Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Yet More Allawi, Allawi, Allawi

More Allawi-for-PM-Again speculation, this time from Marc Lynch on the other side of the Pond. (h/p Laura Rozen)

Also, Ms. Rozen points out, Time is now running a novel endorsement story on Mr. Allawi, from the people who brought you Saddam Hussein. Wouldn’t it be the ultimate irony to see the Bush Administration and the Baath Party together (again, like in the 80's) behind a ‘strong leader’ for Iraq?

The Air We Breathe: Ground Zero and the Lies About Trade Center Dust

Let’s talk about the air around Ground Zero and about the incredible evasions of the truth regarding its safety by the City of New York after 9/11. On this subject, there’s a callousness about the lying that seems to be in direct and proportionally opposite relationship to the overwhelming care and concern with which workers on the scene reacted to the tragic events of September 2001. The efforts of so many, working to bring New York back and to bring some closure to the families of the victims, were treated with almost total disrespect by those who were entrusted with ensuring the safety of Ground Zero workers.

That seven of ten of the workers at the site of the former Trade Towers now suffer chronic respiratory illness shouldn’t come as a surprise, when one considers the air quality tests that were taken of the area around the site immediately after the disaster. According to then-unreleased city data, unearthed by the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project:

The city had taken 87 outdoor air tests between September 12 and September 29.
Seventeen showed asbestos levels deemed hazardous by both the city and the EPA.
Other tests were classified as “overloads”— meaning that there was so much part-
iculate dust in the collection device that no reading could be taken.
(Grand Illusion by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins)

The above air sample data was shared by the city with the EPA, even while both Mayor Giuliani and EPA head Christie Todd Whitman were extolling the safety of the air around downtown Manhattan. In fact, the Mayor argued against federal oversight of the cleanup and city officials told the EPA it wanted to take charge of indoor air cleanup issues locally. The city’s main goal seemed to be proving that New York was safe and open for business. If that meant putting those workers at risk who took on the dirty job of making the city whole again, then so be it. The 30,000 residents of the area and the folks streaming back to downtown businesses, well, they’d be guinea pigs too.

It was clear, early on, that the particulate in the air at Ground Zero contained a finely ground powder of fiberglass, dust, bone fragments, asbestos, lead, and a wide variety of materials that were never before airborne in the kind of volume that the Twin Towers brought down with them when they fell. Yet there was no attempt by the city to reach out for help to keep workers and residents safe— even mask regulations were widely ignored at the Ground Zero site.

In fact, whenever health issues came up after the Towers came down, they were downplayed. Mayor Giuliani even went so far as to publicly take issue with a Mount Sinai Hospital physician, shortly after 9/11, when he speculated that the long-term health effects on those exposed to the dust and rubble at Ground Zero could be serious.

The estimated 1.2 million tons of Trade Center dust permeated the area around downtown Manhattan for months. For months after 9/11, when office workers left their downtown buildings later than rush hour, they would see city trucks out there, hosing down the streets nightly to make them clean in the morning. Every evening, the spray would clean off a fresh coat of the light grey powder that would accumulate on every outdoor surface of the financial district. Yet the city health department suggested that it wasn’t necessary to wear a mask while removing Trade Center dust, even as the EPA hired a certified asbestos abatement contractor to clean its own regional office, located just outside the hazard zone.

Since the city wasn’t appealing for federal help with the cleanup, most large downtown building cleaning crews had no experience with hazardous materials. Many were made up of low-paid immigrants, a high percentage of whom were undocumented, most of whom were given little instruction on preventive measures to protect themselves from the toxins contained in the matter they mopped up. They usually worked without the HEPA (high-efficiency particle-arresting) vacuums the EPA used and advised. After their work was done, most of these workers left the job without any follow-up health checks. Their fates are largely unknown.

The same cannot be said about Ground Zero workers. Most of the men and women at the site have documented their health issues after working at the disaster site. Their asthma rates are 12 times the expected average. For those who worked more than 90 days on the site, the rate is double that. Respiratory diseases are rampant and many have become disabled or died. Even local residents reported that 42.7 percent had at least one persistent upper respiratory symptom during the following year.

