It was October 6, 2004, three years after Ernie Vallebuona's three-month stint as a rescue and recovery worker at ground zero in the wake of the 9-11 terrorist attacks, and he was hunched over and trembling, racked by a pain like nothing he had experienced in his 40 years of sound health. Vallebuona isn't much for complaining; what ailing cop is?
One week after that, he was at a Manhattan hospital, meeting his oncologist, hearing about the heavy-duty chemotherapy he would have to undergo over the next four months. At the visit, a nurse explained he had an aggressive cancer, a rare stage-three, and asked a battery of questions.
Vallebuona answered no to all the questions. He had led a clean life; before becoming a cop, he'd worked in a bank.
This is the story of 9-11 and cancer.
To date, 75 recovery workers on or around what is now known as "the Pile" -- the rubble that remained after the World Trade Center towers collapsed on the morning of September 11, 2001 -- have been diagnosed with blood cell cancers that a half-dozen top doctors and epidemiologists have confirmed as having been likely caused by that exposure.
Those 75 cases have come to light in joint-action lawsuits filed against New York City on behalf of at least 8,500 recovery workers who suffer from various forms of lung illnesses and respiratory diseases and suggest a pattern too distinct to ignore. The basis for the suits stems from the plaintiffs' argument that the government, in a desperate attempt to revive downtown in the wake of the catastrophic events on 9-11, failed to protect workers from cancer-causing benzene, dioxin, and other hazardous chemicals that permeated the air for months. Officials made these failures worse by falsely reassuring New Yorkers that they faced no long-term dangers from exposure to the air lingering over ground zero.
"We are very encouraged that the results from our monitoring of air-quality and drinking-water conditions in both New York and near the Pentagon show that the public in these areas is not being exposed to excessive levels of asbestos or other harmful substances," Christine Todd Whitman, the then administrator of the EPA, told the citizens of New York City in a press release on September 18�only seven days after the attacks. "Given the scope of the tragedy from last week, I am glad to reassure the people of New York . . . that their air is safe to breathe and the water is safe to drink."
Those statements were not only false and misleading, but may even play into the basis for the city's
liability for millions of dollars in the recovery workers' lawsuits. Last February, U.S. District Judge Deborah Batts cited Whitman's false statements as the basis for allowing a different class-action lawsuit to proceed -- this one, against the EPA and Whitman, is on behalf of residents, office workers, and students from Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, many of whom suffer from respiratory illnesses as a result of 9-11."No reasonable person would have thought that telling thousands of people that it was safe to return to Lower Manhattan, while knowing that such return could pose long-term health risks and other dire consequences, was conduct sanctioned by our laws," Batts wrote in her February 2 ruling. "
Whitman's deliberate and misleading statements made to the press, where she reassured the public that the air was safe to breathe around Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, and that there would be no health risk presented to those returning to the areas, shocks the conscience."
...
In many ways,
these illnesses suggest the slow but deteriorating health issues that faced the atomic-bomb survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where thousands died in the years and decades that followed the United States' use of nuclear weapons. And that similarity has not been lost on David Worby, the 53-year-old attorney leading the joint-action suits on behalf of those workers who are already sick, and even dying.
"In the end," Worby declares, "our officials might be responsible for more deaths than Osama bin Laden on 9-11."
...
Of the 8,500 people now suing the city, 400, or about 5 percent, have cancer. The biggest group by far consists of people like Vallebuona, who have blood cell cancers. Seventy-five clients suffer from lymphoma, leukemia, multiple myeloma, and other blood cell cancers; most are men, aged 30 to 60, who appeared in perfect health just five years ago.
The field of cancer research is not known for consensus. But six prominent specialists on cancer and the link to toxins on the faculty of the nation's top medical schools and public health institutions all come to the same conclusions when told these statistics.
The average healthy adult person has a 20 percent risk of having cancer over a lifetime. Calculate that risk over five years--the time frame from the events of 9-11 until today--and it drops to about 1 percent. Yet 5 percent of the suits' workers--1 percent of the overall worker population--have already been diagnosed with malignancies.
And these patients don't include the thousands whose illnesses have yet to be recorded because they aren't participating in the lawsuits or in the World Trade Center medical-monitoring programs.
...
