The 9/11 hijackers and Osama bin Laden, all deservedly dead, planned a coordinated attack with multiple strikes, killing thousands. They made no distinction between victims at the World Trade Center or at the Pentagon or at the likely target of the Capitol, which was saved when heroic passengers brought down Flight 93 in Shanksville, Pennsylvania.
So why does the health program set up by Congress under the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for responders and survivors suffering from serious and too often fatal maladies from exposure to the toxic fallout from the attack — a program that this column has championed for years — exclude Department of Defense personnel, civilian and uniform, if they incurred their 9/11 illnesses at the Pentagon and Shanksville?
Be it an oversight or a drafting error, the implications are clear, as Mike McAuliff explains in the Daily News: Military personnel who aided the rescue and recovery at the Pentagon and in Shanksville and were sickened with cancer and other diseases are not eligible to have Uncle Sam pick up their medical treatment. Soldiers and sailors and Marines and DOD civilians who were exposed downtown are in the program, as are other non-military people, such as firefighters and cops, who were exposed at the Pentagon and Shanksville.
The people spotlighted in the paper, Nate Coward and a former Pentagon employee named Jacqueline, are just two, but there are more and Congress must extend the 9/11 health program to include them. Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand are already working on the problem, and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer must use his considerable clout to get it done this year, along with the full funding of the health program, which is running short of resources.
There are famous images of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld helping evacuate people from the Pentagon on 9/11. Because of the law’s quirk, Rumsfeld, who died last summer from cancer, would not have been allowed to join the 9/11 health program. Fix it.
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