The health of thousands of Americans compromised to protect the EPA administrator’s corporate “friends”; (confirmed by EPA’s inspector general)* “far more contaminated than many Superfund sites, where respirators and moon suits are mandatory”
Worse, this proves to be Bush’s universal mission – carried out by all his appointees, all his administration and starting in late June 2008, he is dragging McCain into it!
from Crimes Against Nature, a book by Robert F. Kennedy
At the time of the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington, I had just opened an office at 115 Broadway, catty-corner to the World Trade Center. When my partner Kevin Madonna returned to the office in Novemmber, he suffered a burning throat, nausea, and a headache that was still pounding 24 hours after he left the site. Despite the EPA’s claims that the air was safe, Kevin refused to return, and we closed the office. Many workers did not have that option; their employers relied on the numerous EPA press releases beetween September 15 and December reassuring the public about downtown Manhattan’s wholesome air quality. On September 18, none other than EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman proclaimed, “I am glad to reassure the people of New York and Washington, D.C., that their air is safe to breathe. ” Not everyone bought the party line. New York’s Senator Hillary Clinton and Congressman Jerrold Nadler, whose district encompasses the World Trade Center site, asked the EPA’s ombudsman office to look into the matter. 5
The ombudsman’s office is an independent complaint deepartment within the EPA whose function is to give the public a voice in cleanups of major hazardous waste sites that otherwise might devolve into back room deals between regulators and polluters. Ombudsman investigators have a bloodhound’s nose for corruption, and the stench at the World Trade Center site set them to howling.
In particular, they knew that Christine Todd Whitman was juggling some heavy-duty conflicts of interest: Whitman’s husband has a deep and continuing financial involvement with Citigroup, which owns Travelers, one of the insurance companies responsible for compensating victims of the attack. Citiigroup stood to save hundreds of millions of dollars from Whitman’s assurances about safety: The faster people went back to their homes, the less Travelers would have to pay for alternative housing. Whitman and her husband were also major bondholders in the New York – New Jersey Port Authorrity, which owns the World Trade Center and might benefit from downgrading the risks.
The EPA’s ombudsman at the time was Robert Martin. He appointed a 30-year solid-waste veteran, Hugh Kaufman, a master engineer and policy analyst for the EPA’s Office of Solid Waste and Emergency Response, to work on Nadler and Clinton’s complaint. Kaufman and Martin discovered that Whittman had downplayed the risks of Ground Zero to the point of lying. They interviewed a large group of EPA employees and other scientists who felt that Ground Zero was far more contaminated than many Superfund sites, where respirators and moon suits are mandatory. They were alarmed that government offiicials were not advising appropriate precautions. When Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News started reporting Martin’s and Kaufman’s findings, the EPA blasted the claims as “irresponsiible.” In November 2001 Whitman removed Kaufman and Martin from the case and issued an order closing the ombudsman’s office. During a weekend in the following April, she sent five agents to confiscate Martin’s files and padlock his offfice. Exhausted from the battle, Martin resigned, hoping that Congress would step in. He’s still waiting.
Three months later Kaufman won a ruling by the Departtment of Labor, which found that there was “no evidence of a valid reason for his removal” and ordered him reinstated. Despite Kaufman’s victory the independent ombudsman’s office was effectively abolished.
The cat was out of the bag, however, and in August 2003, another watchdog within the EPA, the Office of the Inspector General, finally released a report that condemned the adminisstration’s handling of the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks. The inspector general’s report, based on the damning documents assembled by Kaufman and Martin, found that on the day that Whitman declared the air “safe,” the EPA had not yet received the results of the first tests for toxins like caddmium, chromium, dioxin, or PCBs. Days after the attack, the EPA announced that asbestos dust in the area was very low or entirely absent. In fact, more than 25 percent of the samples that the agency had collected around that time showed the presence of dangerous levels of asbestos.
