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NATIONAL COMMISSION ON TERRORIST ATTACKS UPON THE UNITED STATES
Eleventh Public Hearing
Wednesday, May 19, 2004
New School University
New York City
CHAIRED BY: THOMAS H. KEAN
STAFF STATEMENT NUMBER 14: CRISIS MANAGEMENT
RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI, FORMER MAYOR, CITY OF NEW YORK
PANEL IV:
DENNIS SMITH, AUTHOR, "REPORT FROM GROUND ZERO"
JEROME M. HAUER, FORMER DIRECTOR, NEW YORK CITY OFFICE OF EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
EDWARD P. PLAUGHER, CHIEF, ARLINGTON COUNTY FIRE DEPARTMENT
MICHAEL R. BLOOMBERG, MAYOR, CITY OF NEW YORK
THOMAS J. RIDGE, SECRETARY, DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY
MR. THOMAS H. KEAN: I hereby reconvene this, our eleventh public hearing. We'll be hearing this morning from several witnesses. So that they all receive the time they deserve I'm not going to make any additional opening remarks. As an administrative matter, I would again ask all our friends in the audience to refrain from applause or the opposite, simply so that we can give most time to the witnesses and the questions, and get as much as possible into the actual information we're going to get from the hearing.
I now call upon the Commission's executive director, Dr. Philip Zelikow who will be joined by Emily Walker, Kevin Shaeffer and John Farmer in presenting a statement by the Commission's staff on crisis management.
MR. PHILIP D. ZELIKOW: Members of the Commission, with your help your staff is prepared to report its preliminary findings regarding the lessons learned from the emergency responses on September 11th, 2001, to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. These initial findings may help frame some of the issues for this hearing and the development of your judgments and recommendations. This report represents the results of our work to date. We remain ready to revise our current understanding in light of new information as our work continues. Sam Caspersen, Emily Walker, Mark Bittinger, Kevin Shaeffer, George Delgrosso, Jim Miller, Madeleine Blot, Cate Taylor, Joseph McBride, and John Farmer conducted most of the investigative work reflected in this statement.
We begin this statement with profound admiration for the first responders of 9/11, the civilians, firefighters, police officers, emergency medical technicians and emergency management professionals, living and dead, who exhibited steady determination and resolve under horrifying, overwhelming conditions. Along with the passengers and crew aboard the airplanes, the first responders on 9/11 were the first soldiers on the frontlines of a new kind of war. Some of them became its first casualties, some of them became its first heroes.
MS. EMILY WALKER: Civilian/private sector preparedness. Unless a terrorist's target is a military or other secure government facility, the first, first responders will almost certainly be civilians. The private sector controls 85 percent of the critical infrastructure in the nation. Homeland security and national preparedness therefore often begins with the private sector. Private sector preparedness should include, one, a plan for evacuation, two, adequate communications capabilities and three, a plan for continuity of operations. All three elements were tested in the private sector experience at the World Trade Center.
Evacuation. The centerpiece of preparedness is an evacuation plan. One of the lessons learned from the 1993 bombing was that evacuation procedures were inadequate. Although an estimated 50,000 civilians were evacuated, it took over four hours to complete the general evacuation of the buildings, with specific rescues going on for hours more. By all accounts, many steps were taken to improve evacuation procedures in the years between 1993 and 2001.
The evacuation effort on 9/11 was largely successful on floors below where the planes hit. Some of the evacuees have told us that the pre-9/11 drills helped them that morning. Others indicated that the drills had not helped, or could not recall having participated in pre-9/11 drills. The Port Authority's post 1993 installation of glow strips on the stairs and emergency lighting in the stairwells was cited by evacuees as significantly assisting their progress, as was the Port Authority's provision of flashlights to some tenants.
Some who worked in the World Trade Center told us that fire drills conducted by the Port Authority were extremely useful in their evacuation on September 11. Others, however, felt that the drills were formalities which did not engage the full attention or participation of most office workers on the floor. A former fire warden labeled the office workers as, "very uncooperative," claiming that most people refused to leave their offices because they were too busy and that those who did participate did not pay attention. The World Trade Center complex did not conduct a full evacuation training exercise. Individual companies had practiced drills isolated to their floors.
