Tip of the Iceberg

The Opposites Game
All the Strangeness of Our American World in One Article
By Tom Engelhardt

Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that’s been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.

The piece by Craig Whitlock appeared on June 19th and was headlined, “U.S. military criticized for purchase of Russian copters for Afghan air corps.” Maybe that’s strange enough for you right there. Russian copters? Of course, we all know, at least vaguely, that by year's end U.S. spending on its protracted Afghan war and nation-building project will be heading for $350 billion dollars. And, of course, those dollars do have to go somewhere.

Admittedly, these days in parts of the U.S., state and city governments are having a hard time finding the money just to pay teachers or the police. The Pentagon, on the other hand, hasn’t hesitated to use at least $25-27 billion to “train” and “mentor” the Afghan military and police -- and after each round of training failed to produce the expected results, to ask for even more money, and train them again. That includes the Afghan National Army Air Corps which, in the Soviet era of the 1980s, had nearly 500 aircraft and a raft of trained pilots. The last of that air force -- little used in the Taliban era -- was destroyed in the U.S. air assault and invasion of 2001. As a result, the "Afghan air force” (with about 50 helicopters and transport planes) is now something of a misnomer, since it is, in fact, the U.S. Air Force.

Still, there are a few Afghan pilots, mostly in their forties, trained long ago on Russian Mi-17 transport helicopters, and it’s on a refurbished version of these copters, Whitlock tells us, that the Pentagon has already spent $648 million. The Mi-17 was specially built for Afghanistan’s difficult flying environment back when various Islamic jihadists, some of whom we’re now fighting under the rubric of “the Taliban,” were allied with us against the Russians.

Here’s the first paragraph of Whitlock’s article: “The U.S. government is snapping up Russian-made helicopters to form the core of Afghanistan's fledgling air force, a strategy that is drawing flak from members of Congress who want to force the Afghans to fly American choppers instead.”

So, various congressional representatives are upset over the lack of a buy-American plan when it comes to the Afghan air force. That’s the story Whitlock sets out to tell, because the Pentagon has been planning to purchase dozens more of the Mi-17s over the next decade, and that, it seems, is what’s worth being upset about when perfectly good American arms manufacturers aren’t getting the contracts.

But let’s consider three aspects of Whitlock’s article that no one is likely to spend an extra moment on, even if they do capture the surpassing strangeness of the American way of war in distant lands -- and in Washington.

1. The Little Training Program That Couldn’t: There are at present an impressive 450 U.S. personnel in Afghanistan training the Afghan air force. Unfortunately, there’s a problem. There may be no “buy American” program for that air force, but there is a “speak American” one. To be an Afghan air force pilot, you must know English -- “the official language of the cockpit,” Whitlock assures us (even if to fly Russian helicopters). As he points out, however, the trainees, mostly illiterate, take two to five years simply to learn the language. (Imagine a U.S. Air Force in which, just to take off, every pilot needed to know Dari!)

Thanks to this language barrier, the U.S. can train endlessly and next to nothing is guaranteed to happen. “So far,” reports Whitlock, “only one Afghan pilot has graduated from flight school in the United States, although dozens are in the pipeline. That has forced the air corps to rely on pilots who learned to fly Mi-17s during the days of Soviet and Taliban rule.” In other words, despite the impressive Soviet performance in the 1980s, the training of the Afghan Air Force has been re-imagined by Americans as a Sisyphean undertaking.

And this offers but a hint of how bizarre U.S. training programs for the Afghan military and police have proven to be. In fact, sometimes it seems as if exactly the same scathing report, detailing the same training problems and setbacks, has been recycled yearly without anyone who mattered finding it particularly odd -- or being surprised that the response to each successive piece of bad news is to decide to pour yet more money and trainers into the project.

For example, in 2005, at a time when Washington had already spent $3.3 billion training and mentoring the Afghan army and police, the U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report indicating that “efforts to fully equip the increasing number of [Afghan] combat troops have fallen behind, and efforts to establish sustaining institutions, such as a logistics command, needed to support these troops have not kept pace.” Worse yet, the report fretted, it might take “up to $7.2 billion to complete [the training project] and about $600 million annually to sustain [it].”

