Real 9/11 Heroes Speak Out Against Rudy (The American Prospect)

[marmar]

Real 9/11 Heroes Speak Out Against Rudy

New York City firefighters are out to set the record straight on Rudy Giuliani's 9/11 legacy.

Ari Paul | July 10, 2007


It's been nearly six years since the 9/11 attacks and six months since former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has decided to grace the race for the Republican presidential nomination with his presence. Now unions representing New York's Bravest are popping a tough question.
What on Earth did this man do on 9/11 and in its aftermath that was so breathtakingly heroic?

More accurately, they are campaigning to expose how Giuliani short-changed and endangered the city's 11,000 firefighters over the course of two terms, and then went on to exploit their heroism during and after the 9/11 attacks for his own political advantage.

Martin Steadman, a spokesperson for New York's Uniformed Fire Officers Association (UFOA), explains that the New York City Fire Department issued a report on communication devices after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing showed that the department's hand-held radio devices were wholly inadequate.

The report, which landed on Mayor Giuliani's desk his first day in office, explained that department radios didn't work between floors in high-rises or in deep subway tunnels.

The city eventually bought several thousand new Motorolas in 1999, according to the New York Times. Chaos soon ensued, says Steadman, after firefighters complained that there were strong echoes and voice delays on the new radios. But as the 9/11 Commission report shows, when the FDNY responded to the 9/11 attacks, it was using the analog radios that "performed poorly" during the 1993 bombings.

As a result, more than 200 firefighters in the north tower did not receive an evacuation call on their radios. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=real_911_heroes_speak_out_against_rudy

[pocoloco]

1. The Firefighters are still POed big time at Rudy for calling off the

search for their missing Bros!!

[speedoo]

2. Rudy's failure to address the radios issue AFTER the first WTC attack...

resulted DIRECTLY in the loss of firefighter's lives on 9/11.

That alone should doom him politically, or worse. Just a matter of getting the word out.