Residents of Manhattan, beware of the flaccid reassurances of mayor Michael Bloomberg. In the wake of a fire in the abandoned Deutsche Bank office building near ground zero, “Mr. Bloomberg sought to reassure residents that the chemicals in the building likely did not present a significant health risk, saying air-quality tests so far showed no danger,” the Herald Sun reports. Moreover, Bloomberg indicated that the strange X-Files effect we are told went into effect on September 11, 2001—i.e., cave dwelling terrorists were able to defeat the laws of physics—no longer applies. “Officers were preventing nearby residents from returning to their homes, telling them authorities were concerned the former Deutsche Bank office building, vacant since the terrorist attacks six years ago turned it into a toxic nightmare, could fall. Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that fear turned out to be unfounded.”

Let us recall the pronouncements of Christie Todd Whitman, head of the Environmental Protection Agency on the day everything changed, including the laws of science. “EPA Administrator Christie Whitman announced today that results from the Agency’s air and drinking water monitoring near the World Trade Center and Pentagon disaster sites indicate that these vital resources are safe,” the EPA announced after the attacks. In February 2006, however, a federal judge found Whitman guilty of making “‘misleading statements of safety about the air quality near the World Trade Center in the days after the Sept. 11 attack.” The judge found Whitman “may have put the public in danger,” according to the New York Times (Julia Preston, “Public Misled on Air Quality After 9/11 Attack, Judge Says,” February 3, 2006).

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“Ground zero workers, volunteers and firefighters have since suffered from lung diseases and cancers, many have died,” writes Steve Watson. “The New York Times reported earlier this year [2006] that the Fire Department tracked a startling increase in cases of a particular lung scarring disease, known as sarcoidosis, among firefighters, which rose to five times the expected rate in the two years after Sept. 11.”

“Nearly 70 percent of the rescue workers who toiled in the dust and fumes at Ground Zero after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks suffer breathing problems, said a study by the Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan,” Xinhua News reported last September. “Following the attack, the air in lower Manhattan was polluted with toxic dust from the pulverized skyscrapers. Police, firefighters and others had high rates of lung abnormalities, and many such problems could last a lifetime, the study said.”

As for Whitman, it appears she is yet another garden variety sociopath of the sort rife in governmental positions. According to author and radio host Laura Flanders, there is a “conflict between Whitman’s responsibility to the public and her own family’s financial affairs” (see Flanders’ Bushwomen: Tales of a Cynical Species). “As the former Governor of New Jersey, Whitman owned bonds worth between $15,000 and $50,000 in the New York/New Jersey Port Authority—the owner of the World Trade Center site and the major liable party in the affair. Her husband, John R. Whitman, formerly a Citigroup vice-president, manages hundreds of millions of dollars in the banking giant’s assets, and Travelers Insurance, a Citigroup subsidiary, stood to lose multiple millions in Manhattan medical claims.” In non-Bushzarro times, this would be considered a big time conflict of interest. As we are in the deep water of the Bushzarro era, however, it is business as usual.

Even though judge Deborah Batts denied Whitman immunity against a class action lawsuit on behalf of Whitman’s victims—subjected to the toxic effects of 2,000 tons of asbestos and more than 400,000 tons of concrete—chances are, as a darling and factotum of the ruling class, she will get off the hook. The case, Benzman v. Whitman, is currently on appeal and will likely be locked up in the courts for years to come. “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 those areas, shock the conscience,” declared Batts at the time. Of course, as the corporate news media prefers to headline the mindless antics of Paris, Britney, and Beyoncé, chances are Whitman’s crimes will fall off the radar screen entirely.

“Mayor Michael Bloomberg says the fire ‘extended the sacrifice’ made by the city and its firefighters on 9/11,” reports CBS News 21 out of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. “It brought the stench of smoke and the screech of sirens back to an area still trying to recover from the attacks.” Indeed, it may, as well, extend the sacrifice of Manhattan’s hapless residents, caught up in the “new Pearl Harbor” launched by the Muslim-hating neocons and their neolib criminal collaborators, determined to reduce recalcitrant Arabs and Persians to groveling and sniveling vassals, as Zbigniew Brezinski would have it.

In fact, not a single American will escape this extended sacrifice, as the government hurriedly imposes its police state control grid—from airport and transport Gestapo zones to national ID schemes and massive NSA high-tech snooping—and decimate the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, little more than “goddamned” pieces of paper, according to the decider and commander guy.

Of course, such sacrifice pales in comparison to that of the Iraqis, highlighted last week by the “suicide bombings” in the villages of al-Qataniyah and al-Adnaniyah, the deadliest yet in Iraq’s “sectarian violence.” Naturally, as the BBC tells it, the “US military blamed al-Qaeda for the … bombings, saying it fitted the profile of ’spectacular’ strikes expected by al-Qaeda during the ongoing US ’surge’ operation.” Never mind, as well, it fits the profile of strikes conducted by white guys in wigs and Arab garb.