F
Freedom Fighter
Guest
Giuliani's Ground Zero Legacy
September 8, 2007 Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/opinion/08collins.html
Rudy Giuliani is going to be at ground zero next week, taking part in
ceremonies to remember the victims of Sept. 11. That was inevitable - the
man has so identified himself with 9/11 that it's amazing he hasn't tried to
patent it. It's also a terrible idea.
After the attacks, Giuliani did his best work in front of a microphone,
speaking simply and honestly to the city and the nation. Ground zero, on the
other hand, is the site of his worst failure.
That's saying a great deal when you consider that this is the man whose
crack plan for disaster response involved building the city emergency
command center in one of the towers of the best-known terrorist targets in
the nation.
But think about this: In the final months of his mayoralty, Giuliani went to
ground zero 41 times, with whatever visiting statesman, movie star or sports
hero who happened to be in town. He would walk them around the edge of the
disaster zone and retell the story of 9/11. They could see ironworkers and
crane operators dismantling the ruins and emergency workers looking for
remains of the victims. Beneath those workers, the still-burning wreckage
coughed up benzene and PCB's and asbestos. The city had received many
reports about the danger of that air. Looking down, Giuliani could see that
very few people - except the health supervisors - were wearing protective
gear. And he did nothing about it.
Now, some of those workers have gotten sick. Since thousands of them have
filed lawsuits, it's not likely that there will be any coming to terms with
the numbers soon. The city has not even acknowledged that James Zadroga, a
34-year-old New York City police detective who died in January 2006, was
killed by what his family said was more than 400 hours put in at the site.
But a New Jersey coroner found that Zadroga died from a disease caused by
his exposure to the ground zero dust. A widower, he left behind an orphaned
5-year-old daughter who is being raised by her grandparents.
Construction workers and emergency crews who raced to a stricken New York,
eager to offer their services, are now wheezing and, in some cases, sitting
immobilized in their living rooms, sucking oxygen from a tank. Their
families have already paid a terrible price, and either the city or the
federal government is likely to wind up with a financial bill equal to the
moral one it already bears.
Workers exposed to toxic air can be protected by respirators. They're
uncomfortable and heavy, and people don't like to wear them, even when it's
important to their health and safety. So the person in charge of a dangerous
site needs to make it clear that only those with proper equipment can come
anywhere near it. That's what happened in Washington at the Pentagon, where
there haven't been health problems. Over in Staten Island, where workers
were examining the rubble that the ground zero crews had excavated and
loaded onto trucks, people were so well-protected that some of them looked
like bit players in a space movie.
At ground zero, the priority was getting the site cleared as quickly as
possible to show the world that New York was back to normal. The workers
were left on their own. This happened on the watch of a mayor who had been
eager to save us from our own imperfect impulses by bringing down the heavy
hand of the law on every jaywalker, Chinese New Year firecracker-thrower or
ferret owner in the city, not to mention the famous squeegee wielders.
Giuliani also set the worst possible example. While his own expeditions to
ground zero were generally confined to the areas where the air was much less
dangerous, his failure to ever, ever wear serious protection sent a very
strong signal to the workers: Real Men Don't Wear Respirators.
Sept. 11, 2001, gave Giuliani an extraordinary platform from which to
educate the country about terrorism and public safety. Imagine how much help
he could have been if he had talked about the mistakes made, the lessons
learned. But he has never admitted error.
He has never acknowledged that it might have been better if he had focused
less on getting the disaster site cleared away fast, and more on getting all
the workers out in one piece. Recently, he had the temerity to claim that
he's a victim, too. "I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most
of the workers ... I was exposed to exactly the same things they were
exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them," he said last month during a
campaign stop in Cincinnati.
Forty-odd tours of the edge of the site with beauty queens and foreign
dignitaries is not exactly the same as months of round-the-clock work on top
of a mass of burning plastics. Questioned later, Giuliani copped to the
universal politician non-apology - a failure to communicate. Then he added
"... but I was there often enough so that every health consequence that
people have suffered, I could also be suffering."
It was, you see, all about him.
--------------------------------
The MYTH of GIULIANI AND 9/11:
When Rudy Giuliani emerged from the toxic dust of the World Trade Center the
national media caught a quick case of amnesia, preferring the iconic image
of a "hero" over reality. They quickly forgot Giuliani's dismal tenure in
mayoral office, his life-costing failures to address the threat of
terrorism, and his sorry performance on the morning of September 11, 2001.
By the time his ship came in on 9/11, Giuliani's approval rating among his
constituency, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, had hit a Bush-like
37 percent. In desperation to recover his plummeting popularity, Giuliani
seized upon any and every opportunity to appear the "hero." Despite ordering
a crackdown on speeding, his car and entourage were seen and reported in the
press as greatly exceeding the speed limit in racing to locations of
newsworthy events so he could appear there in front of the media cameras.
Desperate to become the "hero," he broke the laws he demanded that others
obey.
Prior to 9/11, Giuliani's most criminally negligent if not malevolent
pretense to heroism came with his West Nile Virus hoax. This usually mild,
mosquito-borne disease is not contagious person to person and is far less
dangerous than common influenza, but Giuliani had the media play it up as an
impending disaster, and came on like a knight in shining armor with a
solution. His cure was far worse than the disease, and no doubt has caused
and will cause many illnesses and deaths, as did his post-9/11 assurances
that the Ground Zero air was safe to breathe. He had all of New York City
repeatedly sprayed from the air with Malathion, a highly toxic insecticide,
and completely disregarded the manufacturer's advised safety precautions in
doing so. Note that malicious intent is far harder to prove in
environmental poisoning cases than as when Giuliani ordered the police to
falsely arrest someone, or tacitly encouraged them to brutally beat or shoot
suspects to death - all among the many incidents that led to his plummeting
popularity before 9/11.