In no case, to our knowledge, did any tenant in the World Trade Center practice a drill where the employees walked down the stairs and exited the building. They did not know that the rooftop doors were kept locked, and that there was no plan for rooftop evacuation. They did not know that they should not evacuate up, and so some people began climbing stairs instead of trying to find clear paths of descent.
Some companies in the World Trade Center had developed their own evacuation plan separate from the Port Authority plan. Particularly notable was the plan in place for Morgan Stanley. Employees had practiced the plan, some had a copy both at the office and at home. Generally speaking, however, companies located in the World Trade Center did not have independent evacuation plans.
Communications. The second part of private sector preparedness is communications. Once a decision is made to react to an emergency, there must be an effective way to communicate that decision to tenants and/or employees, to account for tenants and employees in the aftermath of an event, to communicate with concerned family members, and to continue operations. The tenants of the World Trade Center varied widely in their success in meeting these challenges. Like the first responder community, tenants at the World Trade Center experienced severe communications problems on 9/11.
The phone system in the World Trade Center continued to work immediately after the planes struck both towers, perhaps with the exception of the floors that were hit and those above them. During the time between 9:03 and 9:55 a.m., however, there was an abnormally high calling volume and the network, both landline and wireless, could not successfully respond to every request for service which affected those placing 911 calls. When the South Tower collapsed, the Verizon switching station went down, and all phone service was lost in the 16-acre World Trade Center complex.
Blackberries worked well during the day of September 11 when other means of communication were failing. This was because the control channel on the wireless network had a great deal more capacity than the wireless voice channel. Once evacuated, companies needed to locate their employees.
Finding employees and accounting for those missing became a full-time mission for several days. Most companies did not have any record of who was in the office on September 11th, 2001. There were few cases where employees were given a place to congregate following an evacuation or a location to call. Few companies had a crisis communications plan in place before disaster struck.
Continuity of Operations. Once employees have been evacuated and accounted for, the third pillar of private sector preparedness is continuity of operations. The response to 9/11 illustrates that continuity is one of the most difficult challenges because many of the people involved in continuity are also closely involved in the event. Some companies had backup sites and redundant facilities that were outside Lower Manhattan.
And although it was difficult for some employees to reach them, these preparations provided the best opportunities for resuming business operations. In those cases where there were usable and operable backup spaces, the issues the companies faced included lack of plans for personnel, equipment, files, and training to use these redundant facilities. Those tenants that did not have backup facilities located outside of Lower Manhattan faced the additional challenge of scrambling for new locations.
The spirit of cooperation, however, was enormous. Companies offered competitors their space. Suppliers rerouted supplies such as computers and phones to those in need. Corporation donated time, expertise, and valuable equipment to the entire City of New York's physical operations as it tried to re-group days after the event. The Mayor's Office of Emergency Management, by all accounts, did a superb job in coordinating these efforts.
The Current State of Private Sector Preparedness. At a hearing held at Drew University last November, witness after witness told the Commission that despite 9/11, the private sector remains largely unprepared for a terrorist attack. We were also advised that the lack of a widely embraced private sector preparedness standard was a principal contributing factor to this lack of preparedness. The Commission responded by asking the American National Standards Institute, ANSI, for help. To develop a consensus, ANSI convened safety, security, and business continuity experts from a wide range of industries and associations, as well as from federal, state, and local government, to consider the need for standards for private sector emergency preparedness.
ANSI has recommended to the Commission a voluntary national preparedness standard, based on prior work of the National Fire Protection Association, with a common framework for emergency preparedness. The Commission will be considering whether to endorse this national preparedness standard, known as the NFPA 1600.
MR. KEVIN SHAEFFER: Public sector emergency response, developing an integrated command system. We now turn to the public sector emergency response. In this statement we step back from the specifics of the tactical decisions on the scene. We focus on potential lessons in three areas. Develop an integrated command system, size up the situation and keep re-evaluating it, and communicate and implement decisions.
