Indira Singh Interview, April, 2005, Part One

This is a transcript of Part One of Bonnie Faulkner’s interview with Indira Singh on the Guns and Butter radio program, which aired April 27th, 2005 on KPFA in Berkeley.

Real Audio stream of archived show here.

Ground Zero 911: Blueprint For Terror, Part One

Bonnie Faulkner (BF):
Today on Guns and Butter, Indira Singh. Indira Singh has been working
on Wall Street since 1975. On 9/11 she was working as a senior
consultant for JPMorganChase. She was tasked with developing a
next-generation, operational, risk-blueprint. Which would proactively
identify exposures, including money laundering, rogue trading, and
illicit financing patterns.

It was in this capacity 9 months
later, she became aware of the biggest threat to our country, a
trans-nationally protected terrorist cartel that brought us 9/11.

Indira
Singh is a private pilot and a climber. Prior to 9/11, she volunteered
as a civilian emergency medical technician, until she was injured at
ground zero.

Indira Singh, welcome.

Indira Singh (IS): Thank you, Bonnie.

BF: Indira, where were you on Sept. 11th, 2001? You were living in New York City, weren’t you?

IS:
Yes, I was living and working in lower Manhattan, a couple hundred
yards away from the World Trade Center. My apartment was southwest of
the site, and I worked on Wall Street for JPMorganChase.

BF: Now, where were you on that very morning of Sept. 11th? Were you at home? Were you at work?

IS:
That morning I was at home, I was late. I was supposed to have attended
a risk conference that was being held on the 106th floor of the WTC, at
the North Tower, and for some reason, I woke up late and didn’t make it
there. So when the first plane hit I was actually on my way out in a
business suit and I turned back, changed into my EMT clothes, I was a
civilian Emergency Medical Technician in New York State, and the 2nd
plane hit and I basically went down to the site from that point on.

BF: So, were your offices actually in the WTC?

IS:
No, they weren’t, they were on Wall Street itself, and there were
offices that I consulted in all around the WTC, but the only reason I
would have been there that morning was the risk-technology seminar.
Risk Orders basically invited people from all over the world, all over
the country. There were close to a hundred delegates already assembled
when the first plane hit, nobody made it off the 106th floor.

BF: And that was a meeting you were scheduled to be in, and you were simply late.

IS: I was late.

BF: Indira, what’s an Emergency Medical Technician, and how did you become an EMT?

IS:
Well, I was Pre-Med for many years before I went into technology but I
was basically a mountain climber, I traveled to Asia many times, and
when you indulge in these pretty risky activities in quite remote
areas, someone ought to know how to set a broken leg or take of medical
emergencies.

That part of the world is itself beset with
terrorist attacks, I frequently saw the results of violence, or just
serious accidents, buses falling over into a ravine…

So
about 4 or 5 years prior to 9/11, I decided to get licensed so I would
know what to do in case of an emergency. And in NYC, because it’s so
dense with hospitals, there are not very many volunteer Ambulance
Corps, but I did belong to one in Brooklyn, I rode a bus, (an
ambulance), pretty much every Friday night… so the rules are in a
multi-casualty accident, one the size of the WTC attack, it’s ‘all
hands on deck’.

BF: So, you were in a business suit on the street when the first plane hit the first tower?

IS:
Yes. I was on the out of my building, technically, and I went back and
I changed into my EMT clothes and I remember that being very much in
slow motion, and trying to assemble my jump-kit… I went back again for
my burn sheets because we knew it was an airplane incident… a lot of
little things like that are the things I remember that I did at that
time.

BF: What was like… out on the street when the plane hit the towers?

IS:
It was panic, it was absolute chaos… people were running… no one knew
what had happened… a lot of people wanted to get close to see it…
really, the panic happened when the first tower came down… it was utter
panic.

I was located south of the towers and there’s no
egress there, there are only the bridges, the Brooklyn Bridge, the
Manhattan Bridge, so you’re basically trapped. Most people south of the
towers felt trapped. Most people tried to run towards the water and
then north which is the only way you get out, but it was absolute panic.

I
was advising people that I saw what to do, mostly my neighbors and
friends, and I remember that after the first tower collapsed, I was
telling them to dress for winter, I don’t know why the words ‘nuclear
winter’ kept going through my head because you couldn’t see anything,
you were so close to the ground, people are small and the dust-cloud
was so dense you couldn’t see in front of you… I remember calling
someone in California because most of my friends on the East Coast,
their lines were down or busy, so I kept calling further and further
west until I got someone awake in California, it was 6 o’clock, and I
asked them to turn on the TV and see what was going on because we
couldn’t see anything. It was just so black.

BF:
That was actually the very next thing I was going to ask you was about
the dust clouds, because I’ve seen pictures of the streets of NYC…
actually I have met a woman who was an artist who was there at the
time, her apartment windows were blown out, and she took pictures on
the street of the devastation after the plane hit, but then, more
pictures after the towers came down, and you could tell the difference
in frames because after the towers came down, there was this incredible
dust over everything.

