Irony on the rocks with a twist...

We all remember the images of Wall Street opening a week after 9/11, of the search and recovery efforts at Ground Zero, of men and women returning to workplaces coated with fine grey dust, and schoolchildren going back to public schools in Lower Manhattan. Now this corporate/government "rush to return to normalcy" plan has brought upon us yet another burden for us to bear, proving once again that our government, and multinational corporations, care more about their profit margins than they do about human beings.

It turns out that the first responders, search and recovery, investigators, students and workers at nearby buildings, cleanup crews, and students at lower Manhattan schools, near Ground Zero weren't given adequate warnings, or protection against the hazards of the dust, and now thousands of them are coming down with lung ailments, heart ailments, organ failures, even cancer and they are being run through the "Bureacuractic Denial Factory" by both the Feds, and New York State governments as they try to get them to pay for their mounting medical problems:

A study to be published in the February edition of Environmental Science and Technology shows the dust released by the collapse of the World Trade Center may not prove as dangerous as previously thought.

The study, funded by the American Chemical Society, found that 99 percent of the dust particles in the cloud were greater than 10 microns in width – large enough to get stuck in the upper respiratory tract and thus be quickly expelled.

"In the early part of the event, people were exposed to a very complex mixture of dust and smoke," said Dr. Paul Lioy, associate director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute, run by Rutgers University and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey. Lioy is one of the principal authors of the study.

http://www.disasternews.net/news/news.php?articleid=1694

“An estimated 40,000 rescue and recovery workers were exposed to caustic dust and airborne toxic pollutants following 9/11,” says Philip Landrigan, of the department of community and preventative medicine at Mount Sinai.

The study is the largest conducted so far, involving 9500 workers at ground zero. It found that almost 70% of these had a new or substantially worsened respiratory problem as a result of breathing in dust from the collapsed buildings. One-third had diminished lung capacity.

http://www.sqlspace.com/9-11-responders-still-struggling-to-breathe-easy-vt34270.html?start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=&sid=08aab0434f0679f67ff6443d55876b55

Nearly seven out of 10 Ground Zero workers have suffered lung problems during or after their work at the site, according to a study of health effects related to the 11 September 2001 attacks.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/5295158.stm

Just days after September 11, 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency assured the public that there should be no concern about any health hazards associated with exposure to smoke and debris in lower Manhattan. This disturbing documentary asks whether the EPA’s pronouncement was based on science or politics. Now many of the first-responders who risked their lives within that toxic chemical soup are seriously ill or dying. Filmmaker Heidi Dehncke-Fisher and producer Bruce Kennedy reveal how 9/11’s latest victims are America’s forgotten heroes.

http://www.sundancechannel.com/film/?ixFilmID=7283

Alex Sanchez likes to say he's "living proof" the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's response to the September 11 terrorist attacks bordered on the criminal. Sanchez was exposed to dust from the World Trade Center disaster as a cleanup worker in skyscrapers around ground zero. He spent seven months enveloped in the lethal material, wiping it from cubicles, blowing it out of vents. It stung his throat, burned his eyes, and choked his lungs.

http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0536,tracker_writer,67520,.html

One of the people who assured New Yorkers that the air was likely safe after the 9/11 tragedy now has second thoughts, one day after a study was released that shows a majority of those who worked at ground zero now have some kind of lung problems.

Christie Whitman, who was an administrator with the Environmental Protection Agency in 2001, said one week after the attacks that, "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 breath and their water is safe to drink," she added.

The study, from the Mount Sinai Medical Center, says nearly 70 percent of the rescue and cleanup workers who toiled in the dust and fumes at ground zero have had trouble breathing, and many will probably be sick for the rest of their lives, doctors said Tuesday in releasing results of the biggest Sept. 11, 2001, health study yet.

http://www.wnbc.com/news/9798821/detail.html

According to a new report on the health effects of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City, 70% of the rescue personnel and workers who responded to the disaster suffered from lung problems during and after the recovery efforts. For some those problems persisted for at least two-and-a-half years after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and experts are not surprised.