We will first discuss incident command at the Pentagon. On any other day, the disaster at the Pentagon would be remembered as a singular challenge, an extraordinary national story. Yet the calamity at the World Trade Center included catastrophic damage 1,000 feet above the ground that instantly imperiled tens of thousands of people. The two experiences are not comparable. Nonetheless, broader lessons in integrating multi-agency response efforts are apparent in analyzing the Pentagon response.
Emergency response at the Pentagon represented a mix of local, state, and federal jurisdictions. The response was generally effective. It overcame the inherent complications of a response across jurisdictions because the Incident Command System, a formalized management structure for emergency response, was in place in the National Capital Region on 9/11.
Because of the nature of the event, a fire and partial building collapse, the Arlington County Fire Department served as Incident Commander. Different agencies had different roles. The incident required a major rescue, fire and medical response teams from Arlington County at the U.S. military headquarters, a facility under the control of the Secretary of Defense.
Since it was a terrorist attack, the Department of Justice was the lead federal agency in charge, with authority delegated to the FBI for operational response. Additionally, the terrorist attack impacted the daily operations and emergency management requirements for Arlington County and all bordering and surrounding counties and states.
At 9:37, the west wall of the Pentagon was hit by hijacked American Airlines Flight 77, a Boeing 757. The crash caused immediate and catastrophic damage. All 64 people aboard the airliner were killed, as were 125 people inside the Pentagon, 70 civilians and 55 military service members. Approximately 110 people were seriously injured and transported to area hospitals.
While no emergency response is flawless, the response to the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon was mainly a success for three reasons. First, strong professional relationships and trust established among emergency responders. Second, the adoption of the Incident Command System, and third, the pursuit of a regional approach to response.
Many fire and police agencies that responded to the Pentagon had extensive prior experience working together on regional events and training exercises. Indeed, just before 9/11 preparations were underway by many of these agencies to ensure public safety at the annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that were scheduled later that month in Washington, D.C. Local, regional, state, and federal agencies immediately responded to the Pentagon attack.
In addition to county fire, police, and sheriffs departments, the response was assisted by the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport Fire Department, Fort Myer Fire Department, the Virginia State Police, the Virginia Emergency Management Agency, the FBI, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Medical Response Team, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and numerous military personnel within the Military District of Washington.
Command was established at 9:41 a.m. At the same time, the Arlington County Emergency Communications Center contacted the Fairfax County, Alexandria, and District of Columbia fire departments to request mutual aid. The incident command post provided a clear view of, and access to, the crash site, allowing the Incident Commander to assess the situation at all times. At 9:55 a.m. the Incident Commander ordered an evacuation of the Pentagon impact area because of an imminent partial collapse, which occurred at 9:57 a.m. No first responder was injured in the partial collapse.
At 10:15 a.m. the Incident Commander ordered a full evacuation of the Command Post because of the warning of an approaching hijacked aircraft passed along by the FBI. This was the first of three evacuations caused by a report of incoming aircraft. This first evacuation order was well communicated and coordinated. Several factors facilitated the response to this incident, and distinguish it from the far more difficult task in New York.
There was a single incident. The incident site was relatively easy to secure and to contain. There are no other buildings in the immediate area. There was no collateral damage beyond the Pentagon.
MR. JOHN FARMER: As we noted yesterday in staff statement number 13, in July 2001 Mayor Giuliani signed a directive entitled "Direction and Control of Emergencies in the City of New York." Its purpose was, "to ensure the optimum use of agency resources while eliminating potential conflict among responding agencies which may have areas of overlapping expertise and responsibility." To some degree, the mayor's directive for incident command was followed on 9/11.
It was clear that the lead response agency was the FDNY, and that the other responding local, federal, bi-state, and state agencies acted in a supporting role. As we described yesterday, there were instances of coordination at high levels of command. In addition, information was shared on an ad hoc basis, such as when NYPD rescue teams passed their evacuation order to FDNY units they encountered in the North Tower. Any attempt to establish a unified command on 9/11, however, would have been frustrated by the lack of communication and coordination among responding agencies.
The Office of Emergency Management headquarters, which could have served as a focal point for information-sharing, was evacuated. Even prior to its evacuation, moreover, it did not play an integral role in ensuring that information was shared among agencies on 9/11. Certainly, the FDNY was not, "responsible for the management of the City's response to the emergency," as the mayor's directive would have required.
