Why the Pentagon Is Doing Polygraphs, and Officials Prepare to Release Huge Set of 9/11 Documents

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I'm Will Jarvis, in for Tracy Mumford.

Today's Tuesday, September 8th, here's what we're covering.

“We're going to start with three updates on the Trump administration from over the long weekend.”

First, the Times has learned that at the Pentagon, dozens of military officers and civilian workers have been given polygraph tests as part of an investigation into leaks to the press. The search came after a flurry of news reports that detailed how the ongoing war in Iran has eaten into the military stockpile of critical munitions like interceptor missiles. The Pentagon has responded with an unprecedented investigation. Around 50 people have been hooked up to the polygraph machines and questioned about whether they shared classified information with journalists.

It's the first time in modern history that mass polygraph tests have been given to the top ranks of the U.S. military.

People with knowledge of the investigation say it seems to have two goals.

“One, find who leaked the information and two intimidate others so they don't leak in the future.”

The leaks had fueled an atmosphere of deep distrust and paranoia inside the Pentagon. That current and former defense officials say has been stoked by defense secretary Pete Higgseth since last year. The Pentagon has conducted a number of leak investigations and Higgseth has consolidated his control over the military by firing and replacing senior leaders who he sees as more loyal. In response to questions from the Times, the Pentagon spokesman said the department does not comment on internal matters.

But that securing classified information is quote critical to ensuring the security of the United States and of our troops deployed around the world.

Also, the White House is moving to change a federal childcare subsidy in an effort to promote a more traditional view of families. The plan would tap into a fund that's designed to help low-income parents afford childcare so they can go to work or school. It gives roughly $9,000 a year per child and health department data shows that currently most people getting the subsidies are single mothers. But in an effort champion by Vice President JD Vance, the new plan would expand those benefits to couples where one person stays at home to raise kids.

The couples would have to be married. The change would effectively create a government incentive for parents not to work as part of a broader conservative movement to advance policies that promote mothers staying at home. Critics say the change could not only hurt single parents, but also end up redirecting money away from childcare providers. That could force some to raise prices or close altogether potentially worsening what many experts say is already a major childcare shortage in the U.S. It finalized the new rule could go into effect as soon as next year.

And last update. What does he know about New Mexico? Nothing. Thank you's trolling. In New Mexico, there's been quick and intense backlash to President Trump's suggestion that the state be renamed New America. There won't stand, but in the meantime, he's getting a lot of attention out of it.

Over the weekend, Trump and the White House shared posts promoting the idea, which comes on the heels of the administration's move to rename the Gulf of Mexico, the Gulf of America, and Lake Ontario, Lake America. But unlike those moves which were carried out through the federal geographic's name database, Trump has no legal authority to rename New Mexico or any other state. Any proposed renaming would require changing New Mexico's constitution, and the state's Democratic leaders said there's absolutely no way they would consider doing that.

In New York City today, officials are set to release more than 170,000 pages of previously unseen documents about the air quality at ground zero in the aftermath of September 11th. More than two decades the papers have been kept private, but a health advocacy group had sued to force their release, and ahead of the 25th anniversary of the attacks this week, the mayor's office has started to make them public. Back in 2001, the collapse of the Twin Towers showered a huge area of lower Manhattan with dust and debris, and for months afterwards, the enormous pile of wreckage from the towers continued to smolder. At the time, city and federal officials, including the mayor and the head of the EPA, reassured New Yorkers that the air above ground zero was safe to breathe.

The documents show that in November of 2001, the levels of one carcinogen, benzene, were spiking in the neighborhood, and that even 10 months after the attacks. Officials were finding evidence of a spestus as much as half a mile away. In the years since, an alarming number of firefighters, police officers and other emergency responders have been diagnosed with respiratory diseases and blood and lung cancers.

“Overall, more people are believed to have died from illnesses related to the aftermath than the nearly 3000 people who were killed in the attack itself.”

