Blue Spot

World Trade Center behind schedule, over budget | Reuters

NEW YORK, June 30 (Reuters) - Rebuilding at the World Trade Center, site of the Sept. 11 attacks, is behind schedule and over budget, and major problems mean new cost estimates and timetable must be drawn up, officials said on Monday.

Firm projections for the planned memorial, museum, five skyscrapers and transit hub now will be issued by the end of September, New York Gov. David Paterson said.

And it is too soon to say whether the Freedom Tower, which would replace the Twin Towers in the Manhattan skyline, will have to be scaled back, the site's owner said.

The centerpiece of the rebuilding effort, the Freedom Tower had been due for completion in 2011. At 1,776 feet (541 metres) it would be the tallest building in the United States.

Paterson spoke to reporters after the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the agency that owns the site, issued a report he commissioned because he feared the projects would take longer and cost more than his predecessors predicted.

Only part of the memorial will be done by the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. That anniversary had been the previous deadline for unveiling the memorial featuring two reflecting pools marking the outlines of each of the Twin Towers.

However, developer Larry Silverstein said three adjacent skyscrapers on the 16-acre (6.5-hectare) site will be completed on time by 2012.

The project's $14 billion cost keeps rising as commodity prices soar and the 19 federal, state and city agencies that are all involved fail to solve logjams.

Labels: 9-11, Ground Zero, Local

Here's a look at what's going on at Ground Zero as of yesterday.

Labels: 9-11, Ground Zero

CIA watchdog faults agency on 9/11 - U.S. Security - MSNBC.com

WASHINGTON - The CIA’s top leaders failed to use their available powers, never developed a comprehensive plan to stop al-Qaida and missed crucial opportunities to thwart two hijackers in the run-up to Sept. 11, the agency’s own watchdog concluded in a bruising report released Tuesday.

Completed in June 2005 and kept classified until now, the 19-page executive summary finds extensive fault with the actions of senior CIA leaders and others beneath them. “The agency and its officers did not discharge their responsibilities in a satisfactory manner,” the CIA inspector general found.

“They did not always work effectively and cooperatively,” the report stated.

Labels: 9-11, Intelligence

Giuliani Bungled Preparation in Years After 1993 Attack on Trade Center.

Critical failures by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani before, during and after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001, raise serious questions about his ability to be commander-in-chief.

In this thirteen minute documentary, fire fighters, fire officers and family members give dramatic testimony about Giuliani's leadership failures. Their dramatic stories tell how Giuliani failed to provide the FDNY with radios that worked, which led to the deaths of 121 fire fighters inside the World Trade Center's North Tower because they were unable to hear orders to evacuate.

Fire fighters also point to Giuliani's poor judgment in placing his emergency command center at 7 World Trade Center, a known terrorist target after the 1993 bombing.

This video documents the mayor's lack of respect for the fallen when he called off the recovery effort at Ground Zero on Nov. 1, 2001, after $200 million in gold bullion was recovered.

"We produced this documentary because we need to make sure our members know Giuliani's real record," said IAFF General President Harold Schaitberger.

"The UFA participated in this video to correct the myth that Rudy Giuliani has perpetrated on the American public," said Steve Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association of Greater New York, IAFF Local 94.

Labels: 9-11, Election 2008, FDNY, Giuliani, Ground Zero

For those of you interested in what's going on at Ground Zero, the video shows the re-building efforts at and around the site as of April 27 2007. Some nice shots from the 14th floor of the World Financial Ctr. I'll be taking some new footage soon.

Labels: 9-11, Ground Zero

Is Rudy Giuliani really the 9-11 saint that the media portrays. Keith Olbermann discusses this with Newsweek's Jonathan Alter. Just as Alter says, the Dems need to take a page out of the 2004 GOP playbook and attack Rudy at his perceived strengths. He is not the9-11 heroe that the media make him out to be. Just ask the FDNY. He was not the perfect mayor either. Just ask the African-American community.

Labels: 9-11, Election 2008, Giuliani, Ground Zero

Keith Olbermann talks with Rachel Maddow on the disdain the FDNY has for Rudy Giuliani and Rudy's record of draping his whole post-mayoral career around the tragedy of 9-11.

Labels: 9-11, Air America Radio, Election 2008, Heroes

Newsweek correspondent, Michael Isikoff, interviews professor and author of "Nation of Secrets," Ted Gup.

Labels: 9-11, Civil Rights, Constitutional attacks, Domestic spying, Intelligence, Military secrets, Patriot Act, Surveilance

JFK plots fuels concern about spread of extremism - Yahoo! News

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Caribbean and Latin American links of people charged in an alleged plot to blow up New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport underscore the spread of global extremism, analysts said on Sunday.

But they warned about overstating the threat from America's southern neighbors, and said the case showed that U.S. counterterrorism efforts were working to avert another attack like that of September 11, 2001.

U.S. officials on Saturday said they had charged four people, including a former member of Guyana's parliament, with planning to blow up the Kennedy airport's jet fuel tanks and part of the 40-mile (64-km) pipeline feeding them.

Three of the four suspects, who included a former airline cargo handler, have been arrested, federal law enforcement officials said. The fourth was being sought in the Caribbean.

Labels: 9-11, Homeland Security, Intelligence, Terrorism

wcbstv.com - New Study Links Blood Cancer To Ground Zero Toxins

(CBS) NEW YORK A new study has emerged that raises serious concerns about 9/11-related illnesses. For years, scientists reported that it was too soon to link cancers to the toxins that workers were exposed to at Ground Zero after 9/11. But new research is finding a link between Ground Zero toxins and certain types of cancers.

