White House lied about air quality post 9/11. This is what the EPA Inspector General says in their new and damning 160 page report

I think also the most important thing I think out of the report that has not gotten a lot of attention is that the I.T.’s office looked at the current clean up that the E.P.A., finally after months and months of criticism and public outcry, agreed it was going to do a clean up of lower Manhattan, but decided only to do residential apartments and only those where people requested it. The inspector general’s report says quite clearly that this clean up is inadequate–that the only way that a real clean up of downtown Manhattan can happen is, number one, if buildings are cleaned up as systems. If you have a central air conditioning system and three or four apartments want to be cleaned up but the whole building is not cleaned up that pollution can travel through the HVAC system back into apartments that have been cleaned.

 The Inspector General is recommending that buildings be cleaned all together, all at once and also the inspector general is saying that the commercial office buildings have to be cleaned, not just residential buildings. And the E.P.A.’s response to that is that’s going to cost a lot of money. So the inspector general reminds E.P.A. in his rebuttal or her rebuttal that President Bush and Christie Todd Whitman originally said that no expense should be spared for the people of lower Manhattan. I think that is the battle that is still being waged by people like Congressman Jerry Nadler and Senator Hillary Clinton. I think they will have a press conference today about it–that the full clean up of lower Manhattan still has to be completed because if there were pollutants, and there were, that made their way into buildings that have not been properly cleaned, then that pollution and those toxic chemicals are still there, circulating in the air.