"If Rudolph Giuliani was running on anything but 9/11, I would not speak out," said Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son was among the 343 FDNY members killed in the terrorist attack. "If he ran on cleaning up Times Square, getting rid of squeegee men, lowering crime — that's indisputable.
"But when he runs on 9/11, I want the American people to know he was part of the problem."
Such comments contradict Giuliani's post-Sept. 11 profile as a hero and symbol of the city's resilience — the steadfast leader who calmed the nerves of a rattled nation. But as the presidential campaign intensifies, criticisms of his 2001 performance are resurfacing.
Giuliani, the leader in polls of Republican voters for his party's nomination, has been faulted on two major issues:
• His administration's failure to provide the World Trade Center's first responders with adequate radios, a long-standing complaint from relatives of the firefighters killed when the twin towers collapsed. The Sept. 11 Commission noted the firefighters at the World Trade Center were using the same ineffective radios employed by the first responders to the 1993 terrorist attack on the trade center.
Regenhard, at a 2004 commission hearing in Manhattan, screamed at Giuliani, "My son was murdered because of your incompetence!" The hearing was a perfect example of the 9/11 duality: Commission members universally praised Giuliani at the same event.
• A November 2001 decision to step up removal of the massive rubble pile at ground zero. The firefighters were angered when the then-mayor reduced their numbers among the group searching for remains of their lost "brothers," focusing instead on what they derided as a "scoop and dump" approach. Giuliani agreed to increase the number of firefighters at ground zero just days after ordering the cutback.
More than 5 1/2 years later, body parts are still turning up in the trade center site.
"We want America to know what this guy meant to New York City firefighters," said Peter Gorman, head of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association. "In our experiences with this man, he disrespected us in the most horrific way."
The two-term mayor, in his appearance before the Sept. 11 Commission, said the blame for the death and destruction of Sept. 11 belonged solely with the terrorists. "There was not a problem of coordination on Sept. 11," he testified.
And Saint Rudy's reputation as Mr. No Tolerance For Crime Of Any Sort has taken a hit as well, as Giuliani's memory is about as good as Alberto Gonzales':
Rudolph W. Giuliani told a grand jury that his former chief investigator remembered having briefed him on some aspects of Bernard B. Kerik’s relationship with a company suspected of ties to organized crime before Mr. Kerik’s appointment as New York City police commissioner, according to court records.
Mr. Giuliani, testifying last year under oath before a Bronx grand jury investigating Mr. Kerik, said he had no memory of the briefing, but he did not dispute that it had taken place, according to a transcript of his testimony.
Mr. Giuliani’s testimony amounts to a significantly new version of what information was probably before him in the summer of 2000 as he was debating Mr. Kerik’s appointment as the city’s top law enforcement officer. Mr. Giuliani had previously said that he had never been told of Mr. Kerik’s entanglement with the company before promoting him to the police job or later supporting his failed bid to be the nation’s homeland security secretary.
In his testimony, given in April 2006, Mr. Giuliani indicated that he must have simply forgotten that he had been briefed on one or more occasions as part of the background investigation of Mr. Kerik before his appointment to the police post.
He said he learned only in late 2004 that the briefing or briefings had occurred, after the city’s investigation commissioner reviewed his own records from 2000. To this day, Mr. Giuliani testified, he has no specific recollection of any briefing or the details of what he was told. But he said he felt comforted because the chief investigator had cleared Mr. Kerik to be promoted.
“He testified fully and cooperatively,” a statement from Mr. Giuliani’s consulting firm said of the former mayor’s grand jury appearance. The statement added: “Mayor Giuliani has admitted it was a mistake to recommend Bernie Kerik for D.H.S. and he has assumed responsibility for it.”
Mr. Kerik pleaded guilty last summer to improperly allowing the company, Interstate Industrial Corporation, or its subsidiaries, to do $165,000 worth of free renovations on his Bronx apartment in late 1999 and 2000. The company has denied paying for the work, and has disputed any association with organized crime. But the two brothers who run it have been indicted in the Bronx on charges they lied under oath about their dealings with Mr. Kerik.
There is no evidence that Mr. Giuliani knew about the apartment renovation before promoting Mr. Kerik to police commissioner. But the top investigator who briefed Mr. Giuliani in 2000, the transcript shows, was aware that Mr. Kerik’s brother and a close friend had been hired by an affiliate of the company, which for years had been struggling to secure a city license.
