How September 11th Revealed the Real Hillary Clinton
“I don’t think any of us expected that our government would knowingly deceive us about something as sacred as the air we breathe,” she said, her voice tightening in anger. “The air that our children breathe in schools, that our valiant first responders were facing on the pile.”
Surrounded by fire fighters and the doctors who were treating them for respiratory and other illnesses incurred when they worked on the massive mound of Ground Zero rubble—the “pile” as it was known—the-then junior senator for New York was incandescent. Audio recorded at the time by WNYC captures a Hillary Clinton quite unlike the controlled public figure who is now but a step away from the White House.
The Hillary Clinton who emerges from the WNYC tapes that day is passionate, raw and unrestrained. Above all, she is livid.
She had just learned that the Bush administration had instructed officials of the federal Environmental Protection Agency to reassure New Yorkers after 9/11 that the air over Ground Zero was safe. In fact, they had a pretty good idea that it was a toxic pall of asbestos, cement, glass dust, heavy metals, fuels and PCBs.
“I am outraged,” the senator went on. “In the immediate aftermath, the first couple of days, nobody could know. But a week later? Two weeks later? Two months later? Six months later? Give me a break!”
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