One question looking forward, in light of the experience of 9/11, is whether establishing a single incident commander is possible or appropriate in a city like New York, or at an incident like the World Trade Center fires. The Incident Commander point is important. More important, though, is to embrace the concept of an integrated command system
On 9/11, the problem was less about turf battles on the scene. It had more to do with command systems designed to work independently, not together. Since 9/11, a consensus is emerging within the emergency response community that a clear Incident Command System should be required of all response agencies.
As of October 1, federal homeland security funding will be contingent upon the adoption and regular use of such a system by emergency response agencies. In New York City, the Mayor's Office announced a new Incident Command System plan last week. There is also consensus that regional mutual aid agreements, as exist in Northern Virginia and the New York metropolitan area, could become the future of formal joint response plan with neighboring jurisdictions working together along with state and federal representatives, to be sure they have the collective capability to respond to catastrophic events.
In other words, every county or municipality may not need its own HAZMAT team. States are also considering Emergency Management Assistance Compacts to help insure that regional resources are available for a comprehensive response. So, every city does not need to buy the capacity to deal with extreme events.
Sizing Up the Situation. On 9/11 the FDNY command structure immediately grasped the massive scale of the catastrophe. The commanders called for a large number of units. The FDNY commanders also immediately and correctly judged that the North Tower should be evacuated as quickly as possible. The decision to evacuate the still intact South Tower was a more difficult judgment which they made after they talked with Port Authority police and building personnel in their tower, about five minutes after these chiefs arrived at the scene.
The FDNY commanders also had to decide whether they should try to fight the fires. They rapidly and accurately judged that this was impossible, so they should concentrate on evacuation and consider firefighting only in the context of freeing trapped civilians. The FDNY commanders needed information on the situation within the buildings. Here they encountered more difficulty.
They did not have good information on which building systems were operating, or which, if any, stairwells were open. As ascending firefighters discovered situations, they could not always communicate this information to others. But if they could have communicated it, there was not a protocol in place for receiving and integrating this information in order to enhance the situation awareness for all the fire commanders, including those beyond the lobby command post.
As evacuees descended, there was no protocol for quickly debriefing them on what floor they came from, what the conditions were like on that floor, and how they got down. Again there was no focal point to receive and integrate this information. Such a field intelligence setup, suggested by military experience could be valuable in large and complex incidents, though it might not be necessary for more ordinary situations.
Lacking adequate situation awareness, the FDNY made key decisions about how to deploy personnel to help in the South Tower after it was hit. The commanders decided to dispatch more units to the scene, assigning them to the South Tower. If they had understood that units were still arriving at the North Tower or were already there but still in the lobby, they could have considered whether to reassign some of the units already at the scene to render immediate assistance to the South Tower.
The decision to handle the South Tower by dispatching new units meant that the number of firefighters available to help evacuees in that tower was relatively small for at least the first 20 minutes after the tower was hit, though that number sadly was rising in the minutes before the tower collapsed. As the conditions deteriorated, the FDNY commanders had to judge whether the buildings were in danger of collapse. Building collapse, like other dangers to response personnel, is a constant concern in firefighting.
Specific chiefs are tasked with responsibility for tracking these safety issues. The best estimate of one senior chief, provided to the chief of the department sometime between 9:25 and 9:45, was that there might be a danger of collapse in a few hours, and therefore units probably should not ascend above floors in the sixties. We did not see any evidence that this assessment had any impact on operations before the collapse of the South Tower effectively disabled every FDNY command post. Even after the South Tower collapsed, another senior chief reportedly thought that the North Tower would not collapse because its corner frame had not been struck.
Other than observation from the ground, remote observation, and a Fire Department boat in the Hudson River, the only other source of information on the building condition was from the air. NYPD aviation had helicopters observing the situation. There was no video feed from these helicopters to the overall command post. With the evacuation of the Office of Emergency Management headquarters, their radio observations were not readily available to chiefs either. Repeated updates from the NYPD aviation unit were not communicated to the FDNY.