They've already suffered from the World Trade Center cough and from chronic lung diseases. Now doctors say 9/11 responders could face debilitating blood cancers from breathing the toxic air.

The scary reality hit retired firefighter Lee Ielpi hard when he was told he had a rare blood cancer. "I didn't have any words, I was speechless," said Ielpi, who spent nine painstaking months at Ground Zero as he searched for the remains of his son Jonathan, also a firefighter. "My mind -- it ran the gamut of fear, anxiety, my family."

Labels: 9-11, Ground Zero, Healthcare, Local

Bill Moyers on how the media enabled the Bush administration's case for war.

Labels: 9-11, Dissent, Fox propaganda, Iraq War, Journalists, Media

If you're wondering how much progress is being made, here's some footage (as of 4/20/07) of Ground Zero. Some nice shots from my 14th floor office.

Labels: 9-11, Ground Zero

The FAA's security branch generated 105 so-called daily summaries between April 1 and September 10, 2001, the report said. Fifty-two of those summaries mentioned bin Laden or al Qaeda, and five discussed hijacking "as a capability al Qaeda was training for or possessed." With 52 warnings, why [wasn't security increased] in 2001?



read more | digg story

Labels: 9-11

By Mike Lupica-NY Daily News

Rudy Giuliani runs for President, if he runs, from the same place where George Bush still tries to run his war in Iraq - from the rubble and ashes of Sept. 11.
Giuliani doesn't run from any city he still governs, or any state, or even from the U.S. Senate. He runs from a place called Sept. 11, and you would, too.
Giuliani runs, if he runs, from a job to which he was never elected, just appointed. Or perhaps anointed. It's the job of America's Mayor, and it is the best job he is ever going to have, one with which he can have a longer run than a Supreme Court justice if he plays his cards right.
When you are the mythical mayor of America, instead of a declared candidate for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, it means nobody wants to talk about what kind of mayor of New York City you were before Sept. 11, 2001. That is a real good thing for Giuliani.
There are a lot of reasons why Giuliani should quit while he is ahead in some of the polls, but the best is this: the inevitable collision between some of the myths that have grown up around him in the last six years and the facts.
If the other guys in the race just let him run on Sept. 11, let that be the only thing in play - "It really is all people see," one veteran Democrat said last weekend in New Hampshire - then he wins the nomination. Only it doesn't work that way, not in a world where everything is in play, and where the whole process, with each passing election, becomes dumber than Britney Spears.
The only thing Giuliani has run since leaving office is the booming franchise of Giuliani. He has written a huge best seller and made a small fortune giving speeches all over the world. He has run a lucrative consulting business, one that enables him to fly down to a place like Mexico City for a few days, explain to them how they can reduce the crime rate and then he pockets big change.
Only now he sounds as if he is talking himself into making a run for the nomination it is hard to see him ever getting, one that is hard to see him ever getting from the yahoos in his party, even if he is ahead in some polls the way Hillary Clinton is ahead, mostly for being famous.
But Giuliani ought to ask himself how he gets the nomination of a right-wing, red-state party with his positions in favor of stem-cell research and gun control and gay civil marriages and abortion. If he really does make his run, how do those views play on the Dick Cheney news channels, or in the Church of the Religious Right?
Giuliani ought to ask how long he will be on the stump before everybody starts banging away at him with Bernard Kerik, his police commissioner and former business partner, someone Giuliani thought would be a tremendous head of Homeland Security after turning the job down himself. Kerik is another one who wants you to think he cleaned up crime in New York City all by himself, another guy with a badge who thought the law applied to everybody except him.
Kerik will be in play the way Giuliani's second wife, Donna Hanover, and the way she found out about the breakup of her marriage on television, will be in play. So will the whole subject of race relations in the city during Giuliani's time running it. And even the conditions under which the rescue workers worked at Ground Zero.
Did Giuliani find the best in himself during those first days after the planes flew into our buildings? He did. He did his job and, in doing that job, got carried along by the best in the city, as if he was one of the ironworkers who came walking over the bridge from Stuyvesant High School that first afternoon, coming from everywhere, carrying their tools in leather bags, the ones who told the police, "We're here to work."
And when the police asked them how that day, the ironworkers said, "We cut steel, you're gonna need us." And kept walking towards the ruins of the World Trade Center.
When people see Giuliani now, they see that. They see it all, with Giuliani in the foreground. They see the city getting up, slowly at first, then defiantly. The life of the city changed forever that day. So did Giuliani's. No longer was he a man with a complicated life running the world's most complicated city. He was seen as a hero.
America's Mayor. He runs, if he runs, from there. And if it was only that, if how you did that day and in the days to follow, he wins. It isn't the only issue. There are a lot of them with Rudy Giuliani and always were and always will be.
He never ran for the Senate in the end; he never ran for governor. Now the yes-men he's always had around him tell him he can get the nomination for President. It would be easy if it were all Sept. 11, 2001. The problem for Giuliani is Sept. 10.

Labels: 9-11, Election 2008, Giuliani

JUAN GONZALEZ- New York Daily News- New York, N.Y.: Sep 6, 2006. pg. 7

Copyright Daily News, L.P. Sep 6, 2006

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 noncompliance." 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.

jgonzales@nydailynews.com

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction or distribution is prohibited without permission.

Labels: 9-11, Giuliani, GOP Hypocrisy, Ground Zero