Friday, March 23 2007   -   9/11 Consequences

WASHINGTON, March 21 — Testifying at a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg pleaded for at least $150 million in annual federal aid to monitor and treat thousands of people who became ill after being exposed to dust and debris at ground zero.

The mayor also called for the creation of a special fund to compensate those who became sick, urging that the city and its contractors be protected from potentially ruinous liability as a result of lawsuits brought by rescue and recovery workers who have argued that they were not adequately protected from the environmental hazards left by the World Trade Center’s collapse.

Senators from both parties expressed sympathy for the mayor’s arguments, which were delivered at the start of a three-hour hearing of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions.

Full story plus useful links for further information about the real story follow...  

Friday, February 2 2007   -   9/11 Consequences

Bonnie Faulkner's Introduction to the program:

Toxic conditions at Ground Zero on 9/11 and long afterward, have had devastating physical and psychological effects on a category of persons known as first responders. The emergency medical technicians, firemen, police, national guard, ex-military, rescue workers and others. These are the people who showed up, some within minutes, some from across the country, and stayed for weeks and even months. At Community Church in New York City on September 9, 2006, a group of 9/11 first responders shared with us their experiences at Ground Zero and how they were treated afterward. Though they were touted as heroes, they were treated, in the words of New York 9/11 activist, Les Jamieson, like "poor servants." Today we bring you four of these stories, with National Guardsman David Miller, Former NYC Police Officer Craig Bartner, Ground Zero Volunteer and Civil Air Patrol Pilot, Mike McCormick and former Air Force Special Ops, Kevin McPadden.

 

Thursday, January 18 2007   -   9/11 Consequences

New Film Trailer and Interviews at Visibility911.com



Visibility 9-11 last week published a three-part series focusing on the 9-11 dust and its aftermath. One week after September 11th, Christie Todd Whitman, then Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, stated, "Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington D.C., that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink", even though the EPA had information to the contrary.

In fact, the 9-11 dust was extremely caustic and in August of 2003, the EPA issued a report documenting changes made by the Bush administration to the EPA's initial cautionary statements, which were originally worded to warn the public of the dangers in the dust. These warnings were changed to reassurances and the public never heard the truth. These lies have resulted in at least 70,000 people getting sick from breathing the toxic dust, and now, over five years later, they are dying.  

Friday, December 15 2006   -   9/11 Consequences

A US Department of Homeland Security program that compiles data on millions of travelers and determines how likely they are to be terrorists may be operating illegally, according to privacy advocates and some members of Congress.

The Automated Targeting System (ATS) gathers travelers’ data from foreign governments, from numerous Customs and Border Protection sources, and from the Passenger Name Record, a controversial system used by the United States and Europe to gather travelers’ information from airlines and travel agencies.

 

Monday, December 4 2006   -   9/11 Consequences

To date, 75 recovery workers at ground zero have been diagnosed with blood cell cancers that a half-dozen top doctors and epidemiologists have confirmed as having been likely caused by that exposure. Ernie Vallabuona is one of them. . .

"We're in this period where no one wants to accept the link," Hesdorffer observes. Maybe the official denial stems from economics, from a desire to limit the amount of money owed to the thousands who have lost their health. Or maybe it has to do with politics. Admitting a link, as he points out, "would mean that the fallout from 9-11 was a lot bigger than we'd thought."

What it would mean is that people got cancer from government decisions. From the decision of Whitman to lie about the air quality in Lower Manhattan, which gave the recovery workers and many other New Yorkers a false sense of security. From the decision of the White House to put Wall Street ahead of public health, which the EPA inspector general found had influenced all those rosy statements. And from the decision to let workers toil without proper respirators for weeks, or without any respirators at all.

 

Wednesday, November 22 2006   -   9/11 Consequences

George Orwell warned us, but what American would have expected that in the opening years of the 21st century the United States would become a country in which lies and deception by the President and Vice President were the basis for a foreign policy of war and aggression, and in which indefinite detention without charges, torture, and spying on citizens without warrants have displaced the Bill of Rights and the US Constitution?

