Warnings to NY never reached him, says Giuliani

Warnings of a possible terrorist attack on New York contained in an August 2001 White House briefing paper never reached City Hall, but probably would not have changed local security precautions, former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani told the September 11 commission today.

Giuliani’s testimony was interrupted with angry outbursts by victims’ families, including chants of “One-sided!” and “Put us on the panel!” One man was removed from the hearing after shouting at the panel to “ask some real questions”.

The August 2001 intelligence briefing for President George Bush referred to evidence of buildings in New York possibly being cased by terrorists. It mentioned New York or the World Trade Centre three times.

“If that information had been given to us, or more warnings had been given in the summer of 2001, I can’t honestly tell you we’d do anything differently,” Giuliani testified.

“We were doing at the time everything we could think of … to protect the city.”

Giuliani said the briefings he received from federal officials indicated that New York’s bridges, tunnels and subways were more likely targets.

“I do think the interpretation would have been more in the direction of suicide bombings than aerial attacks,” Giuliani said one day after his top commissioners were grilled over their September 11 response.

Giuliani was shouted down by family members of the trade centre victims about 90 minutes into his testimony.

“My son was murdered!” yelled Sally Regenhard, who lost her firefighter son in the attack. Others in the audience shouted about the failure of Fire Department radios, shouting, “Talk about the radios!”

“You’re simply wasting time at this point,” commission head Thomas Kean told the family members.

Just as Giuliani finished testifying, an unidentified man – who said his brother was a firefighter – jumped to his feet.

“Three thousand people are dead!” he yelled before security escorted him away. “They were not killed because he’s a great leader. Let’s ask some real questions!”

The mayor, in his opening statement to the commission, said its priority should be preventing a new attack, not assigning blame.

“Our enemy is not each other, but the terrorists who attacked us,” Giuliani said.

The mayor acknowledged there were “terrible mistakes” made on September 11, but attributed that to the unprecedented circumstances.

“The blame should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone, the terrorists who killed our loved ones,” Giuliani said as family members broke into applause.

Commission member James Thompson, before questioning Giuliani, said the panel was “not engaged in a search for blame, not engaged in a search for villains.”

Instead, he said, the commission hoped to save the lives of other Americans – a comment that drew more applause.

Giuliani pointed out that the bravery and quick thinking of city rescuers under brutal conditions had saved thousands of lives.

“Maybe 8,000 more, maybe 9,000 more than anyone could rightfully expect” were brought to safety before the towers collapsed, Giuliani said.

About 25,000 people were evacuated from the World Trade Centre.

Giuliani’s appearance was punctuated by frequent heaping of praise from commission members.

He began by describing his actions and feelings on September 11. He recalled his final meetings with several victims, and described the scene when the first tower collapsed.

“It first felt like an earthquake, and then it looked like a nuclear cloud,” Giuliani said.

As he remembered watching a man leap from around the 102nd floor, family members began to cry, clearly disturbed by the account.

The former mayor and his commissioners were widely hailed for their efforts after two hijacked planes slammed into the twin towers, killing 2,749 people.

But on Tuesday, commission member John Lehman said the failure of city agencies to communicate effectively on September 11 was a scandal “not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city.”

Ex-fire commissioner Thomas Von Essen shot back that Lehman’s comments were “despicable.”

Just before Giuliani took the stand, the commission released a 10-page staff report saying that basic flaws in the city’s emergency 911 (999) phone system denied people inside the World Trade Centre potentially lifesaving information.

The 911 phone system’s operators and dispatchers were unaware that fire chiefs were evacuating the doomed twin towers because the city had no way of relaying that information, the commission staff concluded.

With the buildings’ public address systems out of service, workers inside the buildings called 911 for help but were not told to evacuate, according to the report, which was the second part of the most comprehensive probe to date of New York’s response to the attacks.

An unknown number of victims in the south tower might have had a better chance of survival if operators had instructed them not to flee upward, where some found locked roof doors and no hope of escape, the report concluded.

“In several ways, the system was not ready to cope with a major disaster,” the report said.