Giuliani pressed, dissembles on faulty 9/11 radios

In October, Brave New Films released a devastating six-minute clip about one of Rudy Giuliani’s most serious 9/11 failures: his decision to ignore (and lie about) concerns over the FDNY’s radio equipment, which ultimately cost so many lives on 9/11. (The issue is now under investigation by city officials.)

The video explains that Giuliani was told the firefighters didn’t have a functioning communications system after the original WTC attack in 1993, but for seven years, Giuliani ignored the problem. When he eventually ordered new radios, he gave Motorola a lucrative no-bid contract, and the company ended up providing untested radios that didn’t work.

On 9/11, when the order went out to the FDNY to evacuate, the firefighters never heard the order, which is why so many perished. (The NYPD, which had working radios, heard the order, vacated Ground Zero, and lost far fewer people when the towers fell.) Giuliani later said he believes the firefighters ignored the evacuation order on purpose — a claim that disgusts the department and the families of those who died.

Giuliani hasn’t been pressed on any of this by political reporters, so it was a pleasant surprise to see George Stephanopoulos broach the subject this morning. According to a transcript from ABC News:

GIULIANI: I did everything I — I did everything I could think of doing in that situation to help. I think I made mostly the right decisions. Probably didn’t make all the right decisions, but I tried very hard to alleviate the problem as much as I could, and to lift the spirits of the city. And in most cases, I think I made the right decisions. In some cases I may not. […] 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…. 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.

“Impossible”? Hardly.



TP, which has a video clip of the interview, highlighted just how wrong this is.

As Stephanopoulos pointed out, the firefighters on 9/11 were forced to use old equipment that had malfunctioned eight years earlier, during the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center. But it wasn’t “impossible” to get new radios to these firefighters, as Giuliani tried to claim. After the 1993 incident, Giuliani gave Motorola a $14-million no-bid contract. Despite this exorbitant sum, the radios were faulty and had to be taken out of service in March 2001, after a “distress call from a firefighter trapped in a burning house” went unheard. A New York City Council report on the fire department’s radio procurement process concluded: “Thus, despite its acknowledgment two years earlier that several manufacturers were developing technology that might meet FDNY’s CAI specifications, and in apparent disregard of its pledge to evaluate new technologies and products, the FDNY appears to have elected to accept a radio representing an entirely new communications technology from Motorola rather than conduct a competitive review of products and prices.”

I still don’t know why this controversy hasn’t caught on — to be fair, there have been other Giuliani scandals for the media to consider — so kudos to Stephanopoulos for at least asking the question.

As for Giuliani’s response, the fact that he still hasn’t come up with a coherent answer helps highlight just how problematic this is for his campaign.