IS: That’s right, you
could get lost, you couldn’t see in front of you, in fact, I got lost
just going around the corners. The dust clung to all the buildings, and
wiped out any writing… the shapes became very surreal. You didn’t know
where you were, and that was also part of the shock, that everything
that was recognizable became this gray, dark blob, and I got lost many
times just going a couple hundred yards.

BF: Was there also debris in this dust cloud? It wasn’t just fine powder, was it?

IS:
No, there was everything in it. In fact, we asked the EPA later what
was in it and they said there was everything in it including human
remains… suitcases, glass, there was a lot of glass, so much glass… the
towers were extremely high and with the fires and the winds up there,
anything that was blown out was caught in an updraft and carried, there
were whole windows that were carried all the way down Broadway and made
it into the East River, if you can imagine. That’s thousands of yards
away, people were just staring up wondering when and where it would
come down it was being carried like a piece of paper.

And
there were suitcases… we’re just assuming that they were in the planes,
but it was so random, what got thrown out… and right around the
buildings themselves, there was evidence of the usual debris, human and
other remains of an airplane crash, a very serious airplane crash.

So,
that’s not in question. I know a lot of people think that—I’ve heard
everything including ‘holograms’ flew into the WTC, well, I wonder
who’s paying them to put that out there?

One of the things
that I couldn’t do is; I’m an amateur photographer, and I couldn’t take
a single photograph, because what kept going through my mind was that
this was a crime scene, and here were the remains of people’s loved
ones on the street, even if it was just a body part, it was somebody’s
loved one, and I know it was a crime scene, I also know it was a world
event, but it just seemed horrific to me to even just photograph it… in
my opinion, the way I reacted to it, I couldn’t take any photographs.

I understand how necessary it was to have documented every shred of it given what’s happening now.

BF: How long then, did you work as an EMT and what is it that you were doing?

IS:
Well, there was so much chaos Bonnie… when I got there we were setting
up triage sites very close to the area, the triage site that I was
setting up was… to the East of Building 7, where Building 7 came down,
and what we were expecting… as an EMT you’re trained for live
survivors… and there were people on the pile, digging and looking for
survivors, and what happened is, they would bring someone out to the
nearest triage center, we would stabilize them, put them in an
ambulance and send them further uptown.

So we were setting
up triage as close to the pile as possible… on it, in many cases. So
what we were doing was setting up different kinds of stations, I.V.
stations, cardiac stations, wound stations, burn stations… just trying
to have an organized space.

What happened with that
particular triage site is that pretty soon after noon, after midday on
9/11, we had to evacuate that because they told us that Building 7 was
coming down.

If you had been there, not being able to see
very much, just flames everywhere and dark smoke, it is entirely
possible… I do believe that they brought Building 7 down because I
heard that they were going to bring it down, because it was unstable,
because of the collateral damage.

That I don’t know, I can’t
attest to the validity of that, all I can attest to is that by noon or
one o’clock, they told us we had to move from that triage site, up to
Pace University a little further away, because Building 7 was gonna
come down, or being brought down.

BF: Did they actually use the words brought down, and who was it that was telling you this?

IS:
The Fire Department, the Fire Department, and they did use the word,
we’re gonna have to bring it down. And, for us, there observing the
nature of the devastation it made total sense to us that this was
indeed a possibility.

Given the subsequent controversy over
it, I don’t know. I’m not an engineer, all I know is that was my
experience. We backed off a little bit to Pace University, there was
another panic around 4 o’clock because, they were bringing the building
down, and people seemed to know this ahead of time, so people were
panicking again and running… I went back to One Liberty, which was
further south of where I was before and there were triage sites set up
in there… we were treating basically people who were on the pile
digging for survivors, if there were any.

And it was
basically chaos. I asked who was in charge for instance, because I
supposed to check in with whoever was in charge, and no one seemed to
know. It was complete and utter chaos there, if there was someone in
charge… the normal response units around for a multi-casualty incident,
they didn’t know.

One of the big problems is that so many
people in the Fire Dept. and in the Police Dept. at a high level had
been already killed. There was complete and utter shock and disbelief
and they were still trying to sort out the details.

BF: I know you certainly weren’t concentrating on this, but did you happen to notice any fires in WTC7?

IS:
Yes… I think there was, I couldn’t get close enough because of the
smoke I couldn’t really tell where the fires where coming from, I
didn’t have a bird’s eye view, I was down on the ground and there was
all this rubble and devastation around me. If someone told me there was
a fire in Building 7 I would have likely believed it simply because
there were fires everywhere, there were fires because there was so much
paper, and litter on the streets, for hundreds of yards around, there
were fires everywhere, it was confetti, sort of like a ticker-tape
parade. As if someone on the street set fire to a ticker-tape parade.
It would all burn, in a line, so there were just flames everywhere.