Today, Giuliani lives and breathes a 9/11 mantra, and as he desired is
portrayed as an iconic American hero - the "leader" we needed when George W.
Bush was otherwise occupied on September 11, 2001. But was Giuliani REALLY a
hero on or after that infamous day of horror?
As with Bush, Giuliani's failing political career was rescued by the
terrorists that attacked New York on 9/11. Some believe these terrorists
had help from within the US government, and even that some within the
government itself were the actual terrorists. To find criminals, one must
consider who most benefited from the crime. It is strange if not truly
sinister that Giuliani stated to Peter Jennings in an interview that on 9/11
he had prior knowledge of the World Trade Center collapses, but subsequently
he denied and continues to deny that he said this. Here Giuliani is caught
in a direct lie - you can hear it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hNmf76GUCw More documentation can be found
at: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc_giuliani.html
Regarding the Ground Zero air and the many now dead and dying therefrom,
former EPA Secretary Christine Whitman has stated that she urged Ground Zero
workers to wear respirators, but that Giuliani blocked her efforts, and also
that the Giuliani administration appeared to be more concerned with its
image than the safety and speedy response of EPA employees in the wake of
the subsequent anthrax scare.
Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in
a lawsuit against New York City show the Giuliani administration never
meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear
respirators. At the same time, the administration warned companies working
on the toxic pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed.
Giuliani said in the first month after the attacks, "The air quality is safe
and acceptable." However, in the weeks after the attacks, the United States
Geological Survey identified hundreds of asbestos hot spots of debris dust
that remained on buildings. By the end of the month the USGS reported that
the toxicity of the debris was akin to that of drain cleaner. It would
eventually be determined that a wide swath of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn
had been heavily contaminated by highly caustic and toxic materials. The
city's health agencies, such as the Department of Environmental Protection,
failed to supervise or issue guidelines for the testing and cleanup of
private buildings, leaving this responsibility to building owners.
"The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused
response to environmental concerns," said David Newman, an industrial
hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health.
On 9/11 New York was left without an emergency command center because
Giuliani, going against the advice of both the police and fire departments,
decided to locate the center conveniently near City Hall in World Trade
Center building 7, along with tanks containing tens of thousands of gallons
of deisel fuel - in direct violation of New York City fire laws. This was
despite the 1993 WTC bombing that proved it to be the number one terrorism
target. It was this decision that put him on the street on 9/11 instead of
inside a command center coordinating operations. Ironically, this also put
him in front of hundreds of media cameras, sparking his image transformation
into a "hero."
While our "hero" was posing for the cameras, however, there was no
communication possible between the police department and the fire
department, whose REAL heroes were rushing to their deaths inside the
towers. And there was likewise no communication between the police officers
who identified an open stairway for escape from above the fire zone and the
911 phone operators who were telling soon-to-be-dead office workers to stay
put and wait for the firefighters. Giuliani had been aware of the
inadequacy of the emergency services' communications equipment for many
years, but did absolutely nothing about it. This criminal negligence also
doomed hundreds of firefighters that were unable to hear orders to evacuate
the north tower prior to collapse.
Whatever possibility existed for communication between the police and fire
departments, whose radios operated on different frequencies, evaporated when
Giuliani visited a makeshift fire/police command center that had formed in
his absence. There he ORDERED THE POLICE BRASS TO LEAVE and accompany him
uptown. This "heroic leadership" effectively put the fire department and
police department commanders in different physical locations with no
communication possible between them.
Present Police Commissioner Ray Kelly stated that he doesn't have any idea
who was in charge on 9/11 because Bernie Kerik and all the top chiefs in the
police department basically acted as bodyguards to Giuliani and no one was
running the shop.
Firefighters finally took to the streets to protest Giuliani's decision to
limit the number of uniformed firefighters and police officers sifting
through the rubble for remains, and the "scoop-and-dump" haste of the
cleanup. They accused the administration of rushing the cleanup at the cost
of trashing the remains of victims. [And, it is pointed out by 9/11
conspiracy theorists, to quickly dispose of any incriminating evidence. The
steel, some claim bearing evidence of demolition explosives, was shipped to
China and quickly melted down.] At the firefighters' demonstration Giuliani,
in signature style, ordered Peter Gorman, head of the Uniformed Fire
Officers Association, and Kevin Gallagher, head of the Uniformed
Firefighters Association, to be ARRESTED at the protest site! A
spokesperson for Gallagher told the media "The mayor fails to realize that
New York City is not a dictatorship." Gorman went a step further, joining
the multitudes of New Yorkers calling the mayor a "fascist" - an often-heard
charge that dogged Giuliani throughout his mayoral tenure.
The fact is that Giuliani's switch to a scoop-and-dump cleanup coincided
with the removal of millions of dollars in gold, silver, and other assets of
the Bank of Nova Scotia that were buried beneath the towers' debris. Once
the money was out, Giuliani sided with the developers that opposed a lengthy
recovery effort, ordering the scoop-and-dump operation so they could proceed
with redevelopment. Harold Schaitberger of the International Association of
Firefighters (IAFF), the nation's largest firefighters' organization,
assailed Giuliani, detailing how the mayor ditched body-recovery efforts
only 24 hours after recovering the $230 million. "He found the gold on
October 31, and November 1 is when he issued the order to remove the
firefighters from their recovery mode."
President Steve Cassidy of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, which
represents about 9,000 firefighters, recently told The NY Post that the UFA
"will never be with Rudy Giuliani - we will make it known that he is not
qualified to lead."
