2Newsweek USA september 16 2016

46 Drones Drones Unleashed 48 Health Fighting Fire With Cancer 52 Images A GIF-Wrapped Present 58 Photography Life, Like 62 Bands Going, Go-Go’s, Gone ILLNESS IN THE AIR: Placido Perez,

SOME 400,000 PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AFFECTED BY DISEASES, CANCERS AND

MENTAL ILLNESSES LINKED

TO THE ATTACKS

9/11’S SECOND

WAVE

09.16.2016

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09.16.2016 VOL.167 NO.10

24The Hurting Heroes of 9/11

The alarming death toll from the attacks on September 11, 2001, is still rising The reason, doctors say: noxious chemicals released when the towers fell that turned Ground Zero into a cesspool

of deadly disease by Leah McGrath Goodman

34 Disruption From Outer Space

A massive stream of satellite photos will soon let

us track war crimes, spot environmental disasters

as they’re happening and hack the stock market

by counting the cars in Wal-Mart parking lots

46 Drones

Drones Unleashed

48 Health

Fighting Fire With Cancer

52 Images

A GIF-Wrapped Present

58 Photography

Life, Like

62 Bands

Going, Go-Go’s, Gone

ILLNESS IN THE AIR:

Placido Perez, an EMT who was at the base

of the World Trade Center in New York during 9/11, suff ers from health issues such as liver swelling and post- traumatic stress disorder

SENIOR EDITOR R.M Schneiderman

NATIONAL EDITOR John Seeley

POLITICS EDITOR Matt Cooper

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EV

as a “parliamentary coup.” Many of the politicians who voted for her ouster have also been caught up in

a graft scandal ing state oil company Petrobras, and Michel Temer, who has been acting president since May, is banned from running for public offi ce because he violated campaign spending laws

involv-EVARISTO SA

B

BIGSHOTS

to help drive out Islamic State militants who had held the town for three years Turkey launched its incursion into Syria not only to push back ISIS but also to keep Kurdish fi ghters there away from its border Washington has urged Turkey to avoid confrontation with the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, which has been among the most eff ective forces

fi ghting ISIS Turkey views the Kurdish group as terrorists allied with the Kurd-istan Workers’ Party,

or PKK, which has fought against Ankara for decades

BULENT KILIC

BIGSHOTS

Caracas, Venezuela—Hundreds of thou-sands of Venezuelans

fi ll the streets of cas on September 1 to demand the removal

Cara-of President Nicolás Maduro, whose time

in offi ce has seen the collapse of the economy, triple-digit infl ation, shortages of food and medicines, and widespread frus-tration over perceived corruption Opposi-tion groups estimated that at least 1 million people took part in the protest Venezuela refused entry to at least six foreign jour-nalists the day before the protest, according

to the Committee to Protect Journalists

CARLOS GARCIA

between the United

States and Cuba in

more than 50 years

brings U.S

gov-ernment offi cials,

reporters and regular

island U.S airlines

have been lining up

to off er fl ights to the

capital city of

Hava-na, as tourism and

travel by Americans

of Cuban descent is

expected to surge

SYRIA POLITICS HARASSMENT TRUMP CONSPIRACY MIGRANTS

“Was it a slightly hammy bit of political ater? Of course,” Cardoso later admitted in his memoirs “A well-placed penalty kick was not going to magically end infl ation But there was something to be said about the mood of the country and how that might impact the real.”

the-It turns out he was right Brazil defeated the host team in a hard-fought 1-0 victory before a crowd that included a somewhat confl icted Pelé, who was torn between the two nations he called home Wins against the Netherlands and Swe-

was desperately in need of a lift Recent years

had seen a president impeached for corruption,

infl ation in excess of 2,500 percent,

horren-dous massacres of innocents inside a prison

and outside a church, and a general feeling that

the country couldn’t do anything right As June

approached, so did two seemingly unrelated

events that looked destined to add to this record

of failure: the launch of a new currency and

soc-cer’s World Cup tournament

Brazil hadn’t won a World Cup for 24 years—

an almost unprecedented stretch that had many

questioning whether its magical jogo bonito

(beautiful game) had vanished, perhaps forever

As for the currency, there had already been fi ve

new ones introduced in the previous decade to

try to “reset” the economy, each with miserable

results There was no reason to believe this time

would be any diff erent

Yet as the tournament got underway in the

United States, Brazil easily dispatched decent

A PENALTY KICK IN THE PANTS

In Brazil, the most soccer-obsessed

country in the world, politics often

tracks the beautiful game

YELLOW CARD: A soccer fan holds

up a sign reading

“Dilma Out” at

a match against Uruguay in March Rousseff was oust-

ed as president at the end of August.

but won in glorious fashion in 1970, allowing the military to rally around the fl ag during a par-ticularly nasty phase of the dictatorship, when dissidents were being arrested, tortured and killed (Rousseff , then a leftist guerrilla, was jailed that same year.)

Another convergence occurred in 1950, when Brazil hosted the World Cup for the fi rst time

Organizers built the world’s biggest stadium, the Maracanã, then with a capacity of nearly 200,000, to show the world its people were not

“savages,” to quote Rio’s mayor at the time zil’s infamous 2-1 loss to Uruguay in the fi nal not

Bra-den followed Finally, on July 17, Brazil played

Italy to a scoreless draw before winning the

tour-nament in a penalty shootout, 3-2 The nation

erupted in celebration, and a prominent

colum-nist wrote of “a new phase in Brazil’s history:

the return of national self-esteem.” “The best in

soccer can also win the battle against misery and

backwardness,” crowed another Coincidence or

not, the new currency began to work as planned,

and infl ation slowed to just 2 percent that month

By October, Cardoso had been elected president

He served two largely successful terms, and the

real remains Brazil’s currency

I couldn’t stop thinking of all this on the fi nal

Saturday of the Rio Olympics, as Brazilian

soc-cer and politics once again converged By

beat-ing Germany in another dramatic shootout,

Brazil won Olympic soccer gold for the fi rst

time, providing a depressed nation with its most

joyous moment in years In doing so, the team

exorcised some of the demons from its 7-1 loss

to the Germans at the 2014 World Cup—which,

let’s say it again, “coincidence or not,” marked

the beginning of the country’s descent into two

long years of humiliation, scandal and

reces-sion Brazil’s win also consolidated a nationwide

belief that, against all odds, the Rio Olympics

had been a (moderate) success But for the vast

majority of Brazilians, who either don’t live in

Rio or couldn’t care less about wrestling or

com-petitive swimming, the soccer victory was

prob-ably even more of a boost to morale

Pundits drew larger parallels to the nation’s

fate “I think the cloud that was hovering over

Brazil is starting to dissipate,” Guga Chacra,

a popular television commentator, wrote on

Facebook shortly after the match’s fi nal

whis-tle blew “All of us, deep down, know this.” The

president who led Brazil into this awful

reces-sion, Dilma Rousseff , was removed from offi ce

at the end of August There are tentative signs

the economy is starting to turn around In other

words, there’s a good chance the worst is over

Lots of countries love soccer, but it’s safe to

say that Brazil, with its unmatched fi ve World

Cup titles, is more obsessive than most So is

it healthy for politics to so closely track the

national pastime? Does it give politicians the

power to cynically manipulate the public mood

and paper over Brazil’s real problems?

Journal-ists and athletes alike have long debated these

questions Pelé complained in his memoir that

at the 1966 World Cup, the Brazilian team

suf-fered “tremendous pressure” from the newly

installed military government to win a third

consecutive championship to “cover up the

divisions in our society.” Brazil lost that year

66 years later, when Neymar fi red home the fi nal penalty kick against Germany on August 20.

It’s easy to imagine how “bread and circuses”

could once again be used to distract the masses

The dour public mood has been the oxygen that

allowed the Operação Lava Jato (Operation Car Wash) probe into corruption at Petrobras, which ultimately took down Rousseff , to keep burning over the past year If people are happier and take their angry gaze off Brasília, it will become easier for Congress (and factions within the judiciary)

to pass measures that would obstruct the work of investigators and let part of the establishment off the hook Meanwhile, Rousseff ’s ouster means her successor, Michel Temer, who is almost as unpopular as she was, will work hard to draw a line under the misery of the past two years Sure enough, in a newspaper editorial headlined “The

World Rediscovers Brazil,” Temer congratulated the soccer team for “passing from discredit to the pinnacle, opening a road that Brazil should also follow in other fi elds.”

Will history repeat itself? I believe Brazil has matured, and the lessons of this crisis won’t be easily forgotten It’s also possible that another event—such as upcoming plea bargains in the Lava Jato case—could rekindle public rage But I also believe that nations have limits to their suf-fering and will eventually grasp at opportunities

to move on Confi dence and sentiment are ical to politics and to economies, and optimism often becomes self-fulfi lling Furthermore, I know that journalists are always looking for grand narratives about the fate of nations And that’s why I would bet that Brazil’s soccer gold, and the Olympics in general, will eventually be remembered by some as the beginning of the end of Brazil’s crisis Coincidence or not

“A WELL-PLACED PENALTY KICK WAS NOT GOING TO MAGICALLY END INFLATION.”

BRIAN WINTER is the editor-in-chief of Americas

Quar-terly, where a version of this article was fi rst published.

PAGE ONE/TRUMP

THE SCOOP

for the Trump Organization, the assorted nerships and family trusts controlled by Trump and his private company, and every other shred

part-of fi nancial information he is hiding As Nixon once said, in declaring that he welcomed an

taxes, because if he is elected president of the

United States this November, that and his many

other fi nancial secrets will be all anyone in

Wash-ington will be discussing for years to come

Unlike every other nominee for the presidency

over the past four decades, Trump has refused to

release his tax returns He uses the bogus claim

that he can’t because he is being audited, an

argu-ment Richard Nixon could have used to block

releasing his tax returns in the midst of the

Water-gate scandal, but didn’t (after a lot of delay) Also,

Trump’s returns from 2002 through 2008 can be

released without an issue—all audits involving

them are over But he wants to pretend—or should

I say lie?—that turning over records more than a

decade old will somehow aff ect a current audit

Let’s not pretend: Trump is hiding

some-thing Is he a tax cheat? Does he give nothing

to charity? Does he derive income from

invest-ments in Ukraine and Russia? Who knows? He

has a labyrinthine collection of partnerships,

private corporations, holding companies and

other investments America does not know

if he is a joint investor with unsavory

char-acters (he has been before) or what fi nancial

incentives drive him So imagine the day after

Trump is elected president If there is a

Dem-ocratic majority in the Senate—which appears

likely—the fi rst subpoena coming out of a

con-gressional committee will be for his tax returns

Whatever nasty secrets they contain will come

spilling out The next set of subpoenas will be

THE POINT OF NO RETURNS

Is there a nasty October surprise

hiding in Donald Trump’s taxes?

BY

KURT EICHENWALD

@kurteichenwald

examination of his taxes, “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”

Normally, those subpoenas might be ered fi shing expeditions, but in Trump’s case

consid-it will be essential oversight of the executive branch No one would be able to know if Trump travels to Russia to continue his game of kissy-face with Vladimir Putin because he is acting in the interest of the United States or because he is

in a fi nancial deal with the Russian dictator or some of his oligarch pals

Republicans—and members of the media who aren’t thinking this through—are yipping about potential confl icts of interest for Hillary Clinton because of contributions to the Clinton Founda-tion when she was secretary of state This is a legit-imate inquiry, but this “scandal” is about money going to charitable eff orts all over the globe, with the names of contributors in the public domain

No one has suggested Clinton or any member of her family personally benefi ted, unless you count the pleasure they might have received in help-ing battle neglected tropical diseases that rav-age underdeveloped nations or from any of the group’s other worthwhile endeavors

Compare this with the Trump Organization, which is private and secretive It puts money directly into his pockets and his kids’ pock-ets How much? We don’t know From where?

We don’t know Is the fi nancial benefi t Trump receives from the Trump Organization shaping his foreign policy proposals, as vague as they are?

We don’t know

Now dig into Trump’s lie about why he can’t release his tax returns Pretend the audit argu-ment is legitimate Fine Let him keep them secret

Instead, release the fi rst two pages of his Form 1040, plus his one-page Schedule A dat-ing back to, say, 2006 A decade should suffi ce

These documents, nothing more than a mary of his tax returns, could not aff ect any audit The only thing these three pages reveal

sum-is the bottom line; they are like the back-cover description of a book Even if Trump insists he must keep the metaphorical book hidden, he can at least tell us what it’s about

Here’s what we would learn from those three pages: Trump’s gross, adjusted gross and net income by type His total claimed deductions

His eff ective federal tax rate and the total amount he paid in taxes His total charitable con-tributions (since he brags about that so much, he should be willing to reveal them) The amount he paid in state and local taxes, by type That infor-mation would resolve some of the big questions about Trump and his fi nances

Trump could release two other documents

without aff ecting any audit As my colleague Matt Cooper has written, Trump has yet to prove he is being audited He could simply release the letter the IRS sends to notify taxpay-ers their returns are being examined If it exists, why won’t he release it?

Trump can also make public a sworn affi vit identifying his investors and business part-ners, as well as his fi nancial relationships with them It is all likely going to come out through subpoena when he is president; why not let the American people know the answers now?

da-As we move closer to the November election, perhaps those reporters following Trump on the campaign trail are going to start recognizing he can release those three pages from his taxes, the audit letter and the affi davit without causing a

ripple at the IRS audit offi ce If they really want

to do their jobs, they will start pressing Trump for those documents, and his excuses will put the lie to this “I’m under audit” nonsense My colleagues in the press will come to realize that the secrets and potential confl icts hidden in Trump’s fi nances are far more important than whether Clinton met with a Nobel Prize win-ner who contributed to the Clinton Foundation when she was secretary of state—as the Associ-ated Press recently huff ed and puff ed in what was easily the worst article of the election year

If there is something untoward about Trump’s businesses and personal fi nances, Americans need to know now, rather than waiting to dis-cover later if that now-hidden information will set off the rumblings of another impeachment when the curtain is pulled back Running for president is not a game The White House is not some trophy anyone should be allowed to grab without revealing basic information Reporters, Democrats and even Republicans should insist that Trump release those three pages, the letter and the affi davit

And if he refuses? Then voters should reject him Trump may love Putin, but he shouldn’t be allowed to keep his fi nances secret, as do all the other cronies of the Russian dictator

her to be careful, a warning Clara didn’t heed.

The editor implied that “I wouldn’t get a ommendation from him for any other intern-ships, or further work, if I didn’t,” says Clara, now a 23-year-old general assignment reporter

rec-at a diff erent news outlet “I didn’t know whrec-at else to do I was afraid saying no would mean I wouldn’t collect any more clips.”

After declining his invitation several times, she

and photography intern at a newspaper in the

southeastern United States when a section

edi-tor asked if she’d ever had sex He also sent Clara

(not her real name) several fl irtatious texts during

her two years at the paper, asking if she would

come to his house and whether she “would do

anything for him.” A teacher at her high school

sensed something bad was happening and told

STORIES NO ONE DARES TELL

After a scandal at Fox, sexual harassment

in the news business is making news

BY

LUCY WESTCOTT

@lvzwestcott

PAGE ONE/HARASSMENT

eventually went to his house “I told him I didn’t really want to fool around, that I had changed my mind,” and asked him to watch a movie, she says

Instead, he told Clara that watching a movie wasn’t why she was there He forcibly performed oral sex on her before she grabbed her clothes and ran out She was able to avoid seeing him again at the paper, but he continued to contact her for two months, until she went to college She never reported the incident

Clara is one of the 53 women and two men who contacted Newsweek about sexual harass-

ment related to their jobs in journalism In July, I emailed friends and colleagues seeking stories and was soon inundated with recol-lections of inappropriate jokes, comments on race and appearance, and unwanted touching and worse by sources, colleagues, bosses and the public Newsweek has granted anonymity to

mid-those who requested it; many women still work

at the companies where they say they were harassed While this is not a scientifi c survey, it’s an opportunity to hear the stories of women who have faced irritating, intimidating and, at times, life-threatening behavior

I’ve also decided to include a few of my riences with sexual harassment I was a 22-year-old intern at an international news organization

expe-in Washexpe-ington, D.C., when an older, married male journalist invited me to go stargazing with him in rural Virginia When I declined, he sent

me an email: “I hope I can count on you as a very mature person and not hear some

crazy rumors in the offi ce.” That same year, an older male sports photog-rapher detailed the injury of a well-known football player by reaching under the table and tracing lines on

my knee and thigh

Like many of the women who spoke with Newsweek, Clara blames herself

for what happened “It wasn’t until I went to counseling and told my therapist what happened did I realize it was rape The question

of consent never crossed my mind at 18,” she says

Five years after the attack, she says, she is unable

to cover stories that involve sexual violence due to her post-traumatic stress disorder

At her new job, she says, “it was humiliating, not because my boss wasn’t accepting—just because I had to admit I couldn’t [cover stories about sexual trauma] and why,” she says “No one wants to tell that story to their boss.”

she had been harassed by Ailes for more than two decades

Sexual harassment is defi ned by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as

“unwelcome sexual advances, request for ual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct

sex-of a sexual nature.” Sexual assault is defi ned as nonconsensual physical contact and can include rape, according to the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network But sexual comments, jokes and insinuations are also not acceptable and can make a workplace unbearable

A 2013 study from the International Women’s Media Foundation found that nearly two-thirds of women journalists polled have experienced some form of harassment or abuse in relation to their work The ever-changing nature of the media

industry, including lack of job security, lutely” leads to fewer women telling their manag-ers or other authorities about sexual harassment due to the fear of retaliation, says Elisa Lees Muñoz, executive director of the IWMF

“abso-A recent British study found that more than half of the women in a variety of careers had experienced sexual harassment at work, rising to

63 percent of girls and women between the ages

of 16 and 24 In the U.S., a survey of 2,235 women

by Cosmopolitan last year found that one in three

women ages 18 to 34 has been sexually harassed

at work, and that the food service, hospitality and retail industries had the highest reported levels of harassment The prevalence of sexual

BURY THE LEDE:

After a male

col-league screamed

at her for rejecting

his advances, this

journalist started

spending more

time away from

the offi ce, and her

work suff ered.

PAGE ONE/HARASSMENT

harassment in journalism is particularly

disturb-ing when you consider that a reporter’s most

important job is to expose wrongdoing And yet

so many women journalists are afraid to speak

up when they are the victims “[Women] are

afraid to say something,” says Muñoz, “afraid of

being the squeaky wheel, afraid they wouldn’t

get assignments.”

Thinking back to her time working in a

Wash-ington, D.C., news bureau nine years ago,

Eliz-abeth (not her real name) remembers that she

didn’t want to get her male colleague fi red, even

though he was harassing her She was a

23-year-old reporter; he was an assistant They became

friends, but she was in a long-term relationship

and said no when he asked her out

He began texting her all the time and shifting

his schedule to match hers, showing up when

she did in the morning He tried to talk to her

about his anxiety problems and told her how

unfair it was that he didn’t get to write

Return-ing to the offi ce one day after covering a

meet-ing, Elizabeth found herself alone with him,

a situation she had managed to avoid for fi ve

months “He immediately came to my part of

the offi ce My desk was sort of in a corner, and

he walked all the way up to me He was getting

angry: ‘Why are you such a bitch to me?’ ‘You

really strung me along.’ ‘You know I have

anxi-ety issues, and you decided to fuck with me

any-way,’” she recalls

“At this point, he’s literally backed me into

a corner I said a couple of times, ‘You need to

step back from me.’ He was yelling at me but

[also saying], ‘We would be perfect together We

should really be a couple.’ It got really creepy.”

Despite this harrowing scene, Elizabeth did

not report him “It feels so dangerous to burn

bridges in journalism, specifi cally because

every-one ends up working together again and because

jobs are so tenuous,” she says

The majority of women who spoke with

News-week said their sexual harassment happened

early in their careers Janille Miller was in her

mid-20s when she interviewed for a broadcast

journalism job After an interview with the news

director, Miller went with him to meet the head

of news, who asked her to stand up and turn

“I FELT HUMILIATED AND DISGUSTED AS THE HEAD OF NEWS LOOKED ME UP AND DOWN AS THOUGH

“I knew what had just occurred was wrong,” says Miller, who was off ered a job and a contract after that demeaning audition “I hated myself for allowing it to occur,” she adds

Andrea Tantaros, another former Fox News employee who has made sexual harassment claims against Ailes, recently told New York mag-

azine that in 2014 he asked her to do “the twirl” so

he could look at her fi gure In her lawsuit against Ailes, Tantaros says, “Fox News masquerades as a defender of traditional family values, but behind the scenes it operates like a sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult, steeped in intimidation, inde-cency and misogyny.” In her complaint, Carlson says Ailes ogled her, asked “her to turn around so

he could view her posterior” and said Carlson was

“sexy” but “too much hard work.”

DANGERS ABROAD

While there are laws against harassment in U.S workplaces, women journalists abroad often have little protection Moreover, reporting from countries regularly accused of human rights

abuses can be particularly cially when sexual harassment is deliberately used as a means of intimidation, as was the case

dangerous—espe-in Egypt durdangerous—espe-ing the Arab Sprdangerous—espe-ing

In 2011, CBS journalist Lara Logan was ally assaulted while covering protests in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, in one of the most well-known incidents of a woman journalist being violently attacked while doing her job She spoke about the incident on 60 Minutes three months later,

sexu-and Jeff Fager, then-chairman of CBS News, said he hoped that would break the “code of silence” surrounding the risk of sexual assault

JEN

faced by women journalists reporting overseas

Amanda Mustard is a photojournalist who lived and worked in Egypt for three years In Egypt, she says, reporting as a woman meant the constant threat of rape On multiple occa-sions, she was followed home and assaulted “I would regularly walk around with a can of Coke

in my hand in case I had to throw it at body,” she says She wore a stab vest to prevent unwanted touching and wore her belt inside out because that made it harder to remove

some-Mustard developed a “serious physiological response to leaving the house,” and the stress became so bad she had a small stroke known as

a transient ischemic attack Even when she was

in the hospital, a doctor fl irted with her and told her she was just “being silly,” despite the right side of her body going numb and her sudden inability to speak

‘YOU DON’T KNOW HOW BAD IT HAS BEEN’

Mustard says there’s “a real need for older female champions” to speak out about their experiences of sexual harassment “The two

generations need to work together more.” Leslie Bennetts was a journalist for 45 years

On the third day of her fi rst job at a newspaper

in Philadelphia, she says, she was in the elevator when a man grabbed her breasts and “jammed

me up against the wall.” That man was the book editor, and her boss’s response when she told her was “Oh, that dirty old man.” Harassment from sources was constant, she says

Bennetts says young women journalists need

to understand “how bad a lot of this has been

If they haven’t experienced this personally, they don’t know it exists.”

Despite the sordid stories and what she endured as a woman in journalism, Bennetts feels optimistic and has “a sense that the world

is changing.” She points to how quickly the Murdoch family acted in removing Ailes, the man who had made their company billions

“It’s time for women to say we are absolutely not going to participate in these systems anymore

We are absolutely going to fi ght back, make it lic, do whatever you have to do,” she says “For my generation, we owe it to our daughters.”

pub-+

ROGER AND OUT:

Bennetts, who has

quickly Ailes was

booted from Fox.

PAGE ONE/CONSPIRACY

SPY TALK

body The band of his wristwatch was torn but not broken That was enough to fi re up the right-wing Twitterverse with conspiracy theories claiming that Rich was murdered as he was on his way to sing to the FBI about internal DNC emails

Such notions might have evaporated had not Julian Assange hurled a thunderbolt into the aff air a few weeks later The WikiLeaks impre-sario, penned up in Ecuador’s London embassy

as he dodges a rape allegation in Sweden, announced he was off ering a $20,000 reward for information leading to a conviction in the Rich case He hinted that the slain man had been

a source in his organization’s recent publication

of 30,000 internal DNC emails, which led to the

fi ring of several top Democratic Party offi cials

“What are you suggesting?” a startled viewer from Dutch television asked him

inter-“I am suggesting,” Assange said, “that our sources, ah, take risks, and they, they become concerned to see things occurring like that.” His organization later “clarifi ed” on Twitter that “this should not be taken to imply that Seth Rich was a source for WikiLeaks or to imply that his murder

is connected to our publications.”

But Assange had already lit the fi re No matter that the Metropolitan Police Department issued

a statement saying there was “no indication that Seth Rich’s death is connected to his employ-ment at the DNC.” Police Chief Cathy Lanier, normally cautious, may have inadvertently

Rich drained the last of his Bell’s Two Hearted

Ales and started walking home through a trendy

neighborhood of northwest Washington, D.C

At 2:30 a.m on July 10, the torrid heat that had

gripped the city for weeks had eased slightly

Maybe it was the relative cool that prompted him

to walk through several dark, dicey blocks to his

apartment in Bloomingdale, a rapidly gentrifying

neighborhood a mile away Or maybe he thought

the walk would do him some good after venting

to his longtime bartender about his unsuccessful

eff orts to reconcile his love life with his 12-hour

days at the Democratic National Committee

Whatever the reason, Rich, 27, a

computer-voting specialist at the DNC, would soon leave

family and friends grieving His decision to walk

home would become part of a wild conspiracy

theory that once again portrays Hillary Clinton

and the Democrats as murderous criminals

At 4:19 a.m., police patrolling nearby responded

to the sound of gunfi re and found Rich mortally

wounded at a dark intersection a block and a half

from a red-brick row house he shared with friends

He had multiple gunshot wounds in his back

About an hour and 40 minutes later, he died at a

local hospital Police have declined to say whether

he was able to describe his assailants

The cops suspected Rich was a victim of an

attempted robbery Strangely, however, they

found his wallet, credit cards and cellphone on his

A CONSPIRACY OF DUNCES

Hillary Clinton’s enemies are using the death of DNC staff er Seth Rich to once again portray her as a murderous criminal

BY

JEFF STEIN

@SpyTalker

fueled the speculation during a crime-scene press conference on August 5, when she said,

“Right now, we have more questions than answers.” No suspects have been arrested

Mary and Joel Rich are distressed by the ent political exploitation of their son’s death Seth Rich had just accepted a promotion from the DNC

appar-to a position in Clinappar-ton’s campaign, they say “It’s unfortunate and hurtful,” his parents say, in a statement to Newsweek,

“that at the moment a murderer remains

at large, there remains unfounded press speculation about the activities of our son that night We should be focusing on the perpetrator at large.”

Residents of Bloomingdale, about 20 blocks north of D.C.’s Union Station, had long complained about crime One resi-dent tells Newsweek her house was bur-

gled a few years ago while she and her husband were inside Another resident complained on the neighborhood blog about “a small group of guys with a silver handgun terrorizing this neighborhood for weeks with min-imal response from public offi cials.” Residents were particularly incensed about a deterioration

in security over the past two years related to a massive water department tunnel project

Meanwhile, sources involved with the DNC’s investigation of the hack rule out the notion that Seth Rich played any role in it “There was

no indication that any insider was involved in this,” says one source, demanding anonymity in exchange for discussing the investigation “Every indication is this was a remote attack from a

foreign government—the Russians There is no indication that…there was any nefarious action taken by any employees in that environment.”

Nor is there any evidence Rich downloaded and printed out the DNC’s internal emails, the source says: “This is a very sophisticated actor This is not some kid coming in and downloading documents and handing them to somebody.”

The Kremlin has denied any involvement in the DNC hack Assange has declined to discuss who gave him the material

Assange has an agenda here, the source adds:

to damage Hillary Clinton, which tracks with Moscow’s apparent desire to see Donald Trump elected “This is a match made in heaven,” he says “Assange has the vehicle to leak it, and the Russians have the vehicle by which to provide him with the data.”

Since Rich’s killing, the police presence in Bloomingdale has been beefed up, a local resi-dent tells Newsweek That is too late for Rich, and

for his family, his colleagues and his friends, who gathered August 3 at Lou’s City Bar to honor his memory “His parents were here,” Joe Capone, the general manager, said at Lou’s “People got

up and said some words about Seth and what a great guy he was and how they missed him.”

Capone pointed to Rich’s usual seat at the corner of the bar “He was a great guy,” he said

“Just a couple-of-beers kind of guy.” One news account describing Rich as despondent and drunk the night he was killed, penned by a jour-nalist in the conservative London Daily Mail,

missed the mark, he said “That was just not Seth I never saw him drunk or even tipsy.”

RUSHING INTO HELL:

Once the towers fell,

thousands of

volun-THE HURTING HEROES

OF

9/11

THE ALARMING DEATH TOLL FROM

THE ATTACKS ON SEPTEMBER

11, 2001, IS STILL RISING THE

REASON, DOCTORS SAY: NOXIOUS

CHEMICALS RELEASED WHEN

THE TOWERS FELL THAT TURNED

GROUND ZERO INTO A CESSPOOL

OF DEADLY DISEASE

B Y L E A H M C G R AT H G O O D M A N

WHEN PLACIDO PEREZ closes his eyes, he can still

see the World Trade Center towers beneath him

On weekends, he would sometimes fl y his

red-and-white Cessna along the Hudson River, taking

self-ies with the towers in the background, stark against

a cerulean sky “I still look at the pictures all the

time,” he says “I remember the good times It’s

what gets you through.”

Perez also has pictures he took of the September 11,

2001, attacks He was standing at the base of the

tow-ers that morning with a digital camera, not far from

where he worked as a manager at a

telecommunica-tions company “I was on my way to work, and, boom,

I heard a turbine smash into one of the buildings,” he

says “I remember the sounds and the people jumping

[from the towers] That marble plaza outside of the

towers where the globe sculpture was—remember it

had speakers? Muzak was playing They couldn’t stop

the music It was automatic People were jumping,

and debris was fl ying It was awful.”

Perez, a licensed emergency medical technician,

stayed downtown to help people trying to escape the

burning buildings The next day, he returned to the

site and volunteered alongside thousands of police

offi cers, fi refi ghters, construction workers and ers to search for survivors He didn’t leave Ground Zero for a week, working 12- to 14-hour shifts When

oth-he needed rest, oth-he slept at toth-he site

Now, on the 15th anniversary of 9/11, he’s gling to accept a harrowing truth: His time saving lives at Ground Zero has made him sick—and could kill him “Between 2005 and 2009, I ended up in the emergency room six or seven times, thinking I was having a heart attack and about to die,” says Perez,

strug-59 They were panic attacks—his heart rate as high

as 157 beats per minute, well above the average for

a healthy man his age Then came the respiratory problems that would choke him in his sleep and wake him in the night He discovered he had restric-tive lung disease, post-traumatic stress, rhinitis,

+

STILL COUNTING:

Only the Battle

of Antietam accounted for more American deaths in one day, but the death toll continues to climb as rescue workers get older, and sicker.

BED OF TOXINS:

Perez volunteered for 12-hour shifts during the rescue eff orts and some- times slept at the site when he was exhausted

asthma and swelling of the liver so severe it began

to interfere with his blood platelets, esophagus,

dia-phragm, stomach and other digestive organs

He says his liver disease is now so far advanced

and the scarring so great that it cannot heal or

regen-erate—only a transplant can help him All he can do

is wait Perez says if the disease progresses further,

the doctors fear it will mean cancer or liver failure “I

have never done any drugs, and I don’t drink I weigh

163 pounds and am thin, except for my liver, which is

like an inner tube around my waist

“This shouldn’t be happening to me.”

GROUND ZERO EXPOSURE

diseases as a result of exposure to Ground Zero

Doctors with the World Trade Center Health

Pro-gram, which the federal government created in

the aftermath of the attacks, have linked nearly

70 types of cancer to Ground Zero Many people

have fallen victim to cancers their doctors say are

rare, aggressive and particularly hard to treat “The diseases stemming from the World Trade Center attacks include almost all lung diseases, almost all cancers—such as issues of the upper airways, gas-troesophageal acid refl ux disease, post-traumatic stress, anxiety, panic and adjustment disorders,” says Dr David Prezant, co-director for the Fire Department of the City of New York’s World Trade Center Medical Monitoring Program

With the exception of the Civil War battle of tam, more American lives were lost on September 11,

Antie-2001, than on any other day in U.S history: 2,996

peo-+

RESCUE THE RESCUERS: Dixon, above, spent two months digging for survivors He now suff ers from numerous health problems Dr

Crane, director

of a Mount Sinai clinical center, treats more than 22,000 9/11 res- cue and recovery workers.

As many as 400,000 people are estimated to be affected

by diseases, such as cancers, and mental illnesses linked

to September 11

ple were killed—265 on the four hijacked planes, 125

at the Pentagon and 2,606 at the World Trade

Cen-ter and surrounding area More than 411 emergency

workers died on 9/11, and the total number of rescue

and recovery workers who have died has more than

doubled since the attacks, to 1,064 as of July,

accord-ing to data obtained exclusively by Newsweek from

the U.S Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

(CDC) and the National Institute for Occupational

Safety and Health

The wider population is also suff ering: As many as

400,000 people are estimated to be aff ected by

dis-eases, such as cancers, and mental illnesses linked to

September 11 This fi gure includes those who lived

and worked within a mile and a half of Ground Zero in

Manhattan and Brooklyn, the vast majority of whom

still don’t know they’re at risk Mark Farfel, director

of the World Trade Center Health

Registry, which tracks the health of

more than 71,000 rescue workers

and survivors, says, “Many people

don’t connect the symptoms they

have today to September 11.”

Richard Dixon, a cop with the

New York Police Department

who is based in the Bronx, agrees

“You don’t think that the cough

you get today will be the cancer

you get tomorrow.” He spent two

months working in rescue and

recovery at Ground Zero Since

then, he’s had sleep apnea,

sinus-itis and gastroesophageal refl ux

disease (GERD), which can be a

precursor to cancer

And he’s one of the lucky ones

Unlike others on the force, he’s still

able to work—and is cancer-free

“We lost 23 NYPD offi cers in the

attacks,” he says “But many more

have died since then of these

Sep-tember 11–related illnesses We

need to fi nd out why, or that list

of names on the 9/11 memorial is

going to just keep growing.”

THE WORLD TRADE

CENTER COUGH

workers started showing up at

Mount Sinai Hospital in New

York for treatment and medical

assistance Many of them had

injuries and respiratory problems

from the debris that had fallen on

them, including what became known as “the World Trade Center cough.”

“The symptoms these patients have are ing,” says Dr Michael Crane, director of the World Trade Center Health Program’s lead clinical center

terrify-at Mount Sinai, which treterrify-ats around 22,000 rescue

and recovery workers “They will suddenly wake up and fi nd they cannot breathe.”

One Mount Sinai patient who had the cough was John Soltes, a retired cop for the Port Author-ity of New York and New Jer-sey, which had oversight of the World Trade Center towers He worked at Ground Zero for almost nine months clearing debris and recovering the remains of his col-leagues “I only had the cough for

a year,” he says “I know some guys who still have it.” His cough led to GERD and a serious com-plication of that condition, called Barrett’s esophagus, which can develop into cancer “I’ve already dealt with skin cancer on my face,

my cheek and my back,” which are also 9/11-related, he says “So

I am trying to be careful.”

Daisy Bonilla, an NYPD school safety agent, also worked in res-cue and recovery at Ground Zero, taking care of orphaned chil-dren whose parents died in the attacks Today, her upper airways are too infl amed to swallow solid food “Food would get stuck in

my esophagus, and I would feel like I was choking,” she says “So now I have protein shakes or have

to have all my food pureed I en’t been able to go to a restaurant with friends I haven’t had solid foods or eaten a steak in over a

hav-“ It had all kinds of awful things in it Burning jet fuel Plastics, metal, fiberglass, asbestos

god-A witch’s brew.”

year It sucks, but I am getting used to it I try to look

at it in a positive way—at least I am alive.”

Crane is also regularly seeing cancers that have

been developing since as far back as 2005 As of

June, 5,441 of the 75,000 people enrolled in the

World Trade Center Health Program have been

diagnosed with at least one case of 9/11-related

cancer, according to data Newsweek obtained from

the program And many of them have multiple

can-cers, with the total number of cancers certifi ed at

6,378 as of June “Any internal cancer below the skin

is awful,” Crane says “But cancers of the digestive

organs, cancers in the gut, can sit there sometimes,

and you don’t even know they are growing.”

Paul Gerasimczyk, a retired NYPD cop who worked

in the Ground Zero cleanup, says he fi rst went to

Mount Sinai in 2005 for treatment for “the cough”

and discovered he had asthma “Beads of sweat were

breaking out on my face, I was coughing so hard,” he

says “The doctor said, ‘Did you call the ambulance

and go to the hospital?’ I said, ‘No, I thought it was

just coughing.’ And she said, ‘You had an asthma

attack.’” By 2007, Gerasimczyk learned he had

developed kidney cancer, as well as GERD “When

you’re told you have cancer, you’re in disbelief,” he says “You feel you’re healthy, and you’re in denial You feel you can beat it, the operation will be success-ful.”

He says two close friends who worked at Ground Zero didn’t make it—one died of pancreatic cancer and the other of brain cancer “They don’t just die; they die in the worst ways imaginable,” he says “My friend Angelo Peluso, who died in 2006, they had to remove an egg-shaped tumor from his brain The fi rst time they operated on him, he was mentally impaired and could only say my name The second time they

operated, he never left the hospital, and in months he was gone It just rips the heart out of your chest.”

A CESSPOOL OF CANCER

to understand why people are still dying When the towers came down, they say, they released a massive plume of carcinogens, turning lower Manhattan into

a cesspool of cancer and deadly disease “We will never know the composition of that cloud, because

+

THE ENDLESS CLEANUP: Soltes spent almost nine months digging

up remains

He now suff ers from numerous health problems, including cancer and post-traumat-

the wind carried it away, but people were breathing

and eating it,” says Mount Sinai’s Crane “What we

do know is that it had all kinds of god-awful things in

it Burning jet fuel Plastics, metal, fi berglass,

asbes-tos It was thick, terrible stuff A witch’s brew.”

In a report issued just months after the attacks,

the National Resources Defense Council, a New

York–based environmental advocacy group, noted

that the World Trade Center’s north tower

con-tained as much as 400 tons of asbestos That, along

with burning offi ce furniture, mainframe

comput-ers and the thousands of fl uorescent lights in the

buildings, led to the release of lead, mercury,

vol-atile organic compounds and other deadly poisons

“An environmental emergency such as this, with

hundreds, if not thousands, of toxic components

simultaneously discharged into the air on the scale

of September 11th is unprecedented,” the

organiza-tion wrote, and the eff ects “unknown.”

Because the fi res burned at Ground Zero for more

than 90 days, a later study explained that the

con-taminants found in the dust immediately after the

attacks continued to show up in samples for weeks

The results, the study said, supported “the need to

have the interior of residences, buildings, and their respective HVAC [heating, ventilation and air-con-ditioning] systems professionally cleaned to reduce

long-term residential risks before rehabilitation,” the study said, noting the probability of “acute or long-term health eff ects” from dust, which could

be stirred up endlessly

New research confi rms this toxic cocktail caused heightened rates of cancer “If you compare our can-cer rates to the general U.S population, our rates are about 10 percent higher than expected,” says the Fire Department’s Prezant, who tracks the health profi les

of 15,700 fi refi ghters and emergency medical services workers “If you compare it to our pre– September

11 data, the cancer rates range from 19 to 30

per-+

AS DEBRIS RAINED DOWN:

Bonilla patrolled Ground Zero for months and looked after orphaned chil- dren She now needs a walker.

“ They don’t just die;

they die in the worst ways imaginable.”

cent higher for our fi refi ghters.” He says the data are

carefully adjusted for age, exposure and other factors

to “yield the most conservative numbers.”

Prezant also found that fi refi ghters at Ground

Zero had a substantial reduction in lung capacity

“Normally with lung exposure, you recover,” he says

“I found that their lung function did not recover,

despite treatment and despite time I attribute it to

the extremely infl ammatory nature of the dust found

at the World Trade Center site

When you look at [the dust

parti-cles] under a microscope, they are

very jagged, and they are coated

with carcinogens.”

Yet following the attacks,

the government repeatedly

announced the air within Ground

Zero’s 16-acre zone was safe to

breathe One week after the

tow-ers fell, Christine Todd Whitman,

then the head of the U.S

Envi-ronmental Protection Agency,

stated that the air did “not pose

a health hazard.” She was wrong

At the time, the EPA “did not have

suffi cient data and analyses to

make such a blanket statement,”

according to a 2003 U.S

inspec-tor general report “The White

House Council on Environmental

Quality [under George W Bush]

infl uenced, through the

collabo-ration process, the information

that the EPA communicated to

the public through its early press

releases when it convinced the

EPA to add reassuring statements

and delete cautionary ones.”

The U.S Court of Appeals later

ruled that Whitman wasn’t liable

for the EPA’s claims, because she

did not intend any harm Perez,

the rescue worker, is still bitter

about the EPA’s assurances He

lost several friends to breathing

the dust “No one was saying

any-thing about the chemicals and

what it meant to be breathing the

ash of so many toxins mixed with human remains,”

he says “I had friends that developed carcinoma in

their lungs, and many of them were deep in the pile.”

TOO YOUNG TO DIE

have dispersed to all 50 states, the District of

Colum-bia, Puerto Rico and more than 15 countries, including Canada and the U.K., as well as parts of con-tinental Europe and the Middle East, says Farfel, the World Trade Center Health Registry direc-tor “You see all these survivors with elevated asthma, behavioral issues, post-traumatic stress, sub-stance-abuse issues and increased cancer rates,” he tells Newsweek

“This has now been linked to the attacks and corroborated by mul-tiple studies.”

The registry is part of a broad network of post–September 11 clinics and organizations belong-ing to the World Trade Center Health Program The program is publicly funded by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health and the CDC, and it consists of a responder program for rescue and recovery work-ers like Perez, as well as a thinly attended survivor program for those who lived and worked near Ground Zero “A lot of people who should enroll in the program don’t, because they think other people need it more than they do,” Crane says

No one knows exactly when downtown New York became safe again—and some, like Bonilla, say it isn’t safe now But those directly exposed to the World Trade Center disaster who can prove they lived or worked in the area between September 11,

2001, and July 31, 2002, when the cleanup ended, can receive free treatment for a growing list of ill-nesses linked to the 9/11 attacks In December, Congress reauthorized a bill to provide free medi-cal services and treatment to responders and sur-vivors of September 11 for the rest of their lives In

fi scal 2016, Congress will spend $330 million on the

“ When I think about being down there, searching the rubble, I know each and every one of us would do it again tomorrow.”

+

IN WAVES: simczyk noticed asthma symp- toms in 2005;

Gera-in 2007, he was told he also had kidney cancer.