I had no medical difficulties whatsoever.
I was tiptop shape.
I ran, I swam, and I did the bike.
I was very fit.
I was an athlete.
I really liked it there.
I took great pride in the fact that at 41 I could hit the ball to the second baseman
and still beat the ball to first.
I mean, that's how fast I was.
You are looking at somebody who, in his younger years, ran the mile on the track team in 5
minutes and 30 seconds.
I was a gymnast.
I played football.
Listen to me now.
The other [Inaudible] says, I'm huffing and puffing.
I can't get my -- can't get my breath.
I can't get enough oxygen.
My sinus tissue is totally destroyed.
Headaches.
Stomach aches.
Joint pain.
We were coughing.
This symptom that became wide-known in the medical profession as the World Trade Center
cough.
I mean, when you have thousands and thousands of people suffering from the same symptom,
that should give you a clue.
We took the time to go down to Ground Zero, not to benefit ourselves, but to benefit our
city and this nation.
Yeah, I went down there to help in any capacity as just a concerned citizen.
You're under the impression that we've got to take care of our country.
We're the kind of people that rush into an emergency while others flee.
This is not a mayor or a governor or a president who is sitting in an ivory tower.
I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more than most of the workers.
I was exposed to exactly the same things they were exposed to.
So, in that sense, I'm one of them.
I could tell you the only times we saw him down there pretty much was for conferences,
parading another prince or a sheik or Oprah or someone down there.
And it really wasn't to help us.
I don't remember anybody eating for a long, long time -- maybe the entire day.
But I remember most of us wanting something to drink to clear our throats.
There were millions of microscopic shards of glass.
There was asbestos.
There was dioxin.
There were polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
The first couple of days when there was still unburned jet fuel at the site, there were
organic solvents, most notably benzene.
Concentrations were very high and the mixture of chemicals is a mix that has never previously
been encountered.
I've lost a great deal of my breathing capacity.
I suffer from restrictive airway disease.
I have problems with my voice box.
Went and saw a private lung doctor and he says you have asthma.
Asthma?
What in the hell are you talking about?
I never had asthma in my life.
Still, today, I cannot get any sleep unless I am medicated.
Now you're at home.
You're sick.
You're probably depressed because you're sick or of things that you are re-experiencing.
And now you have no money.
And you have kids and a spouse and a car payment, maybe college bills, food, utilities, and
no one seems to care.
We're being victimized by 9-11 twice.
All these elected officials said that, you know, we're not going to forget.
We're going to do what's right.
And that's what they said right after 9-11.
And now, six years later, you can hear crickets.
And one of the main persons I am very disappointed in is Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
We haven't seen Mayor Giuliani help anybody.
When I see Rudy Giuliani, I -- if I see it on TV, I just turn the TV off because the
hypocrisy of running the campaign on a 9-11 agenda and you're having people still dying
and still becoming much sicker than they were a year or two years prior is really insulting.
HE would have every right to run on that platform if he was helping us, if he was walking around
with us, if he was coming to our meetings, if he was coming to our organizations, coming
to our unions, coming to the city and saying give these people their benefits.
Give them their comp.
Give them their medication.
Give them their treatment.
But that's not happening.
I haven't heard a word out of you, sir, as far as what you're going to do for the 9-11
responders.
After he left office, I mean, you may have to turn in your key to the city, but I don't
believe turning in your moral compass and your responsibility to the people who trust
you -- that shouldn't fall by the wayside.
We've been abandoned.
I want to know.
You tell me.
Sit down.
Meet with me.
Meet with some of the responders.
And you tell us, what are your plans for what you're going to do for the 9-11 responders?
Mayor, what's the situation right now?
The situation is that two airplanes have attacked, apparently -- [Sirens ]
He had made this colossal mistake of locating the command center in the only complex that
had all ready been attacked by Islamic fundamentalists and that they vowed to return to.
The command center was built, but it was built in the wrong place -- within the World Trade
Center complex -- the very place that had been attacked in 1993.
Why was he running that day -- running around?
