The Freedom Tower

Larry McShane of the Associated Press reports today that “Almost everyone agrees Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t belong at ground zero.”
Almost everyone?
McShane rightly asks “who gets access these days to the 16-acre pit where the World Trade Center once anchored the Manhattan skyline, a slice of the city that many regard as hallowed ground?
Construction workers. The families of victims. The occasional journalist. And not too many others, in stark contrast to the days immediately after Sept. 11 when the smoldering site was overrun with celebrities, politicians and even Playboy playmates.
Amid the chaos after the twin towers fell, rescue workers and cleanup crews mingled with a parade of well known visitors: Muhammad Ali, Robert De Niro, cast members from “The Sopranos,” Martha Stewart.
Miss America Katie Harman signed body ID tags for grateful workers. Boxing promoter Don King toured the site, as did U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other world leaders. Almost half of the Senate arrived en masse.
The vast majority came to offer support and condolences, although critics suggested others viewed a trip to the devastation as a photo op.
“It was like you had celebrity status only if you got in at ground zero,” recalled Brian Jordan, a Franciscan priest who spent long hours in lower Manhattan in the weeks after two hijacked planes struck the towers.
Within a month, the city was turning down hundreds of requests to visit the site and began asking celebrities to avoid the area as the treacherous search for remains continued.”

Our tradedy has become everyone’s photo op …

From: Jeanne ( JeanneIris@earthlink.net )Ms. Marion Eggleton (posted from the Camden Courier Post) states the fearful message with vigor. Common? Yes. Sensible? I wonder.

Does she realize that her words support the very fear tactics of the generals whom she fervently admonishes, who are sworn to uphold the decisions made by their Commander in Chief?

The United States has intelligence operations in place at this very moment. It was our intelligence that assisted the capture of those involved with the recent terrorist activity in Europe. We should all pray that young women and men with high ingenuity and resourcefulness will continue to choose to enter the professions dedicated to preserving our peace. They work with intensity and intention 24/7, 365.

Our country is strong. We have intelligent, creative leaders who are ‘chafing at the bit’ to receive the winning number of votes of educated citizenry in the next election. Right now, the duty of every U.S. citizen is to analyze the evidence before us. Read, listen and, most of all, question those who wish to be the leaders in the upcoming years. Accept only logical answers. Encourage discussion.

Inventing fearful scenarios will only perpetuate ignorance. We have had enough ignorance!

We attract into our lives those conditions, which dominate our consciousness. I don’t know about you, but I intend to live a fulfilled, productive life, and I wish the same for my children along with those of my relatives and friends.

As long as there is breath in me, I will be the United States citizen who concentrates on and contributes to the advancement of this nation, illustrating to the world its strength of character, altruism, creativity, intelligence and stewardship. That is the only way to maintain a secure future for our loved ones.

Blogger News Network reports:
“Forty two year old Felicia Dunn-Jones was a civil rights attorney from Staten Island. She had the misfortune to be in a U.S. Department of Education office a block north of the World Trade Center on 9/11. As she fled, she was coated in toxic dust containing benzene, asbestos, dioxin and other chemical agents from the WTC inferno. Five months later, she was dead.” We’ve periodically reported this in the past but it is an emerging story that requires a closer look.

“The previously healthy lawyer died of sarcoidosis, a tissue inflammation associated with exposure to environmental hazards that starts in the lungs and then spreads through the body, producing microscopic lumps (granulomas) on vital organs, scarring them and causing death. Her death on 10 February 2002 is now the first to be recognized as being caused by the toxic cloud which hovered over Ground Zero. Her name was read for the first time today during New York City memorial services commemorating victims of the terrorist attack.

New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner, Charles S. Hirsch says

“Exposure to World Trade Center dust on 9/11/01 contributed to her death [from sarcoidosis with cardiac involvement] and it has been ruled a homicide,” wrote New York City’s Chief Medical Examiner, Charles S. Hirsch in May 2007. “The total number of World Trade Center victims is now, 2,750.” Not only does this ruling mean that Dunn-Jones’ name will be added to the WTC Memorial and read aloud at WTC memorial ceremonies, it also opens the door for others who have since died or who are now suffering with WTC-related illnesses to obtain treatment and/or compensation. For the first time, Hirsch has finally agreed to link WTC dust to 9/11 fatalities.

