Relatives of firefighters killed at the World Trade Center in 2001 have attacked Rudy Giuliani, mayor of New York on 9/11, in a video apparently aimed at damaging his hopes of running for President.
The recording includes footage of the twin towers falling, alongside claims that Mr Giuliani’s poor decisions and lack of preparedness for a terror atrocity caused needless firefighter deaths.
A total of 343 firefighters were killed in the terrorist attacks, many of them trapped inside the towers when they collapsed.
The anti-Giuliani campaign alleges that the mayor failed to provide working radios for firefighters, making it impossible for them to learn that the towers were on the verge of collapse.
They also claim that Mr Giuliani located an emergency centre in a building that collapsed on September 11 and that he pushed for a faster clean-up of ground zero at the expense of finding remains.
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The video, published yesterday, was backed by the families of some of the dead and by the International Association of Fire Fighters union, which opposes Mr Giuliani’s candidacy.
“Virtually the whole thing goes back to him with the radios,” says Jim Riches, a deputy fire chief whose son was killed on September 11, in the video. “He’s the guy on the top, and he’s the guy you yell at. He takes the hit. And my son is dead because of it.”
Mr Giuliani’s campaign for the Republican nomination denounced the images as a “mockumentary”, saying that the former mayor had a long history of supporting firefighters’ health and safety.
Michael McKeon, his campaign spokesman, said that the union releasing the video only supported Democratic presidential candidates.
In an extra sideswipe, he said that the union leadership “makes Michael Moore look like Edward R Murrow”. (Ed Murrow was a journalist noted for honesty and integrity.)
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Lee Ielpi, a former New York firefighter whose son also died on September 11, appeared at a news conference with McKeon, calling the video a “disgrace” and saying it is full of “half-truths”.
“I was there. I saw it. I experienced it,” said Mr Ielpi, who worked at ground zero for the nine-month cleanup. “I’m not going to let lies like this go.”
Mr Ielpi tried to refute the claims made in the tape that workers searching for remains were pulled back from the rubble, arguing that Mr Giuliani allowed some workers to return.
Richard Sheirer, the former Office of Emergency Management Commissioner, told the same news conference that it wasn’t the radios that didn’t work, but rather a high-rise signal transmission system that didn’t work in one of the towers. He said that the transmission system worked “perfectly” in the other tower, until it crashed to the ground.
Later, Harold Schaitberger, the general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, warned that Mr Giuliani was opposed by firefighters on both sides of the political divide.
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“Giuliani’s biggest problem is that this video is a bipartisan condemnation of his record on 9/11,” said Mr Schaitberger.
The 13-minute video was being distributed to the union’s 280,000 members, to the media and online. It includes statements from leaders of the city’s two largest firefighter unions, who say that Mr Giuliani became rich and famous on his image as a post-September 11 hero while ignoring firefighters’ needs.
“This image of Rudy Giuliani as America’s mayor, it’s a myth,” said Steve Cassidy, president of the Uniformed Firefighters Association, which represents about 9,000 firefighters.
Mr Cassidy said that his union supported George Bush in the last election and had supported George Pataki for governor of New York.
“It’s not about Republicans, it’s about this Republican,” he said.
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Peter Gorman, president of the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, says in the video that Giuliani’s image is more important to him than the needs of firefighters.
“He’s making millions, tens of millions of dollars on the backs of my members, as far as I’m concerned,” he says.
The video has echoes of the smear campaign launched by the Vietnam Swift Boat Veterans to discredit John Kerry, the Democrat candidate and a decorated Vietnam veteran, during the last US Presidential election.