"Blood cancers are different," Specialist Francine Laden says, noting the tie between benzene and leukemia, as well as dioxin and lymphoma. "It's not beyond the realm of feasibility that these chemicals caused these cancers." David Ozonoff professor of environmental health at Boston University School of Public Health, puts it more firmly: "For an acute episode like this, it's definitely possible these blood cancers were caused by 9-11."
Ozonoff's colleague, Richard Clapp adds, "It's hard not to attribute these cancers to 9-11." His gut, he says, is telling him one thing: "We'll be seeing a cancer explosion from 9-11, and we're starting to see it today."
...
When NYPD officers Vallebuona and Walcott searched the rubble as part of the initial bucket brigade, they wore nothing over their faces but surgical masks. Respirator masks came weeks into their months-long recovery work; sometimes they came with the wrong filters.One day, he was sitting in the shed with his colleagues, eating candy bars and drinking sodas, when some FBI agents entered. They were dressed in full haz-mat suits, complete with head masks, which they had sealed shut with duct tape to ward off the fumes. As Walcott took in the scene, contrasting the well-protected FBI agents with the New York cops wearing respirator masks, one thought entered his mind: What is wrong with this picture?...
When it occurred to these responders that they might be sacrificing their health for the sake of the cleanup, as it did to anyone who came in contact with the foul-smelling smoke and dust, they took comfort in the official word at the time. I
n the immediate aftermath of 9-11, the EPA issued multiple statements on the air quality downtown. All were reassuring in nature. On September 18, the day after the New York Stock Exchange reopened for business, the EPA's Whitman said the air was safe to breathe.It has turned out those words were, in fact, false.
In August 2003, the EPA inspector general issued a scathing 155-page report concluding that the agency hadn't had the data to make such blanket declarations at that time. By then, more than a quarter of EPA samples showed unsafe levels of asbestos, and the agency had yet to complete tests for mercury, cadmium, lead, dioxin, and PCBs.
The inspector general's report went on to disclose another disconcerting fact, that the White House had pressured the EPA to sanitize its warnings about ground zero. The inspector general revealed that the White House Council on Environmental Quality had taken a red pen to the agency's press releases, adding reassuring statements and deleting cautionary ones, creating the overly rosy picture that the air was clean. In reality, the 9-11 fallout was like nothing anyone had been exposed to before.
Everything in the towers had been ground into dust--concrete, steel, glass, insulation, plastic, and computers. (Don't any of these THOUSANDS of people find that to be suspicious???????) Dust analyses would detect glass shards, cement particles, cellulose fibers, asbestos, and a mixture of harmful components, including lead, titanium, barium, and gypsum. In all, the dust contained more than 100 different compounds, some of which have never been identified. And then there were the fires that smoldered for three months. They gave off not only the putrid plume, but also a blast of carcinogens--asbestos, dioxin, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs. They also emitted benzene.
In one disturbing analysis done by the U.S. Geological Survey, the dust had such high alkalinity levels it rivaled liquid Drano.
Thomas Cahill, a physicist who sent a team to analyze the plume from a rooftop a mile away from ground zero, says he got worried once he noticed the color of the smoke had turned a fluorescent blue. That's a sure sign that ultra-fine particles (which can go deep into the lungs and enter the bloodstream) were coming off the Pile and permeating the air. When his team tested the plume, the scientists found higher levels of sulfuric acid, heavy metals, and other insoluble materials than anywhere else in the world, even in the Kuwaiti oil fields.
"These poor people are part of an enormous experiment, I think."
...
Five years after September 11, the Mount Sinai Medical Center released data from its WTC Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, which has tested 17,500 recovery workers to date.
In that analysis, doctors found that nearly 70 percent of the 9,500 subjects they surveyed experienced new or worsened respiratory symptoms at ground zero; close to 60 percent saw those symptoms persist for years.But at the Mount Sinai program (and at the WTC program of the FDNY, which declined to comment for this article), the link between the dust cloud and cancer is discussed more as a possibility than a reality.The WTC programs--funded by the federal government--have their share of critics, who wonder how interested the doctors are in the 9-11 and cancer issue. Al O'Leary, the spokesperson for the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, says that many of its members feel as if the doctors are ignoring the signs of a growing cancer cluster.