In 2006, according to the New York Times, “a joint report by the Pentagon and the State Department... found that the American-trained police force in Afghanistan is largely incapable of carrying out routine law enforcement work, and that managers of the $1.1 billion training program cannot say how many officers are actually on duty or where thousands of trucks and other equipment issued to police units have gone.” At best, stated the report, fewer than half of the officially announced number of police were “trained and equipped to carry out their police functions.”

In 2008, by which time $16.5 billion had been spent on Army and police training programs, the GAO chimed in again, indicating that only two of 105 army units were "assessed as being fully capable of conducting their primary mission," while "no police unit is fully capable." In 2009, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction reported that “only 24 of 559 Afghan police units are considered ready to operate without international help.” Such reports, as well as repeated (and repetitive) news investigations and stories on the subject, invariably are accompanied by a litany of complaints about corruption, indiscipline, illiteracy, drug taking, staggering desertion rates, Taliban infiltration, ghost soldiers, and a host of other problems. In 2009, however, the solution remained as expectable as the problems: “The report called for more U.S. trainers and more money.”

This June, a U.S. government audit, again from the Special Inspector General, contradicted the latest upbeat American and NATO training assessments, reporting that “the standards used to appraise the Afghan forces since 2005 were woefully inadequate, inflating their abilities.” The usual litany of training woes followed. Yet, according to Reuters, President Obama wants another $14.2 billion for the training project “for this year and next.” And just last week, the Wall Street Journal’s Julian Barnes reported that new Afghan war commander General David Petraeus is planning to “retool” U.S. strategy to include “a greater focus on how Afghanistan’s security forces are being trained.”

When it comes to U.S. training programs then, you might conclude that Afghanistan has proved to be Catch-22-ville, the land where time stood still -- and so, evidently, has the Washington national security establishment’s collective brain. For Washington, there seems to be no learning curve in Afghanistan, not when it comes to “training” Afghans anyway.

And here is the oddest thing of all, though no one even bothers to mention it in this context: the Taliban haven’t had tens of billions of dollars in foreign training funds; they haven’t had years of advice from the best U.S. and NATO advisors that money can buy; they haven’t had private contractors like DynCorp teaching them how to fight and police, and strangely enough, they seem to have no problem fighting. They are not undermanned, infiltrated by followers of Hamid Karzai, or particularly corrupt. They may be illiterate and may not be fluent in English, but they are ready, in up-to platoon-sized units, to attack heavily fortified U.S. military bases, Afghan prisons, a police headquarters, and the like with hardly a foreign mentor in sight.

Consider it, then, a modern miracle in reverse that the U.S. has proven incapable of training a competent Afghan force in a country where arms are the norm, fighting has for decades seldom stopped, and the locals are known for their war-fighting traditions. Similarly, it’s abidingly curious that the U.S. has so far failed to train a modest-sized air force, even flying refurbished Italian light transport planes from the 1980s and those Russian helicopters, when the Soviet Union, the last imperial power to try this, proved up to creating an Afghan force able to pilot aircraft ranging from helicopters to fighter planes.

2. Non-Exit strategies: Now, let’s wade a little deeper into the strangeness of what Whitlock reported by taking up the question of when we’re actually planning to leave Afghanistan. Consider this passage from the Whitlock piece: “U.S. military officials have estimated that the Afghan air force won't be able to operate independently until 2016, five years after President Obama has said he intends to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. But [U.S. Air Force Brig. Gen. Michael R.] Boera said that date could slip by at least two years if Congress forces the Afghans to fly U.S. choppers.”

In other words, while Americans argue over what the president’s July 2011 drawdown date really means, and while Afghan President Hamid Karzai suggests that Afghan forces will take over the country’s security duties by 2014, Whitlock’s anonymous “U.S. military officials” are clearly operating on a different clock, on, in fact, Pentagon time, and so are planning for a 2016-2018 target date for that force simply to “operate independently” (which by no means indicates “without U.S. support.”)

If you were of a conspiratorial mind, you might almost think that the Pentagon preferred not to create an effective Afghan air force and instead -- as has also been the case in Iraq, a country that once had the world’s sixth largest air force and now, after years of U.S. mentoring, has next to nothing -- remain the substitute Afghan air force forever and a day.

3. Who Are the Russians Now?: Okay, let’s move even deeper into American strangeness with a passage that makes up most of the 20th and 21st paragraphs of Whitlock’s 25-paragraph piece: “In addition,” he reports, “the U.S. Special Operations Command would like to buy a few Mi-17s of its own, so that special forces carrying out clandestine missions could cloak the fact that they are American. ‘We would like to have some to blend in and do things,’ said a senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the clandestine program.”

No explanation follows on just how -- or where -- those Russian helicopters will help “cloak” American Special Operations missions, or what they are to “blend” into, or the “things” they are to do. There’s no further discussion of the subject at all.

In other words, the special op urge to Russianize its air transport has officially been reported, and a month later, as far as I know, not a single congressional representative has made a fuss over it; no mainstream pundit has written a curious, questioning, or angry editorial questioning its appropriateness; and no reporter has, as yet, followed up.

As just another little factoid of no great import buried deep in an article focused on other matters, undoubtedly no one has given it a thought. But it’s worth stopping a moment and considering just how odd this tiny bit of news-that-won’t-ever-rise-to-the-level-of-news actually is. One way to do this is to play the sort of opposites game that never quite works on this still one-way planet of ours.

Just imagine a similar news item coming out of another country.

*Hot off the wires from Tehran: Iranian special forces teams are scouring the planet for old American Chinook helicopters so they can be well “cloaked” in planned future forays into Afghanistan and Pakistan’s Baluchistan Province.

*The People’s Daily reports: Chinese special forces operatives are buying relatively late model American helicopters so that... Well, here’s one problem in the opposites game, and a clue to the genuine strangeness of American activities globally: why would the Chinese need to do such a thing (and, in fact, why would we)? Where might they want to venture militarily without being mistaken for Chinese military personnel?

That might be a little hard to imagine right now, but I guarantee you one thing: had some foreign news source reported such a plan, or had Craig Whitlock somehow uncovered it and included it in a piece -- no matter how obscurely nestled -- there would have been pandemonium in Washington. Congress would have held hearings. Pundits would have opined on the infamy of Iranian or Chinese operatives masking themselves in our choppers. The company or companies that sold the helicopters would have been investigated. And you can imagine what Fox News commentators would have had to say.

When we do such things, however, and a country like Pakistan reacts with what’s usually described as “anti-Americanism,” we wonder at the nationalistic hair-trigger they’re on; we comment on their over-emotionalism; we highlight their touchy “sensibilities”; and our reporters and pundits then write empathetically about the difficulties American military and civilian officials have dealing with such edgy natives.

Just the other day, for instance, the Wall Street Journal’s Barnes reported that U.S. Special Operations Forces are expanding their role in the Pakistani tribal borderlands by more regularly “venturing out with Pakistani forces on aid projects, deepening the American role in the effort to defeat Islamist militants in Pakistani territory that has been off limits to U.S. ground troops.” The Pakistani government has not been eager to have American boots visibly on the ground in these areas, and so Barnes writes: “Because of Pakistan’s sensitivities, the U.S. role has developed slowly.”

Imagine how sensitive they might prove to be if those same forces began to land Russian helicopters in Pakistan as a way to “cloak” their operations and blend in? Or imagine just what sort of hair-trigger the natives of Montana might be on if Pakistani special operations types were roaming Glacier National Park and landing old American helicopters outside Butte.

Then consider the sensitivities of Pakistanis on learning that the just appointed head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service turns out to be a man of “impeccable credentials” (so says CIA Director Leon Panetta). Among those credentials are his stint as the CIA station chief in Pakistan until sometime in 2009, his involvement in the exceedingly unpopular drone war in that country’s tribal borderlands, and the way, as the Director put it a tad vaguely, he “guided complex operations under some of the most difficult circumstances imaginable."

Here’s the truth of the matter, as Whitlock’s piece makes clear: we carry on in the most bizarre ways in far-off lands and think nothing of it. Historically, it has undoubtedly been the nature of imperial powers to consider every strange thing they do more or less the norm. For a waning imperial power, however, such an attitude has its own dangers. If we can’t imagine the surpassing strangeness of our arrangements for making war in lands thousands of miles from the U.S., then we can’t begin to imagine how the world sees us, which means that we’re blind to our own madness. Russian helicopters, that’s nuthin’ by comparison.

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. His latest book, The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s (Haymarket Books), has just been published. You can catch him discussing it on a TomCast video by clicking here.

[Note for readers: On the folly of American training programs for the Afghanistan Army, TomDispatch had an on-the-spot report that still shouldn’t be missed, Ann Jones’s September 20, 2009, piece “Meet the Afghan Army, Is It a Figment of Washington’s Imagination?”]

Wikileak's Afghan Disclosure: A plot engineered by the White House?

A thought-provoking piece in the Post today, saturated with allegations by Hamid Gul (former head of the Pakistani ISI), exposes potential U.S. complicity in the leaking of U.S. intelligence data from the occupation of Afghanistan.  The MSM angle on the leak is to excoriate Pakistan and (of course) Iran for allegedly aiding the Taliban/Al Qaeda/Haqquani bogeymen that frustrate the efforts of the U.S. in Afghanistan.  As reported in the story, Gul does not disguise his opposition to the U.S. occupation, and does not deny his past existence as a tool of the CIA (along with bin Laden, Haqquani, and countless others) in its covert support of the mujhadeen's resistance of the Soviets.  Without doubt, Gul knows the design of the great game in Afghanistan, so it's worthwhile to evaluate his opinion.   Gul's opinion is that many of the intelligence reports disclosed in the data leak originated from Indian operatives who manufactured the reports for two reasons: (1) to implicate Pakistan and alienate it from the U.S., and (2) the most basic human need of greed, as Gul alleges that operatives are paid for each report they submit regardless of the quality of veracity of the intelligence reported.  Contrary to Gul's assertions, I had surmised that many of these same intelligence reports had originated from operatives in the Afghanistan region who were reporting Pakistani and Iranian involvement as a means to give the U.S. a casus belli for planned action against Iran.   Perhaps both assertions or true, and perhaps neither.  In any event, Gul's statements are thought-provoking, and again reveal the many prisms through which a single event can be viewed.  

The more important context overlaying the entire Afghanistan debate is: what the hell are we trying to doing there?  What is victory?  At best, victory in Afghanistan seems be that "we would be in minimalist possession of a fractious, ruined land, at war for three decades, and about as alien to, and far from, the United States as it’s possible to be on this planet.  We would be in minimalist possession of the world’s fifth poorest country.  We would be in minimal possession of the world’s second most corrupt country.  We would be in minimal possession of the world’s foremost narco-state, the only country that essentially produces a drug monocrop, opium.  In terms of the global war on terror, we would be in possession of a country that the director of the CIA now believes to hold 50 to 100 al-Qaeda operatives (“maybe less”) -- for whom parts of the country might still be a “safe haven.” And for this, and everything to come, we would be paying, at a minimum, $84 billion a year."  Source for quote: http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175272/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_the_petraeus_syndrome/#more
   

Document leak part of U.S. plot, says Pakistani ex-general with ties to Taliban

By Karin Brulliard for the Washington Post 
Wednesday, July 28, 2010; pg. A08 

RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN -- From the deluge of leaked military documents published Sunday, a former Pakistani spy chief emerged as a chilling personification of his nation's alleged duplicity in the Afghan war -- an erstwhile U.S. ally turned Taliban tutor.

Now planted squarely in the cross hairs, retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul seems little short of delighted.

In an interview Tuesday, Gul dismissed the accusations against him as "fiction" and described the documents' release as the start of a White House plot. It will end, he posited, with an early U.S. pullout from Afghanistan -- thus proving Gul, an unabashed advocate of the Afghan insurgency, right.

President Obama "is a very good chess player. . . . He says, 'I don't want to carry the historic blame of having orchestrated the defeat of America, their humiliation in Afghanistan,' " said Gul, 74, adding that the plot incorporates a troop surge that Obama knows will fail. "It doesn't sell to a professional man like me."

That sort of theory makes Gul an incarnation of some of the United States' greatest challenges in dealing with Pakistan, a U.S. ally. Here, prominent figures closely linked to the security establishment not only trumpet what they view as vast American scheming but also, U.S. officials and the leaked documents allege, provide support to Afghan rebels.

Gul did that in an official capacity as head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency from 1987 to 1989, when he helped the CIA funnel Islamist fighters into Afghanistan to fight the Soviets. Eloquent and polished, he was viewed by his American partners as pro-Western and moderate, while his Saudi benefactors saw him as a pious, conservative Muslim.

After the Soviet withdrawal, the Saudis' characterization seemed to prevail. Gul continued to support the rebels in a semiofficial capacity, as did other elements of Pakistan's security forces that view the Taliban as a tool for influence in Afghanistan, U.S. officials say.

With the greatest detail yet made public, the leaked documents depict American views of Gul as a murderous terrorist agent. According to some of the documents, he possessed dozens of bombs for Taliban fighters to detonate in Kabul, instructed militants to kidnap United Nations workers, hatched a plan for a suicide bombing in Afghanistan to avenge an insurgent and assured fighters that Pakistan would provide them haven.

The reports are unconfirmed. But they are hardly surprising to those closely following the Afghan war, or to Gul himself. On Monday, he described himself as a "whipping boy" for the United States.

Current and former U.S. officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, variously described him as "very dirty" and a man with a "horrible reputation."

"There's no doubt where his sympathies lie," a U.S. official said, echoing the views of many Pakistani defense analysts. "Even though Gul may not be a card-carrying member of a terrorist group, he stays in touch with militants, offering his insights and advice on their activities."

Obama said Tuesday that the documents do not reveal any issues that weren't already part of the public debate on Afghanistan and that they "point to the same challenges that led me to conduct an extensive review of our policy last fall."

Gul, one of several former Pakistani military officials whom the United States accuses of fueling the Afghan insurgency, has deemed the war a "war against Muslims." He has acknowledged being a member of a militant organization banned by Pakistan.

Former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who had fired Gul as ISI chief on suspicion that he wanted to overthrow her, fingered him as a threat shortly before her assassination in 2007. Gul has since publicly shared what he calls his "assessment" that the United States was behind Bhutto's slaying, an allegation U.S. officials vehemently deny.

Gul and a senior ISI official say he cut ties with the agency upon retiring two decades ago. But he remains a major figure in Pakistan, where he regularly airs his anti-American views on talk shows. Gul said talking to the media is one of his hobbies, as are horticulture and trying to lower his golf handicap of 18.

His support for the Taliban is purely "academic," he said.

"There is not physical input to it. I don't have the means. I don't have the will," Gul said, speaking in his living room in the garrison city of Rawalpindi. "I am not an enemy of America. I am against their policy, much as many very patriotic Americans are against the policies."

To that end, Gul said, he holds Taliban leader Mohammad Omar in high regard for his "resistance" to U.S. invaders, though he said he has never met the man. He readily acknowledged that he has maintained friendships with former mujaheddin such as Jalaluddin Haqqani, a onetime CIA-backed fighter whose network is now viewed as the coalition forces' most lethal foe.

"The Americans dropped him like a hot brick," Gul said. "Why should I discard him just because he is doing the same thing . . . that they did against the Soviet occupation? They are fighting for the liberation of their country."

A conversation with Gul is a journey into the dense web of suspicion in this region, where Americans detect Pakistani and Iranian involvement in attacks in Afghanistan, Afghans see the ISI under every rock, and Pakistanis sense nefarious Indian designs all around them.

In Gul's version, India is where the leaked documents implicating Pakistani aid to the Taliban originated. The reports, he said, were fed by Indians to Afghan intelligence agents and intelligence "contractors" who are paid for each report they file. The reports are meant to pressure Pakistan to toe the American line, he said, a view widely shared here.

Gul said he was singled out in the reports because of American fears that he will expose U.S. "cavities" -- corruption, poor planning and complicity in the opium trade -- in the Afghan conflict. Pakistan's cooperation with the United States, he said, has "ravaged" its economy and social fabric.

"My future generations are going to be proud when they read about their ancestors," Gul said. "What about the American children, when they read about this -- that a retired 74-year-old general brought about the defeat of America in Afghanistan? What were their generals doing?"

But Gul reserved praise for Obama, who, he said, was expertly playing this game of intrigue. The document leak was orchestrated to indict Bush-era war policy, and the troop surge to expose Pentagon follies; soon a massive antiwar movement will rise, Gul said.

"I am sitting here understanding your politics better," he said, almost giddily. "Obama has been given the peace prize, the Nobel Peace Prize, in anticipation of what he is going to do. Somebody has read his mind. And I have read his mind, too."

Staff writer Peter Finn in Washington contributed to this report.

9/11 Followup: Sweeping the (Toxic) Dust Under the Rug

According to the article below a settlement proposal between the City/World Trade Center insurance carrier parties and emergency workers who claimed damages resulting from their work at or near near Ground Zero has been approved by the federal district judge. 95% of the workers must accept the approved settlement for it to become effective. The article notes that the lawyers for all parties now encourage the settlement, but fails to disclose the plaintiffs' attorney fees (usually 30-40% of the total settlement amount, plus expenses-- so likely in the ballpark of $300M) as a likely inducement for plaintiffs' counsel. The article also does not address whether the plaintiffs waive any further right to sue if they accept the settlement, but this is typically a basic element of any such settlement. Notably, the Court has made no findings of fact on the toxicity of the WTC dust, and in fact seems to have encouraged plaintiffs to accept the settlement so that this admittedly difficult scientific evidence would not have to be approved in Court. Depending on your perspective, the proposed settlement and waiver either represents a long-sought, judicially efficient victory for the plaintiffs or, to the cynic, a relative bargain for the WTC insurers, City of New York and other government types in avoiding any true scientific or judicial evaluation of how so many people developed such terrible diseases through exposure to the WTC dust, usually days after the bombing/demolition/attack. All of this begs the question, what was in the aerosol/dust that allegedly caused cancers and other alleged ailments? If this settlement is approved, we may never know.

Hellerstein Approves Respiratory Illness Settlement for 9/11 Workers

Mark Hamblett
06-24-2010
Originally printed in the New York Law Journal

Southern District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein yesterday approved the settlement in the 9/11 respiratory illness litigation at the end of a nearly seven-hour long hearing.

The judge and lawyers for the parties in the litigation pushed hard to persuade World Trade Center rescue and cleanup workers exposed to allegedly toxic dust at the site to accept a settlement that could run as high as $716 million.

Although billed as a "fairness hearing," the session was clearly an effort to convince at least 95 percent of 10,000 claimants to opt into the settlement. The deal requires 95 percent acceptance in order to go into effect.

Kenneth R. Feinberg, who was appointed by Judge Hellerstein to hear appeals from compensation decisions, spoke by conference call from Washington, D.C., and addressed the principal uncertainty confronting plaintiffs—legislation being negotiated on Capitol Hill to provide more money to 9/11 first responders and cleanup workers.

"If you opt out in the hope that there will be a better legislative alternative down the road, I believe personally, you will be making a mistake," said Mr. Feinberg. "The legislative process grinds slowly and after waiting over five years for the legislation to be enacted, it is still not enacted."

Judge Hellerstein had rejected an initial settlement on March 19 as providing inadequate compensation to those injured at Ground Zero.

Yesterday, he defended the latest deal during the seven-hour session that included emotional testimony from some plaintiffs as well as presentations by lawyers.

Retired NYPD Detective Candace Baker, who claims the 400 hours of overtime she put at Ground Zero caused her breast cancer, and retired firefighter Kenneth Specht, who claims his cancer was caused by exposure to toxic dust, both criticized the settlement for not providing enough money for solid tumor cancers.

The judge told Ms. Baker he understood her frustration. But, he said, "This is a settlement system and not a compensation system, so I have to pay attention, and the lawyers have to pay attention, to what is provable."

Later, he added, "I hope that when Ms. Baker and Mr. Specht go home and think about this, they vote to approve the settlement and opt in—not because it's perfect, it's far from perfect. It's good. It's the best we could do."

In the morning, Judge Hellerstein praised Margaret Warner of McDermott Will & Emery, the lawyer for the entity that holds the purse strings, the World Trade Center Captive Insurance Company. The judge said Ms. Warner's "indefatigable energy and intelligence really drove the settlement."

The lead lawyers, including Ms. Warner, although described by the judge as "protagonists," are now united in their interest in having the settlement approved.

Plaintiffs' co-liaison counsel Paul Napoli, of Worby Groner Edelman & Napoli, Bern, and James Tyrrell of Patton Boggs, lead lawyer for the city and its contractors, both worked hard to close the deal.

Under the agreement, plaintiffs could receive anywhere from a few thousand dollars to almost $2 million, depending on the severity of their injury and the degree of exposure at Ground Zero.

Mr. Napoli said that the amount was "fair, reasonable and more than adequate." He added that the legislation in Congress was "the elephant in the room," but he cautioned plaintiffs that "very few bills," between 2 percent and 3 percent, that are proposed in Congress actually become law.

'Potent' Defense

Mr. Tyrrell laid out the obstacles for those who choose to litigate rather than settle, including the possible immunity afforded the city and its contractors in responding to a civil emergency.

Mr. Tyrrell said plaintiffs would have an enormous hurdle in establishing a causal link between the allegedly toxic dust and injuries suffered by those at the site.

"In the federal courts, only good science gets to go to the jury," Mr. Tyrrell said, and Judge Hellerstein as "the gatekeeper" would "have to look, in advance, at the science both sides have offered."

This would mean, "very difficult, lengthy hearings on the different evidence" with respect to 383 separate diseases claimed to have been caused by the conditions at the disaster site.

Judge Hellerstein agreed, saying Mr. Tyrrell was prepared to present "extraordinarily potent defenses" against the claims.

Mr. Specht later said he was "shocked to the core" to hear the defenses Mr. Tyrrell would present in litigation.

But Judge Hellerstein stopped him.

"You have to understand we have an adversary system of justice and Mr. Tyrrell is doing his job and it's his job to present the defense as vigorously as he can," just as it is Mr. Napoli's job "to present the conditions of the plaintiffs."

If Mr. Tyrrell did not do the job he did, the judge said, the city "would have been eaten alive with all kinds of claims," legitimate and illegitimate.

Corporation Counsel Michael A. Cardozo spoke in favor of the settlement.

"How do we fairly compensate the heroes who went down to the pile who worked tirelessly to put this city back on its feet?" Mr. Cardozo said. "It wasn't the fault of the contractors or New York City, at least, in our view, that these people were injured, but there is no question that some people were injured and they suffered damages."

Tiered System

The settlement calls for the slotting of plaintiffs along four tiers based on the severity of their injuries, with tier four including the most serious health problems, such as lung cancer.

Ms. Warner explained that 50 percent of the 10,000 plaintiffs are expected to qualify for tier four and will received 94 percent of the cash in the settlement that will range between $625 million and $716 million, depending on the number of people who opt in and future claims made over the next five years.

Ironworker Richard Prager angrily told the judge the $10,000 he would receive for a physical injury he suffered at the site does not begin to compensate him for his health problems, including respiratory difficulties.

"This isn't fair to me, this is not fair to my family," he said. "I'm insulted. I didn't go to Ground Zero to sue. I went there because this is my home."

Mr. Napoli rose to say that Mr. Prager is an example of "one size does not fit all" in the settlement and Mr. Prager may well be one of those people who opt out.

Retired NYPD Detective Joseph Greco rose to speak in praise of the settlement. Mr. Greco, who has severe asthma, said he was one of the initial test cases set for trial in May before the parties reached a settlement.

Mr. Greco, who said he is on steroid medication, said his young son recently asked him how the family would pay the bills if something happened to him. The settlement, Mr. Greco said, "puts my mind at ease."

Judge Hellerstein approved the settlement despite familiar opening remarks by Mr. Tyrrell that the settlement was private and did not need judicial approval.

The deal still leaves several defendants in the case, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; insurers of workers who toiled at the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where the debris was shipped; and insurers for the barges that transported the debris from lower Manhattan.

Judge Hellerstein expressed hope that the current settlement would lead to the resolution of the claims against those defendants.

UPDATE:  

House rejects bill to aid sick 9/11 responders

By ANDREW MIGA and DAVID B. CARUSO, Associated Press

A bill that would have provided up to $7.4 billion in aid to people sickened by World Trade Center dust fell short in the House on Thursday, raising the possibility that the bulk of compensation for the ill will come from a legal settlement hammered out in the federal courts.

The bill would have provided free health care and compensation payments to 9/11 rescue and recovery workers who fell ill after working in the trade center ruins.

It failed to win the needed two-thirds majority, 255-159. The vote was largely along party lines, with 12 Republicans joining Democrats supporting the measure.

