Twenty-five years. That’s how long it took for the truth about the air at Ground Zero to finally reach daylight. This week New York Mayor Zoran Mamdani released more than 170,000 pages of city records confirming what first responders, downtown residents, and Stuyvesant High School kids have known in their bodies for a generation — the air was not safe, leaders knew it, and they lied. Paul was there in September 2001 as a National Guard officer working the pit. He’s spent the years since watching friends die of cancers and illnesses that never should have been a mystery. This episode brings you inside two of the most important conversations he had over the 9/11 weekend — with Katy Tur from Ground Zero and with Ali Velshi on The Eleventh Hour — as the country marked a somber anniversary and rang a seventh bell for the more than 9,400 who’ve died since the attacks.
This is not a nostalgia episode. It’s an accountability episode. Cancer cases among 9/11 survivors have roughly tripled in the last five years alone. The forever wars that started on that day are still going, now with Iran added to the ledger and Congress still on the sidelines. Paul lays out what real accountability looks like — naming names, launching a bipartisan investigation, and prosecuting the people who lied if their lies broke the law — and why the fight has to continue on 9/12, 9/13, and every day after. Because next time a toxin cloud rolls into an American city, leaders need to know the American people will not let the lie stand.
In this episode
- Why this 9/11 felt different — more unity, more reflection, and a seventh bell added to the memorial for those killed by the toxins after the attacks
- Mayor Mamdani drops 170,000 pages of previously withheld city records confirming the air at Ground Zero was not safe
- The Katy Tur conversation from Ground Zero with 9/11 Health Watch’s Ben Chevat on why it took a quarter century to get the truth
- Paul on Ali Velshi’s Eleventh Hour: “They told us the air was clear and they lied. Our friends have been dying for 25 years.”
- The Stuyvesant High School betrayal — 13- and 14-year-olds sent back to class so Wall Street could reopen
- Why cancer treatment cases among 9/11 survivors have tripled in five years, from roughly 8,870 in 2021 to more than 27,300 in 2026
- The through-line from Agent Orange to burn pits to Ground Zero — a generational pattern of government lying to the people who ran in first
- The demand: name names, launch a bipartisan investigation, and if people broke the law, send them to jail
- Why there is still no formal 9/11 curriculum in New York schools — and why that’s an opening for bipartisan action
- The link to today: a new forever war with Iran, no congressional authorization, and the same accountability vacuum that let the Ground Zero lie stand
