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

From the New York Times, it's the headlines, I'm Will Jarvis, Infra Tracey Mumford. Today's Tuesday, September 8th, here is 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 happened last month after a flurry of news reports that detailed how the war in Iran has depleted the military's stockpiles of critical munitions like interceptor missiles. Around 50 Pentagon employees were hooked up to the polygraph machines and questioned about whether they shared classified information with journalists. It was the first time in modern history that mass polygraph tests have been given to the top ranks of the US 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 Hegseth. Since last year, the Pentagon has conducted a number of leak investigations, and Hegseth has consolidated his control over the military by firing senior officers he sees as disloyal. In response to questions from the Times, 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 child care 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 child care, 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 J.D. 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 policy proposal could hurt single parents and end up redirecting money away from child care providers, potentially forcing them to raise prices or even shut down. And last update, "What does he know about New Mexico? Nothing." In New Mexico, there's been quick and intense backlash to President Trump's suggestion that the state be renamed New America. 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 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. For more than two decades, the papers have been stored away, 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 around ground zero was safe to breathe. But even the fraction of the records that the Times was able to review before their release suggests that was not true, and that people were encouraged to return to the area before it was safe. 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 asbestos 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 3,000 people who were killed in the attack itself. Now, the documents released 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, we had to be somewhat cautious today because there's fuel everywhere, and as we speak, recovery operations continue. 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 and seriously injuring three others. 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 skidded across a public road, smashing into vehicles along the way. According to one person with knowledge of the investigation, all five people who were killed were in a van carrying workers for an airline cleaning company. 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 much faster than the system is designed to handle, though some said it could have slowed the plane enough to prevent at least some of the injuries or deaths. And finally, just a few years ago in Kenya, there was a thriving economy for digital gig work. People there transcribed medical notes, reviewed flagged social media posts, and even got paid to do people's homework. At one point, at least 40,000 Kenyans were writing essays and doing other assignments for college students in the U.S. and elsewhere, according to one estimate. It was often lucrative work, a study job, and the Kenyan government was even looking for ways to help more people get involved in the online economy, even though it didn't condone the homework help specifically. Then, open AI released chat GPT, and my colleague Adam Satariano, at times tech reporter, has been covering how that sudden arrival of AI upended Kenya's digital economy. I talked to 134-year-old Triassius 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 3 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. And so, he would hire other students to write essays. He rented a house that he had room set up with computers and mattresses, so students could come over from the university, write their essays. When they were too tired to write, they could rest. But 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. Wade just started to fall. The job started to thin out, and eventually had to close his business, and he was left struggling to figure out what to do next. So parts of this are a very specific Kenya issue. Each year you have more than 100,000 students graduate from Kenyan 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. It can start to become a real cycle people get into when they are constantly having to rebaro and pay down and rebaro again and again and again. For them it can become this real financial trap where it's impossible to get it 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.