Sign the Petition
Giuliani’s failure to provide FDNY with adequate radios must be investigated
10,433 signersWe, The Undersigned, demand an investigation into the Giuliani administration’s failure between 1994 and 2001 to equip firefighters with the radio equipment they needed to perform their duties on 9/11 with the highest likelihood of their own survival. We ask for an investigation to find answers to the following, unresolved questions:
* Why was nothing done to improve FDNY radio performance for seven years after a clear need was demonstrated in the 1993 World Trade Center attack?
* When new radios were finally ordered, why did the city block other companies besides Motorola from bidding on the contract?
* Once Motorola was given the contract, why did its cost jump from $1.4 million to $14 million?
* Why were these new radios never tested?The families of the firefighters who lost their lives on 9/11 deserve answers to these questions. We call on a full, public investigation to uncover the facts behind the Giuliani administration’s pre-9/11 emergency preparation
Jane Hamsher outlines Rudy’s huge 911 problem:
The need to lionize the firefighters as the true heroes of 9/11 left the public (and the media) with little appetite to hear how they had been betrayed by Rudi Giuliani. Falludi goes on to recount how, when Giluliani tried to claim in his appearance before the 9/11 commission that the firefighters had “stood their ground,” one of the people in the back of the room shouted “My son was murdered! Murdered because of incompetence, and the radios didn’t work.” Tom Kean tried to shut her up, saying “You are simply wasting time here.”
But Rudy’s running for President now, and his whole shtick depends on him being the true hero of 9/11. The fact is, however, that in a competition the firefighters have a much more solid hold on that place in the firmament. It’s ironic yet fitting that the power they derive from the national need to fill that void will be used to take Rudy down, but if the families are successful and the New York City Council launches an investigation of what happened with the radios, I frankly don’t see how he overcomes it. Even the true believers will have to side with the firefighters, having erected all their justifications for a five year war on the need to avenge their deaths.
If Rudy is revealed to be a greedy, incompetent, excuse-making churl in the process, he can try and follow the right wing playbook and smear the firefighters like they were some brain injured 12 year-old boy.
Good luck to him with that one.