Feds Avoid Linking WTC Air to Rescue Worker Deaths

The Federal government has decided that it won’t standardize guidelines for autopsies that could link the poisoned air around the World Trade Center to the later deaths of the rescue workers at the site. On Friday, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health posted a note on its website saying that it would “pursue other avenues for documenting long-term health effects from exposure to air contaminants from the World Trade Center disaster.” Apparently, the NIOSH feared the data collected would be “misinterpreted.” The word “cover-up” springs readily to mind.

The federal government made every effort after it failed to stop the Al Qaeda on lower Manhattan to assure everyone that the air was safe to breathe. Former EPA boss Christie Todd Whitman remains at large, and the White House seems intent on making sure she stays out of jail. This journal has documented her criminal negligence, and it is clear from the record that it wasn’t just her idea.

Now, the feds have decided that standard autopsy procedures could illustrate just how bad the air was during those awful days down at The Pile. Standard procedures for this kind of thing result in standard data. Data, of course, tend to be analyzed and from them, people draw conclusions. And the draft document that the NIOSH canceled on Friday stated, “The pressures induced by implications of autopsy findings for compensation, litigation, and media scrutiny represent additional challenges to those engaged in postmortem evaluation of individuals who were exposed to the WTC collapse.”

Why cancel this draft document on a Friday afternoon? It’s a practice popular in Washington and on Wall Street among those PR flaks who haven’t figured out the internet yet. In the old days, a press release or report issued at 5 pm Friday would be overlooked by the press in the journos’ rush to start the week-end. They wouldn’t see it until Monday, and there was the Monday news to work on. The internet has changed all that. Congratulations to the NIOSH for making the lead story in this issue.

The government, having failed to protect the people of New York on September 11, 2001, aggravated the situation by lying about the environmental risks. Knowing the police, firefighters, iron workers and the rest who ran to do what they could, not one of them would have said, “no, I won’t go.” But they might have taken better care of themselves, brought respirators, worked shorter shifts. Thousands are going to die of World Trade Center Cough; New Yorkers live with that fact. The decision by NIOSH merely proves that the wall of silence from Washington continues.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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