NYPD aviation did not foresee the collapse of the South Tower, though at 9:55, four minutes before the collapse, a helicopter pilot radioed that a large piece of the South Tower looked like it was about to fall. Immediately after the collapse of the South Tower, a helicopter pilot radioed that news. This transmission was followed by others, beginning at 10:08, warning that the North Tower looked like it was about to collapse. These calls reinforced the urgency of the NYPD's evacuation of the area.
Although evacuation orders were also transmitted immediately by FDNY commanders, we earlier mentioned that these orders did not reflect the situation awareness reflected in the NYPD transmissions. The NYPD warning could not be relayed to the overall FDNY command post, since that post was disabled. Nor was there any capacity to relay this warning directly to the chiefs trying to regroup near the North Tower. Looking forward, a fully integrated Incident Command System will assure that evolving situation awareness is shared among responding agencies and will assist first responders in sizing up the situation at hand.
MR. ZELIKOW: Communicate and Implement Decisions. Effective decision-making in New York was hampered by limited command and control and internal communications. Beyond the point we made earlier about a command system integrated across agencies, the FDNY had limited command and control of its own personnel. This was true for five main reasons
One, the magnitude of the incident was unforeseen. Two, commanders had difficulty communicating with their units. Three, FDNY personnel who were not dispatched self-dispatched and units which were dispatched consistently rode heavy with extra firefighters, a particular problem in some of the scarce elite units.
Four, more units were actually dispatched than were ordered by the chiefs. And five, once units arrived at the World Trade Center they were not accounted for comprehensively and coordinated. The NYPD's 911 operators and FDNY dispatch were not adequately integrated into the emergency response. This is an issue for an integrated command system, but it manifested itself as an inability to communicate key decisions to the people who most needed to hear about them, or gather intelligence from the people who could communicate it.
In several ways, the 911 system was not ready to cope with a major disaster. As we explained yesterday, these operators and dispatchers were one of the only sources of communication with individuals on the damaged floors. Once the seriousness of the situation was apparent and evacuation decisions had been made, this guidance should have been made available to these operators and dispatchers.
If it had been, individuals could have been told to evacuate. They could have been told not to go upstairs, which might have helped people in the South Tower. In future disasters, it is important to analyze how victims or the public will attempt to get information and help, and to be sure the people giving that information are part of the emergency response team.
The Port Authority's response was hampered by inadequate communication. For example, although the FDNY commanders at the North Tower advised Port Authority police and that tower's building personnel to evacuate the South Tower, shortly before 9:00 a.m., there is no evidence that this advice was communicated effectively to the building personnel in the South Tower. A vital few minutes may have been lost and, when that tower did make its announcement to evacuate at 9:02 a.m., it was the ambiguous advice that everyone may wish to start an orderly evacuation if warranted by conditions on their floor. The Port Authority's Jersey City Police desk was also unaware of the evacuation decisions when, at 9:11 a.m., it advised workers on the 64th floor of the South Tower to stay near the stairwells and wait for assistance.
In general it was the practice of the Port Authority's differing commands to use localized frequencies. When officers reported from the tunnels and airports, they could not hear the commands being issued over the World Trade Center command frequency. The NYPD experienced comparatively fewer internal command and control and communications issues.
Because the department has a history of mobilizing thousands of officers for major events requiring crowd control, its technical radio capability and major incident protocols were more easily adapted to an incident of the magnitude of 9/11. In addition, its mission that day lay largely outside the towers themselves. Although there were rescue teams and a few individual police officers climbing in the towers, the vast majority of NYPD personnel were staged outside assisting with crowd control and evacuation and securing other sites in the city.
The Pentagon response too was plagued with difficulties that echo those experienced in New York. As the Arlington County after-action report notes, there were significant problems with both self dispatching and communications. "Organizations, response units, and individuals proceeding on their own initiative directly to an incident site, without the knowledge and permission of the host jurisdiction and the Incident Commander, complicate the exercise of command, increase the risks faced by bona fide responders, and exacerbate the challenge of accountability."
