Is this freedom? Is this the shining example of democracy the rest of the world is supposed to look up to?
Or is it criminal?
www.nynewsday.com...
Another Lie, One Among Many
by Jimmy Breslin
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.""
There's more, I just didn't want to paste the whole article
