Twenty-five years after the September 11 attacks, New York City is finally opening more than 170,000 pages of previously unpublished records concerning the toxic air and environmental aftermath at Ground Zero.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani is presenting the release as a long-overdue act of transparency.

He is right about one thing: the families, survivors and first responders deserve answers.

But the timing—and the way Mamdani is framing the records—raises a much larger question.

Why did so many of these records remain out of public view for so long?

Mamdani announced Tuesday that his administration is releasing the first batch through a new city portal dedicated to records concerning the environmental and health effects of the September 11 attacks. Hundreds of thousands of additional pages are expected to be released over the coming year.

The initial disclosure includes Department of Environmental Protection records from 68 boxes discovered in recent years, along with a 2001 memorandum warning then-Deputy Mayor Robert Harding that the city could face tens of thousands of potential legal claims.

“The very least our city owes the families, survivors, and first responders whose lives were forever changed by the September 11th attacks is transparency and accountability,” Mamdani said.

“For too long, New Yorkers have had to fight for access to records that should have been available to them in the first place,” he added.

That is a serious indictment of the system—and one that deserves investigation regardless of which political party happens to control City Hall.

The disclosure follows a lawsuit brought by 9/11 Health Watch seeking access to the records. Mamdani says the documents could reveal what city officials knew about hazardous conditions at Ground Zero, when they knew it and how they responded while facing potential legal exposure.

Longtime first-responder advocate Jon Stewart appeared alongside Mamdani and emphasized the scale of the environmental danger.

“There was poison in the air and on the ground and in the window sills and in your air conditioners and covering your pets and your clothes. And it stayed there for months,” Stewart said.

Those questions deserve a thorough examination.

But there is another point that should never get lost amid the investigation of government failures: none of this would have happened without the terrorist attack that created the crisis in the first place.

The toxic aftermath did not occur in isolation. It followed an act of mass murder carried out by al-Qaeda terrorists who deliberately targeted innocent Americans.

Nearly 3,000 people were killed on September 11, 2001.

Thousands more first responders, survivors and other Americans have since died from illnesses connected to the attacks, according to federal estimates and victim-compensation records.

Those deaths matter. The government's response matters. The question of whether officials knew more about the dangers than they publicly acknowledged matters.

But accountability for the aftermath must never become an excuse for blurring accountability for the attack itself.

Osama bin Laden and the terrorists who carried out the September 11 attacks created the catastrophe. Government failures afterward may deserve scrutiny, criticism and, where appropriate, consequences. But they did not create the emergency.

That distinction should not be controversial.

Mamdani has previously argued that the wars that followed September 11 caused consequences worse than those inflicted by the terrorists themselves. That worldview deserves scrutiny because it risks placing the greatest moral responsibility on the American response rather than on the terrorists who deliberately murdered thousands of civilians.

There is nothing wrong with demanding that government tell the truth.

In fact, Americans should demand exactly that.

If officials knew toxic conditions existed while publicly minimizing the danger, the public deserves to know. If bureaucrats buried records, delayed disclosures or prioritized liability over human health, those decisions should be exposed.

But the story should never be rewritten so that the government response becomes the original crime.

It wasn't.

The terrorists attacked America. The government then had a responsibility to protect the people left behind.

Twenty-five years later, New York owes the survivors and first responders every unanswered fact contained in those files.

Transparency is essential.

Accountability is essential.

And so is remembering exactly why there was a Ground Zero in the first place.