Their story raises the question of a cover-up at Ground Zero - although's it's not clear why the government would want to keep the discovery under wraps.

A footnote to this summer's 9/11 Commission Report states: "The CVRs and FDRs from American 11 and United 175" - the two planes that hit the Trade Center - "were not found."

FBI spokesman Jim Margolin and Frank Gribbon of the FDNY said this week they are certain the devices weren't recovered.

The "black boxes" - actually orange - could have provided valuable information about how the 9/11 attacks were pulled off.

The cockpit voice recorder, which captures the last 30 minutes of a doomed flight on a tape loop, would have captured the hijackers' voices and any radio transmissions. The flight data recorder records key data such as airspeed, heading and altitude.

They are built to survive an impact of 3,400 Gs and a fire of 1,100 degrees Celsius for one hour, somewhat higher than estimates of the World Trade Center blaze.

"I can't recall another domestic case in which we did not recover the recorders," Ted Lopatkiewicz, spokesman for the National Transportation Safety Board, told CBS News in 2002. However, officials said little of the jets was recovered.

DeMasi, with now-defunct Engine Company 261, told his story in a 2003 book published by a group that calls itself Trauma Recovery Assistance for Children. He said he donated 4 ATVs to the cleanup and became known as "the ATV Guy."

"At one point, I was asked to take federal agents around the site to search for the black boxes from the planes...," he wrote. "We loaded up about a million dollars worth of equipment and strapped it into the ATV...

"There were a total of four black boxes. We found three."

Efforts to locate and interview DeMasi, now said to be with the FDNY's Marine Unit, were not successful.

But his account was verified by another member of the TRAC Team, recovery site volunteer Mike Bellone. He said he didn't go out with FBI agents on the ATV but observed their search.

At one point, Bellone said he observed them with a red-orange, charred device with two white stripes. Pictures on the NTSB Web site show the devices are orange with two white stripes.

"There was the one that I saw, and two others were recovered in different locations - but I wasn't there for the other two," Bellone said. He said the FBI agents left with the boxes.

Bellone has been criticized for his handling of TRAC finances and for wearing an official uniform when he's only an honorary fireman - but those allegations came after DeMasi's account. - via info.interactivist.net

An untold story of 9/11

BY MICHAEL DORMAN - Newsday Staff Writer - April 17, 2006

Former federal terrorism investigators say a piece of luggage hastily checked in at the Portland, Maine, airport by a World Trade Center hijacker on the morning of Sept. 11 provided the Rosetta stone enabling FBI agents to swiftly unravel the mystery of who carried out the suicide attacks and what motivated them.

A mix-up in Boston prevented the luggage from connecting with the plane that hijackers crashed into the north tower of the trade center. Seized by FBI agents at Boston's Logan Airport, investigators said, it contained Arab-language papers revealing the identities of all 19 hijackers involved in the four hijackings, as well as information on their plans, backgrounds and motives.

The luggage saga represents what the former federal authorities describe as an untold story of 9/11 -- offering explanations for questions long unanswered about the investigation of the tragedy, such as how authorities were able to identify the hijackers so soon after the attacks.

The former federal investigators said information found in the bag was passed on to Justice Department lawyers, who prosecuted Zacarias Moussaoui on charges growing out of the suicide attacks. A Justice Department spokesman, Brian Roehrkasse, said: "Under the judge's order, we're not going to comment on anything relating to the case."

Mohamed Atta, a chief coordinator of the hijackings, and conspirator Abdulaziz AlAlomari spent the night before the attacks in room 232 of a Comfort Inn south of Portland. They checked out at 5:33 a.m. on Sept. 11. Portland Police Chief Michael Chitwood said they drove in a rented blue Nissan Altima -- eventually seized by the FBI -- to Portland International Jetport.

Records show the Altima was parked in an airport lot around 5:45, allowing Atta and Alomari only a few minutes to catch a 6 a.m. commuter flight to Boston's Logan Airport. Although they planned to hijack an American Airlines jet that would take off from Logan later that morning, investigators said they might have gone through Portland in the belief that airport security would be less stringent there.

Once the commuter flight landed at Logan, Atta and Alomari boarded American Airlines Flight 11 bound for Los Angeles -- which they would crash into the trade center.

'A number of telling items'

A staff report to the 9/11 Commission later concluded: "The Portland detour almost prevented Atta and Alomari from making Flight 11 out of Boston. In fact, the luggage they checked in Portland failed to make it onto the plane. Seized after the Sept. 11 crashes, Atta and Alomari's luggage turned out to contain a number of telling items, including correspondence from the university Atta attended in Egypt; Alomari's international driver's license and passport; a videocassette for a Boeing 757 flight simulator; and folding knife and pepper spray, presumably extra weapons the conspirators decided they didn't need."

The report did not say how many bags were checked in Portland, nor did it differentiate them by their contents. But three commission staff members who helped prepare the report said there were two pieces. Two staff members, John Raidt and R. William Johnstone, said it was clear both bags belonged to Atta. "He plopped both of them down on the luggage rack," Raidt said. "Alomari just stood by."

An affidavit filed by FBI agent James K. Lechner in federal district court in Portland reported that two bags checked by Atta were recovered at Logan Airport Sept. 11. They were never placed on Flight 11 before it departed from Boston, Lechner said, but there was no explanation of why they had not been loaded. Lechner described them as "a green Travel Gear bag" and "a black Travelpro bag."

