Giuliani On 9/11 Acted As "Benevolent Dictator"

Times: Giuliani Seized Control After 9/11, Acted As A 'Benevolent Dictator'

Monday, May 14, 2007
Raw Story

A story in tomorrow's New York Times (reg. req.) is highly criticial of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's handling of the recovery operation in New York City following 9/11, claiming that his desire to downplay problems and return the city to a semblance of normality as quickly as possible has led to serious health problems for many of those who worked at ground zero.

The Times also charges that Giuliani sidelined experienced federal officials from FEMA, OSHA and the Army Corps of Engineers, placing the cleanup instead in the hands of "a largely unknown city agency" that offered "a generally slipshod, haphazard, uncoordinated, unfocused response to environmental concerns."

According to the Times, "one Army Corps official said Giuliani acted like a 'benevolent dictator.'"

Excerpts:

An examination of Giuliani's handling of the extraordinary recovery operation during his last months in office shows that he seized control and largely limited the influence of experienced federal agencies. In doing that, according to some experts and many of those who worked in the trade center's ruins, Giuliani might have allowed his sense of purpose to trump caution in the rush to prove that his city was not crippled by the attack.

Administration documents and thousands of pages of legal testimony filed in a lawsuit against New York City, along with more than two dozen interviews with people involved in the events of the last four months of Giuliani's administration, show that while the city had a safety plan for workers, it never meaningfully enforced requirements that those at the site wear respirators, even long after the last survivor was rescued.

At the same time, the administration warned companies working on the pile that they would face penalties or be fired if work slowed. Administration officials also on some occasions gave flawed public representations of the nature of the health threat, even as they privately worried about exposure to lawsuits by sickened workers.

"I would describe it as a conspiracy of purpose," said Suzanne Mattei, director of the New York office of the Sierra Club, which has been critical of how the cleanup was handled.

"It wasn't people running around saying, 'Don't do this safely.' But there was a unified attempt to do everything as fast as possible, to get everything up and running as fast as possible. Anything in the way of that just tended to be ignored."