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Foes May Use 9/11 Against Giuliani
Rudolph Giuliani is banking on his image as "America’s mayor” following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to help propel him to the Republican presidential nomination in 2008. But some foes are hoping to turn his 9/11-related performance against him. Those opponents include officials from a national firefighters union and some relatives of the 9/11 victims, who vow to publicly attack decisions Giuliani made before and after the terrorist strikes, the Los Angeles Times reports. One complaint is that Giuliani failed to modernize communications systems that proved unable to relay an evacuation order to some firefighters in the World Trade Center — an order that could have spared lives.
Story Continues Below Critics also point to Giuliani’s decision to locate the city’s main emergency command center in the Trade Center complex even though the towers had been targeted in a 1993 bombing. On 9/11, the 23rd-floor office was destroyed in the attacks. The International Association of Fire Fighters, the nation’s largest firefighter union, will aim its anti-Giuliani message at its own 280,000 members, according to union President Harold Schaitberger. But he added that the union will also "stand ready” to support a public campaign by families who lost loved ones in the World Trade Center attacks, according to the Times. On another front, lawyers want to question Giuliani under oath as part of a federal lawsuit charging that the city negligently dumped the remains of victims from the Trade Center ruins in the Fresh Kills garbage facility on Staten Island. And Sen. Hillary Clinton is considering calling on Giuliani to testify before a Senate subcommittee she heads, which is probing whether the government failed to protect recovery workers from the effects of polluted air after the Trade Center’s destruction. Giuliani aides say the firefighters union is driven by political considerations. The union was an early supporter of Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential race. "The union is not the firefighters,” Giuliani strategist Anthony Carbonetti told the Times. "I don’t think they’ll have much success. The more we keep talking about Rudy’s record, the more people will see how much he did to support all the uniformed services in the city.” Two polls in late March showed that Giuliani was maintaining a significant lead over his GOP rivals in the race for the Republican nomination. © NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved. Editor's note:
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