BF: What an experience. Are you still emotionally affected by this? I would imagine so…

IS:
Yeah, for those of us who responded, we are never prepared for anything
like this. The shock of… in a lot of ways, the WTC was my backyard and
to those of us who lived between the shadow of the twins, all I can
basically say, this may sound silly, but I refer to the book ‘Divided
We Stand’ which is a book about the building of the WTC towers, and the
people who lived and worked there experienced these two controversial
towers completely differently than the rest of the world… most people
think that you go to the top and get vertigo looking down, but for
those of us who knew, the best vertigo to be had was to be right at the
bottom, hold on to one of the corners and look all the way up, you
pretty much couldn’t stand, so they were mysterious international
structures that were the center and the heart of our Western
Civilization, basically.

I thought that it was pretty
remarkable that they were situated in lower Manhattan, the south end of
Manhattan Island was considered sacred ground by native Americans, and
a lot of people thought that one of the reasons that Wall St. was so
successful was because it was built on such sacred ground.

So,
because… it was my choice to live there, and work there and build my
career there… it hit me, it was my backyard, and my community, my
neighbors, my friends, my colleagues, this was personal to us in a way
that wouldn’t have been if for instance, you were just commuting into
work. We were very connected to that very special area of lower
Manhattan.

BF: Now, did you work as an EMT for more than one day? How long did this go on for you?

IS:
Well, I worked pretty much non-stop, at the One Liberty triage center,
it went on until Saturday or Sunday, until basically I was so sick that
I was experiencing cardiac symptoms and a friend came to get me and
take me out of there. I was pretty stubborn, I wouldn’t go to a
hospital, but none of us really wanted to be another victim… so I was
there until Sunday, I believe.

BF: I just wanted to clarify, wasn’t it a Tuesday that this happened?

IS:
Yes. I was there fairly non-stop I don’t think I slept for more than an
hour or two hours for the first 3 days. And I was at the One Liberty
triage site, I was there all of that night, the night of 9/11, 9/12.
That was the most remarkable night because we had nothing, we had no
food, we had no coffee… I just didn’t understand how no one could know
how bad it was there, we literally squeezed 30 cups of coffee out of
one sorry bag of grounds!

If you know anything about One
Liberty, that building… there was Brooks Brothers, a very famous
business clothing store for men and women, and there were coats,
cashmere coats, and we had no blankets so I went upstairs to get the
coats so the Firefighters would have something to keep them warm and I
remember the guards thinking they couldn’t do it, so I gave them my
credit card for hundreds of thousands of dollars of cashmere coats
which were fairly contaminated anyway, but I remember the shift in
reality, breaking all the rules, we had no food, the Firefighters broke
in for food, just to get Goat cheese and chicken sandwiches, and it was
simultaneously a morgue, a place for Firefighters to rest, triage
station, and a place to lay out sandwiches, all there in the lobby… it
was fairly incomprehensible.

Outside, you could see, there
was this mountain of burning debris, people with tears and horrified
looks on their faces just basically arguing… there were fierce and very
heated arguments about the best way to go about moving the debris to
reach the survivors that we knew were still alive underneath, and we
knew people were still alive, as far as I know, at least until Thursday
afternoon if not Friday.

BF: So then, you were on the scene working as an EMT until the following Saturday or Sunday, so maybe 5, 6 days?

IS: Yes.

BF: And then what? Your health was being affected…

IS:
Yeah, I couldn’t breathe, I was experiencing cardiac symptoms, I had
already treated some people, there was a 29 year-old Firefighter who
went into cardiac arrest on Wednesday, so there were people who… rescue
workers, who really were injuring themselves, there was glass… eye
injuries were the most common because of the smoke and the debris, and
the flames and the sparks from the metal cutting torches, it wasn’t
uncommon to pull glass out of somebody’s eyes and for them to go right
back… burning right through rubber boots… you knew that you had maybe 3
days to get somebody out of there so you were willing to go to the edge
of your own safety. All the rules were broken at that point.

BF:
So are you saying that in addition to the professionals and the EMTs
like yourself, were there just NY citizens in there digging through
this rubble?

IS: Well, in at least one case
I know there was a young man who had broken his knee which I had
splinted, I think was on Wednesday or Thursday, not sure, but he was
looking for his brother, and I remember that because he didn’t wanna be
moved from the site, and I think he knew that if he was moved from the
site he could never come back and he would never see his brother again.
So, I know they were letting him stay, so he could just stay there for
a while until we evacuated him. If you weren’t there the first day, you
pretty much weren’t getting in by the second or the third day.

And
because, believe it or not, there were people looting the bodies, we
didn’t want a lot of people, a lot of chaos, there was enough chaos
anyway because most of the Fire Dept. and the Police Dept., the
response units, had no idea who there new bosses were because their old
bosses had perished.