Cassidy's blunt assessments stemmed from the "poor preparations" Giuliani
made to protect the city and first-responders in the wake of the 1993 WTC
bombing that killed six. "For someone running for the highest office in the
country and claiming to be a leader on terrorism, Giuliani's track record
stinks," Cassidy declared. 9/11 Commission member John Lehman likewise said
that New York City's disaster planning was "not worthy of the Boy Scouts,
let alone this great city."
"All he was doing was wandering around the city, and he wasn't able to make
sure firefighters and police could communicate. Serious mistakes, crucial
mistakes were made," Cassidy fumed, pointing to the faulty radios that had
failed in 1993 and failed again in 2001, preventing hundreds of firefighters
from hearing orders to evacuate the north tower. "On the heroic memory of
343 dead firefighters, he wants to run for president of the United States!
It's a disgrace."
"Rudy Giuliani did not have New York City prepared for a second terror
attack, and prior to September 11th his poll numbers reflected that he
couldn't get elected to any significant position," the UFA head stated.
"What did he do, in the weeks and months after 9/11, except claim he was the
guiding light?" He also lashed out at Giuliani for campaigning on
"revisionist history," and excoriated him for "not lifting one finger" to
help sick Ground Zero workers who had to push Albany legislators to pass
9/11 health-care bills after hundreds of first responders fell ill.
A relevant video documentary, "Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend," can be viewed
at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCYEEO-58I&eurl=http://www.rudy-urbanlegend.com/
"This image of Rudy Giuliani as America's mayor, it's a myth," states
Cassidy. Denying charges of political motivation for opposing Giuliani,
Cassidy said his union supported George Bush in the last election and had
supported George Pataki for governor of New York. "It's not about
Republicans, it's about THIS Republican," he said.
Jerome Hauer was the city's emergency management director from 1996 to 2000,
and is recognized as a leading expert on biological and chemical terrorism.
"Rudy would make a terrible president and that is why I am speaking now," Mr
Hauer told London's The Sunday Telegraph. "He's a control freak who
micro-manages decisions, he has a confrontational character trait and picks
fights just to score points. He's the last thing this country needs as
president." Mr Hauer also accused Mr Giuliani of failing to sort out turf
battles between the city's police and fire departments, and of appointing
inexperienced cronies to key positions.
INTERVIEW: Wayne Barrett by Williams Cole
http://brooklynrail.org/2006/9/local/wayne-barrett
Wayne Barrett, a Senior Editor at the Village Voice, is an icon of New York
City journalism, resulting from exhaustively researched investigative
reporting that led to his classic books City for Sale: Ed Koch and the
Betrayal of New York, and Rudy! An Investigative Biography. Rudy! reveals
shocking new information about Giuliani's past and was instrumental in
researching Giuliani Time, a recent feature documentary about Giuliani and
New York City. Barrett's new book (co-written with Dan Collins) is Grand
Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11. - W. Cole
Williams Cole (Brooklyn Rail): In writing and researching the book, what was
the most shocking thing you found out about Giuliani and 9/11 for you, a
Giuliani expert?
Wayne Barrett: I was really surprised at how the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing had absolutely no effect on his consciousness. Six people died, but
so many more could have and we show in four or five different ways how a
much bigger catastrophe was only narrowly averted. It was a dramatic
announcement of the arrival of terrorism in this country and in this city.
Then in June of '93 the FBI and the NYPD busted terrorists in Queens who
were a week away from blowing up the Holland Tunnel, the United Nations, a
whole series of targets. So 1993 was the peak year of terrorism in this
country and in this city prior to 9/11, yet it did not register in any way
in the Giuliani mind. We did many interviews with people that were in high
levels within the Giuliani administration, who interviewed for the police
commissioner in 1993 and the panel that Giuliani appointed for choosing the
police commissioner. All of them say that the question of the '93 bombings,
the question of terrorism generally, absolutely never came up. The mayor
never raised it, top advisors never raised it, it was nowhere on the screen,
it was nowhere. It was much the same two years later when Giuliani created
the Office of Emergency Management which, retroactively, he claimed was the
best sign that he understood the terrorist threat. But as we establish in
the book, terrorism had nothing to do with the OEM. Again, we interviewed
the panel that picked the first OEM director, we interviewed the candidates,
even Jerry Hauer who got the job, and terrorism had almost nothing to do
with the creation of the OEM. So what I was really shocked about, and
surprised about, was how clear it was that terrorism was something that
Giuliani never fixated on.
Brooklyn Rail: But now he pitches himself as an expert on terrorism.
Barrett: Yes, but it's not just Rudy who postures himself as a terrorism
expert. Why is it that after every event, the media immediately asks him to
come on, and the media positions him as an expert on terrorism? It is
obviously a consequence of the belief that because he was roaming the
canyons of lower Manhattan on 9/11, that somehow that is an indication that
he is a leader in the fight against terrorism, when actually he wouldn't
have been in the canyons of lower Manhattan if he had located his command
center where Mike Bloomberg has now and where his own top security people
recommended he locate it in the '90s - namely in downtown Brooklyn,
underneath the ground. If the command center had been there, Rudy wouldn't
have been roaming the canyons of lower Manhattan and he wouldn't be the icon
of 9/11. But somehow that visual has insinuated itself in the American
media mindset, that he's the expert on terrorism because he faced it down
that morning. He should have been operating less inspirationally and more
effectively in a command center in a responsible location, rather than at a
most vulnerable location. And he should have been with his top chiefs, the
fire department, police department, emergency management; he should have
been making solid judgments about how to respond to this. Instead, he was
walking the streets of lower Manhattan, making bad decisions down there as
well.
Rail: And it's pretty clear that the comments on security and terrorism are
going to be one of his defining roles should he run for president.
