Hamas: NY’s East Side Access Delayed, Wasteful Because No Children Enslaved To Dig Tunnels

Other factors the consultants found include wasteful, redundant contracts, conflicting jurisdictions, and corruption, none of which went against the way Hamas does things in Gaza anyway.

New York, May 23 – Consultants from the militant Islamist movement that governs the Gaza Strip issued their report today on the audit they conducted of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s failure to maintain scheduling and budgetary discipline in its decades-long project to connect the Long Island Rail Road with Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal on the borough’s east side, with the chief factor, in the consultants’ view, the MTA’s refusal to conscript minors to perform the most hazardous underground tasks as the movement itself has done in Gaza.

A group of mid-level Hamas officials submitted their analysis to the MTA and several federal agencies that provided funding for the massive infrastructure project, a project that already dwarfs in cost others of similar physical scope. The Hamas analysis’s chief critique of the project’s economic management centers on labors costs, which instead of upwards of $5 billion to date, could have topped out at less than $200,000 had the MTA adhered to Hamas’s tunnel construction standards: drafting young boys to excavate the passages with hand-held equipment and to labor under inhuman conditions for little or no recompense and with no regard for basic safety or hygiene.

Other factors the consultants found include wasteful, redundant contracts, conflicting jurisdictions, and corruption, none of which went against the way Hamas does things in Gaza anyway.

Initial estimates and budgeting put the East Side Access project cost at just over $3 billion; it has already ballooned to more than $11 billion. Completion at first aimed for 2009; current forecasts call for LIRR commuter train operations to commence no earlier than the end of 2022. A more assiduous application of child slave labor, the Hamas report contends, could have slashed those skyrocketing costs and, as a societal benefit, taken thousands of young people off the streets and a life of the violent crime now plaguing New York.

“The supply of unemployed youths available in the metropolitan area – in upper Manhattan, in the Bronx, in Queens, and in Brooklyn alone, even without extending the draft as far as Newark – is effectively unlimited,” the report observed. “We acknowledge that the conscription of such wastrels departs from the dominant culture in New York, but the East Side Access project needs to alter its conceptual paradigm to achieve what its proponents aim to achieve. If that means shoveling young minorities into collapsing tunnels on either side of the East River instead of into Rikers Island or some crack house in the shadow of Yankee Stadium, that should make little difference.”

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