Comments by "" (@DavidJ222) on "Giuliani on the memory of 9/11 that sticks with him every day" video.
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NEVER FORGET, Last year during a July ceremony in the Rose Garden to formally sign a bill that will extend the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund through 2092, Trump told a group of more than 60 first responders an outrageous lie when he said "Many of those affected were firefighters, police officers, and other first responders. I was down there also, but I’m not considering myself a first responder. But I was down there—I spent a lot of time down there with you.”
Trump has told outrageous lies about helping first responders on 9/11 in the past. On the campaign trail on April 18, 2016, in Buffalo NY, he said: " Everyone who helped clear the rubble - and I was there, and I watched, and I helped a little bit."😲
There is no evidence that Trump participated in recovery efforts, there’s also no evidence he spent any time near ground zero in the week following the attack.
NEVER FORGET, that on 9/11, just hours after the towers fell, Trump bragged to local TV station WWOR, that his building 40 Wall Steet, was now the tallest building in downtown Manhattan. On a day of such unimaginable loss and tragedy, Trump seemed to be more focused on the bragging rights of now having the tallest building in Manhattan. In his diseased narcissistic mind, that day was all about him But in true Trump fashion, his boast about having the tallest building in Manhattan after the towers fell was a big lie. The nearby 70 Pine Street building is 25 ft, taller than Trump's.
Trump also lied about losing 100 friends on 9/11. To this day, he has not been able to name one friend he lost on 9/11.
Trump: "And as soon as I heard the news, I rushed down to the WTC. I didn't even use my chauffeur, I just ran. I ran so fast...as fast as I could, which is pretty fast, from the standpoint of running. You wouldn't believe how fast I ran. I ran so fast that I was the first responder there. The firemen in their big red firetrucks were right behind me. I ran so fast that I passed them on the way to the towers. I saved a lot of people that day. I saved so many lives that day, that some people said I may have saved TOO many lives. A lot of people don't know this, but it's true, it's so true."
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There’s much speculation as to how Rudy Giuliani “America’s Mayor,” the widely admired civic leader who presided over NYC during 9/11, could have been siphoned into Trump’s underworld. We got a Trump thanks to a compliant, sensationalist media apparatus that breathed life into his phony self-made billionaire myth, just as we owe them for Rudy, who they cast as a post-9/11 American hero..
By the time that the planes crashed into the Towers on Sept. 11, 2001 Giuliani was a master surfer of the wave of public opinion. In the attacks that played out in lower Manhattan, at the Pentagon, and in Shanksville, PA, close to 3,000 people were killed — 343 of them uniformed New York City firemen.
Overnight, the media turned Giuliani into a larger than life heroic figure. But the people that were most intimately familiar with the city’s pre-9/11 counter-terrorism preparations knew that it was Giuliani’s failures as Mayor which contributed directly to the horrific body count for the FDNY that day.
On Feb. 26, 1993, the World Trade Center was attacked with a 1,200-pound bomb concealed in a rental truck that exploded in the basement. The blast killed six, injured 1,000 people, and forced 50,000 to evacuate.
In a detailed after-action report published in 1994 by the FDNY, the inability of firefighters and their officers to communicate over their analog radios that day was flagged as a vital issue that needed to be addressed with urgency. In 2008 — when Giuliani was running for president — FDNY Lt. James Wood recounted his experiences during the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in an informational video produced by the International Association of Firefighters (IAFF).
While the bombing had taken place during Mayor Dinkins tenure as Mayor, Giuliani was sworn in on Jan. 2 1994. As the IAFF recalls it, the critical report about the defective fire radios gathered dust for several years.
It took until March of 2001 for new digital radios to be deployed, but they were withdrawn weeks later after they were deemed responsible for a near life-ending miscue when a firefighter isolated in a basement fire in Queens radioed a “May Day” call for assistance that none of his co-workers heard over their radios. It was only picked up by another fire company miles away. The new radios were shelved, and the old dysfunctional analogs were put back in service.
The contract for the new radios was a no bid, non-competitive contract that was, as it turned out, just an extension of an existing contract with Motorola, which has a near-monopoly on emergency communications.
According to a report issued by the NYC Comptroller the next month, Giuliani had “willfully” violated “city contracting rules…. endangering firefighters in a reckless bid to buy a new type of hand-held radio that it later had to pull from service,” The Times reported that “the new digital radios were never properly tested before being distributed to firefighters.” As City Comptroller Alan Hevesi documented, “they were purchased through what he described as an improper process that did not allow competing companies to bid for the contract.” At the time, Michael Wolf, who represented Com-Net Ericsson, a Motorola competitor, told the Times he was stymied in his efforts to even get the city to consider his company’s products.
Just six months later, FDNY’s bravest faced the doomsday scenario as they sized up the rescue operation in the Twin Towers on 9/11 that would take so many of their lives. They were equipped with the same analog radios that had failed them so badly when the WTC was bombed back in 1993. As the IAFF video documents and as the 9/11 timeline confirms, at 9:32 am. on 9/11, an FDNY Chief ordered all members in the North Tower down to the lobby. Even though he repeated the order, not a single company responded.
At 9:59 the WTC South Tower collapsed; and at 10 am the order to abandon the North Tower was repeated. Inside the North Tower were 121 firefighters who never heard that order. They perished when the North Tower collapsed at 10:28 am.
“On 9/11 firefighters went into the North Tower and started ascending the tower, yet they were being called back and they kept going,” said Richard Salem, an attorney who has been representing several of the firefighters’ families who lost loved ones when the North Tower collapsed. “Not one other uniformed officer from any other department, who had functioning radios, perished in that tower other than the FDNY.”
Despicably, Giuliani tried to cover up his own malfeasance by telling the 9/11 Commission that the North Tower firefighters had ignored the radio orders because of “their willingness, the way I describe it to stand their ground.”
Retired FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Riches, who lost his son Jimmy in the North Tower, will tell this tragic story to anyone who will listen. He and other surviving family members shadowed Giuliani during the 2008 primary and carried on a media campaign that was picked up by outlets like the Guardian..
“These radios did not work in the WTC in 1993 and they did not work in 2001." Jim Riches stated. "We got the story out there but when the media christened him ‘America’s Mayor,’ it all went away.”
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