Giuliani pressed, dissembles on faulty 9/11 radios

December 23, 2007

In October, Brave New Films released a devastating six-minute clip about one of Rudy Giuliani’s most serious 9/11 failures: his decision to ignore (and lie about) concerns over the FDNY’s radio equipment, which ultimately cost so many lives on 9/11. (The issue is now under investigation by city officials.)

The video explains that Giuliani was told the firefighters didn’t have a functioning communications system after the original WTC attack in 1993, but for seven years, Giuliani ignored the problem. When he eventually ordered new radios, he gave Motorola a lucrative no-bid contract, and the company ended up providing untested radios that didn’t work.

On 9/11, when the order went out to the FDNY to evacuate, the firefighters never heard the order, which is why so many perished. (The NYPD, which had working radios, heard the order, vacated Ground Zero, and lost far fewer people when the towers fell.) Giuliani later said he believes the firefighters ignored the evacuation order on purpose — a claim that disgusts the department and the families of those who died.

Giuliani hasn’t been pressed on any of this by political reporters, so it was a pleasant surprise to see George Stephanopoulos broach the subject this morning. According to a transcript from ABC News:

GIULIANI: I did everything I — I did everything I could think of doing in that situation to help. I think I made mostly the right decisions. Probably didn’t make all the right decisions, but I tried very hard to alleviate the problem as much as I could, and to lift the spirits of the city. And in most cases, I think I made the right decisions. In some cases I may not. […]

STEPHANOPOULOS: They make two main charges. Number one, that those firefighters in the north tower, many of them lost their lives because their radios didn’t work. They also say you ended the recovery efforts too soon.

GIULIANI: Well, the radios that you’re talking about weren’t put online for three, four, five years after. So, it would have been impossible for me to have those radios ready…. Even with the new equipment, it took another two or three years for those radios to be put online. So it would have been impossible for us to have gotten them online before that, given the fact that it took so long afterwards.

“Impossible”? Hardly.

TP, which has a video clip of the interview, highlighted just how wrong this is.

As Stephanopoulos pointed out, the firefighters on 9/11 were forced to use old equipment that had malfunctioned eight years earlier, during the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center.

But it wasn’t “impossible” to get new radios to these firefighters, as Giuliani tried to claim. After the 1993 incident, Giuliani gave Motorola a $14-million no-bid contract. Despite this exorbitant sum, the radios were faulty and had to be taken out of service in March 2001, after a “distress call from a firefighter trapped in a burning house” went unheard. A New York City Council report on the fire department’s radio procurement process concluded:

“Thus, despite its acknowledgment two years earlier that several manufacturers were developing technology that might meet FDNY’s CAI specifications, and in apparent disregard of its pledge to evaluate new technologies and products, the FDNY appears to have elected to accept a radio representing an entirely new communications technology from Motorola rather than conduct a competitive review of products and prices.”

I still don’t know why this controversy hasn’t caught on — to be fair, there have been other Giuliani scandals for the media to consider — so kudos to Stephanopoulos for at least asking the question.

As for Giuliani’s response, the fact that he still hasn’t come up with a coherent answer helps highlight just how problematic this is for his campaign.

I feel sorry for the Republicans. ALL of their candidates have more flaws than virtues. Maybe they all got hit by the Y2K virus and the effects are only showing now.

  • Rudy pulled off one of the most successful PR campaigns of all time in the days and weeks after 9/11 and in the process convinced most of the nation that he was something he was not. As much as I hate the long presidential campaigns these days, it’s taken that long to break down the image he created, so keep it up NYC. You knew the man behind the PR. The rest of the country needs to hear what you have to say.

  • Rudy has no answers so he intentionally tries to confuse the issue. To the average voter/viewer one walks away thinking he couldn’t have done anything about it anyway whereas it was a major blunder and he was forewarned years in advance that it was a major problem that needed to be corrected.

    Guiliani is a phony who just happened to be mayor on 9/11 but really just screwed the incident up worse than it was. He did nothing…nothing that should earn him the hero title he tries to wear like a crown. I’m surprised he’s lasted this long in the race for the GOP nomination. The more one looks the more they see what a joke this guy really is He’s milked 9/11 for all the profit and fame he could get out of it but now the real truth is coming out and he will not stand the scrutiny.