Barrett: Absolutely, I think the rationale for his presidential candidacy is
five years of spin about him as the leader on 9/11 and as the terrorism
prophet. I think he made some terrible mistakes that morning in terms of
strategic response, but as far as an inspirational figure goes, he said all
the right things. Even on 9/11 itself he was circumspect enough to say
let's not blame a community for this attack - he was urging tolerance.
After seven-and-a-half years of his mayoralty, the last thing we would
expect from him is empathy and tolerance. But beyond that voice was seven
years of miserable preparation for any attack, and even critical mistakes
that day. For example, he left the makeshift command post set up at the
World Trade Center - essentially a table set up by the fire department -
with all the police brass, in total violation of his own protocol. If he
had left even one of the top police commanders with the fire chiefs, if he
had observed even one iota of his own protocol, then the fire chiefs would
have known what the police brass believed, which was that the towers were
going to collapse. But because he didn't leave anybody there, because he
didn't insist on a unified command post, but instead split the command post
himself, then the malfunctioning of the radios proved to be very much more
deadly because you couldn't have communication. If you had a police chief
standing next to a fire chief at the command post, they would have been able
to exchange vital information. There were critical failings, even on that
terrible morning.
Rail: Talk a little more about the radio situation.
Barrett: I think we have major, shocking revelations about the relationship
between the Giuliani Administration and Motorola. There is such travesty in
the fact that firefighters wound up with the same radios in their hands that
malfunctioned at the '93 bombing. We have one chapter devoted exclusively
to tracking the narrative of why it was that no change occurred on the radio
front, and that there are all kinds of relationships. A pivotal person at
the city's information agency had a sister who worked for Motorola in a high
capacity, and this was the woman who steered the city, in large measure,
toward the new radios that were purchased. But even so, the city waited
until March of 2001 to actually put new radios in firefighters hands, and
then those radios malfunctioned within a week. The Giuliani Administration
could have easily reconfigured those radios, the new radios, and put them
back in fire houses in the intervening months between then and 9/11.
Instead, as a lame duck administration, it didn't do anything to put those
radios back out. We detailed a whole story of the nexus of the
relationships between Motorola and the Giuliani Administration and I think
it's certainly one of the reasons that so many firefighters died that day -
because of how bad radio communications were. I think we make that case
very strongly.
Rail: Who went on the record for the book and were you surprised by some of
the people that did?
Barrett: Some of the most interesting quotes in the book come from the staff
of the 9/11 Commission itself. We talked to almost everybody who worked on
chapter nine of the 9/11 Commission report that deals specifically with the
city's response. I think some of the most interesting quotations come from
people like Don Farmer, who was one of the top counsels in the Commission in
charge of chapter nine, and Sam Caspersen who is top assistant. Both of
them said some pretty remarkable things in the book. Don Farmer, for
example, says that there's no question, had the command center been located
at a responsible site where the city could've functioned that day, that in
his mind there's no question that the number of casualties would have been
greatly reduced. The current Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says that he
doesn't have any idea who was in charge on 9/11 because Bernie Kerik and all
the top chiefs in the police department basically acted as bodyguards to
Giuliani and no one was running the shop. They didn't even open the
emergency command center at the police department until an hour into the
incident. Louis Anemone, the highest-ranking officer throughout most of the
Giuliani era, said he worked for more than a year developing what he called
the vulnerability list, defining the most vulnerable sites for terrorists in
New York. But when he made his presentation to the mayor about it, Anemone
said the mayor glazed over, he was totally uninterested. And of course, the
World Trade Center was at the top of his vulnerability list. So some of the
people who did talk for the record are pretty remarkable. It's a sign of
the fact that, in New York at least, people are willing to come to grips
with the failings that cost lives that day.
Rail: I wonder if you could comment, after writing two books now about
Giuliani, how you would sum up his personality? Does he calculate things
politically, is he an opportunist? What is the essence there? Can he admit
mistakes?
Barrett: He's never really admitted any mistakes about 9/11. It's
astonishing to me. I don't think he's a very reflective man about these
kinds of things. Rudy is a spinmeister, he is an extraordinary, flexible
public personality in the sense that he now champions virtually any
Republican. He was campaigning for Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, who
likened gay people, black and gay people, to animals. Yet the night of 9/11
Rudy went to the house of Howard Koeppel, his gay friend, where he had been
staying because of his marital difficulties, and where he continued to stay.
He was living with two gay men on the night of 9/11 and now he's campaigning
for Rick Santorum who is likening them to animals. That's Rudy's
ever-flexible political mind. The last time he ran for public office was in
1997. People tend to forget how long ago it was, and then he was very
consciously projecting himself as this very non-partisan manager who was
only sort of accidentally a Republican. He used to do everything to
distance himself from his years of service to Ronald Reagan when he ran for
mayor of New York in 1989 and 1993. He consciously did that, and explicitly
did it. Now, he invokes Ronald Reagan all the time. Recently he was
campaigning for Ralph Reed and he was invoking Jesus in Florida. He is
certainly calculated. It's this elastic politics, this ability to be
whatever he needs to be to make it to the next goal. It's so striking. I
don't think there's any core there.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Giuliani: Nasty Man - by Edward I. Koch, former NYC mayor.
Giuliani Time (DVD) - with David Dinkins, Ron Kuby, Wayne Barrett, Rudolph
W. Giuliani, Kevin Keating.
Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 - by Wayne
Barrett and Dan Collins.
"Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend" can be viewed at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCYEEO-58I&eurl=http://www.rudy-urbanlegend.com/
September 8, 2007 Gail Collins, Op-Ed Columnist
http://select.nytimes.com/2007/09/08/opinion/08collins.html
Rudy Giuliani is going to be at ground zero next week, taking part in
ceremonies to remember the victims of Sept. 11. That was inevitable - the
man has so identified himself with 9/11 that it's amazing he hasn't tried to
patent it. It's also a terrible idea.
After the attacks, Giuliani did his best work in front of a microphone,
speaking simply and honestly to the city and the nation. Ground zero, on the
other hand, is the site of his worst failure.
That's saying a great deal when you consider that this is the man whose
crack plan for disaster response involved building the city emergency
command center in one of the towers of the best-known terrorist targets in
the nation.
But think about this: In the final months of his mayoralty, Giuliani went to
ground zero 41 times, with whatever visiting statesman, movie star or sports
hero who happened to be in town. He would walk them around the edge of the
disaster zone and retell the story of 9/11. They could see ironworkers and
crane operators dismantling the ruins and emergency workers looking for
remains of the victims. Beneath those workers, the still-burning wreckage
coughed up benzene and PCB's and asbestos. The city had received many
reports about the danger of that air. Looking down, Giuliani could see that
very few people - except the health supervisors - were wearing protective
gear. And he did nothing about it.
Now, some of those workers have gotten sick. Since thousands of them have
filed lawsuits, it's not likely that there will be any coming to terms with
the numbers soon. The city has not even acknowledged that James Zadroga, a
34-year-old New York City police detective who died in January 2006, was
killed by what his family said was more than 400 hours put in at the site.
But a New Jersey coroner found that Zadroga died from a disease caused by
his exposure to the ground zero dust. A widower, he left behind an orphaned
5-year-old daughter who is being raised by her grandparents.
Construction workers and emergency crews who raced to a stricken New York,
eager to offer their services, are now wheezing and, in some cases, sitting
immobilized in their living rooms, sucking oxygen from a tank. Their
families have already paid a terrible price, and either the city or the
federal government is likely to wind up with a financial bill equal to the
moral one it already bears.
Workers exposed to toxic air can be protected by respirators. They're
uncomfortable and heavy, and people don't like to wear them, even when it's
important to their health and safety. So the person in charge of a dangerous
site needs to make it clear that only those with proper equipment can come
anywhere near it. That's what happened in Washington at the Pentagon, where
there haven't been health problems. Over in Staten Island, where workers
were examining the rubble that the ground zero crews had excavated and
loaded onto trucks, people were so well-protected that some of them looked
like bit players in a space movie.
At ground zero, the priority was getting the site cleared as quickly as
possible to show the world that New York was back to normal. The workers
were left on their own. This happened on the watch of a mayor who had been
eager to save us from our own imperfect impulses by bringing down the heavy
hand of the law on every jaywalker, Chinese New Year firecracker-thrower or
ferret owner in the city, not to mention the famous squeegee wielders.
Giuliani also set the worst possible example. While his own expeditions to
ground zero were generally confined to the areas where the air was much less
dangerous, his failure to ever, ever wear serious protection sent a very
strong signal to the workers: Real Men Don't Wear Respirators.
Sept. 11, 2001, gave Giuliani an extraordinary platform from which to
educate the country about terrorism and public safety. Imagine how much help
he could have been if he had talked about the mistakes made, the lessons
learned. But he has never admitted error.
He has never acknowledged that it might have been better if he had focused
less on getting the disaster site cleared away fast, and more on getting all
the workers out in one piece. Recently, he had the temerity to claim that
he's a victim, too. "I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most
of the workers ... I was exposed to exactly the same things they were
exposed to. So in that sense, I'm one of them," he said last month during a
campaign stop in Cincinnati.
Forty-odd tours of the edge of the site with beauty queens and foreign
dignitaries is not exactly the same as months of round-the-clock work on top
of a mass of burning plastics. Questioned later, Giuliani copped to the
universal politician non-apology - a failure to communicate. Then he added
"... but I was there often enough so that every health consequence that
people have suffered, I could also be suffering."
It was, you see, all about him.
--------------------------------
The MYTH of GIULIANI AND 9/11:
When Rudy Giuliani emerged from the toxic dust of the World Trade Center the
national media caught a quick case of amnesia, preferring the iconic image
of a "hero" over reality. They quickly forgot Giuliani's dismal tenure in
mayoral office, his life-costing failures to address the threat of
terrorism, and his sorry performance on the morning of September 11, 2001.
By the time his ship came in on 9/11, Giuliani's approval rating among his
constituency, according to a Quinnipiac University poll, had hit a Bush-like
37 percent. In desperation to recover his plummeting popularity, Giuliani
seized upon any and every opportunity to appear the "hero." Despite ordering
a crackdown on speeding, his car and entourage were seen and reported in the
press as greatly exceeding the speed limit in racing to locations of
newsworthy events so he could appear there in front of the media cameras.
Desperate to become the "hero," he broke the laws he demanded that others
obey.
Prior to 9/11, Giuliani's most criminally negligent if not malevolent
pretense to heroism came with his West Nile Virus hoax. This usually mild,
mosquito-borne disease is not contagious person to person and is far less
dangerous than common influenza, but Giuliani had the media play it up as an
impending disaster, and came on like a knight in shining armor with a
solution. His cure was far worse than the disease, and no doubt has caused
and will cause many illnesses and deaths, as did his post-9/11 assurances
that the Ground Zero air was safe to breathe. He had all of New York City
repeatedly sprayed from the air with Malathion, a highly toxic insecticide,
and completely disregarded the manufacturer's advised safety precautions in
doing so. Note that malicious intent is far harder to prove in
environmental poisoning cases than as when Giuliani ordered the police to
falsely arrest someone, or tacitly encouraged them to brutally beat or shoot
suspects to death - all among the many incidents that led to his plummeting
popularity before 9/11.