Detective James Zadroga and Daughter Tylerann

At least 12 other people who worked at Ground Zero have died of diseases attributed to the chemicals and toxic materials which formed an omnipresent cloud during rescue and recovery efforts at the disaster scene. One of them was New York Police Department Detective James Zadroga, 34, who was the first NYPD officer to die of a WTC-related illness (black lung disease). After escaping from 7 World Trade Center as it collapsed, he spent over 470 hours digging through Ground Zero rubble in the ensuing weeks, all the while inhaling fumes and gases present in the area. Not long after finishing rescue and recovery work at the WTC, Zadroga developed symptoms such as a chronic cough and shortness of breath. Within months, he was on oxygen and taking stereoids and antibiotics, which would continue until his 6 January 2006 death.

Tens of thousands of other Ground Zero workers and area residents suffer to some degree from respiratory ailments. They include firefighters, police officers, and construction workers, who are sometimes called the “walking dead.” About 70,000 people are participating in Mount Sinai Medical Center’s WTC health study; more than 60,000 report respiratory proble.”

This is sobering from a writer in New Jersey who mixes and mingles too much contradictory disinformation and honest to goodness common sense. Staying in Iraq after telling enormous lies to get troops there is a high crime that no number of replacement generals can erase. There are so many layers of nonsense, I don’t blame any one of us for being confused, even generals who have built careers on doing just what they’re told to do.

This piece illustrates how a bamboozled public like ours can no longer think its way out of a paperbag, nevermind war that will kill thousands of our children before our babies are safe from the fools running our government. My apologies to Marion Eggleton in the Camden Courier Post in advance or not standing behind her 100% but I’ve heard people use that what she says is right on:

“Daily we are offered pronouncements from the liberal Congress through the major media outlets that the war in Iraq is lost. They say we cannot win and must bring our troops home.

First, they authorized the war and sent more than 3,600 of our finest men and women to their deaths. Then when the fighting gets tough, or what they view as tough, they want to put our tails between our legs and come home. Untouchable

Are they oblivious to the daily threats by al-Qaida and Islamic terrorists who are committed to destroying life as we know it? Do they think we still live on an island and are untouchable by our world enemies?

Have they forgotten how easily a few committed individuals were able to bring down the World Trade Center towers, killing more than 3,000 people? Have they forgotten how close they came to losing their own lives in a similar attack on the Capitol had it not been for a few courageous passengers?

They sit in their cushy, air-conditioned offices with all the comforts of a king, oblivious of the threats being posed to the citizens they have sworn to protect. Are they so willing to sell America out for the sake of their perceived political lives?

They have already demonstrated this with their unwillingness to secure our borders, to enact realistic immigration reform and their willingness to trade our children’s and grandchildren’s futures with their frivolous, nonstop spending to buy political favor. Establish base

Don’t they see the front line for the Islamic terrorist thrust is in Iraq? Don’t they realize that giving up that front will allow al-Qaida and similar groups to establish a major base of operations with oil and nuclear possibilites from which to foment their religious thrust to convert all of us to their way of life?

Do they want their wives and daughters wearing burqas and everyone on their knees five times a day to pray to a God that only Muslims recognize? Wake-up call

The London and Scotland attacks in June should have been a wake-up call that individuals whom we trust to protect our health, and have every opportunity that life has to offer, will and can turn on us and destroy our way of life.

Daily, these members of Congress turn their backs on the events happening around the world and they seem to be oblivious to the fact that the next attacks, if and when they come, are going to be directed at their pompous, secure lives.”

George Martin began a cross-country walk Sunday to raise money for the rescue and recovery workers who have fallen ill since 911.
Martin is a former NFL football player for the New York Ginats and captain of the 1986 Super Bowl champions. Martin was cheered on on by volunteers who watched as he began a walk that hopefully will end four months from now when he walks across the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco.
Martin, who is 54 years old walked to Hackensack, New Jersey anjd expects to cover at least 30 miles a day during his campaign.

Alternet.org wants to know if it gets any lower than this:
The National Collector’s Mint is offering a World Trade Center anniversary commemorative coin using silver recovered from vaults at Ground Zero itself.
“Breathtaking. That’s the only word for the World Trade Center anniversary commemorative coin from National Collector’s Mint. Breathtaking is the word they use, and who could argue? Not me,” says Alternet writer Steve Burgess. “Each coin features an outline of the World Trade Center towers in silver. It’s no ordinary plunder. This is silver recovered from vaults at Ground Zero itself!
The price is $29.95 US, plus $4.95 shipping and handling. Same price for Canada. Five dollars go to 9-11 charities. What charities are those? ” 9-11 charities for the victims,” a spokesperson says.
It turns out that six years is more than enough time for passions to cool and patriotic commercial enterprise to take hold. National Collector’s Mint has offered very similar products for several years now.
Almost as an afterthought, Burgess asked the company if anyone ever calls to suggest that these products represent a veritable Ground Zero of bad taste. “A few people,” she says, “but only Canadians. All the complaints have been from Canadians.”

