Friday, December 3rd 2010
New York Daily News

All of a sudden, Senate Republicans have gone on the attack against providing medical care and compensation to the Forgotten Victims of 9/11 with gross and insulting distortions of the truth.

The biggest lie in the propaganda that Republicans are disseminating to kill the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act: “Congress strongly supports the 9/11 heroes.”

Were that the case, Washington long ago would have met the national obligation to the rescue and recovery workers who responded after the terror attack and suffered serious illnesses and even death as a consequence.

It didn’t happen, largely because the same Republican forces - George W. Bush and countless GOP members of the House and Senate – resisted efforts even to recognize that lung diseases and other ailments were epidemic among thousands of responders.

Now, the House has passed the Zadroga bill and Senate Democrats are pushing hard for a vote by the close of the lame-duck session. So, now, the Republicans, led by Wyoming Sen. Mike Enzi, are claiming falsely that the U.S. has done generous wonders for Ground Zero workers.

Worse, they intimate that those benefits that the Democrats managed to eke out are riddled with waste, fraud and abuse.

They should stand at the graves of all those whose lungs were fatally destroyed, starting with NYPD Detective James Zadroga, who labored for 450 hours at Ground Zero, and repeat the libel.

They should visit the clinics at Mount Sinai Medical Center where the wheezing sick come for treatment, and repeat the libel.

They should read the record of numerous House hearings that documented how soundly used all federal monies have been, and repeat the libel.

They dare not.

No, instead they distort the truth by pointing out that immediately after 9/11 the government established a compensation fund that paid out $7 billion. They leave out that the fund closed before all the illnesses now at issue became known.

And they torture decency by holding up the fact that some 10,000 responders and survivors will participate in a $625 million settlement of lawsuits. They leave out both that the settlements offered only part recompense and that the monies would be deducted from any payments awarded by a reopened compensation fund.

As for the thousands more who did not sue and are not party to the settlement, well, who cares about them?

Not Enzi and his Republicans.

By the latest head count, the 58 members of the Senate Democratic caucus are united behind the Zadroga bill. A lone Republican, Mark Kirk of Illinois, has joined in support, leaving the bill one Republican vote shy of passage. The lies are meant to give GOP members cover for betraying American citizens who volunteered in service to their country at a dark hour and paid dearly for it.

That is the disgraceful truth. It must not prevail.

Original article here.

Interview by John Bursill.

343 brave New York City Firefighters died on 9/11, this episode of Visibility 9/11 is dedicated to them!

If you have not heard the name Erik Lawyer it is one to remember. Erik is a full time Firefighter and is a new shinning light in the 9/11 Truth Movement. He has been impressing all he meets with his simple message demanding a thorough criminal forensic investigation of the 9/11 World Trade Center catastrophe. He and his fire-fighting comrades want the authorities to do their job and carry out an investigation in accordance with fire scene investigation protocols, that he and all US fire fighters adhere to religiously.

On 9/11 so many things happened for the first time and the one that is of greatest concern to Erik and his group, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth is the near complete destruction of evidence at this fire crime scene and the subsequent monumental cover up and obfuscation of the little remaining evidence.  Independently gathered evidence clearly demonstrates that incendiaries and explosives were used to facilitate the three WTC buildings destruction.  For more information, see the Visibility 9-11 Special Report, Thermite Fingerprint- The Loaded Gun of 9-11.

In this latest interview John and Erik talk about the future plans for Firefighters for 9/11 Truth and their achievements so far and we also talk about the strong bond being formed between ”Firefighters for 9/11 Truth” and the highly successful ”Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth”. Soon an exciting new video is to be produced by both groups providing an even better and broader video resource for public education than the current “9/11 – Blue Print for Truth”; while still sticking to a careful non-conspiratorial fact based approach.

Visibility 9/11 congratulates Erik and Firefighters for 9/11 Truth for their commitment to truth and justice in the face of personal attack and ridicule. As Erik has demonstrated in his Seattle Fire Station, ignorance is no match for hard evidence. It is a simple truth that all who dare to look at that evidence will concede there is a clear and present danger to the American public and the world if we do not find the real reasons for the three building collapses on 9/11. It is also very reassuring to see another group of professional 9/11 Truth Advocates being careful with what they say and do in the name of 9/11 Truth. Firefighters for 9/11 Truth will always put the victims and the first responders concerns and welfare first!

To assist the suffering first responders a ”Firefighters for 9/11 Truth” T’shirt can be bought here: http://firefightersfor911truth.org/?p=530

Related – Visibility 9-11 Welcomes Erik Lawyer, Fire Fighters for 9-11 Truth,  August 2008.

To listen to this program, click Play in the embedded player below. Click download if you would like to download the file for your media player or iPod.

