I read that last year.

What I'm interested in is any opinions on Morell's slant/analysis. Do people here a with him in general, disagree, agree with some parts, etc. He came in for some heavy criticism for a while about it all.

Still haven't read Morrell's book


Didn't know where else to put this story so will put it here.

This is along the lines of my views about Colin Powell though. People LIE through their teeth, and make excuses, cop pleas or craft explanations later......after people have died.

I'm not going to understand security briefing or intelligence reports but I knew full well that it wasn't safe for people to return to their homes right after the collapses.


Former NJ governor and EPA head admits she was wrong to tell people that it was safe to return home to ground zero area after 911.VERY long article.



https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016...ne-todd-whitman


Christine Todd Whitman, who as head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under George W Bush at the time of the 9/11 attacks told the public the air around Ground Zero in New York was safe to breathe, has admitted for the first time she was wrong.
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Among those who were exposed to toxins released when the World Trade Center collapsed, the toll of illness and death continues to rise.

Speaking to the Guardian for a report on the growing health crisis to be published on Sunday, the 15th anniversary of the attacks, Whitman made an unprecedented apology to those affected but denied she had ever lied about the air quality or known at the time it was dangerous.

“Whatever we got wrong, we should acknowledge and people should be helped,” she said, adding that she still “feels awful” about the tragedy and its aftermath.

“I’m very sorry that people are sick,” she said. “I’m very sorry that people are dying and if the EPA and I in any way contributed to that, I’m sorry. We did the very best we could at the time with the knowledge we had.”

She added: “Every time it comes around to the anniversary I cringe, because I know people will bring up my name, they blame me, they say that I lied and that people died because I lied, [they say] people have died because I made a mistake.”

A week after two hijacked passenger jets were flown into the towers of the World Trade Center, killing 2,753 people – 184 died in the Pentagon in Washington DC and 40 were killed when a United Airlines plane came down in a field in Pennsylvania – Whitman issued a statement. It said: “I am glad to reassure the people of New York … that their air is safe to breathe and their water is safe to drink.”

She has always maintained that as head of the EPA she was simply passing on what government scientists were telling her, warning those working at Ground Zero itself to wear respirators but dismissing concerns over the surrounding area, which was engulfed in dust and ash.

Three days after the attacks, Whitman, who had previously been the Republican governor of New Jersey, told reporters: “The good news continues to be that air samples we have taken have all been at levels that cause us no concern.”

In 2003, the EPA inspector general criticized the agency’s handling of the crisis, finding that the EPA had no basis for its swift pronouncements about air quality. Politicians, including the then New York senator Hillary Clinton, laid into the Bush administration, accusing it of deceiving the public.

More than 37,000 people registered with the World Trade Center Health Program (WTCHP), a federal organisation set up in 2011 to oversee those affected by exposure to the toxins released at Ground Zero, have been declared sick. Many have chronic respiratory illnesses or cancer.

More than 1,100 people covered by the WTCHP have died. That number includes first responders who were at Ground Zero and people who lived and worked in the surrounding area.

A WTCHP spokeswoman, Christy Spring, said: “We have a list of health conditions that the program provides medical monitoring and treatment for, established by the government to have been related to exposure to the dust and debris from the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center.”

Whitman said: “If people are dying from this – and I have not seen the data – and they had believed everything was fine, then you have got to blame the message they were hearing, and what they were hearing was that the ambient air quality in Lower Manhattan at the time was OK.”

Jerrold Nadler, a veteran US congressman whose district covers the World Trade Center site, told the Guardian on Thursday that Whitman had never admitted she had been wrong about the air quality.

“She knew or should have known” the air was dangerous, he said.

In 2008, Nadler accused Whitman of causing thousands to suffer injury “and in some cases death” due to “unnecessary exposure to toxins released by the collapse of the World Trade Center buildings”.

In a ruling in a lawsuit brought by New York residents that year, a federal appeals court ruled that Whitman could not be held liable for health problems caused by the air around Ground Zero.

-continued-


On Friday, Whitman questioned the level of proof that the air made people sick, but said: “If this is a direct relation, we all screwed up.” She thought she was right at the time, she said, but added: “I can believe that the scientists may not have had all the information they needed.”

Shortly after the attack on New York, Whitman said it was known that asbestos, lead and other toxins were in the wreckage of the Twin Towers, known as “the pile”, and that those working on rescue and recovery there should wear respirators. Most did not.

As the city under Mayor Rudy Giuliani led the work at Ground Zero rather than the federal government, Whitman said, she had had no authority to enforce the recommended wearing of safety equipment.

At the time, she said that beyond the pile, in the surrounding neighborhoods and the rest of Manhattan, the air did “not pose a public health hazard”.

==

Whitman quit the EPA in 2003.

In 2007 she admitted the real reason why she quit.

from washington post 07/03/07

Revealed: Bush EPA chief says she quit after Cheney rewrote coal power plant rules

Christine Todd Whitman is the media darling of talk shows, the conservative former governor of New Jersey and head of President George W. Bush's Environmental Protection Agency who quit the Bush Administration to "spend more time with her family."

Evidently, that's not true.

In a groundbreaking article today by the Washington Post, the paper alleges that Whitman left the Administration because they pressured her to accept pro-industry coal power plant rules which threatened ghoulish levels of air pollution.

