3. CLEARING THE AIR WITH THE TRUTH

BY

JUAN GONZALES

After nearly five years of lies from top city and federal officials about the health dangers from the toxic dust released by the World Trade Center collapse, the truth has finally begun to emerge.

Back on Oct. 26, 2001, in a Daily News front-page story headlined "A Toxic Nightmare at Disaster Site," I reported that hundreds of tests conducted by the federal Environmental Protection Agency revealed far more elevated levels of toxic pollutants in the air and dust in lower Manhattan than the public had been told.

That shocking story was immediately attacked by top officials in then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani's administration, by the EPA boss at the time, Christie Whitman, and even by the city's main business group, the Partnership for New York City, whose top official labeled it "irresponsible journalism."

Yes, there were some "spikes" in toxic emissions, Whitman and Giuliani Health Commissioner Neal Cohen admitted, but no long-term danger.

Despite their assurances, thousands who returned to lower Manhattan came down with new physical ailments, especially among the city's first responders and recovery workers, but also downtown residents and office workers.

Yesterday came the first conclusive proof that those assurances from City Hall and the EPA were horribly wrong. We got an inkling, as well, of the huge public health toll our city now faces.

Nearly 70% of 9,500 Ground Zero responders and workers monitored by Mount Sinai Medical Center over the past five years have new or worsened respiratory problems. Some may be sick for the rest of their lives.

But this astonishing illness rate cannot simply be attributed to honest human error.

Three years ago, an investigation by the EPA's own inspector general's office revealed that in the first days after 9/11, White House aides rewrote agency press releases to downplay any dangers in order to reopen Wall Street quickly.

Government documents uncovered by this column since 9/11 showed city and federal officials hid important information about the true extent of contamination.

The city's Department of Environmental Protection, for example, found high levels of asbestos in 27 of the first 38 air samples it took in lower Manhattan before Sept. 17, 2001. But the city didn't publicly disclose those results until five months later.

On Sept. 12, 2001, Dr. Ed Kilbourne, a top federal scientist, warned in a strongly worded memo to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention against the quick reoccupation of buildings in lower Manhattan because of possible dangers from asbestos and other toxic material, but he was ignored.

On Oct. 6, 2001, Associate City Health Commissioner Kelly McKinney complained that health and safety protections for Ground Zero workers were not being enforced. McKinney offered to have "[Department of Health] personnel ... issue [violations] for non-compliance." But City Hall did not immediately act on his recommendation.

Those at the top simply ignored the warning signs.

Now, thousands are sick, more will get sick in the years to come and an unknown number will die before their time.

Yesterday, Mayor Bloomberg finally recognized this huge problem. He announced the city will provide health treatment to anyone sickened by Ground Zero contaminants — at no out-of-pocket cost to the victim. His program also will treat office workers and nearby residents, thus implicitly recognizing that more than Ground Zero workers have been affected.

It is, however, small consolation to the sick New Yorkers who expected their leaders to tell them the truth when it mattered.

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4. LEBANON: THE US, ISRAEL AND ACCOUNTABILITY

BY

RAMSEY CLARK

On August 30, 2006 the International Action Center will launch a major campaign to require accountability by the United States and Israel for their wars of aggression and assaults on the equal sovereignty of nations, which are crimes against peace, and their war crimes which include excessive force, indiscriminate bombing, targeting civilians and civilian facilities and collective punishments of entire populations.

Reparations are required for more than a thousands deaths, many thousands of injures and an estimated $10 billion for destruction of civilian facilities in Lebanon in one month alone; and thousands of deaths and injuries in Palestine since the Oslo Accords, the systematic destruction of the government of  Palestine, the kidnapping of half the cabinet and the speaker of the Palestinian Parliament, the assassination of leaders and indiscriminate killing of others, and the destruction of the offices of  President Arafat, the Foreign Ministry and civilian facilities throughout Gaza and the West Bank.

If the present ceasefire does not hold, bolder action must be taken. There must be absolute assurance from the U.S. and Israel that they will honor the equal sovereignty of Lebanon, Syria, and Iran and recognize and honor the sovereignty of the State of Palestine, cruelly delayed for 58 years.

