Juan Gonzalez - Time to stop the toxic lies of 9/11: Federal, city leaders should be owning up to WTC health risks

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/09/08/1349257

Democracy Now!

Friday, September 8th, 2006

Satyagraha 100 Years Later: Gandhi Launches Modern Non-Violent Resistance Movement on Sept. 11, 1906

...JUAN GONZALEZ: For some of our younger listeners, especially, who may not be aware of the specific ways in which your grandfather carried out his movement, especially in India, could you talk about some of the tactics used or the key moments in the fight for Indian independence? And also I'd be interested in your perspective on how you see how India today is either carrying out -- whether people are either carrying out or have forgotten much of the lessons of Gandhi.

ARUN GANDHI: Well, nonviolence is something very powerful, and the power behind it is not weapons, but the support of the people. And grandfather had this knack of picking on issues which really affected a lot of people everywhere. And therefore, he was able to get people to come out and join his movement.

Now, to give you an example, the salt march that took place in 1930, when he announced to the nation that he was going to defy the salt laws enacted by the British and defy the British government, even the Congress Party members who were his supporters began to doubt and wonder: "How can you destroy the British empire by defying the salt laws?" And, you know, everybody ridiculed the whole idea, and even the British ridiculed the whole idea, and grandfather remained steadfast there. But the reason why he picked on the salt law was that that was one law that affected everybody, Hindus and Muslims, rich and poor. Everybody across the board were affected by that law. And when he decided that he was going to march 247 miles to the sea --

JUAN GONZALEZ: And if you could explain why that law was so oppressive to the Indian people.

ARUN GANDHI: Because the British had decided that they were going to take the Indian salt back to Britain and refine it and repackage it and sell it back to the Indian people at about 20 times the price, and, you know, enormous taxes were imposed on salt. And India had been impoverished by the British colonialism and imperialism. And people were very poor. And this kind of tax on salt, something that everybody needs every day, was totally unjust, and therefore, grandfather decided to defy this.

And when he marched that day, began the march, 247 miles to the sea, you know, it just caught the imagination of the people. And millions of people poured out into the street. And even if they couldn't participate in his march, they did things in their own cities to defy the British. And the response was so tremendous that the Congress doubters also began to see the wisdom of it, and the British government were taken completely by surprise. And I think that was the turning point in the freedom struggle in India. From that point onwards, the British lost their hold over the country. And it just went down to ultimately giving independence to the country there...

...AMY GOODMAN: Arun Gandhi. I want to thank you very much for being with us. I hope to see you in Memphis on January 11th, on our Breaking the Sound Barrier tour. And I want to let our listeners and viewers know, on Monday, the movie Gandhi will play all over the country, on the 100th anniversary of Satyagraha. 
 

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From Le Monde Diplomatique, August 2006

http://mondediplo. com/2006/ 08/11cuba

 
Havana's medics work around the world

Cuba exports health

Some 14,000 Cuban doctors now give free treatment to Venezuela's poor and
3,000 Cuban medical staff worked in the aftermath of last year's Kashmir
earthquake. Cuba has plans to heal those poorer than itself.

By Hernando Calvo Ospina

 

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At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics

New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/10/washington/10detain.html?pagewanted=all

September 10, 2006
At a Secret Interrogation, Dispute Flared Over Tactics
By DAVID JOHNSTON

WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 - Abu Zubaydah, the first Osama bin Laden
henchman captured by the United States after the terrorist attacks of
Sept. 11, 2001, was bloodied and feverish when a C.I.A. security team
delivered him to a secret safe house in Thailand for interrogation in
the early spring of 2002. Bullet fragments had ripped through his
abdomen and groin during a firefight in Pakistan several days earlier
when he had been captured.

The events that unfolded at the safe house over the next few weeks
proved to be fateful for the Bush administration. Within days, Mr.
Zubaydah was being subjected to coercive interrogation techniques -
he was stripped, held in an icy room and jarred by earsplittingly
loud music - the genesis of practices later adopted by some within
the military, and widely used by the Central Intelligence Agency in
handling prominent terrorism suspects at secret overseas prisons.

President Bush pointedly cited the capture and interrogation of Mr.
Zubaydah in his speech last Wednesday announcing the transfer of Mr.
Zubaydah and 13 others to the American detention center in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba. And he used it to call for ratification of the tough
techniques employed in the questioning.

But rather than the smooth process depicted by Mr. Bush, interviews
with nearly a dozen current and former law enforcement and
intelligence officials briefed on the process show, the interrogation
of Mr. Zubaydah was fraught with sharp disputes, debates about the
legality and utility of harsh interrogation methods, and a rupture
between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the C.I.A. that has
yet to heal...

 

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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-methods8sep08,1,4280936,full.story

CIA Can Still Get Tough on Detainees

New interrogation rules will apply only to the military.
The harsh tactics remain secret.

By Julian E. Barnes
Times Staff Writer

September 8, 2006

WASHINGTON - New U.S. policies on the treatment and interrogation of
terrorism suspects outlined this week by the Bush administration mean
that the military no longer will resort to harsh or extreme methods
to obtain information - but that the CIA could...