"Now, don't you think this is all very suspicious?" O'Leary asks. "The medical community needs to be more open-minded about what diseases can be caused by 9-11."Some cancer specialists agree. Hesdorffer, of Johns Hopkins, still remembers the reaction to his testimony before the Victim Compensation Fund, back in 2004. He was called back about a half-dozen times to explain why he would attribute the pancreatic cancer in his two patients to the dust cloud so soon after 9-11. It was as if no one wanted to make the connection; one patient lost his claim despite the doctor's opinion. "We're in this period where no one wants to accept the link," Hesdorffer observes. Maybe the official denial stems from economics, from a desire to limit th
e amount of money owed to the thousands who have lost their health. Or maybe it has to do with politics. Admitting a link, as he points out, "would mean that the fallout from 9-11 was a lot bigger than we'd thought."What it would mean is that people got cancer from government decisions. From the decision of Whitman to lie about the air quality in Lower Manhattan, which gave the recovery workers and many other New Yorkers a false sense of security. From the decision of the White House to put Wall Street ahead of public health, which the EPA inspector general found had influenced all those rosy statements. And from the decision to let workers toil without proper respirators for weeks, or without any respirators at all.
White House Fears ACLU CampaignKhaled El-Masri was innoncent when detained in a secret CIA prison. Now US civil liberties advocates are helping him take the intelligence service to court. His case is stirring up negative publicity for the Bush administration.
Illegal immigrants toiled for governorAs Governor Mitt Romney explores a presidential bid, he has grown outspoken in his criticism of illegal immigration. But, for a decade, the governor has used a landscaping company that relies heavily on workers like these, illegal Guatemalan immigrants, to maintain the grounds surrounding his pink Colonial house on Marsh Street in Belmont.
Facing Fierce Protest, Mexico's Calderon Takes Power in Unprecedented Midnight Ceremony; Opposition Lawmakers Vow to Block Inauguration
Felipe Calderon has taken over as Mexico's president in an unusual midnight ceremony at the presidential residence in Mexico City. Opposition lawmakers are vowing to physically block him from being inaugurated in Congress. Meanwhile, tension remains high in the southern state of Oaxaca where the federal police are attempting to crush a popular uprising.
Mexican president Vicente Fox transferred power to Felipe Calderon in a midnight ceremony today ahead of massive protests against Calderon’'s inauguration. Opposition lawmakers are vowing to physically block Calderon from taking the constitutional oath before Congress. Supporters of presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador have accused Calderon of stealing July's election. Lopez Obrador is planning to lead a major protest in Mexico City. Calderon's inauguration comes as tensions remain high in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca where the federal police are attempting to crush a popular uprising.
Brawl breaks out in Mexico CongressFelipe Calderon took the oath of office as Mexico's president Friday amid jeers and whistles, in a chaotic ceremony before congress preceded by a brawl between lawmakers still divided over the nation's tight presidential election.
Hundreds to Attend Sean Bell Funeral, Community Leaders Criticize NYPD For Raids
Hundreds of people are expected to attend the funeral of Sean Bell today at the Community Church of Christ, in Jamaica, Queens. It is being held in the same church where the 23-year-old Bell was supposed to be married last Saturday to his high school sweetheart. But hours before the wedding ceremony, he was killed when five undercover police officers fired 50 shots at a car carrying him and two friends. They had just left his bachelors party at a club in Queens. Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield survived the shooting but remain hospitalized. None of the victims were armed.
The police officers have been widely criticized - even by Mayor Michael Bloomberg - of using excessive force. The Rev. Jesse Jackson said of the shooting, "this is a symbol, not an aberration. Our criminal justice system has broken down for black Americans and young black males."
Meanwhile, community leaders are now accusing the police of also harassing friends of Sean Bell when they raided an apartment in Queens and arrested four people who knew Bell.
Portland City Council passes resolution against Iraq war
The Portland City Council unanimously passed a long-discussed resolution today calling on the Bush administration to immediately withdraw U.S troops from Iraq.
Showdown?
In a motion last week, the Justice Department asked a federal judge to block any public testimony about the circumstances of Padilla's interrogations during the more than three years he was detained and interrogated in a military brig in South Carolina.