Because he didn't have a command post because he put it in the wrong place.
He had, you know, put his bunker right in the most dangerous part in the city for terrorists.
It was located there, solely and completely, because of Rudy Giuliani.
[ Music ]
You put the emergency response command center in the World Trade Center in 1997, even though
your Director of Emergency Management suggested -- recommended -- that you not put it there
because it had been a target in 1993.
Why did you do that?
My Director of Emergency Management recommended 7 World Trade Center.
I have no idea what he's talking about.
Because we had all ready had a bombing in lower Manhattan, and because I felt that lower
Manhattan would remain a target, that the best location would be out in Brooklyn.
I have got a copy right here of Jerry Hauer's directive to you, and there were meetings
in which Jerry Hauer said that it's a bad idea, and the police chief, Howard Safir,
said it was a bad idea.
Jerry Hauer recommended that
He gets caught by Chris Wallace lying.
Then why did it say -- the building -- he said it's not -- the place in Brooklyn is
not as visible a target as buildings in lower Manhattan?
He recommended that site as the site that would be the best site.
It was largely on his recommendation that that site was selected.
It's just a flat-out lie.
All the other options were taken away and we kept being pushed back towards 7 World
Trade Center.
It was very clear the mayor was not going to go anywhere else but lower Manhattan.
And we also had back-up centers at the police department in Brooklyn.
We had another back-up center, and we had a virtual command center.
He has no idea what he's talking about.
There was no virtual command center.
We did not have a virtual capability outside of 7 World Trade Center.
Again, he pulls words and ideas out of the air.
But they are simply not true.
[ Music ] The mayor told me that he would like it in lower Manhattan, within walking
distance.
It was simply a situation of that facility being within walking distance of City Hall.
He felt that it would be easier to get the press someplace near City Hall.
As a professor of fire science and related issues, emergency response and things, walking
distance should never have anything to do with where you place an emergency operations
center.
The city agreed to rent the vacant 23rd floor of World Trade Center 7 from Larry Silverstein,
the lease holder of the building, for $1.4 million a year for 20 years.
These politically wired people in the Giuliani administration came up with the World Trade
Center floor as the ideal years.
These politically wired people in the Giuliani administration came up with the World Trade
Center floor as the ideal floor for this location.
There was a lot of opposition to it.
I mean, certainly within the rank and file people involved in emergency management and
those kinds of issues and things.
I, at that point, didn't know of Rudy's relationship with the owner of that building.
To return the favor, Silverstein held a $100,000 fundraiser for Rudy on his yacht a month after
the command center opened.
If you were not with him 100% and didn't support him 100%, they would basically cut your throat.
They had cost the lives of first responders that day because the command center was located
at the World Trade Center.
There were 60 firefighters killed in the Marriott, there was 121 killed in the North Tower, and
the rest were killed in the South Tower.
What would have been different on that command center being operational?
The death toll for firefighters would have probably been cut in half.
A lot of guys wouldn't have been going into buildings or heading up the stairs.
They would have been heading out.
And probably guys in the North Tower would have gotten that message.
Making sure, for example, that if fire companies or groups of police officers are being brought
into the scene that they end up at the right locations.
You know, we know, for example, that on 9-11 a lot of companies -- it was very confusing
to them because a lot of them had never been there before, in the sense of responding to
that complex.
They didn't actually know the numbering system of the buildings and things like that.
And that's a situation where that emergency operations center can play a much, much better
role and be able to coordinate that kind of stuff.
Giuliani should have been like someplace roaring, screaming to people to get out.
Get out.
Run.
You know, run.
But, he ran himself.
He abandoned ship.
He was a coward that day.
The real heroes stayed to help people out and protect them.
Running on the street because he wasn't in the command center.
That running played out in the media as being this on-the-street tough guy.
Television played a really critical role for Mayor Giuliani on 9-11.
We certainly saw him at the disaster scene as soon as the buildings began to collapse,
moving away from that area.
When you objectively look at the before, during, and after, there is really not much you can
find that Rudy did right except for a very good television appearance.
