Giuliani's Deadly Impact?

by Kristen Breitweiser

Can someone please explain to me why Rudy Giuliani gets to give a victim's impact statement at the Moussaoui penalty phase hearing? Which family member did Guiliani lose in the attacks?

Forgive me, but Giuliani is the person responsible for deciding to locate NYC's emergency command center in the World Trade Center along with a diesal fuel tank (against the advice of certain FDNY officials) before 9/11.

Locating the city's emergency command center in a known al Qaeda target (the towers were struck in 1993 and al Qaeda publicly promised to return to finish the job) was a colossal failure in judgment on his part that cost hundreds of lives on 9/11.

During the attacks, because the command center was rendered inoperable, NYC had no clear chain of command and no physical command structure in place to coordinate the emergency response. Frankly, the whole reason Giuliani was on television all day and available for interviews was because he was scrambling around the streets trying to set up a command post since the one he had designed and located was paralyzed during the attacks.

Anyone who wants to witness the results of NYC's abysmal emergency response to the attacks need only listen to the recently released 911 tapes that chillingly reveal a total lack of coordination and flow of vital life-saving information plaguing the city and its emergency response apparatus that day. (By the way, Mayor Bloomberg has yet to fix the 911 system--even five years later.)

Furthermore, Giuliani is also responsible for giving the FDNY inoperable Motorola radios. This, too, cost hundreds of lives when firemen did not hear the order to evacuate the towers prior to their collapse. (By the way, those radios are still not fixed--blame this on Bloomberg, too.)

How is a man who is responsible for such horrific and deadly judgments invited to give a victim's impact statement as to how 9/11 impacted him?

By these standards, should I expect Condoleezza Rice (Ms. "Nobody knew planes could be used as missiles"), George Tenet (Mr. "I failed to tell the FBI for 18 months that two known al Qaeda killers were living in San Diego and planning the 9/11 attacks"), and perhaps, George Bush (Mr. "I was reading a story about a pet goat while thousands of people perished and burned alive in the World Trade Center because I didn't want to alarm the school children.") to provide victim's impact statements, as well?