Individuals in the U.S. and Israeli governments must be held accountable by prosecution for their criminal acts, and responsible leaders must be removed from office by impeachment in the U.S. and appropriate legal action in Israel.

The new tragedy of Lebanon has brought death to hundreds of civilians, children, women and men.  Hundreds of thousands, approaching one-fourth the population of four million, are fugitives from their  homes within and outside of their country. Destruction of the infrastructure will require decades to rebuild, if and when peace comes. Rage at Israel and the U.S. dominate all other emotions in Lebanon and throughout the Muslim world. New anger is spreading over every continent.

If the capture of two soldiers, or one in the case of Palestine, justifies assaults against whole nations and peoples, as Israel has done, then there is no law, no alternative to war, no hope for peace. Only a person with a memory no longer than three weeks could believe the capture of three Israeli soldiers began the present violence. Was not cross-border violence between Israel and Lebanon commonplace for decades? Had not Israel kidnapped half the Palestinian cabinet, destroyed its Foreign Ministry offices and other government buildings and engaged in summary executions throughout Palestine, the West Bank and Gaza, since the elections this year of the Hamas majority in the Palestinian parliament? Was there not a continuum of assaults at will against the Palestinian people over decades?

We must ask whether the forced withdrawal of Syrian peacekeepers from Lebanon earlier this year by the U.S., and Israeli political pressure after the murder of former Lebanon Prime Minister Hariri, were the preludes of a plan for Israel to assault Lebanon and reoccupy territories up to the Litani river in Southern Lebanon. While Syrian forces were present in Lebanon, such an assault did not occur. 

And we must ask whether the fierce assault on Lebanon and Palestine are the prelude to broader actions against Syria and Iran. President Bush has made it abundantly clear that he would like nothing better than regime change in Iran and Syria and has attempted to lay responsibility for violence in Lebanon and Palestine at their door. 

As Iraq descends into uncontrollable sectarian war, President Bush needs new threats to distract the attention of people in the U.S. from what his Shock and Awe policy has brought for Iraq, for us, and for the world. War in Lebanon helps divert attention temporarily and may serve to widen the conflict to include Syria and/or Iran. If not, there are always Cuba, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela and others to act against.

As with Iraq, in Lebanon we have seen a war of aggression, the supreme international crime; an attack on the equal sovereignty of Lebanon, violating the First Principle of the United Nations Charter; excessive force of a major magnitude, with Israeli planes striking a nation defenseless against aerial assaults; indiscriminate bombing; targeting of civilians; and collective punishment, in which everyone in Lebanon suffers.

The future of Palestine remains the central issue for peace in the Middle East. That future is more endangered than at any time since the Oslo Accords. Everyone in Palestine suffers from the violence unleashed on its people by Israel’s renewed Roadmap to War. 

President George Bush supports every act of Israel, every strike against Lebanon and Palestine, alone among international heads of government. And Condoleezza Rice congratulates the Prime Minister of Lebanon for his courage while telling him there must be further destruction of his nation and government--an insult to every human being who cares about peace and understands that the world cannot be made safe for hypocrisy. 

By permitting President Bush to pursue his policy of domination through threat and lawless force, we risk ever widening international violence. 

I hope to see you at the UN Church Center on August 30th . This historic meeting will be the first in a series of national and international mass public gatherings in a Campaign for Accountability for U.S./Israeli war crimes in Palestine and Lebanon. We need your support, participation, and donations.

I hope that you will lend a hand to this campaign as best you can. We must persevere until peace prevails.

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5. POLITICS INFLUENCE BLOOMBERG AIDES ON 2004 PERMITS FOR PRTESTS DOCUMENTS SUGGEST
BY

DIANE CARDWELL

When city officials denied demonstrators access to the Great Lawn in Central Park during the 2004 Republican National Convention, political advocates and ordinary New Yorkers accused Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of squelching demonstrations that could embarrass fellow Republicans during their gathering. The Bloomberg administration denied being guided by politics in banning the protests. Instead, officials said they were motivated by a concern for the condition of the expensively renovated Great Lawn or by law enforcement's ability to secure the crowd. But documents that have surfaced in a federal lawsuit over the use of the Great Lawn paint a different picture, of both the rationale for the administration's policy and the degree of Mr. Bloomberg's role in enforcing it.

