Bush keeps wanting to bring up 9/11.....OK!

[Bluebear]

White House Misled City on Post-9/11 Health Issues



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, "EPA's Response to the World Trade Center Collapse: Challenges, Successes and Areas for Improvement."

"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."

On the morning of Sept. 12, according to the report, the office of then-Administrator of the EPA Christie Whitman issued a memo: "All statements to the media should be cleared through the NSC before they are released." The 165-page report compares excerpts from EPA draft statements to the final versions, including these: The draft statement contained a warning from EPA scientists that homes and businesses near Ground Zero should be cleaned by professionals. Instead, the public was told to follow instructions from New York City officials.

Another draft statement raising concerns about "sensitive populations" such as asthma patients, the elderly and people with underlying respiratory diseases was deleted. Discovery of asbestos higher than safe levels in dust samples from lower Manhattan was changed to state that "samples confirm previous reports that ambient air quality meets OSHA standards and consequently is not a cause for public concern."

Language in an EPA draft stating that asbestos levels in some areas were three times higher than national standards was changed to "slightly above the 1 percent trigger for defining asbestos material."
This sentence was added to a Sept. 16 press release: "Our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York's financial district."

http://www.actupny.org/nyc/epa.html

[Amigust]

1. (Updated) And now doctors fear that more people could die from that

air pollution than from the attacks themselves.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/0912-01.htm

Sorry, didn't notice the original link wasn't good for the whole story. This one at Common Dreams is.

[gratuitous]

2. That will almost certainly be the case

As soon as I heard that asbestos had been used extensively in the structure of the towers, I knew that airborne particles would be thick and heavy in the area.

We will see dozens of cases of mesothelioma and asbestosis in this area every year for the rest of our lives.

[Bluebear]

3. But those cases will be "unrelated"