Five years after the 9/11 attacks many survivors have reported new or worsened sinus or nasal problems along with high levels of psychological distress.

http://www.news-medical.net/?id=19930

Further Resources

http://www.emsresponder.com/article/article.jsp?siteSection=1&id=2836

http://ww4report.com/node/2450

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/041406L.shtml

http://www.sundancechannel.com/gallery/?ixContent=9625&ixAlbum=1

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/arts/television/11dust.html?ei=5070&en=f1b0f5201712a121&ex=1158724800&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1158632016-6iJt5veSTKgSWeMqh3dlEg

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/07/60minutes/main1982332.shtml

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0210-05.htm

http://lungdiseases.about.com/od/generalinformation1/a/wtc_health_plan.htm

http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=63928

TANSTAAFL!

©J.S.Brown 2004-2006

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How much is enough? How can our thinly-veiled desire for vengeance, masquerading as justice, ever hope to vindicate the 3000 human lives, cruelly snuffed by acts of cowardice and desperation? We have long considered acts of terror perpetrated against civilians to be the ultimate evil, yet do we truly believe our enemies consider their acts any more or less “evil” than the indiscriminant bombing of Afghans, Iraqis, or Lebanese civilians? Where is the line drawn that determines what constitutes killing in the name of self defense, and killing in the name of a cause? Does our might make it right to kill as we see fit in order to force others to acquiesce? Is our idealology, our ethics, our morals, so much better than those of others, that we have the right to be judge, jury, and executioner of other cultures?

Nearly all nations have faced unprovoked attacks, and most have responded militarily as a matter of course, when do we start to question whether this response is absolutely necessary? There are those who would argue failure to respond in kind shows weakness, however, is it weakness to act better than our enemies? Is it weakness to measure our responses by whom it is, and why, we have been attacked? Is it wrong to build international support to counter threats of domestic and global terrorism? Is it wrong to expect action based on rationality rather than the same old “cowboy diplomacy?” Why should we wait for history to be the judge? Perhaps history can teach us something about why we are where we are today.

For the past 60 years, the United States has practiced a peculiar form of diplomacy around the world. For much of that time, our primary focus seemed to be in stopping the global spread of Soviet-communism. In this quest, we have allied ourselves with despots and tyrants, installed puppet governments, given out huge amounts of foreign aid, provided military training, weapons, and vehicles, and entered into any number of “black” arrangements where American moral and ethical standards were significantly undermined. While evidence is clearly available, we need only look back a mere 30 years to CIA money, weapons, and training, provided to Afghani rebels fighting a Soviet invasion. Some of this went to a group of rebels led by Osama Bin Laden himself. We provided similar support to Iraq during the Iraq-Iran war of the 1980’s, including providing Iraq with chemical munitions (thanks in great part to men like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfield). We have long supported Israel in its great struggle for survival; surrounded on three sides by nation-states bent upon its total annihilation. To all these ends, we have supported and condoned, the use of WMD’s on civilian populations, we have stood by as men, women, and children were brutalized, tortured, and killed, and we allowed ourselves the luxury of believing we were somehow part of the “…greater good.” But were we?

If we truly believe the taking of innocent lives to be evil, then how can we allow ourselves to be associated with it? How can we justify to our children that what we did was “more right” than what was done to us on 9/11? By what twist of words and “spin” can we continue to condone the slaughter of millions of innocent human lives around the world because a mere 3,000 of them were taken from us on one tragic and horrific day? How can we hope to build a better future, one with peace and prosperity for all humankind when in our grief, we condone the destruction of others? We cannot continue to live a lie. We cannot honor the memory of our loved ones, taken from us by those without remorse, by allowing our government to sanction the taking of more loved ones from others, the price is too high. There is no way to balance the scales through slaughter. We cannot justify our own acts of evil against others because evil was done to us. Either we are better than our enemies, or we become just like them.

"A patriot must be ready to defend his country against his government."
-Edward Abbey

TANSTAAFL!

©J.S.Brown 2004-2006

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