U.S. volunteer charged with terrorism in Uganda
An American volunteer worker appeared in a Ugandan court on Friday charged with terrorism after being caught with a submachinegun, a pistol and 38 rounds of ammunition, according to the charge sheet.
Iraq: Civil War or Divide and Conquer
Even high-school slackers have heard of the age-old strategy "Divide and Conquer." Is it possible that there are outside forces working this strategy in Iraq today? Perhaps rogue elements inside some government(s) would like to conquer Iraq for the oil, permanent bases, strategic position, etc.
Why is it that nobody in the TV news world can utter this possibility? Is it really that outrageous to think that perhaps the same people that lied to launch the war, are still lying today to prolong the war?
Let's look at a few "under-reported" stories:
FLASHBACK: British "Pseudo-Gang" Terrorists Exposed in Basra
Two British soldiers held by "Iraqi authorities" in Basra (also described as "Shiite militiamen" in the corporate media), and subsequently freed after the British stormed a police jail, were working undercover as bombers.
...Washington Post, where the following appears: "Iraqi security officials on Monday variously accused the two Britons they detained of shooting at Iraqi forces or trying to plant explosives. Photographs of the two men in custody showed them in civilian clothes."
The Herald notes the following: "Sources say the British soldiers, possibly members of the new Special Reconnaissance Regiment formed earlier this month to provide intelligence for SAS operations, were looking at infiltration of the city's police by the followers of the outspoken Shi'ite cleric, Moqtada al Sadr," thus admitting the soldiers worked undercover.
The 'Special Reconnaissance Regiment,' according to Regiments.org, "formed with HQ at Hereford from volunteers of other units to support international expeditionary operations in the fight against international terrorism, absorbing 14th Intelligence Company, Intelligence Corps, and releasing the SAS and SBS for the 'hard end' of missions."
Is it possible the 'hard end' of the 'mission' in Iraq is to discredit the resistance and sow chaos in the country by fronting pseudo-gang terrorist groups (or the variant 'pseudo-guerilla operations'), as the British have ample experience with elsewhere, notably in Kenya during the Mau Mau uprising and in Malaya?
"Pseudo operations are those in which government forces disguised as guerrillas, normally along with guerrilla defectors, operate as teams to infiltrate insurgent areas," writes Lawrence E. Cline for the U.S. Army War College External Research Associates Program. "This technique has been used by the security forces of several other countries in their operations, and typically it has been very successful."
Indeed, one long running pseudo op, Gladio, was so successful it managed to render a nominal Italian terrorist group, the Red Brigades (Brigate Rosse), into an excuse (after proper infiltration by agents provocateurs) to increase the power of reactionary forces in Italy and discredit socialist, communist, and even labor movements.
The British SAS honed its "counter-insurgency" techniques in Northern Ireland and there is no reason to believe it has refrained from doing so in Iraq. "Formed to perform acts of sabotage and assassination behind enemy lines during World War 2, the SAS evolved into a counter-insurgency regiment after the war," writes Sean Mac Mathuna. Mathuna cites a 1969 Army Training manual (British Army Land Operations Manual, volume 3, counter-revolutionary operations) that enumerates several "tasks," including:
the ambush and harassment of insurgents, the infiltration of sabotage, assassination and demolition parties into insurgent-held areas, border surveillance … liaison with, and organization of friendly guerrilla forces operating against the common enemy.
Examples "were found during the Mau-Mau rebellion in Kenya during the mid-fifties," Mathuna explains, "when SAS officers commanded some of the infamous 'pseudo gangs' that terrorized the civilian population," and
in Borneo, where they used cross-border operations to attack and destroy guerrilla bases; and in Aden in 1967, where they dressed as Arabs and would use an Army officer to lure Arab gunmen into a trap and kill them. To defeat the insurgents counter-terror must be deployed back at them—described by Ken Livingstone as "subverting the subverters"...
In order to "subvert the subverters" and discredit the IRA in Northern Ireland, the SAS formed the Military Reconnaissance Force (MRF), a covert pseudo-gang. "During the 1972 [IRA] ceasefire the MRF shot civilians from unmarked cars using IRA weapons," writes Mathuna. ''In November 1972 the Army admitted that the MRF had done this one three occasions. One of these incidents happened on 22nd June 1972—the day the IRA announced its intention to introduce a ceasefire. The shootings appear to have been done to discredit the IRA..."