Yet the fates of workers, firemen, and other first responders, as well as area residents remain unheralded in the mainstream. It’s been left to a few environmental groups and unions, like the New York Environmental Law and Justice Project, the International Association of Firefighters, and to a very few reporters, like Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, to unearth the facts and attempt to shine a light upon them (the data they uncovered are the backbone of this post—see their expose, Grand Illusion).

While Rudy Giuliani, ‘America’s Mayor’ is strutting his fame as a Presidential candidate and as the media hero of 9/11, the people who did the dirty work that day and those who stayed in the pit thereafter still wait for the healthcare they need and the respect they deserve. Their attempts to bring the nation’s attention to their plight and to the government inattention that put them unnecessarily in harm’s way deserve our response.

Cole: US Plays With Replacing Iraq PM at Democracy's Peril

Juan Cole’s Salon piece on the subject of US efforts to replace Prime Minister Maliki in Iraq: “Playing musical chairs with the prime minister, an old colonial habit in the United States with regard to its overseas possessions, will simply undermine what little faith remains in democracy in Iraq.”

NYC Emergency Response: 9/11 Mess Still Exists

The news that NYC fire officials have been disciplined in the wake of the Deutsche Bank fire is unsurprising, but it’s not necessarily getting at some of the root problems in the city’s response to fire and other emergencies. Coordination between agencies at Ground Zero and elsewhere has been sorely lacking for years and making the Fire Department the only scapegoat will not change this basic reality.

If we go back to September 11, 2001, when Rudy Giuliani arrived downtown, his prized ‘Command Center’ was sitting on top of a huge supply of fuel and rendered useless by falling debris. So where did he go to command the city’s response? He was told that the fire department command center was over on West St. Shortly after arriving there, the Mayor asked the fire chiefs what message he should relay to people trapped in the Towers (“Find an open stairway and get out,” the chiefs said.”), the Mayor was then hustled off to another command center, at Barclay St, with Police Commissioner Kerik and other police chiefs.

That, of course, was the end of the line of communication of Fire Department advice to remaining occupants of the Trade Center Towers— to find a stairwell, like the open stairway at the top of the South Tower, where the 18 people who ignored 9-1-1 operators’ standing orders to ‘remain in place’ successfully survived the attacks, even though they had been located above the floors where the plane entered the building. It was also the end of an opportunity for interagency communication from a police helicopter on the scene that the buildings appeared unstable, word the fire department never received before the South Tower collapsed.

Now, we know better that New York City needs an ‘informed loop’ from first responders, back to the potential victims of any emergency. Yet Lower Manhattan residents also know that they still couldn’t get information about the safety of air around the Deutsche Bank fire 10 days ago, almost seven years after 9/11. Despite their pleas to city officials to open up an e-mail, internet, or phone information system that would give out such vital information during emergencies, downtown residents’ insistence on better communication have to-date fallen on deaf ears.

Yes, the inspections at the Deutsche Bank building de-construction site revealed multiple violations. But in addition to not provoking a full Fire Department inspection, or the development of a complete firefighting plan for the building, those violations didn’t get the contractor pulled from the job until after Joseph Graffagnino and Robert Beddia met their fate attempting to fight the fire there. Nor were a skeleton crew of fire officials sent first into the highly toxic and totally unoccupied building; instead over 100 firefighters were sent in. And this again occurs almost seven years after over three hundred firefighters lost their lives inside buildings. Even then, the upper echelons of the department knew high-rise fires of that magnitude couldn’t be successfully fought.

Some time after 9/11, our present Fire Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta said, “There would be a dramatic difference” in how the Department would respond to “a similar occurrence” today. Yet there seems not to have been a coordinated effort to make sure the word has percolated down to every level since then. Today, Commissioner Scoppetta pledged that, "We need the unvarnished truth about what happened here, or, as the mayor said, what didn’t happen. So, we will recognize, acknowledge and learn from our mistakes and we will hold everybody accountable, no matter where this investigation takes us.”

