Giuliani Feeling The Heat Over 9/11 Radios

By now, it is fairly well known that on 9/11 the New York City Fire Department's radios simply did not work. In fact, it was the same exact equipment that had malfunctioned in the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center. Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films have the most definitive summary of this.

The fact that no radio upgrade was made in the eight-year interim is something of an albatross for Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign, considering he was mayor of the New York during that very time period.

And on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos the topic came up yet again. Only this time, Giuliani absolved himself by claiming it would have been "impossible" to give the FDNY working radios.

STEPHANOPOULOS: They make two main charges. Number one, that those firefighters in the north tower, many of them lost their lives because their radios didn't work. They also say you ended the recovery efforts too soon.

GIULIANI: Well, the radios that you're talking about weren't put online for three, four, five years after. So, it would have been impossible for me to have those radios ready. It took the city two or three more years...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But they had malfunctioned in 1993.

GIULIANI: But even with the new equipment, it took another two or three years for those radios to be put online. So it would have been impossible for us to have gotten them online before that, given the fact that it took so long afterwards.

Ok. So, Giuliani seems to be saying that after the city purchased the new equipment, it took at least three years for it to be operational. Hence, the FDNY could never have gotten the new radios in time anyways and Giuliani deserves no blame.

Of course, there were eight years between the two attacks on the Twin Towers. Whatever.

But according to Wayne Barrett's book "Grand Illusion", the real problem was not that there wasn't enough time to make the radios operational. Pre-bidding conferences were being held in 1997 after all. Rather, the problem was that the city was blindly dependent on Motorola to outfit the FDNY with the most modern version, even if it took longer (which it did) and the equipment was untested (which it was). As Barrett, a Giuliani critic, writes:

Under Giuliani's watch, the Fire Department had tried to equip its firefighters with portable radios from Motorola that didn't actually exist when the FDNY took the first steps to order them. The radios were so 'undeveloped' according to a subsequent investigation, that the company didn't even put them on its sales list until months after the order was placed in 1999. When the biggest potential fire department customer in America asked for samples, Motorola couldn't send them even a preproduction model for three months. It took three years for Motorola and the department to actually put the first of the 3,818 new radios in a firefighter's hands. Then they boomeranged instantly, failing to communicate a half dozen 'maydays' from a trapped firefighter.

Unlike the handie-talkies the Fire Department had used since the 1960s, these new digital radios, the XTS 3500R, were actually computers that turned the familiar real-life voices of firefighters into urgency-deaf monotones that had a prerecorded and often indecipherable quality to them. No large fire department in this country or anywhere else had or would ever purchase them. The contract for them appeared so wired that only one other company, General Electric/Ericson, showed up at the 1997 pre-bid conference, and FDNY officials decided it was ineligible to participate.

GE/Ericsson's protest letter to city officials, including Giuliani himself, went unanswered. Warren Stogner, the salesman for Ericsson, charged in the letter that "only Motorola can meet the specifications" because language in the bid specified their product and required radio features proprietary to the company. No one heard him then, but years later, Alan Hevesi, the independently elected city comptroller, examined the process and concluded that there was "a willful attempt to circumvent the contract system," withholding over $8 million still due to Motorola. Tom Von Essen, the commissioner who issued the XTS 3500s, was forced by the unheard 'maydays' to pull them out of the firehouses and conceded that there were 'problems' with them that had to be corrected. Yet Giuliani attacked the motives of the Democratic comptroller as 'political,' defended his friend and commissioner, called the radios 'state of the art,' and insisted there was nothing irregular about the contract.

Comments

[imsosure]

He ought to be feeling heat about this.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1656880303867390173

[Webheadstl]

Great comments everybody.­.. better than the Sam Stein piece.

[helonias]

Rudy could easily equip NYC firemen and policemen with modern state of the art radios with a fraction of the vast fortune he made from 9/11.

But he's too greedy and stupid.

