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We started the morning with some Giuliani-9/11 news, so here's some end-of-the-day Giuliani-9/11 musings. There's an awesome update to one of our favorite Rudy Giuliani stories - the story, or mystery, of why was the Office of Emergency Management's emergency center placed at 7 World Trade Center. Here's how it goes:
Sunday - Giuliani appears on Fox News Sunday. Host Chris Wallace asks him why the city's emergency command center was put in 7 World Trade Center:
WALLACE: Nine-eleven. No one questions your courage or your leadership in the days after 9/11, but one question has come up that I'm very curious about.Tuesday - Lloyd Grove, whose New York magazine feature about Judi Giuliani* ran on Monday, has Hauer's response to Giuliani's story: "Rudy's getting a lot of heat for the decision. He's trying to run on his homeland-security and national-security background, and if you start peeling back the skin on the errors he made when he was mayor, you take away a lot of the basis for his candidacy."You put the emergency response command center in the World Trade Center in 1997, even though your director of emergency management suggested — recommended that you not put it there because it had been a target in 1993. Why'd you do that?
GIULIANI: My director of emergency management recommended 7 World Trade Center, and that was...
WALLACE: I have got a copy right here of Jerry Hauer's directive to you. And there were meetings in which Jerry Hauer said that it's a bad idea. And the police chief, Howard Safir, said it was a bad idea.
GIULIANI: Jerry Hauer recommended that as the prime site and the site that would make the most sense, and he recommended it because...
WALLACE: Then why did he say the building — he said it's not — the place in Brooklyn is not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan.
GIULIANI: He recommended that site as the site that would be the best site. It was largely on his recommendation that that site was selected.
Now the Empire Zone follows up with more details: Joseph Lhota, deputy mayor under Giuliani, says that Hauer made the decision to place the OEM emergency ops center in 7WTC. In an interesting bit of spin, Lhota tells the EZ, "Jerry made the recommendation, and you know what? He made the right recommendation," since 7WTC was pretty new, had many federal agencies there already, was blast-proof, etc. (7 WTC collapsed at 5:20PM on September 11, 2001; by then, everyone had been evacuated.)
The OEM director after Hauer, Richard Sheirer later said that the OEM center should never have been in 7WTC. And THEN a 2004 Newsday article says that "Giuliani and Hauer were consistent in their accounts of how the command center came to be removed from 1 Police Plaza in 1996 and put in leased space at 7 WTC" - that "Hauer and other mayoral aides drove the decision, but Giuliani guided them and ultimately made the choice. "
*In the article, Hauer says Rudy's repeated refrain about trained nurse Judi coordinating post-9/11 family assistance efforts "is simply a lie."
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7 WTC wouldn't have necessarily been a bad location if you weren't making allowances for the collapse of the Twin Towers. I don't know how many people in city government in 1997 were anticipating that possibility and/or an airplane strike causing a raining down of debris before the collapse. I don't recall anyone talking about dirty bombs back then either. What if they set off a dirty bomb in lower Manhattan and the winds make it so that they evacuate a hypothetical command center in Brooklyn? Everything looks crystal clear in hindsight and no doubt when the inevitable next strike comes there will be mistakes.
I think placing an Emergency Command center anywhere where there is the least suspicion that it might be a target is foolish (Downtown Manhattan, Financial Center and so on). Placing it across the street from a past target such as the twin towers, there’s really no excuse for that. It was bad judgment, and now both of them are trying to shift the blame elsewhere or to each other.
Lloyd Grove’s response pretty much summed up Giuliani’s presidential bid right there.
Monday Morning QB seems to be conveniently forgetting the attempted bombing of the Twin Towers just 8 years prior to 9/11.
Ramzi Yusef - ring any bells?
Giuliani is a typical Republican: incompetent, a liar, and he cares only about power. That anybody considers him a viable candidate just goes to show how bereft of ideas or principles the modern right is.
No, I didn't forget about 1993. I didn't think it necessary to explicitly mention it because I thought it was implied that in 1997 nobody was thinking in terms of something as devastating as 2001. Nor did I say it was a great idea. My point was that at the time it may not seemed as dumb as it does now.
Anonymass does a consistently good job of twisting people's words whether they are other posters or people in the stories being commented on. Your sarcasm and condescension really make you look foolish and take away what little credibility you have.
7 WTC wouldn't have necessarily been a bad location
Say WHAT?!?!?!? OEM Emergency Center on the TWENTY-THIRD FLOOR of a office building?!?!?
Any qualified "homeland-security and national-security" specialist can tell you it's suppose to be a "bunker" on the ground floor, if not underground with it's own power supply, air supply and water supply. It's not suppose to be on the TWENTY-THIRD FLOOR of a freaking office building. Guiliani wanted the glitz and glamour and now it's time for him to pay!