Now, the documents release could help people who got sick apply for money from federal victim compensation funds, though it could also expose New York City to new or updated lawsuits.

At a press conference in Miami yesterday, what we know so far is the flight was arriving from San Juan Puerto Rico with two crew members on board. The chair of the National Transportation Safety Board said that officials are still looking for answers about why an Amazon cargo jet ran off a runway on Sunday, killing five people. He had to be somewhat cautious today because there's fuel everywhere, and as we speak, recovery operations continue.

The NTSB said that the crash occurred as the plane was landing. It raced off the end of the runway and crashed through airport equipment and a perimeter fence.

It then skitted across a public road smashing into vehicles along the way, according to one person with knowledge of the investigation. People who were killed were in a van carrying workers for an airline cleaning company.

“Do you believe in E-MAS? What have made the difference yesterday? And should they be installed everywhere?”

Those are excellent questions to questions. At the press conference, the head of the NTSB said that while the cause of the crash is still unknown, one focus for investigators will be on whether it could have been mitigated by a technology known as E-MAS.

It's an acronym for a system that's basically like one of those off ramps for trucks along a steep highway.

It's a huge stretch of crushable concrete at the end of a runway that collapses under the weight of an aircraft, slowing it until it comes to a stop.

“For years, federal authorities have recommended that those buffers be installed at airports, and they've said that since the 1990s, the system has successfully stopped more than two dozen planes that have overshot runways.”

But regulators haven't required that airports put the buffers in place, and the Miami airport doesn't have them. Experts are divided on how much of a difference it would have made in this case, since the Amazon plane appeared to be going at a much faster speed than the system is designed to handle. Though some said it could have at least slowed the plane enough to prevent some of the injuries or deaths. And finally, just a few years ago in Kenya, there was a thriving industry for writing essays, and such way, doing the homework for university students in the United States and England and other English-speaking countries.

There is an estimated 40,000 people doing this in Kenya alone, and for many of them this was a lucrative job. Some of them buy nice cars, they get the latest smartphones, they get exclusive tables, it clubs, and it was a good way to make a living for some of these people, but then AI arrived. My colleague Adam Satariano, who covers tech for the times, has been reporting from Kenya, where a once thriving digital gig economy is now seeing the bottom fallout. He says that for years it wasn't just enterprising young Kenyans who threw themselves into that economy.

The government pushed it to, while it didn't officially condone the whole college essay writing industry, it did formalize a national digital master plan that emphasized online gig work, including jobs like transcribing medical notes and reviewing flagged social media posts. In a twist to fate, it finalized that plan in 2022, the same year that open AI released chat GPT. I talked to one 34-year-old Treesias Bundy, and he really exemplifies what happens there. He grew up in a farming village in Kenya, and he moved to Nairobi in 2011, the first in his family to attend university. He was completing his own degree while at the same time writing up to three essays a day for college students elsewhere in the world.

He wrote over 2,500 essays over the next decade plus, and after graduation, rather than going into a career in public health, which is what he had studied, he decided to make a business out of essay writing.

Then AI arrived and students everywhere had a new tool for cheating, essentially. That soon had a big impact on Mr. Bundy's business and others like it.

“We just started to fall. The job started to thin out and eventually had to close his business, and he was left kind of struggling to figure out what to do next.”

This is a very specific Kenya issue. Each year you have more than 100,000 students graduate from Kenya universities into an economy where salary jobs are really scarce, and youth unemployment is very high. But now artificial intelligence is making that even harder. And more broadly, Kenya's experience shows how artificial intelligence is already eating into some of the lower rungs of the global labor market.

“And some experts think that's only going to continue as the technology improves.”

Those are the headlines. Today on the daily, the rise and the risks of by now pay later loans.

It can start to become a real cycle people get into when they are constantly having to rebarrow and pay down and rebarrow again and again and again.

“For them, it can become this real financial trap where it's impossible to get out.”

You can listen to that in the New York Times app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Will Jarvis. We'll be back tomorrow.