[TheHandyman]

Let me see if I can figure this out. Before me stands a man who clams to be a great organizer. He claims that in a disaster he is the one who can get things rolling. He also claime to be tough on terrorism and wants my vote to elect him President so he can bring all these fine skills to bare to restore my country to greatness again.

When he is asked about why the Command Center was in the WTC he says that other people were responsible for that. When people prove that he spent more time at Yankee baseball games then he did at ground zero he claims people are trying to make him look bad. When people ask him about his relationship with Keriak and why he appointed him to head the police he says he had absolutely no idea about any of Keriak's problems. When asked about the relationship between him and the owner of the WTC and the million dollars the owner gave to his campaign after the contract was signed placing the command center in the WTC he says it is mere coincidence. When asked why the radios didn't work he tells everyone it wasn't his fault there was nothing he could do about it.

Hmm, he says he can, but then says he can't and shouldn't be blamed. Hmmm,give him my vote for President or see him for either a liar, incompetent, or both? Hmm, seems pretty obvious, but I voted for Bush twice and that worked out really great so of course I'll vote for him. The nightly news will be full of sexual escapades of the new Prez and that's what I need to distract me for my ever failing life!

Sorry to be so cynical!

[vippy]

The 1993 attack was done by a lone terrorist who could not get any funding for this ordeal.
To connect the 9/11 incident with the first one
is ludicrous but of course, we have to believe it that way because otherwise we would wisen up and see that it was our own people who did it.

[BigBagel]

I was a member of the NYPD on 9/11. We used digital Motorola radios issued sometime in the early 90's. I can't remember the exact year. I noticed firemen still carried the Motorola radios we carried when I joined the department in the early 80's. I have no idea what Rudy's role in the whole thing was if any at all. I never understood why Emergency Management was located at the WTC. It should have been located in one of the outer boroughs in a nondescript warehouse area. I said this before 9/11 and I'm no rocket scientist. I also never understood why the police and fire commissioners were reduced to being Rudy's bodyguards on 9/11. It was idiotic. They had other duties. The fire commissioner had no previous fire department management experience and the police commissioner of America's largest department was a high school drop out with zero police management experience. I personally knew numerous police executives inside the department with advanced degrees and years of police management experience who were passed over for Rudy's buddy. Thank God his campaign is imploding.

[Monrocsol]

St Rudy NineEleven he is not.

This man is not a man. This man is the last man we need, specially after George Bush.

[Richterscale]

One of the most corrupt, megalomaniacs to ever run for office. This crook is Hitler on steroids. The only good thing to come from his campaign is people are seeing him for what he really is, and the opportunistic scum that backed him are being dragged under with him.

[SpindrainDotCom]

Let's hope he catches completely on fire... and turns to ash... then blows away---off in the wind.
Nothing but a faint memory.

[endofworld]

He should be under heat for telling Peter Jennings that he he was told the towers were going to collapse. Six years and still no answers. He has his security apprehend & arrest people who even ask questions. RON PAUL 2008!

[StillAmused]

Great fun, watching the GOP's dashboard Jeebus figurines melt down, one by one.

Such a sequence of presumed party saviors, and they all go down the slide. Wonder if any Repuke dullards are starting to get the messsage?

Gonna be pretty ridiculous at the RNC convention, delegates fighting and scrapping over which security guard or vendor should get the nomination­...

[IkeChicago]

Most of us plan on cooking our goose on Christmas day, apparently Rudy was a little early and cooked his goose weeks ago.

[Maxbyte]

What a mess. A tragedy on top of a tragedy, and Rudy blew it off... along with a lot of lives.

[oldvet]

If Rudy had gotten new radios for first responders, which would have been difficult in that he only had 8 years to do so, it would not have mattered. He would have placed their base station in the world trade center so they would have been out of commission when needed.

He makes me ashamed to be Italian.

[Janco54]

The radios are just a piece of the ultimate unfit for duty Guliani pie.
This narcissistic megalomaniac has gotten a pass from the MSM thanks to FAUX and it's time for that pass to end.