Visibility 9-11 welcomes back Erik Lawyer the founder of Firefighters for 9-11 Truth Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

via: Facebook

FEAL GOOD FOUNDATION RESPONSE TO NEWS THAT THE PRESIDENT of the UNITED STATES DOES NOT SUPPORT H.R. 847

Dear Fellow First Responder:

As you may already know, today we have learned that President Barack Obama no longer supports H.R. 847, the Congressional bill that would guarantee funding for health care and research. While this news is stunning, and a complete reversal of his position on this bill during his 2008 presidential campaign, please be assured that the Feal Good Foundation alongside its friends in labor and the N.Y. Congressional Delegation will continue to fight for this bill and to advocate for full Presidential support. Our fight is not over.

Nearly eight and one half years ago we, the First Responder Community, demonstrated our strength, resilience and determination of spirit following September 11th. We must do so again. While the President’s current stance on H.R. 847 represents an obstacle, we have surmounted such obstacles before and will continue to overcome them now. “Never Forget” is more than a campaign slogan or bumper sticker to the men and women who bravely immersed themselves into the toxic Ground Zero air to save the lives of strangers and rebuild New York City and this country. We will “Never Forget” and today I tell all those opposed to H.R. 847 “We Will Never Give Up.”

H.R. 847 is about guaranteed health care treatment, monitoring and research; nothing more, nothing less. We have witnessed First Responder after First Responder fall victim to 9/11 illnesses over the past several years. Just this week another firefighter and friend perished as a result of his heroic actions. While the White House and detractors of H.R. 847 are quick to point out that treatment for First Responders currently exists at the Centers of Excellence, such arguments are missing the central mandate of the bill – guarantees!
The reluctance of the White House to support this bill merely 8 ½ years after the worst terrorist attack on United States soil merely solidifies the need for guaranteed care now. Shall we rely on “discretionary budgetary spending” twenty years from now when the World Trade Center attack is a distant memory to new administrations?
Are we to trust that presidents in the years to come will allocate sufficient funding for treatment and research when we are already being told that current administrations “don’t have the money to make us healthy? We cannot and will not give up hope that this government will recognize its moral imperative to care for the World Trade Center First Responders.

The Feal Good Foundation will not give up its efforts on behalf of the First Responders. It is our sincere hope that you will continue to join us in our quest for justice.

Sincerely,

John Feal

source: New York Daily News

by Michael McAuliff

CITY ‘SLAP’ AT 9/11 UNIFORMED HEROES
By Susan Edelman
March 15, 2009
New York Post

The city has asked a judge to toss out 9/11 claims by 4,600 cops, firefighters, and paramedics, arguing the “uniformed” personnel are not entitled to workplace protection under state labor laws.

The legal maneuver has infuriated Ground Zero responders, who called the city’s move “a slap in the face.”

New York’s Bravest and Finest fought smoldering fires at Ground Zero, dug for human remains and guarded the toxic disaster site for months, the city says. But they don’t get the same protections as manual laborers, mechanics and other “working men,” the city contends.

“The uniformed plaintiffs do not fall within the class of employees entitled to the protections of the labor law,” city lawyer James Tyrrell argues in a motion filed in Manhattan federal court.

Uniformed workers make up half of about 9,000 city employees, construction workers and others who have filed suits against the city in the World Trade Center cleanup.

If the city gets its way, NYPD and Port Authority cops, firefighters and EMTs would also be dismissed from claims against the city’s WTC contractors.

But a lawyer for the workers, Paul Napoli, said the city’s motion would unfairly “deprive uniformed service workers of basic occupational safety and health under established New York law.”

“I’m furious,” said ex-detective Mike Valentin, 45, who retired on disability from the NYPD in 2007 with severe lung disease and other ailments. He carries an oxygen tank, sleeps with a machine that helps him breathe, and was recently diagnosed with kidney disease.

“There is a special place in hell reserved for Mike Bloomberg,” said Valentin, a father of three who launched the 9/11 Police Aid Foundation to help other ill and struggling responders.

“The callous indifference shown by the mayor enrages me. It’s really sad that the city is protecting the contractors more than its unformed services.”

susan.edelman@nypost.com

This week Visibility 9-11 welcomes back to the program, PhD Physicist Steven E. Jones for an update on his ongoing research into clues hidden in the 9-11 dust. This powerful evidence, all of which is mentioned in a new paper at the Journal of 9-11 Studies titled Extremely high temperatures during the WTC destruction and was found in numerous samples of 9-11 dust collected from different locations around the WTC site. This research includes scientific evidence relating to iron-rich micro spheres, silicate spherules, shiny metallic and semi-transparent silicate-rich spherules, Molybdenum spherule, and bi-layered chips, red on one side and dark grey on the other, which Dr. Jones suspects and speculates to be unexploded Super Thermite, also known as Nano-Thermite. Research on the bi-layered chips is thus far not conclusive but research is ongoing.