Those documents, which include internal e-mail messages and depositions in the court case, show that Mr. Bloomberg’s involvement in the deliberations over the protests may have been different from how he and his aides have portrayed it. They also suggest that officials were indeed motivated by political concerns over how the protests would play out while the Republican delegates were in town, and how the events could affect the mayor’s re-election campaign the following year.

“It is very important that we do not permit any big or political events for the period between Aug. 23 and Sept. 6, 2004,” read one Parks Department e-mail message, referring to issuing permits for the days framing the convention. “It’s really important for us to keep track of any large events (over 1,000 people), and any rallies or events that seem sensitive or political in nature.”

City officials have said in the case that these statements concerned the logistics of scheduling so many events during that time. But, just after the convention ended, Parks Department officials told the organizer of a commemorative event for John Lennon that they could not offer access to the Great Lawn because, as one marketing official wrote, “we had to admit that it was going to be difficult right after all our problems with the rally requests for the park and right before Mike’s re-election.”

“There are practical and political reasons for this decision,” said an e-mail message to the organizer, “which follows, as you know, very closely on the heels of the court cases during the RNC.”

Throughout his tenure as mayor, Mr. Bloomberg has made much of his political independence, saying that his decision-making is guided more by a sense of what is right, than by political expediency or popular opinion. But the documents, which are part of the lawsuit brought by the National Council of Arab Americans and the Answer Coalition, an antiwar civil rights group, indicate that politics and appearances were at the center of the administration’s strategy and that Mr. Bloomberg was more intimately involved in the discussions over demonstrations in the park than he said.

At the time of the convention, Mr. Bloomberg said that he had largely delegated responsibility for determining where protesters could demonstrate to the Parks Department and the Police Department, and he told the court later that he had no knowledge of specific permit denials other than the one for the enormous rally for 250,000 people organized by United for Peace and Justice, an antiwar group.

Mr. Bloomberg wrote that he did “not have unique, personal knowledge regarding the basis of the decision,” and that he had “no knowledge at all regarding the denial of a Parks Department permit to plaintiff,” the National Council of Arab Americans, “beyond a general understanding that other groups sought and were denied Parks Department permits to demonstrate on the Great Lawn during the RNC.”

But an e-mail message from Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner, to Mr. Bloomberg in June 2004 indicates otherwise.

“Following your call, I spoke to Ray about 10 minutes ago,” Mr. Benepe wrote, referring to Raymond W. Kelly, the police commissioner. “Coincidentally, our lawyer and Chief McManus and the Law Department are meeting at this very minute to agree on the language and strategy of the letter rejecting the Arab-American rally on the Great Lawn,” Mr. Benepe continued, referring to Assistant Chief John B. McManus, who oversaw Police Department strategy for the convention.

Mr. Benepe’s message added: “I assume the rejection letter will go out today. I will let you know.”

Stu Loeser, the mayor’s chief spokesman, declined last week to comment on the documents. But in court papers, Mr. Bloomberg said that he did not remember the phone call, the e-mail message or the specific protest they concerned.

The internal communications, some of which were reported in The New York Sun the week before last, offer a rare look at the machinations of the administration and paint a picture of officials scrambling to lock in their approach and then figuring out how to justify it.

Lawyers from the Partnership for Civil Justice, the group representing the protest organizers, argue that the lengths to which administration officials went in rationalizing their approach showed that they understood their actions were flawed.

“The system is a political system, not a permitting system,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, one of the lawyers. “The fact of the mayor’s involvement, the extraordinary lengths officials went through to justify it, makes it clear that free-speech rights are doled out based on politics and viewpoint, and that’s clearly unconstitutional.”

Bloomberg administration officials have said that they do not have a policy to exclude protests, but the court papers suggest otherwise.

In 2003, for instance, when the Parks Department denied a permit for an antiwar protest, Douglas Blonsky, the Central Park administrator, wrote in a memorandum to Mr. Benepe, “It would be imprudent to hold large rallies on Central Park’s lawns at any time of the year,” and later said that “rallies do not work on lawns.”

So when it came time to plan for the large protests expected at the Republican convention, Parks Department officials moved to ensure that the lawns would remain no-protest zones, even though police officials supported allowing the rallies there.