Let’s hope that rather than simply blaming fire officials or canning a few of them after the Deutsche Bank fiasco, the Mayor will take the effort citywide to coordinate government self-assessment and responses. He needs to make obsolete the assessment of 9/11 Commissioner John Lehman that NYC’s command and control communications in 2001 were, “not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city.” New York as a governmental structure still has some serious work to do. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 9/11 for us to accomplish it.

Preparedness: New York City Not As Ready As Its Residents

Any assessment of safety at Ground Zero, both before and after 9/11 has to focus in part on preparedness. If there is an American city that should prepare for high-rise fires, evacuations, toxic material releases, and terrorist attacks, it’s New York City. We know our city is a bullseye for groups with a grudge against the United States, Zionism, Capitalism, gays, liberals, foreigners, and pretty much anybody’s Great Satan. We’re equal opportunity. We also have lots of skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, construction sites, toxic hazards and landmarks to protect.

We’d like to think that in New York, we’re not surprised by the unforeseen. Our leaders, however, have not always been so interested in preparation. Ever since 9/11, we’ve heard endless stories about Rudy Giuliani’s preparedness and kinship with first responders, yet his record in New York City regarding safety and preparedness was pretty dismal.

In 1993, New Yorkers got our first major taste of global terrorism. A bomb went off in the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. The FBI called the detonated charge the, “largest by weight and by damage that we’ve seen since the inception of forensic explosive identification.” This bomb killed six people, caused a complete evacuation of the WTC towers, and nearly toppled the Vista Hotel above the garage. The hotel teetered for most of a day, until it was structurally reinforced. The terrorist bomb there surely contained a large charge of sodium cyanide as well, which luckily burned, rather than vaporizing, which would have killed thousands instantly.

The terrorist who planned the attack, Ramzi Yousef, vowed on his capture and return from Pakistan that the Trade Center would be successfully taken down, sooner or later. In fact, his Islamic terrorist group had also planned a series of simultaneous major attacks against New York City landmarks: bombs that would have struck the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels, the United Nations, and FBI headquarters in New York as well. Fortunately, those attacks were thwarted by the FBI, preventing untold panic and loss of life in the city.

Yet, after the experience of the early 90’s, New York City had done little by September 11, 2001 to harden targets or improve first responder planning for major disasters, whether intentional or accidental. The city allowed the World Trade Center’s owner, the Port Authority of NY and NJ, to be exempt from building codes that would have hardened stairwells, provided safe egress without exposing occupants to falling debris, tightened inspection standards, and allowed the roof egress that had provided a rescue point by Police helicopter in 1993.

In addition, the metropolis whose Mayor told the 9/11 Commission, “I assumed from the day I came into office that New York City would be the subject of a terrorist attack,” located its only emergency command center at the heart of the Trade Center site. It was built above ground, in a building loaded up with 43,284 gallons of fuel on the day terrorists once again struck the complex, eight years later. The emergency command center became a useless, burning inferno on the day of the attacks, from which the Mayor who had vetoed a hardened Brooklyn bunker site would flee under the warm glow of television cameras. Ironically, it was this televised flight that emblazoned Rudy Giuliani into our minds as ‘America’s Mayor.’

New York’s Office of Emergency Management, which was headed on 9/11 by a poorly respected and ineffective leader, responded to the attacks, ad hoc, at the site of the fire incident commander, largely ignored by both Police and Fire officials. The 9/11 Commission point-man for its city response study described the activities of Richie Sheirer, OEM’s head, in the following way, “Richie should have early on pulled together an interagency command post. But he didn’t command respect. He was lost. He was on his cell but he wasn’t talking to the Police Department of Fire Department incident commanders. There was an enormous breakdown in the operations of OEM.”

