From the New York State Penal Law:
[A] person is guilty of Murder … when, under circumstances evincing a depraved indifference to human life, he or she recklessly engages in conduct which creates a grave risk of death to another person […]
Ask yourself whether you think someone in the Bush administration may be guilty of a depraved indifference to human life as you read the following from a story in The Washington Post regarding a statement issued by the the two Democrats on a House science subcommittee charging that FEMA had “manipulated scientific research into the potential danger posed by [formaldehyde] emitted in trailers still housing tens of thousands of survivors of hurricanes Katrina and Rita.”
FEMA “ignored, hid and manipulated government research on the potential impact of long-term exposure to formaldehyde” on Katrina and Rita victims now living in the FEMA trailers, the congressmen wrote in a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, whose department includes FEMA.
Reps. Brad Miller (N.C.) and Nick Lampson (Tex.) cited agency documents given to Congress in alleging that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — generally considered a repository of nonpartisan scientific expertise — was “complicit in giving FEMA precisely what they wanted” to suppress the adverse health effects.
The lawmakers said the CDC’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry ignored one of its experts, Christopher T. De Rosa, after he informed FEMA there was no “safe level” of long-term exposure. They said FEMA bypassed that opinion and “shopped” the agency for its desired recommendation to study only short-term exposure.
“Any level of exposure to formaldehyde may pose a cancer risk, regardless of duration,” De Rosa wrote in a Feb. 27, 2007, letter to a FEMA lawyer, recently obtained by a House Science and Technology investigative subcommittee that Miller chairs. “Failure to communicate this issue is possibly misleading and a threat to public health.”
De Rosa wrote the letter after learning that the CDC bypassed his office to produce a Feb. 1, 2007, report for FEMA that did not consider long-term exposure risks, contradicting his recommendation to the agency in June 2006.
FEMA’s response to these charges?
“For those who are too poor to live elsewhere, FEMA’s position remains as it was in 2006: there are no possible adverse health effects that can’t be cured by opening the windows,” they added.
Let that sink in. FEMA deliberately avoided review by a CDC expert regarding the risks posed by formaldehyde on the health of human beings in order to keep housing poor people in them, people who are likely suffering various afflictions from their long term exposure to the formaldehyde gas emitted by the trailers in which they are forced to reside. Trailers that FEMA has known since early 2006 were essentially toxic waste dumps containing levels of formaldehyde 75 times the recommended maximum exposure for US workers. Now we know that FEMA was told that there is no known safe level of exposure to formaldehyde with respect to the cancer risk to human beings. Human beings that are still living in these trailers as we speak.
What kind of behavior would you call that? Would you say it constitutes reckless conduct evidencing a depraved and indifferent regard for human life? Let’s look at the New York State Penal Code again for a some guidance. Here’s how Penal Code defines “reckless conduct which poses a grave risk of death”:
[C]onduct which creates a grave and unjustifiable risk that another person’s death will occur, and when he or she is aware of and consciously disregards that risk, and when that grave and unjustifiable risk is of such nature and degree that disregard of it constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the situation […]
(cont.)
And here is how “depraved indifference” is defined:
A person has a depraved indifference to human life when that person has an utter disregard for the value of human life – a willingness to act, not because he or she means to cause grievous harm [to the person who is killed], but because he or she simply does not care whether or not grievous harm will result.
I don’t know about you, but someone at FEMA, or elsewhere in the Bush administration must have made the decision that FEMA and any other government agency which might become involved in this issue, would do all it could to ignore any warnings that the risk to the residents of these trailers from the formaldehyde gas was serious and grave. Likely that same person, or persons (it may have been a collective decision after all) decided to deliberately “cherry pick” scientific data to make it appear that the trailers were safe, when clearly they were not under any objective criteria. And despite warnings from their own in house government experts they persisted in doing so, and thereby allowed the people residing in those trailers to incur long term exposure to formaldehyde at levels far exceeding what the US government had previously deemed the maximum permissible exposure to formaldehyde for workers in industries which use that highly toxic chemical.
To my mind that conduct represents not only a reckless disregard for human life, but a conscious decision to disregard the value of the lives of the people living in those trailers. In short, a depraved indifference to human life and to the suffering of people like these:
Becky Gillette, co-chair of the Mississippi chapter of the environmental group, said that representatives also have heard from numerous trailer inhabitants who say they began experiencing health problems ranging from headaches and runny noses to chronic respiratory problems and nosebleeds as soon as they moved in. […]
Dr. Scott Needle, a pediatrician in Bay St. Louis, said he noticed some unusual and persistent health problems among his patients living in the trailers well before the possible link to formaldehyde exposure surfaced.
“I was seeing kids coming in with respiratory complaints – colds and sinus infections – and they were getting them over and over again,” he said. “…Almost invariably, these families were staying in the FEMA trailers.”
How many people will suffer life shortening illnesses as a result of their exposure to these “toxic tin cans?” No one can say, but what we already know is that FEMA did not care to prevent the damage that has already been done to the health of the people living in its trailers, and actively sought to cover up any information regarding the serious health risks to them caused by its own indifference to their plight.
Par for the course with this President.