In early March 2004, Parks Department officials scrambled to make sure Mr. Bloomberg would be on their side in that debate in advance of a meeting he had called to discuss protest permits.

The meeting of city officials also included Kevin Sheekey, who was then president of the privately financed NYC 2004 Host Committee for the convention.

On March 18, Elizabeth W. Smith, chief of marketing and corporate sponsorship at the Parks Department, sent an e-mail message to Mr. Benepe pressing him to enlist Patricia E. Harris, a deputy mayor, in urging Mr. Bloomberg to agree to a ban before that meeting to decide the issue.

The e-mail message suggested that she worried that Mr. Kelly would persuade Mr. Bloomberg to allow the rally on the lawn because it would be easier to police.

“The more I think about it, the more I think that you do NOT want Mayor Mike to walk into that meeting hearing for the first time you and Kelly possibly presenting your opposing views for general debate,” the e-mail message said. “This is just a reminder to you to get to Patti sometime soon so that she can get the mayor on board, which I think is very possible. ‘Security’ trumps everything in this debate, so Kelly goes in to that meeting with the benefit of the doubt.”

The tactic appears to have worked. On March 23, Mr. Benepe’s daily report said, “Today’s meeting with the mayor went quite well,” and added, “We are gratified that he supported the idea of not having any rallies on lawns in Central Park.”

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6. US ARMY CONTEMPLATES REDRAWING MIDDLE EAST MAP TO STAVE-OFF LOOMING GLOBAL MELTDOWN
BY

NAFEEZ MOSADDEQ AHMED

09/02/06 "Dissidentvoice" In a little-noted article printed in early August in the Armed Forces Journal, a monthly magazine for officers and leaders in the United States military community, early retired Major Ralph Peters sets out the latest ideas in current US strategic thinking. And they are extremely disturbing.

Ethnically Cleansing the Entire Middle East

Maj. Peters, formerly assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence where he was responsible for future warfare, candidly outlines how the map of the Middle East should be fundamentally re-drawn, in a new imperial endeavour designed to correct past errors. "Without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East," he observes, but then adds wryly: "Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000 years of history: Ethnic cleansing works."

Thus, acknowledging that the sweeping reconfiguration of borders he proposes would necessarily involve massive ethnic cleansing and accompanying bloodshed on perhaps a genocidal scale, he insists that unless it is implemented, "we may take it as an article of faith that a portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue to be our own." Among his proposals are the need to establish "an independent Kurdish state" to guarantee the long-denied right to Kurdish self-determination. But behind the humanitarian sentiments, Maj. Peters declares that: "A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan."

He chastises the United States and its coalition partners for missing "a glorious chance" to fracture Iraq, which "should have been divided into three smaller states immediately." This would leave "Iraq's three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn." Meanwhile, the Shia south of old Iraq "would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian Gulf." Jordan, a US-Israeli friend in the region, would "retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan." Iran too would "lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan, but would gain the provinces around Herat in today's Afghanistan." Although this vast imperial programme could be impossible to implement now, with time, "new and natural borders will emerge", driven by "the inevitable attendant bloodshed."

As for the goals of this plan, Maj. Peters is equally candid. While including the necessary caveats about fighting "for security from terrorism, for the prospect of democracy", he also mentions the third important issue -- "and for access to oil supplies in a region that is destined to fight itself".

The whole thing sounds disturbingly familiar, especially to those who have read the musings of then Israeli Foreign Ministry official Oded Yinon.

Keeping the World Safe... for Our Economy

Despite trying to dress up his vision as an exercise in attempting to selflessly democratize the Middle East, in a contribution to the quarterly US Army War College journal Parameters almost a decade ago, he acknowledged with some jubilation that: "Those of us who can sort, digest, synthesize, and apply relevant knowledge soar--professionally, financially, politically, militarily, and socially. We, the winners, are a minority." This minority will inevitably conflict with the vast majority of the world's population. "For the world masses, devastated by information they cannot manage or effectively interpret, life is 'nasty, brutish . . . and short-circuited.'" In "every country and region", these masses who can neither "understand the new world", nor "profit from its uncertainties... will become the violent enemies of their inadequate governments, of their more fortunate neighbors, and ultimately of the United States." The coming clash, then, is not really about blood, faith, ethnicity, at all. It is about the gap between the haves and the have-nots. "We are entering a new American century", he says, in a veiled reference to the Bush administration Project of the same name founded in the same year he was writing. In the new century, "we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful. We will excite hatreds without precedent."

In predicting the future course for the US Army, Maj. Peters argues that: "We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends." In this context, he says, "we in the United States will continue to be perceived as the ultimate haves", and therefore, "terrorism will be the most common form of violence", along with "transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars." Meanwhile, "in defense of its interests", the US "will be required to intervene in some of these contests." And then he sums it all up in one tidy paragraph:

"There will be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines, but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."

So what's prompted Maj. Peter's decision to air his vision for the Middle East in the Armed Forces Journal at this time in the wake of the latest Middle East crisis? A number of critical developments.

Source: Imminent Global Crises Converge

According to an American source with high-level access to the US military, political and intelligence establishment, Western policymakers are in no doubt that the world faces the imminent convergence of multiple global crises. These crises threaten not only to undermine the basis of Western power in its current military and geopolitical configurations, but also to destabilize the entire foundations of industrial civilization.

The source said that the latest petroleum data indicates that "global oil production most likely peaked two years ago." This is consistent with the findings of respected geologists such as leading oil depletion expert Dr. Colin Campbell, who in the late 90s predicted that world oil production would peak in the early 21st century. "We have come to the end of the first half of the Oil Age," said Dr. Campbell, who has a doctorate in geology from the University of Oxford and more than 40 years of experience in the oil industry. Similarly, Kenneth Deffeyes, a geologist and professor emeritus at Princeton University, estimates the occurrence of the peak near the end of last year.

The source also said that leading US financial analysts privately believe that "a collapse of the global banking system is imminent by 2008." Although the warning is consistent with the public findings of other experts, this is the first time that a more precise date has been estimated. In a prescient analysis drawing on highly placed financial sources, US historian Gabriel Kolko, professor emeritus at York University, concluded in late July that:

"All the factors which make for crashes – excessive leveraging, rising interest rates, etc. – exist... Contradictions now wrack the world's financial system, and a growing consensus now exists between those who endorse it and those, like myself, who believe the status quo is both crisis-prone as well as immoral. If we are to believe the institutions and personalities who have been in the forefront of the defense of capitalism, and we should, it may very well be on the verge of serious crises."

The source also commented on the danger posed by rapid climate change. Although most conventional estimates suggest that global climate catastrophe is not due before another 30 odd years, he argued that the multiplication of several "tipping-points" suggested that a series of devastating climatic events could be "triggered within the next 10 to 15 years." Once again, this is consistent with the findings of other experts, most recently a joint task-force report by the Institute for Public Policy Research in the UK, the Center for American Progress in the US, and the Australia Institute, which said in January last year that if the average world temperature rises "two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution", it would trigger an irreversible chain of climatic disasters. In its report, the task-force says:

"The possibilities include reaching climatic tipping points leading, for example, to the loss of the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets (which, between them, could raise sea level more than 10 meters over the space of a few centuries), the shutdown of the thermohaline ocean circulation (and, with it, the Gulf Stream), and the transformation of the planet's forests and soils from a net sink of carbon to a net source of carbon."

The source also revealed that US generals had repeatedly war-gamed a prospective conflict with Iran, but consistently found that the simulations predicted "an absolute nuclear disaster", from which no clear winner would emerge. The scenarios gamed were so dismal, he said, that the generals briefed administration officials to avoid such a war at all costs. However, the source said that the Bush administration is ignoring the fears of the US military.

In this context, it would seem that the musings of Maj. Peters issue less from a concerted confidence in US power, than from a sense of growing desperation and unease as the political, financial and energy architecture of the global system is increasingly fragmenting under the weight of its own inherent instability. Despite the seeming gloominess of the situation, however, there is clearly fundamental dissent about the current trajectory of American and Western policy at the highest levels of power. The source remarked that "humanity is on the verge of a precipice, and either we'll all just drop off the edge, or we'll evolve. I'm not sure what that new human being might look like, but it will clearly have to involve a completely new set of ideas and values, a new way of looking at the world that respects life and nature."

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