Presidential Lies: 9/11 EPA Report is Another Lie, One Among Many

[Guest guest]

9/11 EPA Report is Another Lie, One Among Many

 

 

> Jimmy Breslin

>

> Another Lie, One Among Many

>

>

> August 23, 2003, 5:33 PM EDT

>

> I was a few hundred yards up on Liberty Street when the Two Tower of the

> World Trade Center blew. I put my nose inside my shirt and ran through

> smoke that turned day into night. In the smoke were computers, asbestos,

> pulverized glass, human bodies, lead. I got on another street and one

tower

> blew up. Again, the air was black with a pulverized 110-story building.

>

> I did not feel well for two months. I never said anything because I was

too

> embarrassed. A couple of thousand had died. So many others were scorched

> and broken and maimed. I had no right to open my mouth, I thought.

Besides,

> from the first day, the government's Environmental Protection Agency had

> announced that air was remarkably clean. Work on. Breathe on. You're fine.

>

> They lied. They lied because the administration did not want people not

> going to work. They lied the first week and they lied the week after that

> and they have lied every day of the past two years to the people of this

city.

>

> Christine Whitman was the EPA head until recently. I wasn't disturbed that

> her education was a jump horse school, but I thought she was better than

> standing up and doing what she was told by George W. Bush's White House,

> telling lies to a public who had to breathe this air. Turns out she isn't

> much of a human being.

>

> The EPA has just admitted that they lied for all this time.

>

> Now what are we supposed to do? By now I feel better physically because I

> have adjusted to feeling lousy. I'm not going near a doctor. Once I read

> what was in that air, and in it for all those days I spent around there, I

> didn't want to know anything more. Don't scare me. My friend Dan Collins,

> whose office is on Broadway, only yards up from the site, said he has not

> taken a good breath for two years. " They tell me it's good and I know it's

 

> bad, " he said.

>

> This lying with the lives of the people of the nation is not solely the

> habit of Bush and his crew, although it is more widespread and being done

> in so many cases by so many of their people that it looks like a

generation

> of liars.

>

> This war with Iraq started with the full government standing right up and

> looking you in the eye and openly lying about why we had to invade Iraq

> immediately. Bush said the Iraqis had weapons of mass destruction. Why,

> they were starting to make nuclear bombs. He had a statement about this in

> his State of the Union speech. When it was shown to be a lie, Bush had

> people like Condoleezza Rice say, Why are you so worried about 26 words in

> a speech? That the 26 words were about nuclear weapons seemed beyond her.

> Out in the streets, you can scare people with only three words: " Stick 'em

up. "

>

> I sit here in New York and I don't believe one single solitary word of

what

> the government says. Can you believe anything Bush says? Only if you're a

> rank sucker. Then you put that Rumsfeld on and he grimaces and tells you

> the first thing he thinks of, and here is Powell, who I thought would be

> our first black national candidate and he's as bad as the rest of them.

>

> What I would like to do is sit here and type in anger only about Bush and

> his vile people. The trouble is in my memory there is a corrupted past of

> people I favored.

>

> There was the day in 1963 when John F. Kennedy was in Cleveland on some

> sort of appearance and a courier from Washington brought him photos taken

> of Russian missile sites in Cuba. Kennedy canceled the stop and flew back

> to Washington. His press people announced that he had a severe cold. This

> was reported to the country.

>

> Kennedy was rushing back to begin secret meetings about the chances of

> whether the country was going to go into a nuclear war with Russia over

the

> missiles.

>

> Talk worked. We're here. But only one person complained about the false

> report of Kennedy's cold. That was David Wise and he worked on a newspaper

> I was on. He said that it was a dangerous precedent to lie to the nation

> for any reason.

>

> At the time, I thought it a minor complaint about an enormous occurrence.

I

> didn't have the wisdom to understand that once government gets away with

> lying, it becomes virtually impossible to dislodge the habit from any of

> them. I don't know what other lies Kennedy told, but it couldn't have been

> his last and he had our lives in his hands.

>

> It was only months after the Cuban missiles that, on a night in August of

> 1964, Robert McNamara, the defense secretary who presented himself as

being

> a person of unparalleled brilliance, told Lyndon Johnson that a North

> Vietnamese PT boat had attacked the American destroyers Turner Joy and the

> Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin, off Haiphong, east of Hanoi. On a night of

> confusion, McNamara persuaded Johnson that it was an actual attack.

Johnson

> acted. He put the country into a war right there.

>

> The attack on the destroyers never happened. McNamara lied. And the lie

> grew and anybody who took the time to build evidence of this was attacked.

> " This is a just war, " Johnson said.

>

> The war blew up 58,00 of our young.

>

> And now we have this administration welding their lies together on two

> matters, the air you breathe and the war they insist is good for us. We've

> just dealt with 40 years of lying and death. It is getting worse. " We're

> winning in Iraq, " your poor president says.

>

>

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/newyork/columnists/nyc-bres0824,0,131570

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