…there’s so many levels to my 9/11
experience, just from being there because after 5 or 6 days, since I’m
trained for live survivors and it was clear that… there were going to
be no more live survivors, I basically returned home to see what was
left of my community.

That’s when the reality of how 9/11
was gonna be spun to the rest of the nation… we hit that head on
because I don’t know who could possibly expect a contaminated toxic
site burning… the fires burned for 3 months. The big fire went out on
Dec. 18th, but the fires burned into January. I remember calling it a
‘concentration camp’ fire because they were literally cooking the
remains of people, the stench was—unbelievable, and that was my
backyard.

And the EPA refused to declare the site unsafe,
the air quality unsafe, even though they had spent enormous amounts of
money protecting their own building in lower Manhattan.

Basically
my neighbors came to me—actually I should back up because one of the
first things that we did do is, my local Firehouse had lost 14 men,
Engine 4, Ladder 15, so one of the things that I did since I had
organized the neighborhood with other people before is, I wanted to do
a benefit. Because the Firefighter’s wives who were in desperate
straits—I know that there was a lot of money that people all over the
world sent in, the money was pouring in but really even at that time
wasn’t getting to the right people. So I held a benefit for the local
Ladder Co. and more than to raise money it was to let them know that we
appreciated who they were, what they were and that our neighborhood was
there and behind them, who we were and in order for us to get through
this emotionally and physically we needed to do it together.

It
was a way to go around to all the neighbors’ houses, knock on doors,
find out who was in really serious psychological or physical trouble
and who wasn’t, because no one else was doing it for us. We basically
had to do it.

A lot of people did flee with their children
never to come back, so we went around from door to door, looking at the
elderly, people who didn’t have the funds to move on, and encouraged
them to come to the benefit. And just to get out. To meet your
neighbors and see how you’re doing. A lot of people could not because
they were still burying their dead, and a lot of people did come, and
they thought it was a wonderful thing.

But immediately after
that, the neighborhood, we began to schedule meetings because we liked
it and needed it, to be with each other… I set up neighborhood
post-traumatic stress counseling with Safe Horizons, these groups were
beginning to form… and hold group counseling sessions, now, those
counseling sessions, what everyone wanted to talk about was how
physically sick we were. And how the emergency rooms and doctors did
not know what to do for us.

They had no idea what to do for us.

We were exhibiting symptoms, physical symptoms… they didn’t know what it was.

BF: What kind of time frame is this? Where are we since 9/11?

IS:
Right. I held the benefit October 29th, 2001… the first neighborhood
meeting was early in November, and we had at that point connected with
a similar thing that was going on the other side of Broadway, in
Battery Park City they were organizing there because they were
experiencing exactly the same things we were.

So, we were
beginning to coordinate lower Manhattan, we were beginning to organize
and coordinate. We wanted, for instance, one person per building that
would speak on behalf of all the tenants, come to meetings and try to
get the politicians to do something with this EPA that had the nerve to
look at a toxic waste dump burning out of control for 3 months and say
that there was absolutely nothing wrong with the air.

And I
believe even Christy Todd Whitman, she has reversed her opinion but
there were very bitter, heated meetings at the Senate hearings that our
local politicians held during that time—this is November,
2001—basically everyone had been breathing that smoke for 6 to 8 weeks
and it was beginning to show up.

BF: I can’t believe that the government, the City, the State, they weren’t doing anything for people?

IS:
No, they were not. I mean the local politicians were, Gerry Nadler, and
Sheldon Silver, state and local Democratic leaders, who also lived down
there, were livid. And I gave testimony at those hearings—we were
angry, because we were still in shock from 9/11 and could not believe
this administrative betrayal would be so obvious, and of course on the
news the whole focus was the Afghanistan War and ‘Where’s Osama bin
Laden?’, and the anthrax attacks.

Most of the news of lower
Manhattan was blacked out, for instance, there were, at least that I
know of, 11 anthrax scares, 11 times that buildings were evacuated for
anthrax scares that caused huge commotions and panic runnings in the
street that reminded everyone of 9/11.

That was never reported.

BF: Are you talking about NYC, or Washington, DC?

IS: NYC. Lower Manhattan specifically.

BF: No, I never heard about that.

IS:
No, and um, so much went on that went unreported… see, it was
considered unpatriotic to dwell on how bad things were down there. I
don’t know of any other way to put it except—there was one morning, a
father brought his 7 year-old son near the barges where they were
taking away all the debris, the smoldering debris, they would truck the
smoldering debris through our streets at night and off load them onto
barges on the East River or wherever… they were still smoldering!

I
remember one father brought his 7 year-old kid there to see what the
terrorists had done, and we tried to tell him that this was toxic stuff
and his child was too young to smelling and breathing this, and he
seemed to think it was his patriotic duty to bring his child to smell
this, or inhale this toxic stuff and we realized that the world had
gone crazy.

