Bush, Giuliani, Whitman and the Lethal Fallout from 9/11

By HARVEY WASSERMAN

The fallout now taints us all.

Amidst the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, Bush and Giuliani saddled up their bullhorns and raced down to the smoldering World Trade Center to shout out a single "patriotic" demand: re-open the stock market!

And to hell with the health of the good citizens doing the clean-up. Ditto the rest of us down wind.

The public health outcome has now become visible: those brave and caring people who marched onto the site to do what needed to be done are starting to die in droves.

The New York Times says less than a third of them were wearing respirators. Giuliani is getting a long overdue bashing for letting this happen. With all his swagger, Rudy imposed a single demand above all: the financial district must re-open. That people would die doing it was known but never mentioned. Giuliani had his priorities.

Bush's Environmental Protection Agency knew full well that the airborne fallout from the smoldering the World Trade Center was absolutely lethal.

Then headed by the "green" nuclear power advocate Christine Todd Whitman, the EPA knew the cancerous clouds pouring out of the site were a toxic brew of lethal chemicals, the likes of which the world had not seen since Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

The WTC towers were among the last buildings to be lined with large quantities of asbestos, an infamous agent of lethal lung diseases, including cancer.

But they also contained countless computer screens, light fixtures, calculators, telephones, network servers, paging systems, copy machines and much more high-tech office equipment laden with mercury, lead, arsenic and too many other toxic metals to list here. The chlorine-laden plastics, carpeting, concrete, chemical cleaners, furniture, metal struts, window glass---all were pulverized and vaporized into a horrific cloud of murderous dioxins, furans, powdered glass and noxious soot whose killing powers were hideous.

Whitman, Giuliani and Bush were told all that---and then waged a conscious campaign to make sure the rest of us didn't find out. Our callous, corrupt, corporate-controlled media of course complied.

The upshot was a rapid "clean-up" of this horrific site. The first whirlwind we now reap is an escalating rate of sickness and death among those who did the work.

Contrary to law and common sense, most of the clean-up crews were allowed to work without protective garments and breathing devices. Years of investigations must now probe how available (and effective) this equipment really was, not only for those doing the grunt labor amidst the ashes, but also for the tens of thousands of good souls who came downtown to bring them food, coffee and consolation.

As the tragedies spread, so will the lawsuits. Whatever millions of private dollars might have been saved by the rapid re-opening of the financial district will be paid for many times over with billions of public dollars to compensate the health costs of official negligence.

But there is far far more. For all those who labored amidst the WTC rubble, thousands more proceeded to live their lives in Manhattan and elsewhere downwind with no warning of how dangerous it really was to merely breath the air there.

Whitman's EPA knew the particulate fallout that blanketed the region was extremely lethal. Tens of thousands of homes, businesses and public buildings were coated in toxic ash.

At very least, all downwind buildings should have been intensely monitored. Many should have been fitted with advanced filtration units. All carpeting, furniture, walls and fixtures should have been repeatedly tested and cleaned. And then cleaned again. And then cleaned yet again.

Some buildings might never have reopened. And the stock market might have stayed shut longer. Such things cost money.

But who can tell us now how many automobiles, subway cars, public buses, offices, living rooms, bedrooms, public spaces and infants' cradles were saturated with poisonous WTC powders? How many pregnant women breathed in nano-particles that crossed the placenta into the bodies of children now five or six years old?

What will become of these innocent victims of the Bush-Giuliani-Whitman decision to not warn the public of what was in our air, water and food?

In fact, the sick and dying WTC clean-up crews constitute the mere tip of a public health disaster made unforgivably worse by this willful and malicious official neglect.

The diseases and deaths now surfacing from the immediate WTC area are the barest of beginnings. They indicate that far more people will likely die from the toxic 9/11 fallout than perished in the buildings that horrible day.

Characteristically, soon after the WTC attacks, Bush attacked the Clean Air Act on behalf of Republican utility investors who would contribute his 2004 war chest.

And now Whitman pushes a "renaissance" of nuclear power plants. Reactor fallout is one of the few substances even more lethal than what spewed into New York amidst her criminal silence. Had those 9/11 jets crashed into the Indian Point reactors 45 miles north of the WTC, would she also have hidden the ensuing death toll?

Whatever the answer, she now peddles her EPA "credential" to push still more of those infernal, infinitely vulnerable machines, as if 9/11 never happened.

And Rudy Giuliani, the super patriot who put re-opening the stock market so far ahead of the health of his fellow Americans, wants to follow Bush into the White House. Perhaps those who find themselves in his presence should don respirators. Better late than never.

Bush, Giuliani and Whitman have built careers around their "patriotic" responses to 9/11/2001.

But countless New Yorkers---and other downwind Americans---now suffer and die as a direct result of their irresponsible, self-serving negligence. It is a public debt that can never be repaid

Nice spin story...........LOL

Have a good one!:s4:

P4B come on a lot of people got sick from cleaning up the mess from 9/11 and they werent even warned about it.Again the people get fucked by the MAN.....

I still do not understand why some of the workers at Ground Zero didn't wear the masks that they were given. I was working in the financial district at the time, and we knew that the air in the WTC vicinity was toxic. I didn't go back to work for several weeks after 9/11, it was bad even then for some time, and you could see the clouds of smoke and other crap over NYC for months. Sometimes you could even detect it in the air of closed-off buildings, depending on the weather and wind. Many employers gave out throwaway masks to the office workers in our area. I think that I still have a couple. I cannot imagine actually working in that rubble without a heavy-duty mask for protection - at the very least. Amazingly, I don't know of anybody from the financial district that's gotten sick yet from exposure to it.

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Originally Posted by fishman3811

P4B come on a lot of people got sick from cleaning up the mess from 9/11 and they werent even warned about it.Again the people get fucked by the MAN.....

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Are you trying to tell me that fire fighters and policemen aren't trained in protective gear in case of entering or being around a burning stucture? Come on now.......just because Bush and Rudy weren't on TV announcing it doesn't mean shit.

The reason for opening the stock market so soon was to show these assclowns that they may have wanted to shut down New York but they failed!

Have a good one!:s4:

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Originally Posted by Breukelen advocaat

I still do not understand why some of the workers at Ground Zero didn't wear the masks that they were given.

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I'm the same way...there is different jobs at the hospital where I "should" have been wearing the same mask but I can't breath in the damn things. BUT....the job still has to get done.

Have a good one!:s4:

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Originally Posted by Psycho4Bud

I'm the same way...there is different jobs at the hospital where I "should" have been wearing the same mask but I can't breath in the damn things. BUT....the job still has to get done.

Have a good one!:s4:

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I believe that if you were working at Ground Zero, you'd have worn the mask - maybe not the heaviest-duty kind, but "something". It was really, really bad. Maybe your hosptial job's stuff was worse, but I've worked, without a mask, with Diazo printers that used ammonia, had other jobs with toxic stuff, and they were like a walk through the Botanical Garden compared to Ground Zero.


Have a good 'un.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Breukelen advocaat

I believe that if you were working at Ground Zero, you'd have worn the mask - maybe not the heaviest-duty kind, but "something". It was really, really bad.


Have a good 'un.

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Honestly speaking if I couldn't have handled it without the mask I would have had to split. I'm a little claustrophobic....I can tolorate them things for about 15 min before I can't take it anymore.

Have a good one!:s4: