According to a recent report by the EPA’s own inspector general, the Bush Administration instructed the agency to give the public misleading information in the days following the September 11 attack, telling New Yorkers the air was safe to breathe when reliable information on air quality was unavailable. The agency was even ordered to remove helpful tips from its press releases, such as ways to clean indoor areas and information on the effects of the contaminants.

In an interview with New York Newsday‘s terrific science reporter Laurie Garret from last August, Dr. Stephen Levin, director of the World Trade Center Worker and Volunteer Medical Screening Program at Mount Sinai Medical Center, called the report “shocking.” “It’s an outrageous interference in the role of the public-health agencies that were established to protect the people,” Levin said of the Bush Administration‘s alleged influence over the EPA.

This tendency to distort the truth has been shown to be a hallmark of this Administration, whether the issue is clean air, global warming, tax cuts, trade policy or weapons of mass destruction. (See David Corn’s new book The Lies of George Bush for an exhaustive survey of the Bush Team’s mendacity.)

Fortunately, the lies seem to sticking more and more to an Administration that has been called “the worst government the US has ever had in its more than 200 years of history,” by Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof, another longtime member of the mainstream establishment horrified by the Bush Administration’s extremism and deceit. (Click here to read Katrina vanden Heuvel’s account of Akerlof’s dissent from her weblog Editor’s Cut.)

A host of New York Democrats are trying to call the White House to account for its air-quality cover-up. Rep. Jerry Nadler, backed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, has recently demanded a Congressional investigation into the EPA’s handing of the issue, noting that New York City residents and workers continue to breathe in World Trade Center contaminants because of the EPA’s false reassurances about air quality.

Please support Nadler’s call for a bipartisan probe into who ordered the EPA to lie to New Yorkers after September 11. If you need to get your blood boiling first, click here to read the EPA Inspector General’s full report. Then send a letter to your elected reps. It’ll take about sixty seconds with The Nation‘s new activist tool-kit. And it really may help put this issue on the national agenda.