It’s that time again — Giuliani Time! Maybe you should watch the documentary with that same name before giving credit to someone who deserves to be held accountable for his mismanagement of being prepared for 9/11. As Mayor of New York City (forget about him being Mayor of America, as he could not handle the job he had back then), Giuliani made a name for himself attending the funerals of many of those same people he sent to their deaths. No one has ever held this false hero responsible for the blunders that happened on that tragic day.
I worked for the U S Postal Service for 23 years and one of my responsibilities was writing the Contingency Plan for the Brooklyn, NY Post Office, in cases of various kinds of emergencies. If I had been responsible for writing a similar document for the World Trade Center buildings should there have been a fire, I would have had to take into account how those on the highest floors would be safe in such a plan. As the writer of such a plan, if I failed to provide a scenario to get them out under an attack, I would have been fired behind the scenes, but the person who signed off on the plan — the person who should have stepped up and stated “the buck stops here” would have been the Mayor of New York City.
It’s not like Mayor Giuliani had no idea that the World Trade Center would be a target. On February 28, 1993, there was an attack on the World Trade Center that left over 1,000 people injured and six people dead. Back then the Contingency Plan should have been written with such a scenario placed into it — how to save those people on the upper floors from perishing in an attack where there was a fire. If such a document did exist on September 11, 2001, and it included as a plan for those people on the upper floors’ safety to send firemen with “100 pounds of gear” on them (according to the NY Times) that it would have taken four hours to reach their destination, the person who signed off on that plan — Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani — should have been held accountable for its failure to not only save the lives of those on the upper floors, but also for costing the lives of so many heroic firefighters for such a reckless plan.
If there was no such Contingency Plan, that same person is responsible for the lives lost due to criminal negligence as Mayor of New York City for not having such a plan to save the lives on the upper floors without jeopardizing the lives of so many rescuers with such a senseless mission (carrying 100 pounds of equipment which made their task even more impossible). According to the NY Times, “Firefighters wondered aloud how they could have attacked a fire reached at the end of a four-hour climb.” None of this questioning of a Contingency Plan relates to the choice of where the Mayor with whom the buck stops apparently decided to or agreed to place the city’s Office of Emergency Management — in the shadow of the buildings that were known to be the targets of terrorists since 1993 or possibly even earlier.
Based on reporting from FireEngineering.com one year after the tragedy, “Early on, the city's Office of Emergency Management, housed in 7 World Trade Center (which collapsed later in the day), was evacuated, crippling the city's interagency system. There was no backup location for OEM. Although OEM representatives at the North Tower lobby command post were in direct contact with FDNY commanders, OEM could not relay critical information from other agencies. That information included reports from police helicopters predicting the imminent collapse of the South Tower 10 minutes before it occurred and the imminent collapse of the North Tower 21 minutes before it occurred. Police heard the transmission; the fire department did not. There were no police representatives at the FDNY command post.” Evidently, there was no Contingency Plan to allow police and firefighter chiefs to share information via a mutually inclusive communication system. Who should have thought of that? Ask your Mayor, New York City.
Once again, the NY Times reported, “In blunt speech, free of the mythic glaze that varnished much 9/11 discourse, some firefighters wondered why an endless line of rescuers had been sent to an unquenchable fire that raged 1,000 feet up.” Then there are these observations, “I think if this building (the North Tower) had collapsed an hour later, we would have had a thousand firemen in there," said Firefighter Timothy Marmion of Engine 16, and “If it would have collapsed three hours later," he said, "we would have had 10,000 firemen in those buildings.” That opinion is based on the plan that those in charge were given that day as events unfolded.
The plan implemented by the Mayor, whose responsibility it was to have such a plan prepared, in a best case scenario was, in an observation by the NY Times, “Had the buildings not fallen, the gear-laden firefighters would have needed about four hours -- almost as long as it takes to fly across the country -- to reach workers trapped on the high floors.” Then there is this report from the website FireEngineering.com, “About 45 minutes into the operation, several firefighters on the 20th floor (of the North Tower), carrying standpipe packs up the stairs, reported chest pains.”
The bottom line goes straight to the top. Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who basked in the glory of taking credit for organizing such a state of affairs is now back again. It’s Giuliani Time! It’s Time Mayor Giuliani was called to task for his failure to have planned for such a disaster after the 1993 World Trade Center attack, which happened on his watch. Where was his Contingency Plan for such a repeat attack? Why was he never held accountable for his failure to lead? How does this man qualify to be involved in the Mueller Investigation?