But, yeah, they were spraying for cholera, all the way down to Water St. in October and November. None of that went reported.

BF:
At one point, I noticed that you testified as to your physical symptoms
and how this had affected your health. What did happen to you, just on
a physical level?

IS: It’s an interesting
question because I was in excellent physical condition for my age and
gender and I was training for an 8,000m mountain climb, so aerobically
I knew I could be up at 19 – 20,000 feet, no oxygen, doing a fair
amount of aerobic activity… what happened to me is—what happened to all
of us basically, and it doesn’t sound very nice, but this is what
happened—we had sores—some Firefighters I know still have these
horrific sores all over their body, our hair fell out, eye infections,
shortness of breath, Adult-onset Asthma, chronic coughs, tiredness,
extreme fatigue, cardiac symptoms, heart palpitations where you never
had any before, irritability, a lot of symptoms that were consistent
with neurotoxic poisoning, those were just the physical symptoms, and
in some cases people reported that their hair fell out and even their
dental work fell out.

And to me they were consistent with
signs of radiation poisoning. However, the toxic cocktail that had been
burning there… I think a California group went in and analyzed and
pretty much came up with the determination that there were about 900
contaminants, 200 different kinds of dioxins, we had the particulate
matter the asbestos, the concrete, they had said that particles were
ground so fine that they were the smallest particles ever produced in
history. And they blew past all our barriers and got lodged right in
our lungs and most of us who were exposed to that are suffering from
something called reactive airway disease syndrome, which is something
that the coalminers get.

What it means is that from that point on, you cannot be around anything much that triggers an asthma attack.

Stomach
problems… anytime we were ill or not feeling right, the 9/11 health
services and the Red Cross would try to get us into counseling, and to
me at the end of all of this, it seemed that we experienced the same
thing that the Gulf War of other civilians who were exposed to local
superfund site disasters, were all told it was in our head.

That’s
exactly what went on down in 9/11, the WTC is just another massive
superfund site and we were told it was in our heads. So if we weren’t
feeling well, if we were irritable… you had the feeling that it was
just you. It wasn’t until I went to a detox program and got together
with everyone else and compared symptoms we realized that this was an
epidemic.

BF: So traditional medicine, and I guess you mentioned before the doctors, didn’t know how to treat this…

IS:
No they didn’t, and even the Firefighters told us to go for—they said
us the Chinese medicine worked… alternative… never so fast, in the
history, I think, of the world had so many people who swore all this
alternative stuff was junk, never so fast did they just turn around to
acupuncture, and this therapy, and that therapy because, we were all in
trouble.

So some people took a mixture of the traditional
medicine and alternative medicine… one of the things that I had
insisted on in Nov. was that the hospitals start recognizing and
opening programs for the residents, and I just found out that Mt. Sinai
had just got funding for a WTC Program, but it was only for rescue
workers. And Dr. Levin, who headed that program, because I was at the
meetings advocating for the neighborhood said, “You’re sick, you can
come down here. We only have room for 200 people but I’ll make sure you
can get in.”

The earliest appointment was Dec. 7th, 2001,
and I said, “Well that’s fine, what do I go back and tell my neighbors?
Because I was a rescue worker I’m eligible for your… program and
they’re not?”

So when the first programs began to be
configured, it was only to monitor what our symptoms were and to track
us over time. There were very little intervention programs available to
us at the beginning. And in many cases the baseline tests were lost.

BF: The ‘baseline test’, what do you mean by that?

IS:
Well, what happens is when you go to the WTC Program, you are
evaluated, your pulmonary capacity, your cardiac, your blood, they test
it for Mercury, heavy metals, a lot of heavy metal poisoning, lead and
what’s in computers and modern buildings, pretty much everything…

So
a lot of those tests, that I heard from other people sitting in the
waiting room, that I followed up with later, they couldn’t find them,
they were lost, they were trucked somewhere, what happened is the
programs were funded for maybe 6 months, and then some other group
would come in and fund it so they would start over again, so… we were
very jaded and wondered if that was deliberate or just normal
administrative incompetence.

BF: And what about your apartment? I assume you were living in an apartment in Manhattan…

IS:
… basically my apartment, when I came back, remember I’m walking on the
streets and it’s completely contaminated, I walk into my apartment, the
dust was everywhere. On everything. The dust fell for years. Particles
were so small, the dust kept falling for years. Our dust patterns were
such that if you dusted in the morning, 2 hours later you had to dust
again. And every time we cleaned, we would get sick. And that’s why we
called the EPA to find out what was in it.

We would get
really sick. To the point where we couldn’t move, we felt paralyzed,
almost. Because the EPA decided that nothing was wrong with the air,
they wouldn’t provide cleaning, so we had to do it ourselves. And I
know a lot of the corporations hired cleaners, undocumented workers,
many of whom got horrifically sick, and died. I actually went to the
CDC in Dec. and insisted, and I was pretty out of control at that time,
that they start a second body count because my neighbors had already
started dieing.