Nearly all above is true, but the subsequent decision to place an emergency bunker across the Brooklyn Bridge could be equally criticized. One of the first things done on 9/11 was the traffic shutdown of all bridges and tunnels into Manhattan and the immediate clogging of bridges with pedestrian traffic. Local accessability from City Hall seems like a smart decision when determining an emergency bunker location.
As for putting it in the WTC when that site had already been attacked eight years prior? In hindsight, what happened in '01 was forseeable. But I do recall newscasters regarding the clear fall of the Twin Towers and not being able to recognize that they were not there. Their absence was a complete non sequitur from reality. A collapse of both buildings was, frankly, incomprehensible.
I seem to remember that the choice of this site (wtc7) for oem was over the objections of the city council and was quite controversial- so much that it was hypothesized that he put it there as a favor to silverstein the landlord.
i think that it is a sin that all of this time the press has been too lazy to search their own archives and find out the truth- imagine the discussion if chris mathews had quoted the original news reports.
Maybe the press is just more calculating- i do think that this kind of questioning is the future of this Guliani presidential bid- the press has been waiting for the right time to bring out all of the mess that ny-ers remember about this guy- remember he threw the press out of city hall.....
lisad is absolutely correct. This was a huge issue in its day (guessing... first hatched in '96?). The first WTC bombing had taken place and was ripe in everyone's memory. No one thought it was a good idea to put OEM in 7WTC, not Bill Bratton, not Ray Kelly, not the City Council, no one. But you-know-who, in his consensus-building style, rammed it through. Most people wondered why? There were some whispers that he was in with the owners/developers of the site (7WTC was never owned by the Port Authority) but the press (again, as lisad correctly states, being either lazy or cowed) never fully followed up.
There was talk of the Brooklyn Bridge site, other sites in Brooklyn, Governor's Island, but as is his wont, Guiliani is always right. Unless, you know, he's dead wrong.
Yes, I have twisted your words terribly. Poor guy. The only truth to what you wrote is that nobody foresaw the collapse of the twin towers. That much is true. However, to claim that nobody foresaw an attack in that part of the city - in those two buildings in particular - is ridiculous in light of what I wrote in my post. Something that seems to have touched a raw nerve. By your logic, the building which hosts the OEM must physically collapse in order for OEM operations to be sufficiently disrupted. I think not.
Oh, and my sarcasm and condescension are my reason for living. Thanks for the meal.
FACT: I and many others said after the 93 bombing to prepare for a JET attack to raze the towers (as the terrorists promised they'd return to do). IT was even in public hearings at the time!
NO MYSTERY.
FACT: Rudy moved the Bunker from (rent-free) 1 Police Plaza into 7 WTC for a variety of reasons.
a) b/c those 2 floors in 7wtc had been vacant for 8 years... so LARRY SILVERSTEIN, Rudy's largest CAMPAIGN CONTRIBUTOR needed help cuz he was losing millions a year. Rudy stole our money to help his crony. (Ti-Hua Chang at NBC did a great expose of all of this.)
b) Rudy wanted ALL the credit in emergencies which is WHY he took it away from the NYPD (cuz he was still fuming over Bratton getting credit).
Moving the bunker to 7WTC was never a "Mistake". It was an illegal and corrupt move by the biggest crook in US History.
FACT: Bloomberg's location for his bunker? DIRECTLY BENEATH THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE, which is one of the top 5 terror targets in NYC! And not one media source will expose this scandal either.
Ask me for more details.
It's not even open to debate that there were NO SURPRISES on 9/11, but the govern-media spin is so strong that even smart people believe their horseshit. (YEs, NO ONE could have predicted, when the terrorists promised to raze the WTC if they'd hit the WTC! Yeah right!)
EX: even reporters on the morning of 9/11 spoke on tv about the fires weakening the steel!
EX: the NYPD copters radio'd down to warn that one tower was going to fall TWENTY MINUTES BEFORE it fell!
EX: most firemen die when structures COLLAPSE due to a fire burning uncontrollably. Only if Rudy argues that the fires were NOT burning unstopped does he have an excuse. Oh but wait, no one was in charge b/c Headless Chicken Rudy's "critical" Emergency Management Center was on FIRE.
There is tons of concrete evidence that Rudy killed most of the 3,000 victims but media refuses to be "unpatriotic".
STOP repeating Rudy and Media LIES.
PLEASE?
NOTE: in the end, Rudy, Bush, and any of them cannot be blamed, b/c that's like blaming toxic waste for polluting a river. It's the fault of WHOMEVER PUT THE TOXIC WASTE THERE. 3,000 New Yorkers and 3500 US Soldiers would be alive if ONLY Media had told the truth about thousands of issues.
Bush wouldn't even have become Gov of Texas if media had simply TOLD THE TRUTH.
Don't attack the SYMPTOM of a problem (Rudy, Bush). Attack the PROBLEM (media lies) that created the symptoms.
Media is directly responsible for every problem in the world today. (EX: if they'd exposed the reports on Bush refusing to fix New Orleans' levees they could've saved the city. There are NO SURPRISES or "accidents" in this world. Only human negligence.)