 

Monday, October 2 2006   -   9/11 Consequences

...It doesn't say "alien" or "terrorist," although it specifically includes members of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. It says "person" ñ any person, including American citizens. As Bruce Ackerman, professor of law at Yale and author of Before the Next Attack: Preserving Civil Liberties in an Age of Terrorism, puts it:

"Buried in the complex Senate compromise on detainee treatment is a real shocker, reaching far beyond the legal struggles about foreign terrorist suspects in the Guantanamo Bay fortress. The compromise legislation, which is racing toward the White House, authorizes the president to seize American citizens as enemy combatants, even if they have never left the United States. And once thrown into military prison, they cannot expect a trial by their peers or any other of the normal protections of the Bill of Rights."

 

Saturday, September 30 2006   -   9/11 Consequences

Friday, September 29th, 2006

Sen. Patrick Leahy Blasts Congressional Approval of Detainee Bill

AMY GOODMAN: On Thursday, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont condemned the legislation from the floor of the Senate.

SEN. PATRICK LEAHY: It grieves me to think that three decades in this body that I stand here in the Senate, knowing that weíre thinking of doing this. It is so wrong. It is unconstitutional. It is un-American. It is designed to ensure the Bush-Cheney administration will never again be embarrassed by a United States Supreme Court decision reviewing its unlawful abuses of power. The Supreme Court said, "You abused your power." He said, "Ha, we'll fix that. We have a rubber stamp, a rubber stamp, Congress, that will just set that aside and give us power that nobody, no king or anybody else set foot in this land, ever thought of having."

 

Monday, September 4 2006   -   9/11 Consequences

By Anthony DePalma
The New York Times
September 6, 2006

The deadly White House-induced EPA lies about post-9/11 air quality refuse to fade away as more and more first responders and rescue workers succumb to lethal aftereffects. Let us pray for the recovery and survival of as many of these heroes as possible, while working for the belated imprisonment of Rove and other death-dealing, whitewashing "evil doers" who abetted this tragedy from day one. - Ed.

The largest health study yet of the thousands of workers who labored at ground zero shows that the impact of the rescue and recovery effort on their health has been more widespread and persistent than previously thought, and is likely to linger far into the future.

The study, released yesterday by doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center, is expected to erase any lingering doubts about the connection between dust from the trade center and numerous diseases that the workers have reported suffering. It is also expected to increase pressure on the federal government to provide health care for sick workers who do not have health insurance.

 

Thursday, August 31 2006   -   9/11 Consequences

By Bernard Weiner, Co-Editor
The Crisis Papers
August 29, 2006

Excellent review of the downstream consequences -- intended and otherwise -- of the September 11 attacks. - Ed.

The imminent fifth anniversary of 9/11 provides the proper moment for a good, ol'-fashioned sum-up of the past half-decade under CheneyBush, especially because so much has happened in the past 12-months:

The Bush Administration's Katrina debacle, Iraq being sucked deeper into the civil-war vortex, Afghanistan turning once again into a major war theater, more and more military leaders speaking out about the disaster that is CheneyBush foreign policy, the defection of so many moderate conservatives from their GOP home, the plummeting of Bush's popularity to not much more than his fundamentalist base, the revelation that Bush&Co. have been spying on citizens' phone calls and emails without court warrants, the indictment of CheneyBush's chief aide Scooter Libby for obstruction of justice in the case of the White House's outing of a covert CIA agent, the "rendering" of detainees abroad for extreme torturing, etc. etc.

I'll get to the annual list in a moment. But first let's step back and take a deeper overview. Buckle your seat belts, here we go.  

Saturday, August 5 2006   -   9/11 Consequences

President Bush is at the Helm of an Administration that Won't Stop Lying

Paul Craig Roberts
The Smirking Chimp
July 29, 2006

In earlier careers, Dr. Roberts was associate editor of the Wall Street Journal and Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan. Now he's one of the most devastating conservative critics of the neocons' long fascistic spree. Here he offers a potent and 9/11-mindful counterattack on their bloody war on truth. The final few paragraphs summarize our challenge memorably. - Ed.

The Bush Regime has killed tens of thousands of people in Iraq and Afghanistan, mainly women and children. The deaths are excused as unintended "collateral damage" of the ongoing war, but the deaths are nonetheless important to the tens of thousands of relatives and friends. An equally important casualty of the Bush Regime is truth. The American public has been trained to obediently accept their government's lies fed to them by their government's handmaiden, the US Media. No statement or claim by a Bush Regime Official is too outlandish to be received with acceptance. Consider the claim by Donald Rumsfeld, the US Secretary for War and Aggression, made to the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee on May 17, that Iran was to blame for the instability in Iraq.

Did the senators laugh Rumsfeld out of the room? No.