Today, Giuliani lives and breathes a 9/11 mantra, and as he desired is
portrayed as an iconic American hero - the "leader" we needed when George W.
Bush was otherwise occupied on September 11, 2001. But was Giuliani REALLY a
hero on or after that infamous day of horror?
As with Bush, Giuliani's failing political career was rescued by the
terrorists that attacked New York on 9/11. Some believe these terrorists
had help from within the US government, and even that some within the
government itself were the actual terrorists. To find criminals, one must
consider who most benefited from the crime. It is strange if not truly
sinister that Giuliani stated to Peter Jennings in an interview that on 9/11
he had prior knowledge of the World Trade Center collapses, but subsequently
he denied and continues to deny that he said this. Here Giuliani is caught
in a direct lie - you can hear it at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hNmf76GUCw More documentation can be found
at: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/wtc_giuliani.html
Regarding the Ground Zero air and the many now dead and dying therefrom,
former EPA Secretary Christine Whitman has stated that she urged Ground Zero
workers to wear respirators, but that Giuliani blocked her efforts, and also
that the Giuliani administration appeared to be more concerned with its
image than the safety and speedy response of EPA employees in the wake of
the subsequent anthrax scare.
Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in
a lawsuit against New York City show the Giuliani administration never
meaningfully enforced federal requirements that those at the site wear
respirators. At the same time, the administration warned companies working
on the toxic pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed.
Giuliani said in the first month after the attacks, "The air quality is safe
and acceptable." However, in the weeks after the attacks, the United States
Geological Survey identified hundreds of asbestos hot spots of debris dust
that remained on buildings. By the end of the month the USGS reported that
the toxicity of the debris was akin to that of drain cleaner. It would
eventually be determined that a wide swath of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn
had been heavily contaminated by highly caustic and toxic materials. The
city's health agencies, such as the Department of Environmental Protection,
failed to supervise or issue guidelines for the testing and cleanup of
private buildings, leaving this responsibility to building owners.
"The city ran a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused
response to environmental concerns," said David Newman, an industrial
hygienist with the New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health.
On 9/11 New York was left without an emergency command center because
Giuliani, going against the advice of both the police and fire departments,
decided to locate the center conveniently near City Hall in World Trade
Center building 7, along with tanks containing tens of thousands of gallons
of deisel fuel - in direct violation of New York City fire laws. This was
despite the 1993 WTC bombing that proved it to be the number one terrorism
target. It was this decision that put him on the street on 9/11 instead of
inside a command center coordinating operations. Ironically, this also put
him in front of hundreds of media cameras, sparking his image transformation
into a "hero."
While our "hero" was posing for the cameras, however, there was no
communication possible between the police department and the fire
department, whose REAL heroes were rushing to their deaths inside the
towers. And there was likewise no communication between the police officers
who identified an open stairway for escape from above the fire zone and the
911 phone operators who were telling soon-to-be-dead office workers to stay
put and wait for the firefighters. Giuliani had been aware of the
inadequacy of the emergency services' communications equipment for many
years, but did absolutely nothing about it. This criminal negligence also
doomed hundreds of firefighters that were unable to hear orders to evacuate
the north tower prior to collapse.
Whatever possibility existed for communication between the police and fire
departments, whose radios operated on different frequencies, evaporated when
Giuliani visited a makeshift fire/police command center that had formed in
his absence. There he ORDERED THE POLICE BRASS TO LEAVE and accompany him
uptown. This "heroic leadership" effectively put the fire department and
police department commanders in different physical locations with no
communication possible between them.
Present Police Commissioner Ray Kelly stated that he doesn't have any idea
who was in charge on 9/11 because Bernie Kerik and all the top chiefs in the
police department basically acted as bodyguards to Giuliani and no one was
running the shop.
Firefighters finally took to the streets to protest Giuliani's decision to
limit the number of uniformed firefighters and police officers sifting
through the rubble for remains, and the "scoop-and-dump" haste of the
cleanup. They accused the administration of rushing the cleanup at the cost
of trashing the remains of victims. [And, it is pointed out by 9/11
conspiracy theorists, to quickly dispose of any incriminating evidence. The
steel, some claim bearing evidence of demolition explosives, was shipped to
China and quickly melted down.] At the firefighters' demonstration Giuliani,
in signature style, ordered Peter Gorman, head of the Uniformed Fire
Officers Association, and Kevin Gallagher, head of the Uniformed
Firefighters Association, to be ARRESTED at the protest site! A
spokesperson for Gallagher told the media "The mayor fails to realize that
New York City is not a dictatorship." Gorman went a step further, joining
the multitudes of New Yorkers calling the mayor a "fascist" - an often-heard
charge that dogged Giuliani throughout his mayoral tenure.
The fact is that Giuliani's switch to a scoop-and-dump cleanup coincided
with the removal of millions of dollars in gold, silver, and other assets of
the Bank of Nova Scotia that were buried beneath the towers' debris. Once
the money was out, Giuliani sided with the developers that opposed a lengthy
recovery effort, ordering the scoop-and-dump operation so they could proceed
with redevelopment. Harold Schaitberger of the International Association of
Firefighters (IAFF), the nation's largest firefighters' organization,
assailed Giuliani, detailing how the mayor ditched body-recovery efforts
only 24 hours after recovering the $230 million. "He found the gold on
October 31, and November 1 is when he issued the order to remove the
firefighters from their recovery mode."
President Steve Cassidy of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, which
represents about 9,000 firefighters, recently told The NY Post that the UFA
"will never be with Rudy Giuliani - we will make it known that he is not
qualified to lead."