  • I don’t understand how difficult it is to find radios that work. It’s not like it’s some sort of new, untested technology.

  • ***jen flowers***When you say you feel sorry for the republicans I hope you mean sympathy for how pathetic this group has become rather than they just can’t find suitable candidates to represent them. When ever I think of them I think of the story of the frog and the scorpion. When the frog agreed to give the scorpion a ride across the channel to the other island because there was food there and the scorpion was starving where he was, the scorpion had assured him that there was no way he would harm him because they would both drown if he did. So the frog said jump on my back and began the long swim to the other island. Half-way he felt a painful sting in his abdomen and screamed “why, why did you do that? Now we’ll both drown”. And the scorpion replied, “What did you expect? You knew I was a scorpion before you put me on your back.”
    The GOP deserves these candidates who are deeply flawed just like their party and they certainly represent the way the base of their party has acted the past 6yrs.
    Republicans need to take their party back and regain some integrity, where cheating, lying and stealing are no longer commonplace.

  • Rudi “Redrum” Ghouliani. Mass Murderer. Agent of Evil. Enemy of the People. Arch Nemesis of the Truth.

    Now, who exactly wants this nattering ninnyhammer to be President?

  • Well, the radios that you’re talking about weren’t put online for three, four, five years after. So, it would have been impossible for me to have those radios ready…. — the Ghoul

    So, I have one question: how come it was possible for the *police* to have functioning radios, but impossible for the firefighters? Did the NYPD live in some sort of a time warp?

  • bjobotts: I think the punch line to that story is something along the lines of, “I couldn’t help it. It’s my nature.” Seems I heard it in a movie somewhere…

  • The Ghoul owes a debt for his political life to the Midland Moron. A genuine national leader would’ve been on TV instantly and forever that livelong day, leaving not a scrap of photo op to some lameduck mayor striding about in a hardhat. Where are you, Joe DiMaggio? We need visible heroes, and what we have in DC is a dim coward. So while he hid under that CIA bed for 11 1/2 hours, the cameras went elsewhere. And then when the 9/11 commission asked to speak to Howdy Doody about that fateful day, he would only meet with them if he could sit in the lap of his Buffalo Bob.

    Try and imagine JFK hiding in the closet during the Missile Crisis and allowing LBJ to make all the hard calls and photo ops.

  • He’s not “Il Douche”(bag) for nothing, you know.

    Watching all the flailing by the Dimbulbs $ Droolers Chowderhead Marching Society as they go down down down just fills my heart with holiday cheer.

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  • Folks, a few important facts connected to this story and the chronology of Giuliani & Co. on the morning of 9/11. You can find much of this in “Grand Illusion” by Barrett & Collins. First of all, Richard Sheirer, Director of NYCOEM, office of emergency management, FAILED TO REPORT to his headquarters in WTC Building 7, but instead reported to the attacked WTC North lobby where he was videotaped. This is akin to the ‘911’ dispatch operator reporting to the scene of an incident as opposed to managing communications and coordination from a secure location, which is the job of any emergency response management entity. A short time before the first collapse, Giuliani, HIS ENTIRE SENIOR STAFF, Bernard Kerik, and HIS ENTIRE SENIOR STAFF, and Richard Sheirer, and HIS ENTIRE SENIOR STAFF, relocated to a secure location at 75 Barclay where they were allegedly ‘trapped’, but SAFE and ALIVE, while WTC 2 collapsed, unlike the firefighters equipped with faulty radios. Shortly thereafter Giuliani emerged from the dust to appear before the global media with a prescient understanding of what had just happened. Shortly thereafter, he was able to produce a massive hardened and secure location, Pier 92, to house the Search and Rescue operation. Pier 92 was the pre-staged location for bioterror drill, ‘Operation Tripod’, an OEM drill to be held on 9/12/01. So based on this chronology, which is more likely, that Giuliani was the unprepared goof who inherited the spotlight at that moment, or in the words of his lifelong secretary Beth Petron-Hatton “It was so well orchestrated that you would have thought he had prepared for it forever”. The ‘radios’ story is important, but must also be placed within the full context of the chronology of events on that morning.

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