I really don't know what he did that was so good.
I know what my brother did.
I know what the police officers did and what some other really brave civilians did, but
I certainly don't know what he did beyond looking really good on television.
[ Music ]
The
firefighters on 9-11 were carrying precisely the same radio that had malfunctioned during
the response to the '93 bombing at precisely the same location.
And this was something that they knew from 1993.
That, you know, in the Trade Center and in buildings that size, the radios just were
not adequate.
I lost my son, Jimmy, on 9-11.
From what I heard from people that survived, that they saw him up around the 30th floor
and he never made it out.
He never heard the call to get out.
That blame is totally on Rudy Giuliani.
He knew they had a problem with those radios.
Why didn't he do something about it?
Giuliani became mayor in '94.
And he knew.
He had the report right in his hands and it said that the radios did not work, the communication,
in the World Trade Center and that day was horrible in '93.
It was well documented that these radios didn't work and that the signal wasn't strong enough
to communicate.
The other principal problem with the radios is that the fire department radios couldn't
communicate with the police department radios.
This is called interoperability.
What did Mister Giuliani do from the beginning of his administration?
He had eight years.
He did nothing to correct that situation.
We got people dead as a result.
[ Music ]
After years of inaction, the Giuliani administration finally ordered new radios in 2001 -- radios
that were never field tested and obtained from Motorola in a no-bid contract.
Spring of 2001, brand new radios are introduced.
They're introduced without any pilot testing.
They just ordered these radios on their own.
They never field tested them and they never did anything.
So not only did they take forever to deal with the radio problem, they made all the
wrong decisions up the line in picking the radio that would be used.
When these new radios were put in service, they lasted one week.
Within a week, the new inadequate radios almost killed a firefighter when his mayday went
unheard that he was lost.
So it took them eight years to give us radios that had never been tested.
[ Music ]
There was a lot of skullduggery, as I call it, that went on between Motorola and the
city of New York.
The thing was that they have always bought only Motorola.
They would never buy anybody else and they would create enough obstacles so it makes
it -- there's no way you can win it.
Why was everybody else closed out of bidding on this?
Motorola has a very, overly close relationship with the communications people in the city.
Far too close than any vendor I've ever seen.
And it's not a good thing.
So, here, you have a contract that goes from 1 point something million dollars to $14 million
in a weekend.
Things just don't add up.
The new radios had to be recalled as a result of their complete failure.
Firefighters were reissued the old radios that malfunctioned in 1993.
And on 9-11, the consequences would prove to be deadly.
It's documented that the police in the helicopter saw the towers leaning and knew the towers
were ready to come down.
They're up in the sky.
They're all looking at the towers.
They are predicting the partial collapse, at least, of both towers -- 10, 15 minutes
before either tower collapsed.
They issued a vacate order for -- and who heard it was the cops.
And the police, you know, got out of the area.
That information was never relayed to us.
Not a single cop was lost in the North Tower because they had heard the message.
121 firefighters in the North Tower didn't have that option.
Exactly is going on, Kate.
We are unable to make any kind of communication.
Ten Four.
Their radios failed them and that was Giuliani failing them.
Their willingness, the way I describe it, to stand their ground and not retreat and
the fact that so many of them interpreted it that way, kept a much calmer situation
and a much better evacuation.
To say they heard the command to get out and didn't -- how dare
he!
And disobeyed their orders.
No.
It was such an unbelievable statement.
That our sons practically wanted to die.
I know for sure that our son would definitely have come out -- like, he was just so living.
He so wanted to live.
I didn't take the job to commit suicide.
The media is not digging in and trying to really find out about Motorola.
I want to know why Motorola got the contract when they could not provide the department
with an adequate radio, and why they were given such an outrageous contract.
That's what I want to know.
What was Rudy Giuliani doing for the last seven years?
You have to ask yourself, did Rudy prepare?
What job did he do?
Why is there such a deep, deep concern for not finding
the truth?
I want accountability.
[ Music ]
Where was everybody?
Where was the people we depend on?
[ Music ]
Pssst -- do something.