For weeks, a judge and teams of lawyers have been urging 10,000 former ground zero workers to sign on to a court-supervised settlement that would split $713 million among people who developed respiratory problems and other illnesses after inhaling trade center ash.

The court deal shares some similarities with the aid program that the federal legislation would have created, but it involves far less money. Only the most seriously ill of the thousands of police officers, firefighters and construction workers suing New York City over their exposure to the dust would be eligible for a hefty payout.

But supporters of the deal have been saying the court settlement is the only realistic option for the sick, because Congress will never act.

"Ladies and gentlemen, you can wait and wait and wait for that legislation ... it's not passing," Kenneth Feinberg, the former special master of the federal 9/11 victim compensation fund, told an audience of ground zero responders Monday in a meeting on Staten Island.

Democratic leaders opted to consider the House bill under a procedure that requires a two-thirds vote for approval rather than a simple majority. Such a move blocked potential GOP amendments to the measure.

A key backer of the bill, U.S. Rep. Peter King, a Long Island Republican, accused Democrats of staging a "charade."

King said Democrats were "petrified" about casting votes as the fall elections near on controversial amendments, possibly including one that could ban the bill from covering illegal immigrants who were sickened by trade center dust.

If Democrats brought it to the floor as a regular bill, King said, it would have passed with majority support.

GOP critics branded the bill as yet another big-government "massive new entitlement program" that would have increased taxes and possibly kill jobs.

To pay the bill's estimated $7.4 billion cost over 10 years, the legislation would have prevented foreign multinational corporations incorporated in tax haven countries from avoiding tax on income earned in the U.S.

Bill supporters said that would close a tax loophole. Republicans branded it a corporate tax increase.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg called the vote an "outrage." He said it was clearly a tactic designed to stall the bill.

"This is a way to avoid having to make a tough decision," Bloomberg said, adding that the nation owes more to "the people who worked down at 9/11 whose health has fallen apart because they did what America wanted them to do."

John Feal, a ground zero demolition worker who has lobbied extensively for the legislation, expressed disgust.

"They pulled the rug out from beneath our feet," Feal said. "Whatever member of Congress vote against this bill, whether Republican or Democrat, should go to jail for manslaughter."

The bill would have provided up to $3.2 billion to cover the medical treatment of people sickened by trade center dust and an additional $4.2 billion for a new fund that would have compensated them for their suffering and lost wages.

The potential promise of a substantial payout from the federal government had caused some ground zero workers to balk at participating in the proposed legal settlement, which would resolve as many as 10,000 lawsuits against the city.

Initially, the bill would have prohibited people from participating in the new federal compensation program if they had already been compensated for their injuries through a lawsuit, but a change was made in recent days eliminating that restriction.

Nevertheless, with the House rejecting the bill and no vote scheduled on a similar Senate version, it appears almost guaranteed that there will be no new federal law by Sept. 8, the date by which ground zero workers involved in the lawsuits must decide whether to accept the settlement offer.

Under the terms of the deal, 95 percent of those workers must say yes for the court settlement to take effect.

The compensation system set up by the court would make payments ranging from $3,250 for people who aren't sick but worry they could fall ill in the future to as much as $1.5 million to the families of people who have died. Nonsmokers disabled by severe asthma might get between $800,000 and $1 million.

About 25 percent of the money would go to pay legal fees. Contested claims would be heard by Feinberg, who would act as an appeals officer.

Researchers have found that thousands of New Yorkers exposed to trade center dust are now suffering from breathing difficulties similar to asthma. Many have also complained of heartburn or acid reflux, and studies have shown that firefighters who worked on the debris pile suffer from elevated levels of sarcoidosis, an inflammatory disease.

Many of the workers also fear that the dust is giving people cancer, although scientific studies have failed to find evidence of such a link.

The exact number of sick is unclear. Nearly 15,900 people received treatment last year through medical programs set up to treat Sept. 11-related illnesses, but doctors say many of those people suffered from conditions that are common in the general public.

The House bill is named for James Zadroga, a police detective who died at age 34. His supporters say he died from respiratory disease contracted at ground zero, but New York City's medical examiner said Zadroga's lung condition was caused by prescription drug abuse.