The IG report found that White House officials had altered language in the EPA’s news releases to make them less alarming, pressuring the EPA “to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.” The White House blocked public access to raw data from the EPA’s air testing and ordered the agency to delete warnings advising “sensitive populations” to avoid exposure and reword its directive that all residents in the area have their apartments professionally cleaned of toxic dusts. The White House forced the EPA to add language to a press release announcing that “our tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work in New York’s financial disstrict” at a time when the EPA’s tests were showing levels of assbestos 200 to 300 percent above those considered safe by the agency. The EPA associate administrator admitted to the innspector general that the desire to reopen Wall Street was a connsideration when the press releases were being prepared. “EP A’s basic overriding message was that the public did not need to be concerned about airborne contaminants caused by the World Trade Center collapse,” says the IG report. ‘5
A subsequent newspaper story described “screaming teleephone calls” between EPA associate administrator Tina Kreisher and Sam Thernstrom, communications director for the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Kreisher, who now works as a speechwriter for Gale Norton, later acknowledged that she “felt extreme pressure” from . Thernstrom. ,6 Thernstrom’s boss was Council on Environmenntal Quality director James Connaughton, a former asbestos-industry lawyer who had left industry for “public service” three weeks before. According to the inspector general’s report, Connaughton did not want data on health hazards given to the public.
The government’s reassurances may have endangered the health of firefighters, police, construction workers, and resiidents, including schoolchildren. Testing by outside sources has since revealed that contaminant concentrations at Ground Zero were among the highest ever recorded. For example,
scientists from the University of California at Davis, who had conducted over 7,000 similar tests at contaminated sites worldwide, found particulates at levels they had never before seen. One study done by Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York found that 78 percent of rescue workers suffered lung aillments and 88 percent had ear, nose, and throat problems in the months following the attack; half of those still had persistent lung and respiratory symptoms 10 months later. 18
Dan Tishman, whose company, Tishman Construction, was involved in the reconstruction at 140 West Street; required his crews to wear respirators, but he recalls seeing many rescue and construction workers laboring unprotected – no doubt relying on the government’s assurances. “The frustrating thing,” Tishman lamented to me, “is that everyone just counts on the EPA to be the watchdog of public health. When that role is compromised, people can get hurt.”
“In the World Trade Center, the White House and the EPA were basically lying to the people of New York,” Kaufman said. “It’s public be damned at the EPA.” 20
Alas, this was not merely a desperate measure taken at a desperate time; this White House routinely goes to great lengths to withhold vital health information from the public. In May 2003, it blocked the EPA staff from publicly discussing contaamination by the chemical perchlorate-an ingredient in solid rocket fuel. In an apparent effort to please defense contractors, the administration also froze federal regulations on perchloorate, even as new research revealed that alarmingly high levels of the chemical-which can compromise fetal developmentthad been detected in water in more than 20 states. 2I
page 82
For nine months the White House Office of Science and Technology sat on a report exposing the frightening impact of mercury on our children’s health, finally releasing it in Februuary 2003.” Among the report’s findings was the disturbing fact that the bloodstreams of I in 12 American women are coursing with enough mercury to cause neurological damage, permanent IQ damage, and a grim inventory of other diseases in their unborn children. (A more recent EPA study has found that 1 in 6 women carry dangerous levels of mercury and that some 630,000 children born each year are at risk.)
Then, in March 2004, the administration compounded that cover-up by helping the tuna industry conceal from connsumers the true extent of mercury contamination in fish. Under pressure from tuna-industry lobbyists, the EPA and the FDA issued, instead, a mild warning about fish consumption by young children and women of childbearing age, after rejectting the recommendation of an FDA advisory committee. The advisory gently observes that albacore tuna “has more mercury than canned light tuna” but does not discuss frightening reesults of recent tests by the FDA that found canned albacore tuna to have about three times the mercury of canned light tuna, which itself is too contaminated for children or fertile women to eat frequently.
One member of the advisory committee, University of Ariizona toxicologist Vas Aposhian, quit in protest, pointing out that the panel of experts had advised warning children and childbearing women not to eat albacore tuna at all and to eat less light tuna than allowed by the advisory.26 “What is more important to the U.S.,” Aposhian asks, “the future mental health of young American children or the albacore tuna inndustry?”27
page 83
But of all the debates in the scientific arena, however, there is none in which the White House has cooked the books more than that of global warming. In the past three years the White House has altered, suppressed, or attempted to discredit close to a dozen major reports on the subject. These include a 100 year peer-reviewed study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, commissioned by the former president Bush in 1993 in his own effort to dodge what was already a virtual scientific consensus blaming industrial emissions for global warming. The list also includes major long-term studies by the federal government’s National Academy of Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), as well as a 2002 collaborative report by scientists at all three of those agencies.
In September 2002, administration censors released the annnual EPA report on air pollution without the agency’s usual update on global warming, that section having been deleted by Bush appointees at the White House.