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MOUNTAIN VIEWS: BUSH'S VALUES LAID BARE: BIG BUCKS AND LIES OVER LIVES AND HEALTH

By John Hanchette

OLEAN -- Your faithful correspondent was excoriated as a "yellow journalist" last week for criticizing White House bumbling during the recent Northeast blackout, but I'll risk it again.

You think trying to allay public fears of terrorism by pinning the blackout blame on a phantom lightning strike in Niagara Falls was bad?

Wait till you mull over what happened near Ground Zero after Sept. 11, when the White House and Environmental Protection Agency started playing pattycake with the truth about health matters in Manhattan.

The gap in residual outrage is the painful difference between stubbing one's toe and breaking one's leg.

A scant week after the twin towers of the World Trade Center collapsed from the attack by terrorist hijackers two years ago this month, the EPA told America and New York not to worry, the air was OK to breathe in Manhattan.

Turns out, the EPA didn't know that.

Turns out, the White House pressured the EPA to make such rose-colored statements.

Turns out, the air wasn't OK to breathe.

Turns out, people are having all kinds of respiratory trouble in Lower Manhattan.

The EPA's inspector general, an internal watchdog who investigates the specific actions of a specific federal agency, unleashed a 165-page report in late August that has caused seismic tremors in Washington and New York -- through sections of government, politics, medicine and culture.

The report, by a courageous investigator named Nikki Tinsley, details how senior EPA officials, just one day after the terrorist attack, were instructed by the agency's deputy administrator to clear all public statements with the National Security Council.

And the NSC made no bones about its desire that all cautionary air quality statements be toned down or left out -- even to the point of omitting EPA tips on the dire health effects from copious dust in the air, which could contain lead, soot, glass fibers, asbestos, tons of particulate matter, smithereened concrete, and carcinogens such as PCBs and dioxin.

So where is the involvement of President Bush or the White House, you ask?

President Bush is chairman of the National Security Council. He uses the NSC as a forum to discuss and noodle over foreign policy and national security. The NSC is where senior aides and Cabinet functionaries speak up and provide input. When the NSC says something, you can be sure George W. Bush knows about it and approves.

The IG report is damning. It says EPA attempts to warn the public about the risks of breathing asbestos and various other contaminants -- especially the risks to children and asthma patients and old folks -- were either deleted or turned around 180 degrees.

The words "EPA considers asbestos hazardous in this situation" were changed by the NSC and White House to say that low-level exposure caused by the World Trade Center collapse "is unlikely to cause significant health effects."

Tell that to the 350-plus firemen now on permanent disability in New York City from respiratory damage.

Tell that to the 78 percent of rescue and recovery workers who have suffered lung illness.

Tell that to the pregnant women who were near Ground Zero and subsequently delivered so many low-birthweight babies that their risk of doing so was double that of non-exposed mothers.

Even the titles of news releases were flipped at White House insistence. In one press release soon after the catastrophe, the headline relating EPA's "Testing Terrorized Sites for Environmental Hazards" was changed to say the EPA "Reassures Public About Environmental Hazards."

The IG pulled no punches.

"EPA's overriding message was that there was no significant threat to human health," wrote Tinsley.

When, just a week after the Sept. 11 attack, the EPA termed the New York City air "safe" to breathe, it "did not have sufficient data and analyses to make such a blanket statement," the IG continued.

The report makes clear the White House was working with the NSC through the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which -- claims the IG -- influenced the early press releases by convincing the EPA to "add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones."

The IG report says so-called concern over national security was only one motivation for hoodwinking the populace -- another was "the desire to reopen Wall Street."

Great. Our national values are now laid bare.

Let's see now, save the lives and health of thousands of Americans, or start making big bucks again on the stock market? Which will it be? Big bucks or lives and health?

Screw it, let's go with the money.

The EPA is tap-dancing as fast as it can to make excuses for these gross lies. They are lame.

Marianne Horinko, the EPA's acting administrator, says the agency "did the best it could in the face of chaos and catastrophe."

She said the EPA was working, in the wake of Sept. 11, "under unbelievably trying conditions."

The IG report, she opines, "simply seems out of touch with the reality of what took place at the World Trade Center."

Lady, get real. You are the one who's out of touch.

If that's the "best" the EPA can do, you might as well close up shop and save taxpayers a bundle. The agency's role is implicit in its very title. It is supposed to arrange for our Protection from Environmental calamity and hazards.

What it's NOT supposed to do is lie to us, tell us everything's OK when it isn't, and mislead thousands down a trail of falsehoods that will damage health to the point of killing.

What kind of "national security" exists in that?

If some Middle Easterner in that time period had somehow convinced us all that the aftereffects of the World Trade Center collapse were not unhealthy, he'd be rotting in Guantanamo about now.

Instead, this was accomplished by people we pay to protect us.

There were hints very early that something was seriously amiss at EPA.

In February of 2002, the EPA's own Ombudsman Office -- which gives the public a voice in how the EPA works -- accused the huge agency of failing to test the air quality near the World Trade Center after Sept. 11 because officials "knew it would not come up safe," and of "knowingly providing false information to the public about safety."

America and the media paid little attention, and the Ombudsman Office was soon silenced.

No wonder EPA head Christie Todd Whitman quit three months before the IG report came out. She said she wanted to "spend more time with family." She was more likely embarrassed. She was the one, remember, who issued an order shortly after Sept. 11 to dissolve the Ombudsman Office.

The EPA has now drawn much-needed attention to itself. On the heels of the IG report, the General Accounting Office -- the congressional watchdog agency -- last week dropped another bomblet.

Nine months ago, the EPA revised "source review" sections of the Clean Air Act to allow oil companies, utilities and factory operators to relax their compliance. In announcing the program, the EPA actually tried to get us to believe relaxing air pollution rules for heavy industry would somehow reduce health risks and decrease harmful emissions.

Now the GAO, which also has competent investigators, reports the EPA has no comprehensive data or scientific evidence to support this ridiculous boast. The agency, says the GAO, was simply relying upon anecdotal statements from the industries it regulates.

Democrats in Congress are howling and various state officials are mad as hell about all this. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal has publicly accused the Bush administration of selling out to special interests.

The EPA reaction to all this was classic bureaucratic response. The agency trotted out a spokeswoman to insist, "Our improvements will make the Clean Air Act work better to improve public health."

This is government mushroom farming at its peak efficiency -- keeping the citizenry in the dark and feeding it premium-grade manure.

So yes, yes, we're all aware that Sept. 11 was "unbelievably trying," as Ms. Horinko notes.

But so is putting up with an administration that -- it is becoming increasingly clear -- continually lies to us.

I reiterate my previous advice to the Bush administration. Quit trying to assuage us like upset children. Stop making things up to make us feel better. Tell us the truth so we'll know how to act, so we'll know what decisions to make, so we'll have faith in our government again. If you don't, Mr. President, you'll be sitting in Crawford, Texas, sometime in February of 2005, trying to figure out what went wrong, and why you were a one-termer like your father.

There. If that be yellow journalism, make the most of it.


John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure University, is a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer Prize-winning national correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA Today and was recently named by Gannett as one of the Top 10 reporters of the past 25 years. He can be contacted via e-mail at Hanchette6@aol.com.

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com September 2 2003