It is clear now, that because elements within the security forces did not want a political deal with the IRA in the mid-seventies, and the military solution was only possible with a change at the top of the Labour leadership, MI5 and the SAS were prepared to use the same methods the IRA are condemned for - civilian deaths, assassinations, bombings and black propaganda—to bring this about.
In fact, so effective were these "military solution" pseudo-gang terrorist techniques the French employed them in Algeria and Vietnam. "The most widespread use of pseudo type operations was during the 'Battle of Algiers' in 1957," explains Lawrence E. Cline. "The principal French employer of covert agents in Algiers was the Fifth Bureau, the psychological warfare branch." The Fifth Bureau "planted incriminating forged documents, spread false rumours of treachery and fomented distrust among the [FLN, the National Liberation Front] ... As a frenzy of throat-cutting and disemboweling broke out among confused and suspicious FLN cadres, nationalist slaughtered nationalist from April to September 1957 and did France's work for her,” notes Cline, quoting Martin S. Alexander and J. F. V. Kieger ("France and the Algerian War: Strategy, Operations, and Diplomacy," Journal of Strategic Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2, June 2002, pp. 6-7).
Even though the Washington Post mentions two Brits were detained, apparently caught red-handed shooting Iraqi police and planting explosives, it does not bother to mention the SAS or its long and sordid history of engaging in covert pseudo-gang behavior and conclude the obvious: Britain, and the United States—the latter having admitted formulating the Proactive Preemptive Operations Group (P2OG) in 2002, a brain child of neocons staffing the Pentagon's Defense Science Board, designed to “stimulate reactions” on the part of "terrorists" (in Iraq, that would be the resistance)—are intimately involved in sowing chaos and spreading violence in Iraq and more than likely soon enough in Iran and Syria.
It is not surprising the corporate media in the United States and Britain would omit crucial details on this story. In order to get the whole story, we have to go elsewhere—for instance, China's Xinhuanet news agency. "Two persons wearing Arab uniforms opened fire at a police station in Basra. A police patrol followed the attackers and captured them to discover they were two British soldiers," an Interior Ministry source told Xinhua. "The two soldiers were using a civilian car packed with explosives, the source said."
So, the next time you read or hear about crazed "al-Qaeda in Iraq" terrorists blowing up children or desperate job applicants, keep in mind, according to the Iraqi Interior Ministry, the perpetrators may very well be British SAS goons who cut their teeth killing Irish citizens.
SAS men get £100,000 to bribe Iraqi fighters
British Army officers in Iraq are being handed stashes of up to £100,000 in cash for 'operational expenses' without formal controls on how it is spent.
FLASHBACK: British military investigator found hung in Basra
In recent weeks, Masters was thought to have been involved in the investigation into the events of September 19, when Iraqi police arrested two British undercover Special Air Service (SAS) officers in Basra.
According to the BBC, the SAS men were disguised as Arabs and were travelling in an unmarked car containing 'weapons, explosives and communications gear' when they were challenged at an Iraqi security checkpoint.
Bush's Body Language Says "I'm Afraid"
President Bush's face expressed fear in dozens of different ways at his press conference in Amman. For President Bush, fear looks like a slight widening of the eyes together with a slightly crooked half-grimace in his mouth. It is a look that sent shivers through my spine when I saw it in the C-SPAN video--the look of a man who not only does not understand the answers to the questions being asked, but does not understand the reason they are being asked in the first place.
Robert Fisk: Like Hitler and Brezhnev, Bush is in denial
More than half a million deaths, an army trapped in the largest military debacle since Vietnam, a Middle East policy already buried in the sands of Mesopotamia - and still George W Bush is in denial. How does he do it? How does he persuade himself - as he apparently did in Amman yesterday - that the United States will stay in Iraq "until the job is complete"? The "job" - Washington's project to reshape the Middle East in its own and Israel's image - is long dead, its very neoconservative originators disavowing their hopeless political aims and blaming Bush, along with the Iraqis of course, for their disaster.