It’s not that there weren’t other models. The first head of NYC’s OEM, Jerry Hauer, left the job after receiving no support from the Mayor in his battles to attain leverage with the Police and Fire Departments, each of which warred constantly over turf and saw a strong OEM as a threat to their respective goals of supremacy. The Port Authority, from which Mayor Giuliani fiercely attempted to wrest away profitable city airports, actually offered far more city control than NYC ever took when it came to fire code cooperation at the Trade Center. The fact is, the city under Giuliani didn’t prioritize safety around the Trade Center area on an even par with combating petty crime or squeegee beggars.

Now that the Deutche Bank building has once again become a disaster site, causing more first responder deaths, hopefully, a complete review of preparedness and provision for safer, centralized, orderly response will finally be forthcoming. We need better overall coordination between citywide agencies. The question of competent inspection and detailed planning to respond to major city building fires and landmark incidents needs a long, hard look, without a glossing over of the immediate post-9/11 variety.

(main sources: the 9/11 Commission Report and Grand Illusion by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins)

Zelikow Part of Allawi Push to Depose Maliki: Greenwald

For those who are still wondering about Iraqi coup rumors we posted on yesterday, the plot is thickening a bit domestically. Leaks are popping here in the U.S. regarding behind-the-scenes moves to oust the Iraqi Prime Minister. Glenn Greenwald reports today that former State Department advisor Philip Zelikow is up to his ears in the intrigue. Zelikow is simultaneously lobbying for former Iraqi PM Ayad Allawi, who would like U.S. to support deposing PM al-Maliki in favor of himself, while also consulting with the Administration on Iraq policy. Zelikow has been totally silent about his financial relationship with Allawi, all the while intoning about al-Maliki’s failures to the press.

The Greenwald posts today detail a murky and duplicity-filled effort to mold public opinion around blaming the current Maliki government for the failure of the US surge. Presumably, if Bush can blame Maliki, even as the Petraeus Report comes out, it will set the stage for a new Iraqi government to take the reins (with a giant push from Washington), allowing the Administration to invent yet another “new and improved” reason to delay withdrawal— and eat up time until another President has face failure in Iraq.

The Deathtrap Maze at Deutsche Bank is Only the Latest Tragedy in the City's Safety Neglect

Failures in the oversight and inspection at the Deutsche Bank building are becoming more and more apparent as the postmortem on the fire there unfolds. Jim Dwyer reports in today’s Times about the maze of plastic sheeting that condemned Robert Beddia and Joseph Graffagnino to their deaths last Saturday. The seriousness of the hazard was so clear to workers onsite that they left boxcutters at every floor to cut the sheeting down in an emergency. Unfortunately for Beddia and Graffagnino, those tools were of no use when obscured by the intense smoke that filled the empty floors of the doomed building.

Any cursory inspection of the site would have revealed major fire hazards and caused a private worksite to be shut down, but the City was the boss in this case and, as with all the hazards onsite since 9/11, the City’s main goal has been to avoid notice as toxic waste dump. It’s a crime that more lives have been lost at Ground Zero in an effort to sweep environmental and other hazards away from the public eye.

Tomorrow, we’ll start a series on the history of neglect at the former Trade Center site and neglect for the safety of firefighters that goes back into the 1990’s and the beginning of the Giuliani Administration. What happened at the Deutsche Bank building isn’t the beginning, but we can hope it’s nearly the end of the shell game that’s cost so many their lives and their health.

John Galt Corporation's Tavern at Deutsche Bank

Steve M. has a post that includes a good wrap-up of the stories to-date about John Galt Corporation's oh-so-careful work at the Deutsche Bank building. If you ever wonder why there are inspections on hazardous jobsites, this is the reason.

Two dead, more injured now.

Rumors Circulate in Iraq of Coup

Juan Cole is a reliable source of information about Iraq, so while this is only a rumor, think about it in the light of remarks being made about Prime Minister Maliki in NIE and White House reports.

A coup— another historical parallel President Bus would like to make with defending democracy in Vietnam?

UPDATE- Omar, an Iraqi blogger provides a bit more information about the coup panic running through Baghdad. Inconclusive, but interesting reading.

Savin' Iraq by Making Its People Leave

The surge is working. It’s driving out, well, everyone…