White House Deceit Covered Up 9/11 Truths

By: Marie Cocco

The thing you have to remember, when you see in black and white the hogwash the Bush White House forced the Environmental Protection Agency to tell the people of Lower Manhattan after their neighborhood was attacked by terrorists, is that the scandal did not begin with fibbing about whether the air was safe to breathe.

No. The cornerstone of the edifice of deception about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, was laid that morning aboard Air Force One. "No warnings", White House spokesman Ari Fleischer declared when asked if the President had been shown a sign that terrorists might strike with catastrophic fury.

We know now there were months of warnings, fearful cries rising up from the intelligence agencies that a horror could unfold. The FBI had provided the White House with analysis of "patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks", according to the joint congressional committee that probed intelligence failures before 9/11.

How do you stack this up alongside the asthma cases and the chronic coughs and the nagging concern of people who don't know if cancer is in their family's future because asbestos, or some other toxin that spewed from Ground Zero, still is embedded in their homes and schools and in the office carpet?

Well, we know now that the White House treated the well-being of the people who live and work in Lower Manhattan as it does everything else. It was not a public-health concern to be addressed, but a political problem to be managed. Through deceit, if necessary.

At the direction of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, the EPA's inspector general has revealed, the agency that's supposed to protect the public health against environmental hazards added "reassuring statements" to its press releases in the days after the terrorist attack, and deleted "cautionary ones".

The EPA wanted to tell residents to obtain "professional cleaning" - that is, environmentally safe cleaning - to remove from their homes tons of dust containing asbestos, dioxin, lead, pulverized plastics, and steel and glass. The White House removed this from a press release.

The EPA wanted to caution about the health risks to "sensitive populations" - the elderly, kids, and those already suffering from respiratory problems. The White House said no.

The EPA, as a matter of policy, says there is "no safe level of exposure to asbestos", and issued cautions after the great skyscrapers fell. But the White House rewrote a draft EPA press release that initially had said some dust samples from Lower Manhattan showed asbestos at unsafe levels. It changed this to say there was "not a cause for public concern".

A desire to reopen Wall Street and unspecified "national security" concerns were cited by EPA officials as reasons the White House wanted the news upbeat. White House officials involved in the rewrite "chose not to meet with us", the EPA inspector general said.

"People say: 'Are you shocked?' No. I'm not shocked at all", said Madelyn Wils, who chairs the community board in the neighborhood. About a third of her constituents, she said, have developed breathing problems since the attack.

New York lawmakers call for hearings and investigations, but they do not honestly expect them. Congress is controlled by the President's party and has scant interest. The Justice Department, asked by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan) to probe the political meddling, is headed by John Ashcroft. At the moment, Ashcroft is promoting wider government snooping as an antidote to terror.

"In effect, what they said was it's worthwhile to sacrifice the lives of New Yorkers in order to get the economy going faster", Nadler said in an interview.

The EPA and White House reject the report's findings. "They weren't rewritten by the White House at all", acting EPA Administrator Marianne Horinko said in an interview.

How to explain why the inspector general devoted almost an entire chapter to the political editing? It is illustrated with charts. They line up the EPA's cautious words alongside the White House happy talk.

We will likely get no real answers about why this happened, nor assurances it won't happen again. As with so much else, this administration just doesn't think we deserve them.