Below The Beltway

To most Americans, Rudy Giuliani was a hero on September 11th, but there are some people out there who have a different view:

NEW YORK (AP) — Rudy Giuliani’s White House aspirations are inescapably tied to September 11, 2001 — for better and for worse.

While the former mayor of the nation’s largest city was widely lionized for his post-9/11 leadership — “Churchillian” was one adjective, “America’s mayor” was Oprah Winfrey’s assessment — city firefighters and their families are renewing their attacks on him for his performance before and after the terrorist attack.

“If Rudolph Giuliani was running on anything but 9/11, I would not speak out,” said Sally Regenhard, whose firefighter son was among the 343 FDNY members killed in the terrorist attack. “If he ran on cleaning up Times Square, getting rid of squeegee men, lowering crime — that’s indisputable.

“But when he runs on 9/11, I want the American people to know he was part of the problem.”

Regenhard and other survivor families generally cite two areas where they fault Giuliani’s performance before and after 9/11:

His administration’s failure to provide the World Trade Center’s first responders with adequate radios, a long-standing complaint from relatives of the firefighters killed when the twin towers collapsed. The September 11 commission noted the firefighters at the World Trade Center were using the same ineffective radios employed by the first responders to the 1993 terrorist attack on the trade center.

?and

A November 2001 decision to step up removal of the massive rubble pile at ground zero. The firefighters were angered when the then-mayor reduced their numbers among the group searching for remains of their lost “brothers,” focusing instead on what they derided as a “scoop and dump” approach. Giuliani agreed to increase the number of firefighters at ground zero just days after ordering the cutback.

More than 51/2 years later, body parts are still turning up in the trade center site

One could dismiss these people as bitter, but it’s Giuliani who is running, as The Onion once put it, as the candidate from 9/11.