As you know by now, the New York Times joined a number of families suing the City of New York for the release of a number of oral histories and audiotapes from 9/11.
But their lead article leaves you with a sense of tremendous incompleteness in two senses. First, its focus is on the experience of the EMS techs. Now, in part because we've all heard over and over that the hospitals and the triage centers waited all day for casualties, but no one came out, this sense has grown that people either walked out or they died in the collapse, and there wasn't any middle ground. So no real thought has been given to what the EMS people were doing and their experiences have in fact been cut out of our understandings of the day until now -- our sense of 9/11 was, clearly, incomplete. Yet on the other hand after finishing the article you feel as if after all this time, and all the litigation, and thousands of pages, that's it? That's the big revelation?
No doubt, that matters enormously, and that information should have been released (and those oral histories could probably have been released individually.) But all this fuss for that?
Compare the article to this one which the Times puts back up on its web site from 2003, when tapes and transcripts from the Port Authority were released.
Each release of oral histories adds texture and meaning and detail that will be useful, but at some point there may just be a diminishing margin of returns. What's being learned here are the experiences of particular individuals now, and no longer large revelations -- at least of the type so obvious that reporters can glean them by going through the material overnight. Adding the experiences of the EMS techs adds a small piece that can be stapled whole, it does not fundamentally change or reshape our understanding of the day. (Indeed, what the EMS people say is entirely consistent with our understanding of what was going on at the towers: poor coordination, poor communication, poor planning, leaves the troops on the ground to innovate as best they can.) Historians or specialists may be able to pick something up by going through this material line by painstaking line, families may find out about the experiences of loved ones, but that will take far more time than a reporters' blitz through the material the day it's released. Beyond that what we are left with are the experiences of strangers, each important and powerful, but simply more than we can process. (That was why the Times did such a service with their Portraits of Grief.)
Beyond that, the mere fact that selections from the tapes are being played is a service in and of itself, bringing back, as that process does, the memories.
It was interesting that last night NBC's piece on the release built into the story selections from the tapes, chilling, putting you right back into the day. I came into CBS's story late, so I can't be positive they didn't play any tapes, but at least for the portion of the story I saw, their anchor read out loud from the oral histories. Powerful, to be sure, but having not nearly the same impact. It creates a distancing effect, allowing you to hear the words without fully experiencing them or the emotions the tapes call up.