With respect to communications, the Arlington County after-action report concludes, almost all aspects of communications continue to be problematic, from initial notification to tactical operations. Cellular telephones were of little value. Radio channels were initially over-saturated. Pagers seemed to be the most reliable means of notification when available and used, but most firefighters are not issued pagers. It is a fair inference, given the differing situations in New York City and Northern Virginia, that the problems in command, control, and communications that occurred at both sites will likely recur in any emergency of similar scale. The task looking forward is to enable first responders to respond in a coordinated manner with the best situational awareness possible.
Summary. Much of this statement has focused on the Fire Department of New York. We must therefore also note that the FDNY has responded with particular energy to the lessons of 9/11, and has acted to address many of the concerns we have identified. There may be a need, however, to expand the understanding of these lessons across the nation. The president's National Strategy for Homeland Security called for national standards in emergency response training and preparedness. Many experts have cited the National Fire Academy training program as a useful benchmark. We hope this hearing will contribute to education about the kinds of challenges emergency response agencies may face in the future.
(Audio break.)
MR. RUDOLPH W. GIULIANI: Our enemy is not each other. Catastrophic emergencies and attacks have acts of great heroism attached to them. They have acts of ingenious creativity attached to them, and they have mistakes that happen.
Hopefully this commission will assess that correctly, with compassion and with understanding, and then the next one will be done a little bit better. But the next one unfortunately is probably going to be a mix of exactly those same things: acts of great heroism, many, many creative and brilliant things done, and some terrible mistakes that were made. Because when human beings are put under this condition, that's what happens. So our anger should clearly be directed, and the blame should clearly be directed at one source and one source alone, the terrorists who killed our loved ones.
(Applause.)
For each other there really should be compassion, understanding and support, because we're all suffering. The attacks of September 11, 2001, were the worst attacks in the history of our country. Nothing like that had ever happened to us before. Hopefully, they'll remain the worst attacks in the history of our country, even if there may be others.
I believe then, I believe now, that the terrorists had two purposes in attacking us. One purpose was to kill many, many people to make some kind of, in their words, spectacular demonstration. And the other was to break our will, because they were convinced we were a weak people, that we would become disunited, that we would start fighting with each other, that there would be tremendous chaos and confusion.
And I believe today, I believe then, because I observed it and was part of it. I believed it because I knew so many of these men and women, that it was their initial heroism that thwarted the objectives of the terrorists by going into the building, by standing their ground, by interpreting an evacuation order the way a brave rescue worker would interpret an evacuation order, which is first get the civilians out, and then get yourself out.
By doing that they thwarted the objectives that the terrorists had. The terrorists killed too many people, almost 3,000, but the first number that I was given in less than one hour of the collapse of the two buildings, was that over 12,000 people had died. And, in fact, at another point I was given a figure of 15,000 people. That was the calculation made by the Port Authority and the others, of the number of people that had been in the building at the time of the attack which may have been close to 22 to 25,000. And the number of people you could conceivably have gotten out, in the amount of time that the rescue workers had to get people out, and their calculation was 12 to 15,000 people.
When I said to the people of New York and the people of America that the losses were too much for us to bear, that was the number that was in my mind. They were too much for us to bear, even what it turned out to be. But the reason that you have that difference between the 12 to 15,000 originally estimated, and the less than 3,000 that actually took place, is the way in which a combination of the rescue workers and the civilians themselves conducted this evacuation. Not flawless, not without mistakes, and not without some terribly tragedies attached to it.
But overall, maybe 8,000 people more, maybe 9,000 people more than anyone could rightfully expect evacuated from that building because firefighters were walking upstairs while civilians were walking downstairs. I can't tell you how many civilians come up to me no matter where I go, and say to me, I want you to thank your fire department. I want you to thank them.
And I'll say why, and they'll say, because I was walking down, or my brother was, or my sister, or my father, and I saw one of your firefighters walking up while we were rushing down. And I'll say, well what did that do? And they'll say, it made me calmer, it made me feel confident, it made me continue to walk in the right direction.
What we avoided was exactly what any novelist would have written about in an attack like this, had it been written a day before. He would have written that the evacuation, the exit from the building would cause more casualties than the actual attack. It's happened, I don't want to mention the emergencies, I know them, you know them, in which more people are killed trying to get out of the building than are actually killed in the fire or the attack.
