9/11 could pose challenges for Giuliani's '08 run

[Poiuyt]

• "America's mayor" shouldn't run on his 9/11 record, says victim's mom
• Giuliani criticized for locating city emergency center at World Trade Center
• Also allegedly failed to provide 9/11 responders with adequate radios
• Critics angered by his decision to step up removal of Ground Zero rubble

"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."

=============

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 September 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 51/2 years later, body parts are still turning up in the trade center site.

more -

http://www.cnn.com/2007/POLITICS/03/30/giuliani.911.ap/index.html

[HockeyMom]

1. Emergency Center

I do remember thinking at the time that it was a bad move to locate the Emergency Center in the Trade Center. Remember, this was after the 1993 bombing. There were companies, and people, who refused to go back there after 1993. My niece worked for a company there in '93 and it so unnerved her that she quit her job there (on the 4th floor no less) and went to work uptown.

Obviously, Rudy was trying to allay fears with this move. Perhaps there were financial perks involved with it also, which wouldn't surprise me at all.

[Poiuyt]

2. Giuliani polls could fall with recent revelations about associate Kerik, remarks about wife

Former New York City Mayor Rudolf Giuliani is leading the Republican pack in some Election '08 polls. But the same polls seem to suggest that Giuliani is starting to lose some of his momentum.

The drop may continue as allegations rise that his longtime associate Bernard Kerik, onetime nominee to head Homeland Security, has ties to organized crime, as Newsweek's Jonathan Alter comments on in the video below.

NBC's Tim Russert also suspects that people have begun to look deeper into the former mayor's own past. "There are some bumps ahead for all of the candidates, including Rudy Giuliani," Russert says.

One particular issue that Giuliani is trying to clarify is the role of his wife in his campaign and how she might participate in a Giuliani administration. In an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, Giuliani freely admits that his current wife, Judith, may participate in policy decisions and cabinet meetings "if she wanted to."

more -

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/Giuliani_wife_can_make_policy_attend_0330.html

[Gabi Hayes]

3. this is an AP story linked here the other day....very bad reporting on a couple of key points.

they IGNORE Giuliani's insistence at the time that the air around Ground Zero was not unhealthy, which everybody knows to be a huge lie

the Firefighters in South Carolina are a FRONT established by some guy who's a CAMPAIGN WORKER for Giuliani! nice reporting, AP.

http://www.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/mar/09/firefighters_for_rudy


.........



worst of all, in their rush to praise Giuliani, and how he was lionized by 911 commissioners, they ignore this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/911_Commission#Claims_of_gentle_treatment_of_Rudy_Giuliani

Commissioners Thomas Kean, a Republican, and Lee Hamilton, a Democrat, disclosed in their 2006 book Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission (ISBN 0-307-26377-0) that the Commission did not pursue a tough enough line of questioning with former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani because its members feared public anger if they challenged him.

"It proved difficult, if not impossible, to raise hard questions about 9/11 in New York without it being perceived as criticism of the individual police and firefighters or of Mayor Giuliani. We did not ask tough questions, nor did we get all of the information we needed to put on the public record," they wrote. As the New York Times reported, "The commission’s gentle questioning of Mr. Giuliani during his May 19, 2004, testimony at the New School University in Greenwich Village was "a low point" in its handling of witnesses at its public hearings, they wrote."<21>

The authors assert that the commission had failed to ask Giuliani more probing questions partly because of criticism of a comment by fellow commissioner John F. Lehman. At the hearing on 18 May, the day before Giuliani's testimony, Lehman stated that New York’s disaster-response plans were "not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city." The following morning, the cover of The New York Post displayed a photograph of a firefighter kneeling at the World Trade Center site, captioned with the single word "Insult" above.

this is what we have to expect from the media, WRT Giuliani. even as they report some negative information about him, they DEFEND him with inaccurate, misleading, and incomplete information.