A former FBI agent and a former federal prosecutor who helped direct the New England investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks told Newsday that one bag found in Boston contained far more than what the commission report cited, including the names of the hijackers, their assignments and their al-Qaida connections.

"It had all these Arab-language papers that amounted to the Rosetta stone of the investigation," former FBI agent Warren Flagg said. The former federal prosecutor, who declined to be identified publicly, supported Flagg's account.

Hijacker IDs

"How do you think the government was able to identify all 19 hijackers almost immediately after the attacks?" Flagg asked. "They were identified through those papers in the luggage. And that's how it was known so soon that al-Qaida was behind the hijackings.

The former prosecutor agreed that papers from the luggage helped identify suspects. "I can't speak on the record about that evidence," he said. "This evidence was gathered under grand jury subpoenas and I can't discuss grand jury matters."

The papers discovered in the hijackers' luggage were bolstered by other evidence gathered against the conspirators by the FBI, the former federal prosecutor said. "These guys left behind a paper trail," he said. "They had bank accounts. They rented cars. They had to show what they were doing in the United States. We investigated 9/11 from day one on the assumption that there might be a criminal prosecution."

But when it seemed clear that all 19 hijackers had been killed in the attacks, jurisdiction transferred from various federal prosecutors' offices around the country to Justice Department headquarters in Washington.

Flagg, an FBI agent for 22 years, worked on terrorism cases, among others. Now president of Flaggman Inc., a Manhattan-based investigative firm, he was retired by Sept. 11 but stayed in close touch with former FBI colleagues and prosecutors.

He said he first heard the account of the luggage's significance in the investigation on Sept. 28, 2001, after attending the funeral for John O'Neill, a former top FBI antiterrorism official who died helping others to safety Sept. 11 in his new job as director of security at the World Trade Center.

After the funeral, he said, he fell into conversation with a young FBI agent he had helped train in the New York office. The agent, working on the Sept. 11 investigation, told him about the luggage. The agent said the New England prosecutor helping direct the investigation -- whom Flagg also knew -- was familiar with the evidence. Flagg said he telephoned the prosecutor that same day and received confirmation of the agent's account.

"I was devastated because word had already leaked out of the hijackers' identities," Flagg said. "But I was also excited that the FBI had so much evidence so quickly."

The young FBI agent, who has since left the agency, works in private industry and is reportedly in Dubai. He could not be reached for comment.

News reports published in late September and early October 2001 described a piece of luggage apparently belonging to Atta that had been discovered at Logan Airport after the attacks.

That piece of luggage was said to contain Arab-language papers amounting to Atta's last will and testament, along with instructions to the other hijackers to prepare themselves physically and spiritually for death. The papers also admonished them: "Check all of your items -- your bag, your clothes, knives, your will, your IDs, your passport, your papers. ... Make sure that nobody is following you." Similar papers were also found in the wreckage of another crashed airliner.

Flagg and the former prosecutor, however, said it was the second bag that identified all 19 hijackers.

"That was the one that became the Rosetta stone," Flagg said.

9/11 Commission report is a lie

RICHARD CURTIS - GUEST COLUMNIST- seattlepi.nwsource.com

Writing about a speech by one of the members of the 9/11 Commission, P-I columnist Joel Connelly claimed: "Each of us needs to understand why we are doing what we are doing." ("Sept. 11 show the flaws with protocol," May 8)

Indeed! The problem is that the "why" we have been told appears to be a complete fiction.

Connelly seems to assume that because the 9/11 Commission was bipartisan that we should accept its conclusions and recommendations. But is that true? Is the commission's story credible?

The commission's conclusions and recommendations should be totally rejected. Its story is full of lies, distortions and omissions of fact. Following are two of the more than 40 reasons why the official story about what happened on 9/11 is untrue.

First, who were the hijackers? We do not know. None of those named appear on any of the passenger lists released by the airlines. Most important, six of the men named by the government are still alive and have never even been to the United States. We know that because European media (as reported by The Associated Press, the London Telegraph and the BBC) have interviewed them. It is not a matter of mistaken identity not being noticed or someone using a false passport. The commission insists that the people they named were the hijackers but that claim is demonstrably false.

If that most basic claim is false, and the information was available to the commission (which it was), and the commission still claims that it has given us "a full account" of what happened that day based on "exacting research," it's clear that the members are lying. In his book, "The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions," Dr. David Ray Griffin documents all that and concludes the whole report is one long lie.

Second, in the months after 9/11 all of the surviving New York City Fire Department personnel who were on the scene were interviewed. Those oral histories were recorded and withheld from the public until Aug. 15, 2005. Only after losing in court three times did the city of New York finally release them. All 503 are now posted on The New York Times Web site. Why did the city fight so hard to keep them from the public?

It turns out those oral histories reveal details about what was happening in the World Trade Center buildings that are completely inconsistent with the tale told by the commission. Dozens of firefighters and medics reported hearing, seeing and feeling explosives going off in the buildings that collapsed. Why were there explosives, very powerful explosives by all accounts, going off in the buildings? More disturbing, why was the pattern of those explosives identical in some important ways with the pattern used in a planned implosion (or controlled demolition of a building)?

In spite of Connelly's faith in what commission members say, the report seems to be an obvious cover-up. The question that we all need to ask is: What is the commission covering up? Was 9/11, in fact, an inside job?

Richard Curtis, Ph.D., is an adjunct professor of philosophy at Seattle University and a member of Scholars for 9/11 Truth; www.st911.org.