Basically, if you were elderly or had some kind of illness when 9/11 hit and you were living there, you probably didn’t make it.

BF: Did they ever come up with the causes of the deaths?

IS:
No. They wouldn’t. A lot of people left, knew that the area was making
them sick, so they scattered, and as a result we have lost the ability
to track people. A lot of people who came to help us I’m sure came back
home—I’m sure even Firefighters from California went back home with
symptoms and the reason I know this is I talked to rescue workers who
came from New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and I spoke to them as recently
as 6 months ago. There are real macho types and they don’t want to
admit to things and they would say well, ‘has this happened to you,
too’. And I go, ‘yes, it does, it’s happening to all of us, and if you
know other people who were down there, there is a way to fix it, but
full-body steroids is not the way!’

BF:
Indira you mentioned a little bit earlier this very, very fine
particulate dust, and you mentioned a report that talked about this
particulate matter, what is that report, does it have a name?

IS:
There were several reports, because of the investigations that I ended
up doing later, I put a lot of the environmental stuff away, I’m sure
that if somebody googled it they could probably come up with it, it’s
something that I’d have to go through my files and look for. A UPI
reporter, by the name of Alex Cukan, she was amazing, she helped us
through it, and she got the key stories out in Dec. and April, and in
May when the EPA suddenly agreed to clean based on political and
community pressure. But that was 9 months later.

Alex Cukan
talked to us and told us what to expect… and set our expectations about
what the government would and would not do for us, and boy was she ever
right. We owe her a huge debt for just helping us get through that time.

Some
of the things she told us, she said after an incident like this, the
one month anniversary, the 3 month anniversary, the 6 month anniversary
are gonna be really hard, the one year is gonna be horrific… I can’t
thank her enough.

BF: Now, your health has improved greatly since you went through detox, hasn’t it?

IS:
Yes it has… what happened is when the towers fell, I know it registered
on the Richter scale, and for instance, the Federal Reserve Building,
their walls cracked and there are actually signs if you go on a tour
through there were you can see evidence of it, well, the building I
lived in was a landmark building, very old, Revolutionary War-era and
it cracked as well. So we had what the maintenance people called the
9/11 blob moving through the walls and re-contaminating us…

But
something very odd happened, we ended up getting the same kind of mold
and fungus that was in the Deutchsbank Building, which was right
opposite the WTC and we don’t know why but it was also in my building,
in my apartment. So in addition to all the dust we were exposed to this
9/11 fungus, or mold, or whatever, that came through.

So
after I went through detox, I was still living in the apartment and I
was coming back down with symptoms and that’s when they advised me to
leave and go to California, the doctors there did and so I needed to
get out of the apartment as it was re-contaminating me.

BF: Did I hear you correctly when you said your apartment went back to the Revolutionary era?

IS:
Yes, it’s basically a ‘George Washington slept here’ kind of block. The
building had been built and rebuilt and rebuilt several times so when I
left in 2004, last year, and came out to California, and began to pay
attention to the other injuries I had sustained down there, for the
longest time it was all about my lungs and organs that were being
affected. I didn’t get around to the orthopedic injuries until last
year.

BF: Orthopedic injuries with regard to what? Stumbling around?

IS:
Yeah, there was a rescue worker stampede off the pile, because
buildings were so unstable that it was hard to see if something would
fall and collapse, so there would be a signal, 3 bells and a whistle,
and people would rush off the pile, they were working in teams, 19
teams, 20 exits and I just got caught up in one of those and I got
basically trampled, but, you were in another world when you were down
there. You weren’t feeling pain at all. People could work with broken
fingers, and just… adrenaline levels were just so high you didn’t even
notice anything.

…for those of us who sought compensation
for some of our injuries, especially if we didn’t have health
insurance, because everyone lost their jobs because of what happened
there, it is something that rescue workers will not even notice that
are injured for at least 2 or 3 months before they calm down and start
paying attention to themselves.

BF: So you
worked as an EMT for 5 or 6 days, you continued to live in Manhattan,
in that apartment for an additional three, three and a half years?

IS:
Yes, that’s correct. I have been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress,
but I try not to—what happened is that in order for me to be taken
seriously by CBS, by any investigator, I had to put all of that away.
Because they said, you know, she’s just some stressed out—I had to bury
it.

And it was very hard for me, even having gone through
the administrative betrayal of the EPA, and the government denying
us—that they had deliberately allowed this to happen.

See,
that’s as far I knew, that they deliberately let this happen. It wasn’t
until much later, I knew so much more, that not only did they
deliberately—that they actually were involved with it.

What
I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt by the ending of May, 2002, was that
they had deliberately looked the other way and that for me, before
Ground Zero had closed, was like going to the bottom of the pit again.
It was like 9/11 all over again.

