Welcome to FR.
What possible purpose is there in this? Looks to me like some reasonably sick voyeurism.
One could see a very important HISTORICAL significance by there release.
However your reaction makes perfect sense, someone trying to capitalize politically or financially makes more sense than any altruistic purpose for posterity.
This will be a gold mine for the trial lawyers. Those vultures will pore over every second of the tapes, looking for every possible angle they can use to launch multi-million dollar lawsuits against anyone even tangentially involved with the FDNY's response on 9/11.
It could also be a gold mine for the democrats, who will also pore over those tapes looking for anything at all they can blame on George Bush and the Republicans.
When Dale Earnhardt died at Daytona, the Orlando Sentinel, another truly vile ultra-left fish wrap, tried to use the Florida sunshine laws to get hold of the autopsy photos, ostensibly to have them looked at by some "independent expert." Uhhh-huh. Those pics would have "accidentally" wound up all over the internet within hours of the Slantinel getting them. The Legislature responded by passing a law making autopsy pics exempt from the sunshine laws (we do do some things right down here).
The media screeched long and hard about how BushCo was bending the First Amendment over the hood of a car and oiling it up, and naturally they completely missed the main point - namely, that they are so mistrusted and held in such low regard by the public that we automatically assume they have the worst of intentions with anything they do. They simply will not face that fact, and they still wonder why they're sinking into irrelevance.