Another victim of the September 11 terrorist attacks has been identified from debris obtained at Ground Zero.
The remains of Laura Lee Morabito were positively identified as a passenger aboard one of the airliners that slammed into the World Trade Center Towers six years ago.
The 34-year-old Morabito’s remains were identified by the city medical examiner using a new method of DNA testing that can obtain results using smaller amounts of materials than had been necessary until now.
The woman was aboard American Airlines Flight 11 flying from Los Angeles when the plane was commandeered and flow into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Of the 2,750 people who died at the World Trade Center, the remains of more than 1,100 have yet to be identified.

This is news.

The MercuryNews.com reports:

The civil-engineering industry’s failure to admit that cost-saving design features led to the World Trade Center collapse amounts to “moral corruption,” a UC Berkeley engineering professor said Tuesday. Speaking on campus to memorialize the sixth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Abolhassan Astaneh said his five-year study of the collapse of the twin towers revealed that a better design likely would have prevented many of the nearly 3,000 deaths that day. Astaneh sharply criticized the American Society of Civil Engineers, which he said cared more about defending the industry than revealing the truth about the towers’ design. “It’s just moral corruption,” Astaneh said in response to a question from the audience. “I don’t beat around the bushes.” Astaneh, who first researched the disaster in the days following Sept. 11, said he had access to well guarded architectural drawings of the 110-story towers for his study. The schematics showed that the buildings were supported almost completely by thin steel beams around the outside. Thicker beams on the exterior and more concrete surrounding the stairwells would have added at least $30 million to the cost of the buildings, he said, but could have saved hundreds or thousands of lives after airliners hit both towers. Instead, the resulting 1,000-degree fire easily destroyed the structure, he said. Most tall skyscrapers, including Chicago’s Sears Tower, are sturdier and likely would survive such Advertisement attacks, Astaneh said.

The Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan today released the findings from the World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program, the largest multi-center clinical program providing medical screening examinations for the workers and volunteers who worked at Ground Zero and other sites following the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11.

The report has been accepted by Environmental Health Perspectives, the journal of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, and will be published on Thursday, September 7. The paper will be available for members of the working press in the “press - embargo” section of the EHP website at http://www.ehponline.org/. The findings are based upon medical examinations performed between July 2002 and April 2004 on 9,500 WTC responders. These responders were a highly diverse group and included members of the building trades, law enforcement officers, firefighters, utilities and telecommunications workers, transit workers, and many others. All received a comprehensive examination that included complete physical examination, mental health evaluation, pulmonary function tests, chest x-ray, blood tests and urinalysis. Overall, the monitoring program examined close to 12,000 responders during the 21-month period covered by the study; 9,500 of whom agreed to allow their results to be used in this report.

The report found that a high proportion of those examined became sick as a result of their World Trade Center work. It found also that illnesses have persisted in the years since September 11 in a high proportion of the workers. In one area alone – pulmonary function tests - the study found WTC responders had abnormalities at a rate twice that expected in the comparable U.S. population and that these abnormalities persisted for many months and, in some cases, years after exposure.

“Many who worked at Ground Zero in the early days after the attacks have sustained serious and lasting health problems as a direct result of their exposure to the environment there,” said Dennis Charney, Dean for Academic and Scientific Affairs, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, which has been running a number of medical and mental health programs serving responders since July 2002. “This study scientifically confirms high rates of respiratory problems in a large number of responders – including construction workers, law enforcement officers, utilities workers and public sector workers.”

The study published today focuses on respiratory health consequences, one of the earliest areas of concern to emerge. The study found that many responders were symptomatic, with high rates of pulmonary function abnormalities as long as two-and-a-half years after the disaster. The findings are particularly striking, in that the workers who served at the World Trade Center tended to be vigorous, healthy workers who held jobs in strenuous professions such as the building and utility trades before September 11.

I pace upon the battlements and stare
On the foundations of a house, or where
Tree, like sooty finger, starts from the earth;
and send imagination forth
Under the day’s declining beam, and call
Images and memories
From ruin or from ancient trees,
For I would ask a question of them all.
(from “The Tower” by William Butler Yeats)