BF: …now, all of this time before 9/11 and subsequently, you were working. Where were you working?

IS:
September 11th I was a senior consultant for JPMorganChase and Risk. I
had cycled through several of their Risk areas as an enterprise
architect, or an information architect, technology architect… which
basically means that you take a look at the entire enterprise and come
up with a blueprint, make sure that all the systems, not just one
system, but all the systems, the blueprints for all the systems that
are developed to support the business, are in-line, in tune with the
business goals and the business architecture and the business processes
and where the business is going.

So it’s pretty high-level,
we call it the CXO level, or the Chief Information Officer, Chief
Technology Officer levels and there are disciplines and methodologies
and very esoteric software that’s used to manage this. I did that at
JPMorganChase and I also worked for a small company in Washington, D.C.
that was doing some very innovative work regarding technology
interoperability, they were developing some inference engines to think
about how to put technology architectures together and I wanted to use
that for my risk work, basically.

…we were seeking funding
from Incutel which was the CIA’s information technology seeking arm, I
had been spending pretty much every Friday, Thursday-Friday down in
D.C. trying to get that project off the ground, and trying to get it
funded.

BF: So, at this time you were working for two different companies?

IS: That’s correct.

BF:
Could you explain a little bit about what ‘Enterprise Architecture’ is,
and some of the other terms you’ve used, you’re talking about
information technology, and data, right?

IS: Correct.

BF: Computer-type work.

IS:
It is, but at some point, the systems and the computers that are used
in a business are used to support the functions and processes of that
business, and at the highest level, for instance, in a Bank, they have
trading floors, they have retail operations, and they need systems that
will help execute the business, help conduct the business, and clear to
all the front office, middle office, back office, kind of functions,
make sure that all the business efforts are consolidated and reported
on and comply with the rules internal and external that govern the
industry. So it’s a fairly tall order.

And the end of the
day, you want your systems that are for instance doing trading swaps in
Tokyo, to be consistent with those systems that are trading something
else in New York, and at the end of the day you wanna know what your
total business was, and if you want to change your product service
offering, that means your systems have to change in sync with it. And
so the best way to make this happen is to work off blueprints rather
than have one-off systems, so pretty much everyone has a business
blueprint, a technology blueprint, and various other aspects of
everything that works together, it’s pretty much like what you would
expect if you were building a building, you couldn’t just go in with a
load of bricks and put them down.

Similarly, you couldn’t
just go in with a bunch of computers and expect to help run the
business, you need some form of blueprint, so Enterprise Architecture
is the discipline, and we use the word architecture as the blueprinting
of the business and resources and systems that help implement and
support it.

BF: This sounds like it’s highly technical.

IS:
…it’s highly technical but what’s interesting about this is it requires
you to understand the business inside out, so it’s not only the
technology that you need to know about, but you also need to know the
intricacies of banking, and in banking it’s all about ‘risk’. So, it’s
about credit risk, it’s about operational risk, it’s about market risk,
and so on.

…which is why I was pioneering the field of Risk
Enterprise Architecture, or Risk Architecture, and why I called myself
a Risk Architect, because my point was that unless you really
understood risk management, and Enterprise Architecture and merged the
field, you really weren’t going to get that synergy between where the
business was headed, and what you needed to make sure nothing went
wrong in the business, (which was risk management), keep that, and all
those rules and goals and ideas in sync with the systems, which are
implemented to conduct the business.

So, you needed a pretty
smart piece of software to think about this to even blueprint all of
this, and once you’ve blueprinted it, to keep track of what was going
on in the organization, and to make sure that every system was in sync
or the results of the business transactions and the bank were in sync
with… what should be.

BF: So in your position with risk management with JPMorganChase, were you developing software to do this?

IS:
Yes, I was developing the methodology, how to think about it, that was
Part One. Part Two was gaining consensus firm-wide that this was the
way, for instance, we were going to look at operational risk
management, this was how we were going to look at operational risk
management at JPMorganChase, and once everyone had agreed to that, we
were going to phase in by developing software that would help implement
it. So, it was a multi-phase project.

Of course the
agreement was done at a very high level, once we had gotten the
agreement, we would go out and look at vendors that would help us
implement our ideas.

BF: And so you were developing an architecture then that would take a look at all aspects of the business at JPMorganChase.

IS:
Right, in real-time. Because the thing about risk… in the financial
industry over the past 10 years, you have these huge horror stories,
for example Berings, where you had a rogue trader that basically
exploited holes in the system and by the time he was caught it was too
late, the bank went down, and brought a lot of other businesses and
enterprises down.

So we wanted to move from a reactive to a
proactive way of looking at what was going on, you wait until the horse
is bolted too far out of the barn—you really have to take a look at
what’s going on, because financial crimes can be so complex, money
laundering, it’s not just looking at one transaction it’s looking at a
whole pattern or system over time of transactions to see what someone
might or might not be up to. And then of course there are the normal
errors that occur, innocent errors, careless errors, that sort of thing.