 

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http://www.nydailynews.com/news/col/jgonzalez/story/450822p-379421c.html

 

Daily News

 

Juan Gonzalez

 

Time to stop the toxic lies of 9/11

Federal, city leaders should
be owning up to WTC health risks

 

The very leaders who failed to protect countless New Yorkers from the toxic pollution after Sept. 11 are now trying to blame each other.

 

What they should be doing is owning up to their lies and deceits.

 

In the weeks after the World Trade Center collapse, this column repeatedly warned that federal, state and city leaders were all hiding the true extent of environmental hazards in lower Manhattan.

 

Instead of admitting the truth, city and federal officials attacked those columns as alarmist and irresponsible - and they exerted enormous pressure on the Daily News to stop publishing them.

 

Some samples of the supposedly "irresponsible" work:

 

- - On Sept. 28, 2001, I reported that testing of dust samples around lower Manhattan by the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project had revealed more widespread asbestos contamination than Christie Whitman, then the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, had led the public to believe. I also reported that city officials were not enforcing the use of proper safety equipment by workers at Ground Zero.

 

- - On Oct. 9, 2001, I reported that private testing done by a widely respected Virginia environmental firm had revealed unusually high levels of asbestos inside two office buildings near Ground Zero. Many of the fibers had been pulverized into such unusually microscopic size by the towers' collapse that they went undetected by much of the equipment federal agencies were using.

 

- - The story accused of being the most "alarmist" piece ran Oct. 26, 2001, in a front-page story headlined "A Toxic Nightmare at Disaster Site." I revealed for the first time that hundreds of pages of the EPA's own tests showed the agency had detected such toxic substances as dioxins, PCBs, benzene, lead and chromium in the air and soil around the WTC site - sometimes at levels far exceeding federal standards.

 

The EPA's regional administrator immediately blasted the report as "one of the worst kind you can write." He conceded there had been some "elevated readings" near the site but the agency's overall testing "indicates people are safe."

 

"Sometimes the odor is terrible," former Mayor Rudy Giuliani said then, "but what I'm told is that it is not dangerous to your health." 

 

That column led furious City Hall aides and federal officials to pressure The News to stop these reports.

 

The next voice on this subject belonged to Whitman, who wrote an op-ed piece for The News defending her agency's response to air-quality monitoring.

 

But there were too many complaints from sick residents and workers to ignore, and The News continued to publish more of my reports challenging the official story.

 Five years later, there is a mountain of evidence that all levels of government issued misleading information and outright lies about air quality in those early days.

 

Whitman now wants to blame Giuliani for lack of safety enforcement at the WTC site. The city was in charge of Ground Zero and the EPA "didn't have the authority to do that," she says.

 

Another deceit.

 

Yes, Giuliani and the city failed miserably to enforce federal safety rules at the site. For weeks, the city did not ensure that every worker used proper respirators and decontamination methods - something federal inspectors noted in a highly critical report on Oct. 6, 2001.

 

But Whitman's agency had the legal power to step in at any time and take control, under a 1998 presidential directive that puts the EPA in charge of cleaning up contaminated sites after a terrorist attack.

 

More importantly, the EPA created a false sense of security among rescue workers and the public after 9/11. Whitman herself said the agency's early testing of air and dust showed "no reason for concern."

 

That reassuring message had its roots in the White House.

 

Three years ago, the EPA's inspector general revealed that White House aides rewrote the agency's initial press releases to lull both the public and rescue workers into thinking everything was okay.

 

For example, in an EPA draft of a Sept. 13, 2001, press statement, the White House removed the following words - "Even at low levels, EPA considers asbestos hazardous" - and inserted a more benign statement: "Monitoring and sampling ... have been very reassuring about potential exposure of rescue crews and the public to environmental contaminants."

 

City Hall, however, didn't need the EPA or the White House to reveal a major contamination problem.

 

A city Department of Environmental Protection spokesman told The News on Sept. 17, 2001, that "no levels of asbestos or any pollutants that raise concern" had been found.

 

Another lie.

 

In February 2002, the agency finally released the results of its own early testing. It turned out that 27 of DEP's first 38 outdoor tests detected asbestos levels higher than the agency's safety threshold.

 

You'd think that five years after that horrible day, our leaders - from the White House on down - would stop the lies.

Originally published on September 9, 2006

 

==========================

 

http://www.nydailynews.com/09-09-2006/news/story/450755p-379408c.html

 

Daily News

 

I also became sick, sez top Rudy aide

BY DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

 

In the days after 9/11, former Deputy Mayor Joe Lhota was among the highest-ranking city officials at Ground Zero - a place he visited often during eight months of cleanup.

But now Lhota, like so many others who responded to the tragedy, is sick with a life-threatening disease that he believes was caused by his time at Ground Zero.

 

"Do I think it was linked? Yeah, I do," Lhota, 52, told the Daily News...

 

"...It is the responsibility of government - city, state and federal - to work together to take care of the men and women who worked on that Pile," Lhota said. "We shouldn't be fighting on this issue."

 

Lhota also hit back at charges - lobbed by former Environmental Protection Agency head Christie Whitman on this Sunday's "60 Minutes" - that the city knew air quality on the pile was unsafe and should have forced rescuers to wear respirators.

"The comments she has made to '60 Minutes' are grossly inconsistent with the comments she made in 2001," said Lhota, referring to Whitman's repeated assurances then that the city's air was safe to breathe.

 

Originally published on September 9, 2006

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