Cassidy's blunt assessments stemmed from the "poor preparations" Giuliani
made to protect the city and first-responders in the wake of the 1993 WTC
bombing that killed six. "For someone running for the highest office in the
country and claiming to be a leader on terrorism, Giuliani's track record
stinks," Cassidy declared. 9/11 Commission member John Lehman likewise said
that New York City's disaster planning was "not worthy of the Boy Scouts,
let alone this great city."
"All he was doing was wandering around the city, and he wasn't able to make
sure firefighters and police could communicate. Serious mistakes, crucial
mistakes were made," Cassidy fumed, pointing to the faulty radios that had
failed in 1993 and failed again in 2001, preventing hundreds of firefighters
from hearing orders to evacuate the north tower. "On the heroic memory of
343 dead firefighters, he wants to run for president of the United States!
It's a disgrace."
"Rudy Giuliani did not have New York City prepared for a second terror
attack, and prior to September 11th his poll numbers reflected that he
couldn't get elected to any significant position," the UFA head stated.
"What did he do, in the weeks and months after 9/11, except claim he was the
guiding light?" He also lashed out at Giuliani for campaigning on
"revisionist history," and excoriated him for "not lifting one finger" to
help sick Ground Zero workers who had to push Albany legislators to pass
9/11 health-care bills after hundreds of first responders fell ill.
A relevant video documentary, "Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend," can be viewed
at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCYEEO-58I&eurl=http://www.rudy-urbanlegend.com/
"This image of Rudy Giuliani as America's mayor, it's a myth," states
Cassidy. Denying charges of political motivation for opposing Giuliani,
Cassidy said his union supported George Bush in the last election and had
supported George Pataki for governor of New York. "It's not about
Republicans, it's about THIS Republican," he said.
Jerome Hauer was the city's emergency management director from 1996 to 2000,
and is recognized as a leading expert on biological and chemical terrorism.
"Rudy would make a terrible president and that is why I am speaking now," Mr
Hauer told London's The Sunday Telegraph. "He's a control freak who
micro-manages decisions, he has a confrontational character trait and picks
fights just to score points. He's the last thing this country needs as
president." Mr Hauer also accused Mr Giuliani of failing to sort out turf
battles between the city's police and fire departments, and of appointing
inexperienced cronies to key positions.
INTERVIEW: Wayne Barrett by Williams Cole
http://brooklynrail.org/2006/9/local/wayne-barrett
Wayne Barrett, a Senior Editor at the Village Voice, is an icon of New York
City journalism, resulting from exhaustively researched investigative
reporting that led to his classic books City for Sale: Ed Koch and the
Betrayal of New York, and Rudy! An Investigative Biography. Rudy! reveals
shocking new information about Giuliani's past and was instrumental in
researching Giuliani Time, a recent feature documentary about Giuliani and
New York City. Barrett's new book (co-written with Dan Collins) is Grand
Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11. - W. Cole
Williams Cole (Brooklyn Rail): In writing and researching the book, what was
the most shocking thing you found out about Giuliani and 9/11 for you, a
Giuliani expert?
Wayne Barrett: I was really surprised at how the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing had absolutely no effect on his consciousness. Six people died, but
so many more could have and we show in four or five different ways how a
much bigger catastrophe was only narrowly averted. It was a dramatic
announcement of the arrival of terrorism in this country and in this city.
Then in June of '93 the FBI and the NYPD busted terrorists in Queens who
were a week away from blowing up the Holland Tunnel, the United Nations, a
whole series of targets. So 1993 was the peak year of terrorism in this
country and in this city prior to 9/11, yet it did not register in any way
in the Giuliani mind. We did many interviews with people that were in high
levels within the Giuliani administration, who interviewed for the police
commissioner in 1993 and the panel that Giuliani appointed for choosing the
police commissioner. All of them say that the question of the '93 bombings,
the question of terrorism generally, absolutely never came up. The mayor
never raised it, top advisors never raised it, it was nowhere on the screen,
it was nowhere. It was much the same two years later when Giuliani created
the Office of Emergency Management which, retroactively, he claimed was the
best sign that he understood the terrorist threat. But as we establish in
the book, terrorism had nothing to do with the OEM. Again, we interviewed
the panel that picked the first OEM director, we interviewed the candidates,
even Jerry Hauer who got the job, and terrorism had almost nothing to do
with the creation of the OEM. So what I was really shocked about, and
surprised about, was how clear it was that terrorism was something that
Giuliani never fixated on.
Brooklyn Rail: But now he pitches himself as an expert on terrorism.
Barrett: Yes, but it's not just Rudy who postures himself as a terrorism
expert. Why is it that after every event, the media immediately asks him to
come on, and the media positions him as an expert on terrorism? It is
obviously a consequence of the belief that because he was roaming the
canyons of lower Manhattan on 9/11, that somehow that is an indication that
he is a leader in the fight against terrorism, when actually he wouldn't
have been in the canyons of lower Manhattan if he had located his command
center where Mike Bloomberg has now and where his own top security people
recommended he locate it in the '90s - namely in downtown Brooklyn,
underneath the ground. If the command center had been there, Rudy wouldn't
have been roaming the canyons of lower Manhattan and he wouldn't be the icon
of 9/11. But somehow that visual has insinuated itself in the American
media mindset, that he's the expert on terrorism because he faced it down
that morning. He should have been operating less inspirationally and more
effectively in a command center in a responsible location, rather than at a
most vulnerable location. And he should have been with his top chiefs, the
fire department, police department, emergency management; he should have
been making solid judgments about how to respond to this. Instead, he was
walking the streets of lower Manhattan, making bad decisions down there as
well.