People exited this building carefully, they exited this building quickly, they exited this building without harming or hurting each other. And the credit for that goes to Pete Ganci and Bill Feehan and Terry Hatton and Patty Brown and Michael Judge and I wish I could mention all the firefighters and the police officers, those happened to be the ones that I saw that morning, right before they died. And that's the reason they were thwarted in their ambition of sort of breaking our will.
Maybe it would be helpful if I just outlined quickly what I did in the first hour or two that morning, why I did it, and then you know, whatever questions that you have.
The morning of September 11, 2001 was a primary day in the city of New York. The Democratic party and the Republican party were voting to select the next mayor of the city. And I was having breakfast that morning at the Peninsula hotel on 55th Street with two old friends and colleagues, Dennison Young who was my counsel, and Bill Simon who was an Assistant United States attorney who had worked with me.
As we finished breakfast, the police notified Denny, the two police officers that were on my detail that morning, were notified and then they notified Denny Young, my counsel, and Denny walked up to me and he said the following. That it's been reported that a twin engine plane has crashed into the North Tower and there's a terrible fire there. So I left immediately, walked out into the street, and as I walked out into the street, Denny and I looked up in the sky, and what we saw was a beautiful clear day, about as clear as we had had in a long time, and came to the immediate conclusion that it could not have been an accident, that it had to have been an attack.
But we weren't sure whether it was a planned terrorist attack, or maybe some kind of act of individual anger or insanity or some person angry at some business in the building or whatever. But we knew it was an attack. We began to proceed south as quickly as we could, and maybe this is helpful on the telephone contact, we started to make telephone contact in order to get more information. I tried to reach all the people the mayor would generally be in contact with at that point including, we attempted to reach the White House and the Governor's office.
I was successful in speaking with the Police Commissioner, was able to get through to him on the phone, he gave me an initial briefing. I was able to speak to some members of my staff that gave me information. I was not able to reach the fire commissioner. I was not able to reach the head of emergency services, Mr. Sheirer, we were not able to make a call outside the city, to the White House, which led me to believe that we had to have hard lines available in order to do that.
As we were coming down very, very close to this building, just a few blocks from this building on 6th, we passed St. Vincent's Hospital, and I looked outside and I saw outside many, many doctors and nurses and stretchers. And it registered in my mind that we were looking at a war zone, not a normal emergency. That was probably the first thing that said to me, we're into something beyond anything we've handled before. A little below St. Vincent's hospital, we could see the fire in the tower, but we saw a big explosion, and we didn't know what it was. We probably concluded that it was just an after effect of the original attack.
But within seconds of seeing it, we received a phone call from the police, and were notified that a second plane had hit, and realized at that point that obviously it was a terrorist attack. We then proceeded another half mile, we were about a half mile to a mile away when that happened, got to about Barclay Street where we could go no further. I got out of the van and I was approached by Police Commissioner Kerik and my deputy mayor for Operations, Joe Lhota, and they had a group of people behind them. Commissioner Kerik walked up to me, explained to me, and so did Deputy Mayor Lhota how terrible the situation was. The deputy mayor pointed to the sky and said, people were jumping from the buildings.
And I looked up and I thought he was wrong, and I thought I saw debris. And then the Police Commissioner pointed to an emergency truck that was pulling up to in front of 70 Barclay Street, and he said, that will be our command post. We're attaching hard lines into this building, and we're taking over this building. And they were literally taking people out of 75 Barclay Street and setting up a command post. And I said, is that going to be our main command post? And he said yes, that will be our command post, we'll operate out of there, we've evacuated 7 World Trade Center.
I said okay, I said where is the fire department set up, where are they fighting the fire? He said over on West Street. So we began to walk and talk going toward West Street, which is a block and a half to two blocks away. What we talked about at that point was the Commissioner pointing out to me, the other things that he was then doing. He went over a checklist of, we've closed the bridges and tunnels to stop people from coming into the city. We're letting people out, no-one is coming in. That came off a protocol that we had and really the intelligence that we had available, was that was probably the most likely way in which we would be attacked, the bridges and tunnels of New York City.