After industry officials complained to Vice President Cheney about Clinton-era rules requiring plants to update their technology when they conducted routine maintenance to comply with air quality standards, Cheney turned to Whitman, she said.

Whitman told the Post she'd "been stunned by what she viewed as an unquestioned belief that EPA's regulations were primarily to blame for keeping companies from building new power plants."

"I was upset, mad, offended that there seemed to be so much head-nodding around the table," she said. She said she had to fight "tooth and nail" to keep Cheney from turning over the rewriting of the rules to the Energy Department.

Whitman says she wanted a return to Bush's "Clear Skies" initiative, but that went nowhere.

Whitman brought two folders to show President Bush. The first was 2 1/2 inches thick, detailing the dangers of raising legal levels of arsenic in drinking water -- another Administration proposal. She pointed to a folder she'd brought "four or five times as thick."

"If you think arsenic was bad," she recalled telling Bush, "look at what has already been written about this."

Nothing changed. After the EPA rewrote the coal power plant standards, the White House essentially rewrote the rules to favor industry. Whitman said she'd had enough.

"I just couldn't sign it," she told the Post. "The president has a right to have an administrator who could defend it, and I just couldn't."

Soon thereafter, a federal appeals court found that the rule change violated the Clean Air Act -- according to the paper, the judges said the administration had redefined the law in a way that could be valid "only in a Humpty-Dumpty world."

Powell interview on Meet The Press

10/19/08

Gets, Interesting on Whitman and the EPA. Were government scientists being deceptive or relying on old technology? Today's tech is so much more advanced than 15 years ago. I'm sure there was also pressure from the locals themselves to return to their homes. It's a tough situation. Would like to see comparative stats for the health conditions too since there have been bogus claims on both sides.

The second piece from the Washington Post, didn't see where it asked for comments from Cheney. Always should include both sides, especially if the writer is making negative allegations. I looked in the original article ("Leaving No Tracks", June 27, 2007) and one of its major sources for that section is a lobbyist and another is a Florida law professor who specializes in the endangered species act, both of whom had an anti-Bush agenda. So I have to wonder how did the writers get all this inside information? The writers quote Whitman but doesn't mention that they actually interviewed her. So it makes it hard to tell if the article is accurate or a hit piece.

F1,


I forgot to cross my Ts and dot my I's.



In Whitman's "apology",I looked for wording that mentioned the limitations of the equipment circa 2001. Whitman didn't make that claim.
=
In 2003,EPA inspector General issued a report that said that White House "convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones" by having the National Security Council control EPA communications after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

"When EPA made a Sept. 18 announcement that the air was 'safe' to breathe, the agency did not have sufficient data and analyses to make the statement," the report says, adding that the EPA had yet to adequately monitor air quality for contaminants such as PCBs, soot and dioxin.

In all, the EPA issued five news releases within 10 days of the attacks and four more by the end of 2001 reassuring the public about air quality. But it wasn't until June 2002 that the EPA determined that air quality had returned to pre-Sept. 11 levels -- well after respiratory ailments and other problems began to surface in hundreds of workers cleaning dusty offices and apartments.
=

AP article here

http://www.seattlepi.com/national/article/White-House-edited-EPA-s-9-11-reports-1122465.php


EPA Inspector General report here
https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2015-10/documents/wtc_report_20030821.pdf

I think the report says that White House actions were done for "national security" issues.

People are expendable to the govt. Normally it's poor people who take the hit. The residents of lower Manhattan are generally wealthy people and I remember that one of their groups hired a private "air quality"consultant who told them that in no way was it safe for them to return to their homes. Poor people wouldn't have had the option of hiring an expert and being able to afford lodging while waiting to move back home.



==

Good points about the Washington Times article. Ir does quote Christie but doesn't detail where the quotes come from.

here is a Q and A Whitman did with the local newspaper, The Star Ledger in 2012

http://blog.nj.com/njv_editorial_page/2012/12/former_gov_christie_whitman_on.html

Q. Let’s talk about the environment: You said in a 2007 Washington Post interview that you resigned as EPA director because Vice President Dick Cheney insisted on easing air pollution rules.

A. I didn’t say it that way. But that was the final straw.

reagan was a piece of shit.

He worked for the banks. He got the ball rolling for nafta and shipping jobs out of this country---and the third world was the goal let's not kid ourselves. Hello credit card industry.

Anyone who thinks reagan was anything other than a corporate pig should do some reading. He was a master at pissing down your back and telling you it was raining.

yes, yes, finally someone who shares my views! this guy was an ignorant ass, he was responsible for the savins and loan collapses because his aides brought it on, all he was doing when all this was coming down, was eating jelly beans, he was the countrys biggest union buster, he had alzhiemers from day one. biggest political puppet in U.S. history.

I hope the motherfucker burns in hell next to the bankster pieces of shit he worked for

he sold out the screen actors guild. depriving them of residuals just so he could get a job on death valley days,
he worked for anybody who would throw him a bone, unprincipled,
corrupt, and a complete moron.

You mean how like the Clintons work for bankers and big corporate interests? They'll probably be in a hotter level of Hell.

Yes!

binnie your right .reagan was a crook and the bushes just followed suit .all that data that faithful put out there is just words he found online. i been in the ghetto's across u.s.a. n.y. to california .the 80's were drug infested in the black hoods