Rail: And it's pretty clear that the comments on security and terrorism are
going to be one of his defining roles should he run for president.
Barrett: Absolutely, I think the rationale for his presidential candidacy is
five years of spin about him as the leader on 9/11 and as the terrorism
prophet. I think he made some terrible mistakes that morning in terms of
strategic response, but as far as an inspirational figure goes, he said all
the right things. Even on 9/11 itself he was circumspect enough to say
let's not blame a community for this attack - he was urging tolerance.
After seven-and-a-half years of his mayoralty, the last thing we would
expect from him is empathy and tolerance. But beyond that voice was seven
years of miserable preparation for any attack, and even critical mistakes
that day. For example, he left the makeshift command post set up at the
World Trade Center - essentially a table set up by the fire department -
with all the police brass, in total violation of his own protocol. If he
had left even one of the top police commanders with the fire chiefs, if he
had observed even one iota of his own protocol, then the fire chiefs would
have known what the police brass believed, which was that the towers were
going to collapse. But because he didn't leave anybody there, because he
didn't insist on a unified command post, but instead split the command post
himself, then the malfunctioning of the radios proved to be very much more
deadly because you couldn't have communication. If you had a police chief
standing next to a fire chief at the command post, they would have been able
to exchange vital information. There were critical failings, even on that
terrible morning.
Rail: Talk a little more about the radio situation.
Barrett: I think we have major, shocking revelations about the relationship
between the Giuliani Administration and Motorola. There is such travesty in
the fact that firefighters wound up with the same radios in their hands that
malfunctioned at the '93 bombing. We have one chapter devoted exclusively
to tracking the narrative of why it was that no change occurred on the radio
front, and that there are all kinds of relationships. A pivotal person at
the city's information agency had a sister who worked for Motorola in a high
capacity, and this was the woman who steered the city, in large measure,
toward the new radios that were purchased. But even so, the city waited
until March of 2001 to actually put new radios in firefighters hands, and
then those radios malfunctioned within a week. The Giuliani Administration
could have easily reconfigured those radios, the new radios, and put them
back in fire houses in the intervening months between then and 9/11.
Instead, as a lame duck administration, it didn't do anything to put those
radios back out. We detailed a whole story of the nexus of the
relationships between Motorola and the Giuliani Administration and I think
it's certainly one of the reasons that so many firefighters died that day -
because of how bad radio communications were. I think we make that case
very strongly.
Rail: Who went on the record for the book and were you surprised by some of
the people that did?
Barrett: Some of the most interesting quotes in the book come from the staff
of the 9/11 Commission itself. We talked to almost everybody who worked on
chapter nine of the 9/11 Commission report that deals specifically with the
city's response. I think some of the most interesting quotations come from
people like Don Farmer, who was one of the top counsels in the Commission in
charge of chapter nine, and Sam Caspersen who is top assistant. Both of
them said some pretty remarkable things in the book. Don Farmer, for
example, says that there's no question, had the command center been located
at a responsible site where the city could've functioned that day, that in
his mind there's no question that the number of casualties would have been
greatly reduced. The current Police Commissioner Ray Kelly says that he
doesn't have any idea who was in charge on 9/11 because Bernie Kerik and all
the top chiefs in the police department basically acted as bodyguards to
Giuliani and no one was running the shop. They didn't even open the
emergency command center at the police department until an hour into the
incident. Louis Anemone, the highest-ranking officer throughout most of the
Giuliani era, said he worked for more than a year developing what he called
the vulnerability list, defining the most vulnerable sites for terrorists in
New York. But when he made his presentation to the mayor about it, Anemone
said the mayor glazed over, he was totally uninterested. And of course, the
World Trade Center was at the top of his vulnerability list. So some of the
people who did talk for the record are pretty remarkable. It's a sign of
the fact that, in New York at least, people are willing to come to grips
with the failings that cost lives that day.
Rail: I wonder if you could comment, after writing two books now about
Giuliani, how you would sum up his personality? Does he calculate things
politically, is he an opportunist? What is the essence there? Can he admit
mistakes?
Barrett: He's never really admitted any mistakes about 9/11. It's
astonishing to me. I don't think he's a very reflective man about these
kinds of things. Rudy is a spinmeister, he is an extraordinary, flexible
public personality in the sense that he now champions virtually any
Republican. He was campaigning for Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania, who
likened gay people, black and gay people, to animals. Yet the night of 9/11
Rudy went to the house of Howard Koeppel, his gay friend, where he had been
staying because of his marital difficulties, and where he continued to stay.
He was living with two gay men on the night of 9/11 and now he's campaigning
for Rick Santorum who is likening them to animals. That's Rudy's
ever-flexible political mind. The last time he ran for public office was in
1997. People tend to forget how long ago it was, and then he was very
consciously projecting himself as this very non-partisan manager who was
only sort of accidentally a Republican. He used to do everything to
distance himself from his years of service to Ronald Reagan when he ran for
mayor of New York in 1989 and 1993. He consciously did that, and explicitly
did it. Now, he invokes Ronald Reagan all the time. Recently he was
campaigning for Ralph Reed and he was invoking Jesus in Florida. He is
certainly calculated. It's this elastic politics, this ability to be
whatever he needs to be to make it to the next goal. It's so striking. I
don't think there's any core there.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Giuliani: Nasty Man - by Edward I. Koch, former NYC mayor.
Giuliani Time (DVD) - with David Dinkins, Ron Kuby, Wayne Barrett, Rudolph
W. Giuliani, Kevin Keating.
Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11 - by Wayne
Barrett and Dan Collins.
"Rudy Giuliani: Urban Legend" can be viewed at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaCYEEO-58I&eurl=http://www.rudy-urbanlegend.com/