Murder at Ground Zero, Again

Poisoning 9/11 first-responders

by John Aravosis (DC) ·
6/26/2007 10:40:00 AM

We've written about this before.

The Bush administration lied to first responders in NYC after September 11, telling them that the air was safe (it wasn't). There was a hearing about it yesterday. Christie Todd Whitman, the former head of the EPA under Bush, took a lot of heat. The thing the article doesn't note is that the White House had a major hand in lying to the firefighters, cops and others who descended on Ground Zero to help. And Mr. Giuliani had a role as well.

Let's look back at the what the very-conservative NY Post had to say about this:

An Environmental Protection Agency memo claims city and federal officials concealed data that showed lower Manhattan air was clouded with asbestos after the World Trade Center collapse.

And officials sat on the alarming information even as they told the public it was safe to return downtown, the internal memo says.

Testing by the city Department of Environmental Protection showed the air downtown had more than double the level of asbestos considered safe for humans, claimed federal EPA environmental scientist Cate Jenkins, who supplied the memo to The Post....On Sept. 18, then-EPA administrator Christie Whitman said the public in lower Manhattan was not being exposed to "excessive levels of asbestos."

That same day, city testing data, some of which was later made public, showed asbestos levels 50 percent higher and more above what her agency considers safe, the memo states.Whitman said at yesterday's hearing that we should blame the terrorists, not her (for a "moderate" Republican she sure does a great impression of Bush and Cheney). Last time I checked it was the Bush administration, Ms. Whitman, and Mr. Giuliani - and not Osama - who misled the American people about this issue.And America's Mayor has some explaining to do too.

More from the NY Post:

On the day after the attack, the memo claims, city test results from the corner of Centre and Chambers streets and from the corner of Spruce and Gold streets showed asbestos concentration at about twice the level considered safe by the EPA.The city did not release this information to the public, Jenkins says.The next day, Sept. 13, city tests were "overloaded" with asbestos in the air - so much that the lab could not conclude precise amounts - along Church Street.

Again, the information was withheld, the memo claims.When the city published the test results for the weeks following 9/11 on its Web site in February 2002, there were 17 instances where the data was either understated or left blank, Jenkins asserts in her report.

And don't forget the White House role, from Newsday:

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center, the White House instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to give the public misleading information, telling New Yorkers it was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was not available.That finding is included in a report released Friday by the Office of the Inspector General of the EPA. It noted that some of the agency's news releases in the weeks after the attack were softened before being released to the public: Reassuring information was added, while cautionary information was deleted."

When the EPA made a September 18 announcement that the air was 'safe' to breathe, it did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement," the report says.

"Furthermore, the White House Council on Environmental Quality influenced . . . the information that EPA communicated to the public through its early press releases when it convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."

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