http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0732,barrett,77463,6.html/3
August 7th, 2007
BIG LIE
2.
'I don't think there was anyplace in the country, including the
federal government, that was as well prepared for that attack as New
York City was in 2001.'
This assertion flies in the face of all three studies of the city's
response—the 9/11 Commission, the National Institute of Standards &
Technology (NIST), and McKinsey & Co., the consulting firm hired by
the Bloomberg administration.
Actually, Giuliani didn't create the OEM until three years after the
1993 bombing, 27 months into his term.
And he didn't open the OEM's new emergency command center until the
end of 1999—nearly six years after he'd taken office.
If he "assumed from the moment I came into office that NYC would be
the subject of a terrorist attack," as he told Time when it made him
"Person of the Year" in 2001, he sure took a long time to erect what
he describes as the city's front line of defense.
The OEM was established so long after the bombing because, contrary to
Giuliani's revisionism, the decision to create it had nothing to do
with the bombing.
Several memos, unearthed from the Giuliani archive and going on at
great length, reveal that the initial rationale for the agency was
"non-law enforcement events," particularly the handling of a Brooklyn
water-main break shortly after he took office that the mayor thought
had been botched.
Before that, in December 1994, when an unemployed computer programmer
carried a bomb onto a subway in an extortion plot against the Transit
Authority, Giuliani was upset that he couldn't even get a count of
patients from the responding services for his press conference.
Jerry Hauer, who was handpicked by Giuliani to head the OEM, testified
before the 9/11 Commission that Giuliani was "unable to get the full
story" at the firebombing and "heard about the huge street collapse"
that followed the water-main break "on TV," adding:
"That's what led the mayor to set up OEM."
Hauer went through five interviews for the job, and the only time
terrorism came up was when Giuliani briefly discussed the failed
sarin-gas drill.
He even met with Giuliani's wife, Donna Hanover; no one said a word
about the 1993 bombing.
Hauer's own memos at the time the OEM was launched in 1996 emphasize
"the visibility of the mayor" during emergencies (rather than the
police commissioner) as a major objective of the agency.
The now- ballyhooed new office was, however, so underfunded from the
start that Hauer could only hire staffers whose salaries would be paid
for by other agencies like the NYPD.
With that kind of history, it's hardly surprising that the OEM was
anything but "invaluable" on 9/11.
Sam Caspersen, one of the principal authors of the 9/11 Commission's
chapter on the city's response, says that "nothing was happening at
OEM" during the 102 minutes of the attack that had any direct impact
on the city's "rescue/evacuation operation."
A commission staff statement found that, even prior to the evacuation
of the OEM command center at 7 World Trade an hour after the first
plane hit, the agency "did not play an integral role" in the response.
Despite Giuliani's claim today that he and the OEM were "constantly
planning for different kinds" of attacks, none of the OEM exercises
replicated the 1993 bombing.
No drill occurred at the World Trade Center, and none involved the
response to a high-rise fire anywhere.
In fact, the OEM had no high-rise plan—its emergency-management
trainers weren't even assigned to prepare for the one attack that had
already occurred, and the one most likely to recur.
Kevin Culley, a Fire Department captain who worked as a field
responder at OEM, said the agency had "plans for minor emergencies,"
but he couldn't recall "anybody anticipating another attack like the
'93 bombing."
Instead of being the best-prepared city, New York's lack of unified
command, as well as the breakdown of communications between the police
and fire departments, fell far short of the efforts at the Pentagon
that day, as later established by the 9/11 Commission and NIST
reports.
When the 280,000-member International Association of Fire Fighters
recently released a powerful video assailing Giuliani for sticking
firefighters with the same radios that "we knew didn't work" in the
1993 attack, the presidential campaign attacked the union.
"This is an organization that supported John Kerry for president in
2004," Giuliani aide Tony Carbonetti said.
"So it's no shock that they're out there going after a credible
Republican."
While the IAFF did endorse Kerry, the Uniformed Firefighters of
Greater New York, whose president starred in the video, endorsed Bush.
Its former president, Tom Von Essen—currently a member of Giuliani
Partners—was the fire commissioner on 9/11 precisely because the union
had played such a pivotal role in initially electing Giuliani.
