As we approach the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 Al Qaeda terrorist attack that destroyed the World Trade Center and killed thousands on that horrific day, a reckoning is coming for the thousands of others in the years since who died or were sickened from the poisonous cloud that arose when the towers fell.
Critically, as part of the budget for a half dozen federal departments passed by Congress and signed by President Trump this month, the World Trade Center Health Program, which exists in law until 2090, will now have sufficient funding to care for the 140,000 people enrolled, including a 7% annual inflation adjustment up until 2040.
So any cuts or rationing of health care for the heroes and victims of 9/11 can be avoided and the survivors and responders will have the treatment they need.
Here in the city, answers to questions of who knew what and when about the health risks at Ground Zero are also coming into focus.
Previous mayors have refused pleas from members of Congress to open up the WTC files, saying they would turn over the materials if the city was given immunity from lawsuits. But any legal liability exposure was capped at $350 million by Congress in November 2001 and the World Trade Center Captive Insurance Company, which is controlled by City Hall, still has hundreds of millions dollars supplied by the feds to pay out claims.
And there is hardly anyone who can sue. Everyone who received money from the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund administered by the Department of Justice cannot sue. However, still the mayors refused.
This column suggested using the state Freedom of Information Law, requests which were duly filed by Ben Chevat of 9/11 Health Watch. When the FOILs were denied, his pro bono lawyers Andrew Carboy and Matt McCauley sued the city.
The City Council, using powers granted under the City Charter, ordered the Department of Investigation to produce a report on the hidden WTC records. That prompted one agency, the Department of Environmental Protection, to provide some records after telling the court they had nothing. The documents were largely not significant, however in those DEP boxes there is a memo from the assistant chief of the Law Department’s World Trade Center Unit, which was created in the fall of 2002.
The memo says: “These original World Trade Center documents have been collected and scanned by the New York City Law Department. DO NOT DISPOSE OF THESE DOCUMENTS: they must be preserved to serve as evidence in the event future WTC-related legal actions are brought against the City.”
So the Law Department has everything and has had everything for decades.
And there is another memo that just surfaced, written in the weeks after 9/11 and addressed to then-Deputy Mayor Bob Harding, saying that there could be a great many lawsuits.
Carboy noticed that the Harding memo was mentioned in a footnote in the 2006 book “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11” by the late Wayne Barrett and the late Dan Collins. A copy of the Harding memo was just found in Barrett’s papers stored at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of Texas at Austin.
That memo, and everything else, is at the Law Department, which has a new boss in Steve Banks, who was confirmed to be corporation counsel by the City Council 42-6 on Thursday. During his confirmation hearing Banks promised transparency on the WTC files. Now that he is in office, he must publish all of it very soon, while redacting only personal info like phone numbers and Social Security numbers.
The Council must fully fund the Department of Investigation to produce its comprehensive report on the city’s knowledge and actions on the WTC terrorist attack’s lingering environmental and health hazards. Mayor Mamdani has now tapped Nadia Shihata to be the new DOI commissioner.
Shihata, a former Brooklyn federal prosecutor, must commit to the Council during her upcoming confirmation hearing to finishing the job started by just-departed DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber to obey the Council mandate to produce the definitive report on the WTC files.
