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NYT：昨夜の締め切り過ぎても911犠牲者家族の5%は連邦基金を拒否し訴訟を諦めなかった。
以下の記事を逆に裏側から読むと、こういう数字になる。真相追及には十分な数字である。
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/23/nyregion/23FUND.html?th
December 23, 2003
Applicants Rush to Meet Deadline for Sept. 11 Fund
By DAVID W. CHEN
After a last-minute surge, 95 percent of eligible relatives of Sept. 11 victims had applied to join the government's ambitious but much-criticized compensation effort as the deadline neared last night.
Officials with the federal Victim Compensation Fund, who worried just weeks ago that many eligible survivors would not sign up, said applications had come in by the hundreds as the hours to the midnight deadline wound down yesterday.
By day's end, a program that had been criticized as complicated, cold-hearted and ungenerous had achieved twin goals: offering billions of dollars in compensation to families for their pain and economic loss and to injured victims as well, while protecting the airlines whose planes were involved in the attacks from potentially ruinous litigation.
Only a month ago, the fund had received applications from about 1,800 families, or only 60 percent of those eligible, on behalf of relatives killed in 2001 at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and aboard the airplane that crashed in Pennsylvania. That tepid rate, in turn, had prompted members of New York's Congressional delegation to push for a one-year extension of the deadline -- a position that an overwhelming majority of families supported.
But the idea of an extension never made it out of Congressional committee. And as yesterday's deadline approached, people began to file in droves for several reasons, according to family members, lawyers and Kenneth R. Feinberg, the fund's administrator.
Some people outside of New York or Washington -- including a group of Mohawk Indian ironworkers from Montreal who were injured while volunteering at ground zero -- said that they first heard about the program only recently. Some victims' relatives said they had determined that the fund, however flawed, was a surer, quicker bet than litigation against the airlines involved, United and American. Most, though, said that they had simply been too overwhelmed by grief and by the complicated application process.
"I have more things on my plate, right now, in my life, because Mom is gone," said Mary Taddei of Queens, whose mother, Norma, was an administrative assistant at a financial services company at the World Trade Center, and was the emotional and logistical glue of her family. "I just said: `You know what? Forget it. I'm never going to go through that paperwork.' "
But last week, Ms. Taddei, with the help of her lawyer, Justin T. Green, of Kreindler & Kreindler, finally submitted preliminary papers, even though she cringed at the prospect of digging into the facts and finances to come up with a monetary value to replace her mother's life.
"I know that the worst is probably yet to come, just to rehash everything, because there's no dollar value for her life," she said, her voice quaking. "It's enough that I have to live through it every day."
As of yesterday evening, 2,833 people had filed at least preliminary applications on behalf of dead victims, or 95 percent. About $1.5 billion has been paid out so far, or an average of $1.8 million per family, with a high of $6.9 million. An additional 3,624 people had filed injury claims; the awards have ranged from $500 to $7.9 million.The final number of claimants may not be known for about a week, until applications postmarked by the deadline are tallied.
In all, the fund is expected to cost taxpayers as much as $3 billion, far less than the $5 billion that Mr. Feinberg had originally predicted.
Families now have until June 15, Mr. Feinberg said, to complete their applications -- a process that families say can be grueling, intensely personal and time-consuming.
Still, the deadline was a major milestone in the sad, crushing aftermath of Sept. 11. There has been a lot of attention devoted to the memorial at ground zero, and to the independent commission to investigate the attacks. But in the end, the fund may have the biggest tangible impact on the greatest number of people.
"It closes a very, very important chapter in the history of the 9/11 tragedy," Mr. Feinberg said. "I think that many people who filed ultimately said, `I must try, with all the grief and heartache, to bring some degree of psychological closure to this chapter, and if I stay there and litigate, I'm not really able to bring closure to this part of my life.' "
When Congress hastily passed legislation in the days after the terror attacks to create the fund as part of an airline bailout package, officials hailed the plan as a fast and straightforward alternative that would ease the trauma of thousands of families. In exchange for waiving their right to sue -- which some lawyers believed could be a protracted and even risky option -- families were promised an average payment of about $1.5 million, within four months of their completed filing.
But from the outset, the fund was beset by controversy and confusion over its rules, giving it the texture of a malleable work in progress, responsive to public pressure and subject to frequent clarifications.
In December 2001, for instance, Mr. Feinberg issued draft regulations outlining the mechanics of the fund. But after many families and officials criticized the regulations as stingy, he made significant changes in the final regulations, issued in March 2002, to increase payments.
Many people also felt that the fund was unfair to families whose relatives had earned Wall Street salaries of several hundred thousand dollars or more a year. In January, the families of seven victims who worked at Cantor Fitzgerald ﾑ which lost 658 employees, more than any other company ﾑ filed a lawsuit accusing Mr. Feinberg of acting illegally and unfairly, thereby shortchanging the families of all New York victims. But a federal judge dismissed that suit in May.
Then there was the problem of how Mr. Feinberg, a Washington lawyer, was perceived by the families. Despite working free on the fund, he was criticized as being insensitive and inconsistent.
Mr. Feinberg took the criticism to heart, acknowledging that he "underestimated the extent and the depth of the families' grief." Then, when family members started reporting to one another that Mr. Feinberg was fair and even generous in his awards, skeptics like Charles Wolf, who lost his wife, Katherine, an employee at Marsh & McLennan, changed their minds.
"If Ken hadn't changed, we'd be looking at less than half the people," said Mr. Wolf, who was originally so unhappy about Mr. Feinberg that he started a Web site in protest, www.fixthefund.org.
In just the last six weeks, the fund received about one-third of all the claims, with a good number coming from New York City firefighters and employees of Cantor Fitzgerald, Mr. Feinberg said.
Just yesterday, an ironworker, acting on behalf of about 50 Mohawk ironworkers, contacted Trial Lawyers Care, a national consortium of pro bono lawyers, and said that they had only recently learned of the fund from an article in their local newspaper.
Michael Barasch of the Barasch McGarry Salzman Penson & Lim law firm in Manhattan said he was filing up to 500 applications on behalf of rescue workers who suffered respiratory ailments at ground zero. "I know that my phone is not going to stop just because tomorrow, the deadline has passed," he said. "The lungs don't have a calendar."
The last applications filed in the New York office were from two volunteer workers. They walked in 35 minutes before the midnight deadline.
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