The IAFF video reports that 121 firefighters in the north tower didn't
get out because they didn't hear evacuation orders, rejecting
Giuliani's claim before the 9/11 Commission that the firefighters
heard the orders and heroically decided to "stand their ground" and
rescue civilians.
Having abandoned that 2004 contention, the Giuliani campaign is now
trying to blame the deadly communications lapse on the repeaters,
which were installed to boost radio signals in the towers.
But the commission concluded that the "technical failure of FDNY
radios" was "a contributing factor," though "not the primary cause,"
of the "many firefighter fatalities in the North Tower."
The commission compared "the strength" of the NYPD and FDNY radios and
said that the weaknesses of the FDNY radios "worked against successful
communication."
The commission report also found that "it's impossible to know what
difference it made that units in the North Tower weren't using the
repeater channel," because no one knows if it "remained operational"
after the collapse of the south tower, which fell on the trade-center
facilities where the repeater and its console were located.
The collapse also drove everyone out of the north tower lobby, leaving
no one to operate the repeater console.
In addition, the commission concluded that fire chiefs failed to turn
on the repeater correctly that morning—another indication of the lack
of training and drills at the WTC between the attacks.
In the end, firefighters had to rely exclusively on their radios, and
the inability of the Giuliani administration to find a replacement for
the radios that malfunctioned in 1993 left them unable to talk to each
other, even about getting out of a tower on the verge of collapse.
The mayor had also done nothing to make the radios interoperable—which
would have enabled the police and firefighters to communicate across
departmental lines—despite having received a 1995 federal waiver
granting the city the additional radio frequencies to make that
possible.
That meant the fire chiefs had no idea that police helicopters had
anticipated the partial collapse of both towers long before they fell.
It's not just the radios and the OEM:
Giuliani never forced the police and fire departments to abide by
clear command-and-control protocols that squarely put one service in
charge of the other during specified emergencies.
Though he collected $250 million in tax surcharges on phone use to
improve the 911 system, he diverted this emergency funding for other
uses, and the 911 dispatchers were an utter disaster that day, telling
victims to stay where they were long after the fire chiefs had ordered
an evacuation, which potentially sealed the fates of hundreds.
And, despite the transparent lessons of 1993, Giuliani never
established any protocols for rooftop or elevator rescues in
high-rises, or even a strategy for bringing the impaired and injured
out—all costly failings on 9/11.
But perhaps the best evidence of the Giuliani administration's lack of
readiness was that no one at its top levels had a top-secret security
clearance on 9/11.
Hauer, who had left the OEM in 2000 to become a top biochemical
adviser at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was
invited to Gracie Mansion within days of 9/11 for a strategy session
with Giuliani and a half-dozen of his top advisers, including Police
Commissioner Bernie Kerik, Tom Von Essen, and Richie Sheirer, who
succeeded Hauer at the OEM.
Hauer, who had the highest-level clearance, says that "no one else in
the room had one at all."
He was told that the FBI "was trying to get them expedited
clearances."
Hauer had previously taken Sheirer down to the White House to meet
with top counterterrorism brass and learned on his way into the
meeting that Sheirer hadn't "filled out the questionnaire."
When Kerik's nomination as homeland security secretary blew up in
2004, news accounts also indicated that he'd never filled it out.
Von Essen was so out of the loop that he said that prior to 9/11, he
was told "nothing at all," and that he started hearing "talk of an
organization called al Qaeda and a man named Osama bin Laden" a few
hours after the attack.
"It meant nothing to me," he wrote in his own book.
"I was reading the daily intelligence in Washington," Hauer recalled,
"and I didn't feel comfortable talking about things that people
weren't cleared for. Talking in general with Rudy one-on-one was one
thing, but talking to Richie and Bernie and Tommy violated my security
clearances."
Though Giuliani's top team had failed to seek the clearances they
needed prior to 9/11, Kerik and Giuliani attacked the FBI for not
sharing information with local law enforcement officials when they
testified a month after the attack at a House subcommittee hearing.
____________________________________________________
Harry
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