Maliki's snub reverberates through Middle East
That startling show of mistrust in a neighbor led to a cancellation of a meeting between the three leaders Wednesday night and sent a cold shiver across the Middle East on Thursday, raising fears of a region-wide Sunni-Shiite split that the United States may be powerless to control and Iran could benefit from.
Idea of Rapid Withdrawal From Iraq Seems to Fade
The Washington Post also reports the Bush administration is considering a plan to drop reconciliation efforts with Sunni groups and instead prioritize relations with the Shiite and Kurdish groups who dominate Iraq’s government. Insiders call the proposal the 'eighty percent' solution because it would effectively abandon the five million Sunnis who comprise twenty-percent of Iraq's population.
In Baghdad, an estimated two thousand people demonstrated Thursday against the arrest of a pregnant Iraqi woman by US troops. The woman -- Adhraa Hussein Awdas – was reportedly taken from her home in western Baghdad. The marchers issued violent threats and called on the Iraqi government to ban the arrest of Iraqi women by foreign soldiers. Demonstrators said three people were later wounded when Iraqi troops opened fire on their protest.
Iraq’s Interior Ministry has established a new unit to monitor journalists and their news coverage.
In Venezuela, voters go to the polls Sunday in Venezuela's presidential elections. The latest polls show president Hugo Chavez holds a thirty-point lead over his main rival, Manuel Rosales. On Thursday, Chavez said authorities had thwarted a plot by what he called "fascist militants" to shoot Rosales and then blame it on Chavez's government. At a news conference in Caracas, Chavez also talked about President Bush and the Republicans' recent loss in the mid-term elections.
On Nov. 11, the United States for the 38th time since 1972 used its veto in the UN Security Council to protect Israel from condemnation for murdering Palestinian civilians in the Gaza town of Beit Hanoun.
In the Occupied Territories, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has declared talks over a Palestinian unity government with Hamas have reached a dead end. Abbas is now faced with the choice of firing the Hamas-led government or staging a referendum on whether to hold early elections. The collapse of talks comes after Abbas failed to persuade the Bush administration to end the international aid freeze on the Palestinian government. On Thursday, Rice said the US stance is unchanged.
In tens of thousands of homes in the West Bank live others, who may have not ended up in the hospital, but who every day accumulate harsh impressions of the nature and behavior of almost the only Israelis whom they encounter - the soldiers at the checkpoints. The non-Palestinians who pass through the checkpoints can also reach a similar conclusion - that most of the soldiers stationed at them are crude, arrogant, boastful and definitely hardhearted. All too often it appears that the soldiers intentionally cause the line of cars and people to dawdle at a checkpoint for a very long time. All too often they are seen laughing and grinning at the sight of the hundreds of people jostling and crowding in the slow line behind the narrow inspection turnstile.
Meanwhile, former Israel Defense Forces chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon is denying reports he fled New Zealand this week after he was ordered arrested on charges of war crimes.
Ya'lon is also the target of a lawsuit here in the United States for ordering Israel’s bombing of a UN compound in Lebanon in 1996. The attack killed more than one hundred civilians. Ya'alon is currently a 'Distinguished Fellow' at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
Attorney-General Michael Cullen has over-ruled a District Court judge's decision to issue an arrest warrant against a visiting former Israeli general the judge believed was answerable for Middle East war crimes.<
The United Nations has launched a four billion dollar appeal to the world’s richest countries for humanitarian emergencies. Most of the donations would go to Africa, including one billion dollars for the war-ravaged Sudan. UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urged rich countries to improve on previous donations.
In Britain, new video has surfaced of Alexander Litvinenko just weeks before his death. Litvinenko is the Russian spy who died last week of an apparent poisoning. He had been investigating the death of Anna Politkovskaya -- the Russian journalist and government critic shot dead at her Moscow apartment in October. The new video was taken at a journalists' event in London on October 19th. Litvinenko accuses Russian President Vladimir Putin of ordering Politkovskaya’s murder.
The US government has announced it will test an airport screening system this month that takes X-ray photos of travelers in an attempt to find weapons. The test will be launched at the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. Manufacturers say the machine blurs or shades images to obscure body parts and medical devices. The American Civil Liberties Union has labeled the X-raying a “virtual strip search.”
