch eating my bowl of life cereal, getting ready for school. When my grandma called my mom had her flip to the news and I don't think I made her into school till about noon that day when we watched everything on TV and yep still burned into my mind. Go back to seat 27 of the plane and flying over Pennsylvania. This is the part that history demands we not rush. Your stranger among strangers, a software salesman, is a retired iron worker or college judo champion flight attendant,

33:13an ordinary Tuesday cross section of the country. Most of whom that one and another just 90 minutes ago at the departure gate you've just learned from your wife's voice on a phone that you are inside the fourth missile. You've got minutes. No government can reach you. No fighter jet can save you. Every institution ever built to protect you is beneath you or behind you and you are completely on your own at 500 miles an hour. There's what they did. And we know this because Jeremy Glick told his wife Liz on the phone while it was happening and also because an operator named Lisa Jefferson stayed on the line with Todd Beamer and heard it. The passengers gathered at the back of the plane. They talked about it. They discussed it and then before they charged the cockpit, they took a vote. A vote, strangers, was just minutes to live

34:16in the one place in America that morning where no law could reach, where no authority existed and the thing they reached for by instinct was the oldest tool in the American chest in the American drawer. They constituted themselves 40 souls at altitude and they held an election. The eyes had it. The operator on the line heard Todd Beamer recite the Lord's Prayer and then she heard him say let's roll. At 103 the plane went into the ground at Shanksville upside down at 563 miles an hour. 20 flight minutes from the dome of the US Capitol. Everyone aboard was gone. The building on the horizon though still stands. Your Congress met in at this week. People ask when anniversaries like this one what the dead would want from us. I told you the top of the hour I refuse to put words in their mouths and I'm going to keep that

35:19promise. The dead do not need me for spokesman. Their last 100 minutes speak. The people in the towers given final minutes spent those minutes distributing love down phone lines. The people on that plane given just final minutes held a debate and took a vote. Love, self-government practiced under the worst conditions in American history by ordinary people who had every excuse to spin those minutes in any other way. So here's where I am 25 years on. The memorial these people deserve is only partly built of bronze and falling water and if you've not seen it you must go all three places. The rest of it though is a practice and the practice is on us. It looks horribly and unbearably ordinary. It looks like voting in the primary on a clear

36:24Tuesday morning. It looks like keeping this country open and free and unafraid on purpose as a deliberate act precisely because fear is the one weapon of theirs that still works. And we are the only ones who can hand that a victory. Those firefighters on the pile did their part and are dying of it to this day. The 40 on that plane did their part in the space of what six minutes. They held the vote. The living part they left that to us. 25 years ago this morning it was a Tuesday. It's Friday now and the country is still here and it's still hours to keep. Thanks for spending at least an hour with me. I had no idea. I told Dragon that I didn't want to talk about it at all today. Everyone I ask you have to. So I have and that's what I believe.

37:36We're not boring. Lot of news is boring and tedious and depressing and makes you angry. You don't want to live your life like that. Hey I'm Jack Armstrong. He's Joe Getty. We're Armstrong and Getty. We try to bring you the truth and help you figure out this crazy modern world. How about something about a comedic tone? We have a winner. Yes. Listen Armstrong you get a on demand on the iHeart radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I believe that whoever was in that room and did that was a murderer. A new podcast series fault line Haditha tells the story of a shocking crime and a cover-up at the highest levels of the United States Marine Corps. If you've got five players and you offer immunity to four you better be right about the fifth because if you're not then you've just given immunity to your color. Listen to fault line Haditha on the iHeart radio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.