9/11 Hearing in NYC Mayor Giuliani

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Why were we on our own?
http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0420/mondo5.php

"That larger question may never be answered. But some ugly facts about the federal government's action—or rather, inaction—is seeping out during testimony before the commission. Consider the following:

According to Giuliani's testimony, when he was first told of the crash, upon leaving a midtown hotel, he immediately realized it must be a terrorist attack. Speeding downtown, the mayor tried to reach the White House on his cellphone, but couldn't get through.

After reaching ground zero, he went to the city's command center and, from a secure phone, he spoke to Governor George Pataki, who offered to mobilize the National Guard. Giuliani accepted the offer. He called the White House and spoke to a presidential aide, asking if it were true the Pentagon had been hit. "Confirmed" was the reply. Giuliani asked whether the city had air cover. Fighters had been sent aloft 12 minutes before, said the aide. The mayor was told that Vice President Dick Cheney would call him shortly. Almost immediately, the phone rang and an operator said Cheney was on the line. Then, the room started to shake under the tremendous crash of the first tower coming down.

Check out the chronology of events on 9-11 (for instance, at 11 Sept 2001 the Center for Cooperative Research's detailed and heavily sourced timeline of accounts, news stories, and documents), and think about it:

American Flight 11 took off from Boston at 7:59 a.m. By probably 8:13 and certainly 8:15, the FAA knew it had been hijacked. Now, according to government officials quoted in a January 2002 Slate article, NORAD is notified by the FAA "about one minute" after it notices anything amiss, and NORAD says the military can scramble fighters "within a matter of minutes to anywhere in the United States." That didn't happen on 9-11. At 8:46, half an hour after the FAA knew that Flight 11 was hijacked, it crashed into the World Trade Center, unimpeded by any air-defense system. At almost exactly the same moment, Flight 77 from D.C. goes radically off course. Meanwhile, Flight 175 hits the WTC at 9:03. Just afterwards, Secret Service agents burst into Dick Cheney's office, grab him under his arms and propel downstairs to the White House basement and then into a bunker. Bush, at a Florida grade school, is told about the second crash into the WTC but spends the next ten minutes with second-graders, listening to them read a story called "Pet Goat."

At 9:59, the South Tower of the WTC collapses. At 10:28, the North Tower collapses.

During this entire time, New York City authorities were on their own. Beyond that, it seems scarcely conceivable, that with a nation under attack, the mayor of New York had to call Bush—not the other way around. Why was Giuliani not immediately alerted by the Pentagon or the White House or even the FAA?"

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1. Jimmy Breslin on Mayor Giuliani

They Collapse in Awe...
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/nyc-bres0520,0,5077354.column?coll=ny-news-columnists

"Giuliani ran a city of aimless departments, of tax assessors shaking people down, of correction officers bullying people in campaigns, of an illness being used for publicity, of so much golf with a lobbyist that they called him the Commissioner of Golf, of so many strutting around and snarling at the helpless and the powerless, using Giuliani's name as a baseball bat. And always, everybody fearing and shunning blacks. Crime had dropped in his first term. It had dropped all over the country, but he made it seem like it was only his doing. "My crime decrease."

He wanted an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum closed because it offended his strict Catholicism. And then, with a wife in Gracie Mansion and one girlfriend in a car outside, a friend of mine, a detective, drove in with another girlfriend, and he and the other girlfriend's car nearly hit each other. He marched with his girlfriend in a parade and his kids could watch it on television.

Giuliani wanted a high security bunker, placed 23 stories high in a building at 7 World Trade Center. Anybody with the least bit of common sense knew that the bunker in the sky was insane and the price, $15.1 million, a scandal. But he said it would house "My Police Commissioner" and "My Fire Commissioner." In Giuliani's world, everything was "mine."


Breslin never holds back.

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2. I was looking for the 'hecklers" comments

You know, those who had the "nerve" to say they weren't asking questions on the Mayor.


http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0520/p03s01-usgn.html

"The mayor worked to figure out where to set up operations. Eventually he settled on Pier 92, because the following day, a drill was scheduled involving the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and other agencies preparing for a potential biological and chemical attack. The governor quickly joined him there. "We agreed to put our governments together in one room, and run the emergency together," he recalled.
Before his testimony was over, Giuliani encountered a familiar scene - angry New Yorkers. Some people screamed, "Talk about the radios," referring to fire department radios that didn't work well. Giuliani, undeterred as usual, replied, "It's understandable."
The former mayor had few new suggestions for the commissioners. He agreed the 911 system needed to be improved, as well as other communications systems. But he added, "Those radios do not exist today."
In fact, the staff concluded that the FDNY "has responded with particular energy to the lessons of 9/11 and has acted to address many of the concerns we have identified." The city no longer allows off-duty firefighters to join in during emergencies. Almost all the members of the specialized rescue teams streamed into the World Trade Center. They were all lost, and as the commission noted, the city would not have had any ability to address a hazardous material episode."

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3. We've come so far

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/editorial/2582894

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Despite improvements since the Sept. 11 attacks, rescue officials in New York and Washington are still not prepared to handle another disaster because coordination and communications flaws persist, the commission investigating the attacks said on Wednesday.

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4. Here's one statement that should have gotten notice

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/174133_attacks20.html

"Giuliani also said that he had not received information in the summer of 2001 that threatening chatter had spiked, or that an Aug. 6, 2001, presidential memo had mentioned the World Trade Center as a possible target of Osama bin Laden. But he said that such knowledge would not have changed the city's actions."

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5. Out of all the links to 9/11 commissions hearings

with the Mayor, not one gave the comments I heard. Some of them were about the radios & the bunker. Giuliani said blamed the terrorists and then the comment was made "Osama bin Laden, we trained him, and something else," but not one article has it.
Of all the testimony I've watched, nothing stood out like that comment. In other words, this was of our own making.

I really felt for these families.

"Commissioner Jamie Gorelick said she was "disappointed in us in a way that I haven't been in the past" after the hearing Wednesday. Many relatives of people killed in the World Trade Center criticized and in some cases jeered the commission for not asking Giuliani about problems they say may have led to the deaths of hundreds of civilians and firefighters.

"This commission would not exist but for these families, and they fought for these hearings and they deserved to hear themselves the answers to the questions," Gorelick said in an interview. "They deserved to have the questions asked, and we did not do that."

http://www.nynewsday.com/news/local/brooklyn/nyc-uscomm0521,0,1831759.story?coll=nyc-manheadlines-brooklyn