New Book Puts Giuliani in His Place
Time to downsize Rudy 9/11 myth - nydailynews.com
The images and their accompanying story line are, by now, the stuff of legend, seared into memory. Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a lame-duck local pol, becomes the take-charge, already prepared leader of a stunned city and nation on Sept. 11, 2001, striding through the streets of lower Manhattan with his top commanders to rescue, rally and reassure the populace.
Five years later, Giuliani is a pop-culture superhero ("I didn't have time to be afraid, Oprah") and has unabashedly converted 9/11 into wealth, fame and a shot at the White House.
But a new exhaustively researched and unsentimental peek behind the mythology strongly suggests that Giuliani and his top deputies committed many errors that did grave, even fatal, harm to citizens, emergency responders and recovery teams before, on and after that terrible day. Investigative reporters Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, the co-authors of "Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11," think the time has come for the public to trade in myth for some hard, uncomfortable truths.
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Giuliani's top team comes in for criticism: Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik essentially served as Giuliani's personal bodyguard on 9/11 instead of running the NYPD. "I don't know who was directing. I literally don't," current Commissioner Raymond Kelly told the authors.
(more after the break..)
Those failures, perhaps understandable in the chaos of 9/11, are compounded by much less forgivable decisions in the attack's wake. Construction workers and firefighters were allowed to work and eat meals in the still-smoldering ruins without protective respiratory gear despite dire warnings - and as the Daily News has reported, thousands of Ground Zero veterans are now afflicted with upper respiratory illnesses.
Equally inexcusable is Giuliani's rewriting of history to hide his failures. Barrett and Collins describe forum after forum in which the mayor, relying on his mythic glow, says that even obvious mistakes - from the siting of the emergency bunker to the creation of separate police and fire posts on 9/11 - represented wise, intentional strategy. Already, the legend is beginning to fray: The chairmen of the 9/11 commission recently expressed regret at letting America's Mayor off the hook too easily. There will be more such second looks in the future, as America amends the moral of the Giuliani fable to read that even heroes need not be perfect - or pretend to be.
Rudolph Giuliani went from a marginally hated politician to a super-hero of sorts in the minds of average Americans after 9/11, perhaps this new book will shed some real light on this modern day folk hero.
Btw, isn't Giuliani making a fortune in a securities company nowadays?
Thanks Al Czervik for the link!
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New Steven Jones' Lecture on Sept 1
http://www.physics.isu.edu/colloquium/jones06.html
Firefox and 911Blogger V2
Dz,
the new site is a pita. The settings in the comments section do not work properly.
you can't set save comment
you can't set save comment settings unless you are logged in..
i assume by 'pita' you mean 'pity'? if so im sorry you feel that way, the majority of the feedback we've gotten has been mostly positive..
if you could email me via the 'Contact Us' panel I would love to help solve whatever your issues might be with the site. i can assure you that the site works great for me and many others - although there are a few quirks to smooth out yet.
creating an account fixed the problem
!!
cool.. ill put that on the
cool.. ill put that on the bugs list.. i didnt realize you couldnt change the option if you weren't logged in until i just tried it..
I think he meant PITA (Pain In The ***)
Glad you are getting lots of positive feedback, the site is working well for me, and the nested replies are a great improvement.
Rudy Giuliani, fascist criminal.
Not only is Ghouliani a fascist criminal who either helped perpetrate the murders of 9/11 or is helping in covering them up.
He also set race relations, class struggle, & poverty back 50 years when he was dictator, I mean mayor of NYC.
Ghouliani
Ghouliani was part of the 9/11 scam. He was just as complicit as Cheney and is guilty of high treason and mass murder for the crimes of 9/11. I hate that sob. THAT WAS HIS CITY AND HIS PEOPLE!!!! What a piece of human filth.
Ghouliani is human slime.
Ghouliani is human slime. Utter filth. I wouldn't be surprised if he had a picture of Mussolini hanging in his study. there's an interesting bit in McGowan's book "programmed to kill" about rudy's role in the coverup of a child molestation scandal at some army base, I think it was presidio. It doesn't get much lower than him.
It was West Point: "As the
It was West Point:
"As the Mercury News reported: “By the end of the year, 50 children had been interviewed by investigators. Children at West Point told stories that would become horrifyingly familiar. They said they had been ritually abused. They said they had had excrement smeared on their bodies and been forced to eat feces and drink urine. They said they were taken away from the day care center and photographed.”
Despite abundant medical and psychological evidence, and literally dozens of child witnesses, and despite “950 interviews by 60 FBI agents assigned to the investigation, an investigation led by former U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani produced no federal grand jury indictments,” according to the Herald Record.
The Herald also noted that: “In 1987, Giuliani said his detailed investigation showed only one or two children were abused.” This was, it should be noted, a bare-faced lie from the fascistic future-mayor and would-be Senator, as the Herald report divulged: “a still-secret, independent report - produced by one of the nation's top experts on child sexual abuse - confirms the children's accusations of abuse.”
This was not the first time that the prestigious academy had shown an appalling willingness to overlook extreme levels of abuse directed at children by army personnel. A year before the abuse case broke, a 22-month-old child was murdered by an Army staff sergeant. The Mercury News reported that: “After a court martial hearing, the sergeant was given an 18 month suspended sentence and dishonorable discharge.”
In other words, he served no time and was essentially given a free ride for murdering a child. With help from Giuliani, the FBI, the U.S. Army, and the grand jury, the abusers of countless children at the day care center (which was, appropriately enough, building number 666 on the academy grounds) were likewise given a free ride.
As with the Franklin case, the children and their parents were to find justice only through the civil courts. The Herald Record reported that: “lawyers for both the government and the 11 child plaintiffs agreed that some children were sexually abused at the center two years ago” (again contradicting Giuliani's bogus conclusions). The government, however, claimed that it could not be held responsible, due to the “assault exemption in the Federal Tort Claim Act.”
WTC 7 Command Bunker
I have not read the new book, but I read a review of it that highlighted his placement of the Emergency Command Center in WTC 7 as a boneheaded move made "over the objections of subordinates" ("the only bunker ever built in the clouds"). What I would like to know is has there ever been a reporter who pressed for an explanation of why that site was chosen, and has there been a response from Guiliani? Was he just trying to help his pal Silverstein fill up the building? Did he see some strategic advantage in locating the center there? If this book doesn't go into the topic any more than indicated in the review, I think this is something that an enterprising reporter should pursue.
WTC7 could be its own movie...
Examining its contents, demise, etc...