Dr. Jones is a co-founder of Scholars for 9-11 Truth and Justice and co-founder and editor at the Journal of 9-11 Studies.

Intermission music by Experience KEF.

Ending music by Three Shoes Posse.

Get this episode here.

BETRAYED AGAIN: How Bush betrays the 9/11 first responders once more
February 26, 2008
By Sherman Yellen

It’s amazing. Just when you think there are no new depths of shamelessness and betrayal of trust to which the Bush administration can sink, they manage to sink deeper into unchartered infamy. Hold on now, I’m not even mad yet. I’m talking about the seventy seven percent cut in the medical assistance for 9/11 first responders in the current federal budget. Gravely ill firemen, police, and other workers who labored at that site, workers who have come down with life threatening cancers and respiratory illnesses linked to their heroic efforts at ground zero are being shafted once again.

In the name of full disclosure, I am not writing this from some disinterested “good citizen” viewpoint. I have a young nephew, John McNamarra, a heroic fireman who worked as a first responder at that site and who later volunteered for rescue work after Katrina in New Orleans. For the past few years he has been suffering from various cancers resulting from that work for which he is currently under treatment at Sloan Kettering. Last weekend he called me to talk about the government’s new betrayal. As the father of a one year old son, Jack, John is fighting the battle of his life, and there is no godly reason why men such as John have to fight the government as well for proper medical care and compensation. One pill – yes one small pill that reduces the agonizing nausea of his chemotherapy costs as much as a thousand dollars. Okay, I can rail about the greedy drug companies and their obscene profits, but my first concern is our government’s ingratitude and cruelty, something which the congress must address and remedy to help all these men and women.

As Representative Carolyn Maloney writes, “It’s shocking that the president would use his final budget to take an axe to 9/11 health care programs.” Ms. Maloney is a wonderful representative but her use of shocking seems naïve. Are you shocked? After Katrina? After Walter Reed? Not me. I recall that first lie told by the federal government about the risk at ground zero to workers, one that came through the Bush mouthpiece, Christie Todd Whitman, then head of the Environmental Protection Agency, now a lobbyist for nuclear power. This former New Jersey governor claimed that anyone in the area of ground zero, meaning not only the workers who worked in the rubble trying to rescue the buried and reclaim body parts, but the residents of the apartments in the area, were safe from the toxic fumes that filled the air for days, sometimes weeks. According to a later report of the New York City Department of Health “The collapse of the Twin Towers brought 200,000 tons of steel, 5,000 tons of asbestos, 12,000 miles of electric cables and 425,000 cubic yards of concrete crashing down into lower Manhattan… The combustion produced a toxic cauldron of concrete, dust, glass fibers, and cancer-causing asbestos, as well as particles of lead, chlorine…24 gallons of jet fuel, and burning plastics released carcinogens including dioxins etc.” Read the rest of this entry »

White House Molded EPA’s 9/11 Reports
Advisories Were Edited To Play Down Risk From Asbestos

WASHINGTON, Aug. 22, 2003
Original article here.

(CBS/AP) The Environmental Protection Agency’s internal watchdog says White House officials pressured the agency to prematurely assure the public that the air was safe to breathe a week after the World Trade Center collapse.

“Competing considerations, such as national security concerns and the desire to reopen Wall Street, also played a role in EPA’s air quality statements,” the report said.

The New York Times, which reported on the inspector general’s findings before they were made public, points out that officials from the EPA and from the White House criticized the report, saying investigators misunderstood the complexity of the situation after the terror attack.

The agency’s initial statements in the days following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks were not supported by proper air quality monitoring data and analysis, EPA’s inspector general, Nikki L. Tinsley, says in a 155-page report released late Thursday.

An email sent just one day after the attacks, from then-EPA Deputy Administrator Linda Fisher’s chief of staff to senior EPA officials, said “all statements to the media should be cleared” first by the National Security Council, the report says.

Approval from the NSC, which is chaired by President Bush and serves as his main forum for discussing national security and foreign policy matters with his senior aides and Cabinet, was arranged through an official with the White House Council on Environmental Quality,* the report said.

That council, which coordinates federal environmental efforts, in turn “convinced EPA to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones,” the inspector general found.

Read the rest of this entry »

Smearing a hero of 9/11
Friday, October 26th 2007, 4:00 AM

Editorial

There is mounting evidence that the city’s chief medical examiner libeled the memory of Detective James Zadroga by ruling that the cop’s long, arduous service at Ground Zero had nothing to do with his tragic death. Dr. Charles Hirsch appears to have committed a gross injustice that no apology can ever set right.

With the brutal, clinical efficiency of a man accustomed to working with flesh on ice, Hirsch last week summarily notified Zadroga’s family that, to a “certainty beyond doubt,” something other than breathing the toxic remains of the World Trade Center had turned the cop’s lungs to leather. Hirsch didn’t say publicly then what that fatal something might be. But now, the doctor has spoken.

