While Fox News and its BFF Rudy Giuliani blame the deaths of two New York City police officers on Mayor Bill de Blasio, President Obama and black leaders for supposedly creating a climate of police hatred, they conveniently forget how firefighters blamed Rudy Giuliani for directly causing the deaths of 121 firefighters on 9/11. With good reason.
From a 2007 article from The Village Voice, called, “Rudy Giuliani’s Five Big Lies About 9/11”:
Instead of being the best-prepared city, New York’s lack of unified command, as well as the breakdown of communications between the police and fire departments, fell far short of the efforts at the Pentagon that day, as later established by the 9/11 Commission and NIST reports. When the 280,000-member International Association of Fire Fighters recently released a powerful video assailing Giuliani for sticking firefighters with the same radios that “we knew didn’t work” in the 1993 attack (on the World Trade Center), the presidential campaign attacked the union. “This is an organization that supported John Kerry for president in 2004,” Giuliani aide Tony Carbonetti said. “So it’s no shock that they’re out there going after a credible Republican.” While the IAFF did endorse Kerry, the Uniformed Firefighters of Greater New York, whose president starred in the video, endorsed Bush. Its former president, Tom Von Essen—currently a member of Giuliani Partners—was the fire commissioner on 9/11 precisely because the union had played such a pivotal role in initially electing Giuliani.
The IAFF video reports that 121 firefighters in the north tower didn’t get out because they didn’t hear evacuation orders, rejecting Giuliani’s claim before the 9/11 Commission that the firefighters heard the orders and heroically decided to “stand their ground” and rescue civilians. Having abandoned that 2004 contention, the Giuliani campaign is now trying to blame the deadly communications lapse on the repeaters, which were installed to boost radio signals in the towers. But the commission concluded that the “technical failure of FDNY radios” was “a contributing factor,” though “not the primary cause,” of the “many firefighter fatalities in the North Tower.” The commission compared “the strength” of the NYPD and FDNY radios and said that the weaknesses of the FDNY radios “worked against successful communication.”
…in the end, firefighters had to rely exclusively on their radios, and the inability of the Giuliani administration to find a replacement for the radios that malfunctioned in 1993 left them unable to talk to each other, even about getting out of a tower on the verge of collapse.
The mayor had also done nothing to make the radios interoperable—which would have enabled the police and firefighters to communicate across departmental lines—despite having received a 1995 federal waiver granting the city the additional radio frequencies to make that possible. That meant the fire chiefs had no idea that police helicopters had anticipated the partial collapse of both towers long before they fell.
The firefighters union also criticized Giuliani for abandoning them after 9/11.
Yet Fox holds up Giuliani as some kind of stand-up guy and as an icon of personal responsibility – despite his ducking it with the firefighters. And while Fox welcomes unproven theories that blame Democrats for the NYPD officers’ deaths, it ignores the far more damning evidence against Giuliani.
Watch the devastating video about Giuliani, the firefighters and the radios below, from our friends at Brave New Films.