For Mr. Giuliani, who is seeking the Republican nomination for president and who has done well in early polls, his history with Mr. Kerik looms as a likely issue in the campaign. His own aides have anticipated that questions are likely to arise about Mr. Giuliani’s judgment in, among other things, promoting Mr. Kerik for one of the country’s most important national security posts.
Outside of New York City, Giuliani is only known as the stolid, calming presence who walked up Broadway in the aftermath of the attacks, getting in front of the microphone and keeping the public informed after the President of the United States had spent seven minutes after the attacks sitting in an elementary school classroom not knowing what to do, followed by a flight out west like Brave Sir Robin running away. It's hardly surprising that Giuliani was able to recast his image when the video proof was there, especially after George W. Bush was able to recast himself from Brave Sir Robin who Ran Away to Hot Military Stud simply by throwing his arm around a fireman and then invading a country that had nothing to do with the attacks.
But many people have forgotten, and outside of the New York metro area, many never knew, just how deeply in the doghouse Giuliani was until an atrocity transformed him into a hero. By the time his marital problems became public and he announced his intention to end his marriage via press conference before even telling his wife, New York had had quite enough of Rudy Giuliani, as Jeffrey Feldman, a city resident, reminds us:
Almost from the start of his first term, and right up to the morning of September 11, 2001, Giuliani's reign was dominated not by talk of his patriotism, but by troubling discussions of racial profiling, police shootings of unarmed black men, and abuses of power to justify anti-crime policies that seem to terrorize substantial portions of New York City's diverse population.
Unfortunately, the violence in Giuliani's New York has been effectively hidden behind high-impact PR patriotism designed to sell Giuliani to American voters.
To recover the reality of violence and controversy that surrounded Giuliani as an elected official, we need only return to the media discussion that dominated the national airwaves just prior to 2001.
Even A Martian Could See It
March 15, 2000. Unarmed, off-duty security guard Patrick Dorismond is shot dead by undercover police officer Anthony Vasquez. Desmond is a Haitian immigrant. In follow up investigations, the record shows that Vasquez attempted to lure Desmond into a drug by by inquiring about purchasing marijuana. Amidst murky details and rising concern over the number of unarmed black men gunned down by New York police, Mayor Rudy Giuliani releases the Patrick Desmond's juvenile records, claiming as justification for what happened. When questioned about the illegality of releasing sealed juvenile records, Giuliani claims that such restrictions do not apply to dead men. At Desmond's funeral in Brooklyn, thousands of protesters clash with local police--frustrated by the cycle of police violence against black men to have emerged during Giuliani's 7 years as mayor.
The Violence of Zero-Tolerance
In the days leading up to September 11, 2001, the Rudy Giuliani campaign collapsed in a perfect storm of allegations against the mayor: police brutality, marital infidelity, cruelty to his own family members. In the end, he pulled out of his Senate bid against Hillary Clinton, blaming a bout with prostate cancer as the culprit. The man who built a career out of taking on the mob and arresting squeegee men on street corners was brought down by a common affliction easily cured by out-patient treatment.
But six years later, his cancer seems only to have made him stronger--and more adept at building a strong wall of patriotic myth to shield him from reliving the controversies over police violence and abuse of power that plagued him in the past.
But to quote Bob Beckel, even a "martian" can see that the campaign image of Giuliani as a hero standing on the smoldering rubble of the World Trade Center is a calculated political strategy designed to mask the mayor's actual past--a past which puts him at the center of a cloud of violence and one of the most troubling and deadly chapters in the history of America's urban centers.
For those unfamiliar with the police shooting of Patrick Dorismond, you can read about it here. And read about the mayor's response to the shooting of the unarmed Amadou Diallo here, in a surprising paper published by, yes, the Cato Institute.
It's inescapable that the underlying theme of the Giuliani years prior to the 9/11 attacks was a racial tension between minority communities and the law enforcement community that Giuliani championed that was not only constantly at a low, rolling boil, but that spilled over all too often, as in the Dorismond, Diallo, and Louima cases. And for all that people like me speculate on the likelihood of the Bush Administration declaring martial law and cancelling elections, the one Republican who has actually requested a term extension is Rudy Giuliani.
It's easy to look at Giuliani on 9/11/01 and be grateful that when the president was so completely unable to cope, SOMEONE stepped up to the plate. But Giuliani must be looked in the larger context of his time as mayor, and the more you examine his autocratic leadership style, the less appealing a choice he becomes.
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