BF: I remember that case that you mentioned with Berings, wasn’t that trader in Singapore?

IS:
Yes, he was… and really it was because he was allowed to take
positions, that if someone was paying attention, they would have
stopped him before he went too far… there is, in banking and financial
institutes, a number of transactions… how shall I put this… wherein we
are basically forced to look the other way. So, it becomes a matter of
not knowing… not knowing what’s what.

For instance, in my
work in credit risk, I could not get compliance in certain offices, to
comply with the informational blueprint, no matter who I went to. There
was just never going to be compliance. So I just wrote up what I saw,
and I figured as long as I could write, and the regulators could read,
that was it. I wasn’t gonna go any further than that as a senior
consultant, I had done my job. I could bang my head against the wall
maybe a little bit more than others, but I know that there were other
analysts, other risk managers who for instance with some of the
vehicles that were used, were created to support the activities of
Enron, they were highly incensed and they left the firm… that’s a whole
other show!

BF: Now, Indira while you were
developing this software you had to go to an outside vendor, right? To
either develop additional software or help you with what you were
doing… and you considered going to Microsoft or IBM or some other
tech-type company.

IS: …imagine you have a
huge blueprint and you decide that for this piece of it, you’re going
to develop it in house or for this piece of it, you can get some off
the shelf software, but for the most important pieces of it you might
have to go to a specialty house, and at the end of the day, you would
have your own operational risk management system.

The most
important piece that we wanted to have developed was not found in
Microsoft or IBM, however it was found with a small company, and when
small companies have ‘boutique’ software, they usually align themselves
with a larger company… because software is generally provides some very
high-level functionality, chances are a major corporation will want to
use it and major corporations tend not to want to deal with very small
companies, for very good reasons.

What happens if they’re
poorly managed and go out of business? Then a very critical piece of
their software is all of a sudden no longer available for the business.
So, most of these small companies do align themselves with larger
companies, so we would go an IBM and say, ‘do you have any alliance
with a smaller vendor that you think is pretty good in this field’, or
the other field and of course we utilize that tactic in fulfilling our
software requirements.

BF: So who did you wind up consulting with or choosing to work on this software with you?

IS:
I went to the gurus in the industry including those in D.C. who were in
enterprise architecture which is a pretty select field, pretty small
niche, fairly high-level people, I showed them pretty much my ideas,
what I wanted to do, and I asked them for recommendations, to come up
with a list of 2 or 3, and I’m a very consensus-oriented person and
they actually said P-Tech…

They recommended this company
that was based in Boston, actually a suburb of Boston, Quincy, by the
name of P-Tech, which stands for ‘Process Technology’. I didn’t know
very much about it, I had utilized consultants prior, who had used
P-Tech and were very familiar with it and spoke highly of the
capabilities of the software, and so I moved ahead with it, especially
when I found out they had forged an alliance with IBM and IBM was
basically their corporate “big brother” that would fund them and
shepherd them through, give them marketing opportunities.

Because
they had signed an agreement with IBM, we were able to bring in the
company under IBM security clearances and non-disclosure agreements
that IBM had JPMorgan because it was a very large company, most large
companies have agreements with the major software vendors, like IBM or
Microsoft. So, that’s how we were evaluating many software packages,
software houses, risk houses, and P-Tech was one of several that came
on board.

BF: So now, you invited them over for a business meeting to see whether or not you wanted to hire them.

IS:
I had basically been told, “Why not P-Tech?”, April 28th, 2002. So, in
the following weeks I had worked out the details with IBM, with our
security, with my supervisors, with my boss, with the various other
groups that would be interested for instance, in any large company you
can’t make unilateral decisions, especially if dealing on an enterprise
level, you have to get buy-in with the various technology advisory
boards which are internal, and a lot of people were interested in
evaluating P-Tech, my project was one of the first out the door so, we
had pretty much a lot of consensus that this was the thing to do, bring
them in. And that took a couple of weeks so it wasn’t until the 3rd
week of May, 2002 that everything was clear for them to come up, we had
pre-arranged that they would have a one-day session with us and would
provide a presentation to a group of high-level people in risk and
other corporate departments that I was responsible for assembling.

And
one of the important characteristics that we wanted to have tested was
the ability to change things on the fly, the adaptability and
flexibility of the software. And in order for us to test that out, we
set them a test, basically. That they would arrive at the premises at a
particular time, and they would modify their software to address some
of our requirements, and we would then demo this at one or two in the
afternoon and make a decision whether we would go to the next step, and
bring them on board for the next level of software development.

So,
we had a number of conversations in how we would set up the
presentation prior to this. A lot of emails confirming who would be
there, security clearances, their backgrounds, what would happen pretty
much on an hour-to-hour basis.

END PART ONE

Copyright, Guns and Butter, 2005.