Press Esc

From Your New Reality

Following up on our recent report about wannabe Republican president, and former New York City Mayor, Rudy Guiliani's absurd claim that he was just like all those first responders and rescue workers, who clocked up many hundreds of hours in the toxic pit of 9/11's Ground Zero, a story in the New York Times reveals just how much time Guiliani actually spent on site.

The number of visits Guiliani made to Ground Zero between September 11 and December, 2001, is one-tenth of the number of visits he's previously claimed to have made.

Considering, also, that when Guiliani did visit the smoking ruins of the World Trade Centre he spent no more than 15 to 30 minutes at a time there, only increases the suspicion that Guiliani knew exactly how toxic the air was at the site, as did clearly the staff and security detail of the luminaries and world leaders he took there for tours.

Guiliani knew he had to keep his visits to Ground Zero, and the time he was exposed to the toxic air, to an absolute minimum.

Incredibly, Guiliani, who is now trying to base an entire run at the White House on his record as a 9/11 hero, has spent more accumulative hours giving lectures and speeches about the time he spent at Ground Zero (for which he has collected millions of dollars in fees), than the total amount of hours he spent at the site itself.

Remember, Guiliani boasted last week that :

"I was at Ground Zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers. I was there working with them...I'm one of them."

Really. "...as often, if not more" than rescue and cleanup workers who logged 600, 700 or 800 hours on site, over three to four months.

That's a mighty claim. Guiliani tried to tamp down the explosion of controversy generated by such a ridiculous claim the next day, but he didn't retract his words.

So how many hours then was Guiliani at Ground Zero?

The New York Times claims that an "exhaustively detailed account" from Guiiani's own archives shows that between September 17 and December 16, 2001, 'America's Mayor' was at Ground Zero for a grand total of....29 hours.

29 hours, broken up through 41 separate visits. The 41 visits included inspections lasting as few as 13 minutes and also visits to areas near the wreckage pile for meetings before going on the site.

The majority of the visits, according to the New York Times were "to give tours to other officials and foreign dignitaries".

29 hours.

Here, again, is the quote from Guiliani that has infuriated New York City firemen, police and rescue workers, and the families of those who have already died from the deadly dust and fumes they inhaled in the process of clocking up hundreds of hours on the site :

“I was at ground zero as often, if not more, than most of the workers...I was there working with them.

But Guiliani went further than that back in September, 2006, when he first started feeling the heat about the tens of thousands of New Yorkers and rescue workers sickened by the toxic WTC dust :

“I spent as much time here as anyone...I was here five, six times a day for four months. I kind of thought of it as living here.”

According to Guiliani, he visited the WTC site close to 600 times.

Rescue workers I spoke to near Ground Zero in early October, 2001, said Guiliani was rarely seen on site, and only in the company of numerous news crews and photographers, or with world leaders like Vladimir Putin. The only time Guiliani took off his mask (to protect against the dust and fumes), a rescue worker told me, was when he was speaking on camera. The moment the interview ended, the mask went back on.

Between September 11 and September 17, Guiliani did visit the WTC wreckage pile, most famously accompanied by President Bush on September 14, but there are no official accounts of how many visits he actually made.

Considering the dozens of hours he clocked up giving NYC local, US national and international interviews in the days immediately after 9/11, and the fact that he was supposedly co-ordinating rescue and recovery efforts from the relocated emergency centre (the original was destroyed when WTC 7 was brought down), it would be generous to say that Guiliani visited the site 15 to 20 times between September 11 and September 17, 2001.

That figure, combined with the official visit count of 41, taken from Guiliani's own meticulously kept records, makes for a grand total of some 60 visits, before Christmas 2001.

That's about 560 visits less than the total Guiliani claimed in September 2006.

A spokesman for the International Society Of Firefighters said his members are sick to death of Guiliani's grandstanding over his role in the rescue and recovery efforts following the World Trade Centre attacks and has urged the media to begin the "peeling Guiliani's 9/11 onion."

The New York Times appears to have begun that process. Let's hope the rest of the American media follows suit and holds this serial liar to account.