Monstrously, Hirsch said yesterday that, in his opinion, Zadroga brought about his own demise by crushing pill medications and taking them intravenously. Writ large, Hirsch blamed the victim and, even worse, left the lingering, disgraceful implication that Zadroga was a drug abuser.

He wasn’t. And it is a sorry necessity to have to state those words about a dedicated cop and father of a young child, who worked for 450 hours in the thick of the poisonous cloud, began coughing after two weeks and suffered a steady, irrevocable descent to suffocation at age 34. Zadroga died despite excellent medical care, and his autopsy found that his lungs were filled with substances that hung in the air over The Pile. Among them, carbon, silica, calcium phosphate – found in concrete – talc and cellulose.

The New Jersey medical examiner who autopsied Zadroga concluded the toxins destroyed his lungs. Dr. Michael Baden, a former city chief medical examiner who is now the state police forensic pathologist, reviewed and confirmed the autopsy findings. And now Hirsch says that, beyond all question, he knows better.

All agree that crushing pills and injecting the powder can introduce talc and cellulose into the bloodstream. And all agree the substances can damage the lungs. Adding up those facts, and looking at microscopic slides of Zadroga’s tissues, Hirsch says he has proof positive that the fatal injury began with materials in Zadroga’s blood.

Baden, who is not being paid by Zadroga’s family, emphatically differs with Hirsch: “I don’t know what he would have to permit him to make the strong diagnosis he did, and whatever it is, he is wrong.” So much for Hirsch’s “certainty beyond doubt.”

As for substantiating the medical examiner’s judgment, his spokeswoman offered explanations that only made Hirsch’s conduct more outrageous. She said Hirsch is not questioning that Zadroga became ill at Ground Zero; he has only concluded that injecting crushed pills was the intervening cause of death.

Here, then, is Hirsch’s hypothesis for what happened: Zadroga serves his city and country valiantly, becomes agonizingly ill and injects painkillers. This is just a theory, because Zadroga’s family says no such injections ever took place. But let’s say Hirsch is right.

In that event, the truth is Zadroga – desperately ill, fighting for breath, heavily medicated and often out of touch with reality – tried to ease his own suffering as best he could.

Suffering that befell Zadroga only because he responded to 9/11.

Suffering brought on by inhaling the pulverized remains of the fallen twin towers.

Suffering that caused the death of a New York hero.

Suffering that was cavalierly trashed by a medical examiner whose continued tenure in office must be closely reviewed.

Original editorial here.

The Far-Reaching Health Effects of 9/11 Air Pollution
Discover Magazine

First the people in the towers died. Then the rescue workers. Now first responders are succumbing to a 9/11 illness. The next victims: tens of thousands of ordinary citizens who worked and lived in Lower Manhattan—all of whom were told that the air was safe.
While the people who died in the towers and the first responders have gotten much attention from the nation and the press—witness the lead feature from 60 Minutes last night on first responders—the ordinary citizens have gone relatively unnoticed.

So Discover has released a package that focuses directly on this final group of 9/11 victims. The first part is a feature story on how the federal and city governments did not live up to their responsibility to protect the people in Lower Manhattan from air pollution. The second is an interview with Philip Landrigan, the doctor in charge of monitoring the far-reaching health effects of 9/11 on people in New York.

Discover is also creating a forum for people to talk about health problems caused by the pollution from the collapse of the Twin Towers. We invite readers to include their comments on this subject below—either about effects on their own health or their thoughts on the issue and how it’s been handled.

We will gather the information presented in this forum and pass it along to medical authorities and members of Congress to help construct a clearer picture of the scope of the problem.

TWO 9/11-SICK COPS DIE
By LARRY CELONA

September 6, 2007 — Two more cops have died of 9/11-related lung cancer, according to their families.

Officer Frank Macari, 51, died on Monday, after a five-year battle with the disease.

Macari, a 13-year veteran of the force assigned to Brooklyn, developed a tumor on his leg in December 2001, after working at Ground Zero. He leaves a wife and stepdaughter.

Officer Madeline Caro, 41, a 16-year veteran, succumbed to lung cancer in July. Carlo, assigned to the South Bronx, also spent days at the World Trade Center site. She leaves a son and daughter.

Macari’s family will file papers, as Carlo’s family has done, to obtain line-of-duty benefits from the NYPD.

Meanwhile, the sixth annual NYPD 9/11 Memorial Weekend begins tomorrow with a 1 p.m. parade in lower Manhattan, ending at the police memorial wall at Liberty Street and South End Avenue. The weekend includes a Saturday-night concert at Town Hall in honor of the NYPD’s 9/11 victims. It stars tenor Ronan Tynan.