Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Department of Justice Emails Description An account of the resource The Department of Justice received more than 11,000 e-mails in response to the agency's public solicitation for comments upon its plans to distribute the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund of 2001 established by Congress to benefit the victims of September 11 and their families. These e-mails have been organized here by date. September 11 Email September 11 Email: Body The basic content, as unstructured text; sometimes containing a signature block at the end. Tuesday, November 27, 2001 12:03 AM My son died in the WTC disaster. He left a wife and three young children. I have a real dilemma in answering the call for comments. It seems that the government is not a non partial observer here, but conveniently, is appointed to determine the compensation plan, and is suggesting to the families of the victims to sign over their right to appeal. This seems to be counter to all logic, I have always viewed the legal system to be, in some degree, a matter of gamesmanship, who has the best lawyer wins. And it seems that the government is advising the victims not to obtain counsel. Am I incorrect in my observation? I am seriously asking this question, not rhetorically. Shouldn't the victim's families have some idea of a dollar figure? What is the reasonable expectation? I don't think that alot of time has to be spent on form design here. There should be some straight forward method of determining who victims and families are, if we can't figure this out, then the whole process is brought to question. What is Fair Compensation? Well, there are some precedents for this question, what were the settlements in other disasters? How do they relate to this one? Somehow I believe that the trauma of this horrific event exceeds anything that we have experienced to date. It serves no purpose now to assign blame, but security measures from an Airline and Government poin of view were seriously lacking. Then there are issues with what I perceive to be the government's position on reducing any award by any collateral sources of income. My son chose to take the responsible route and funded some security measures, this was a cost that he bore, and was a factor in looking at possible alternatives to employment as it factored into his salary requirements. Now to penalize his family for his investment in insurance seems to send a message that says don't be fiscally responsible, if you sacrifice (by purchasing insurance) you will just provide justification for decreasing the amount of a settlement. Does a family suffer less because they have insurance? I can tell you this isn't the case at all. Another quandry that I have is one of trust, frankly, in the Government, to be really fair; this Airline legislation, why is no one worried about how much money is being moved to the Airlines? There seems to be so much concern about the money going to victim's families, where is this money coming from, well, of course, it comes from the citizens. But it is appropriated and managed by the Government, so the Government has this commitment to fund the victims relief, but is it in their interest to minimize the total payout? Won't it make their problem easier to find the funds if the relief to the families are minimized? So now we have a proposal to not go to court, to minimize the costs, the Government is the author of this proposal. Is this fair or self-serving? I have seen our Legal system work, it seems to be based on the adversarial system. Now we are pushing to remove this adversary process. Did the Airlines not have their lobbyists active during the legislative process? How was the dollar amount of the bailout arrived at? Was there give and take by the pro-Airline lobbyists and politicians? Was this as visible as the Victims Relief issue? There seems to be so many examples of civil cases where the original settlement offers are fractions of what our Legal System finally judged to be fair, will the Government offer be fair from the start? The Government seems to have set itself up as the agent of the Airlines in this issue. I would just like to be more confident that the proceedings will be fair. I think more information is necessary to make a decision. Individual Comment September 11 Email: Date The local time and date when the message was written. 2001-11-27 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource dojA000001.xml 911DA Item Elements describing a September 11 Digital Archive item. Status The process status of this item. approved Consent Whether September 11 Digital Archive has permission to possess this item. full Posting Whether the contributor gave permission to post this item. yes Copyright Whether the contributor holds copyright to this item. yes Source The source of this item. born-digital Media Type The media type of this item. email Created by Author Whether the author created this item. yes Described by Author Whether the description of this item was submitted by the author. no Date Entered The date this item was entered into the archive. 2001-11-27