Because they would be--plans for that would be found very, very often when terrorists were arrested. He then went through a list of buildings that he was covering, we're covering the Empire State Building, we're covering the Stock Exchange, we're covering --went through a whole list of--and he said, I have brought back the entire force, they're all reporting back for duty. We arrived, as we got very, very close to the World Trade Center, one of my police officers said to me, and all of us, keep looking up, keep looking up, because things were falling down around us. And I imagine that was for our own safety.
But when I looked up at that point, I realized that I saw a man, it wasn't debris, that I saw a man hurling himself out of the 102nd, 103rd, 104th floor. And I stopped, probably for two seconds, but it seems like a minute or two, and I was in shock. I mean, I said to the Police Commissioner, that we're in uncharted territory, we've never gone through anything like this before, we're just going to have to do the best we can to keep everybody together, keep them focused.
And the Commissioner said that's right, Mayor, that's right. That was the last thing I saw when I approached Pete Ganci. His operations center, his command center was set up outdoors on West Street, in a position where he could see both towers, where he'd get a view of both towers, which is typically the way a fire is fought in New York City. You set up an outside command post at least as the advance command post, where you can get the best view available of the fire. And he was there and he was in charge and he had the board in front of him, the board is an attempt to try to figure out where resources are located.
He was accompanied by Deputy Commissioner Bill Feehan, between the two of them they had 80 years of fire fighting experience, and they were the two best. And then off to the corner, I didn't get a chance to talk to him, was Ray Downey, who was the head of our search and rescue effort, and Ray was the best in the country. He trained most of the search and rescue teams and handled a lot of the search and rescue at Oklahoma City.
So we had the very best people there. My first question to Chief Ganci, maybe because of what I had just seen was, can we get helicopters up to the roof and help any of those people? Because I could see people hanging out the windows, and I thought I saw people on the roof. I didn't, I don't think because I don't think there were any people on the roof. But at least my observation was there were people near the top of the building.
And Pete pointed to a big flame that was shooting out of the North Tower at the time, and he said to me, my guys can save everybody below the fire, but I can't put a helicopter above the fire. And he didn't say the rest of it, which was do you see the flame, the helicopter would explode, but by pointing I knew what he was saying. He was saying if I put a helicopter near there, these flames that are coming out unpredictably and the helicopter could just blow. And he did say it would be too dangerous and it would not accomplish the result.
I then asked him if he had everything that he needed and he said yes, and he had a conversation with the Police Commissioner who went over with him how to do evacuations. His concern was to get people out of the area for two reasons, and then he reiterated that to me. He said to me, whatever you do, tell people to go north, get them out of here. And then he pointed to south and you could see while he was pointing that things were falling off the building and hitting people, and you could see other bodies that were coming down. That also posed a danger to other people that were on the ground.
And it seemed to me that his major concern at the time was that it was very, very dangerous to exit the buildings, and that had to be done carefully, and it had to be done to the north, because it appeared as if the way the debris was falling, the more the damage was going to happen to the south and to the west. And then he wished us well, and I told him I was going to communicate this, and that I would be back. And I shook his hand, and I said, God bless you, and he said the same. I then walked up with, at this point, the police commissioner, the deputy police commissioner, the chief of the department.
I asked my chief of staff who was now with me to get the fire commissioner. He told me the fire commissioner was in the advanced command post inside one of the buildings, I don't remember which one. I said, it's really important that we all be together at the command post so that we can make decisions, get him and bring him to us. And then we proceeded up West Street, two and a half blocks again, back to where we had originally been. On the way up I saw Father Judge, and it was the last time I saw him, and I asked him to pray for us, which he assured me that he was doing, and I shook hands with him.
And then I walked to 75 Barclay Street, I was really brought inside 75 Barclay Street and told this would be our command post, it was set up with telephones, there were police on the phones, and I was brought into a--like a cubicle inner office and told that we had reached the White House. I had already been informed by my chief of staff that he had reached the White House, and by the police commissioner, who I think had reached the Defense Department, I'm not sure exactly. But both of them had assured me that we had gotten air support, because that's why I wanted to reach the White House. I wanted to make sure that we had air defense for the city, and my chief of staff told me that he was informed by the White House that there were seven planes that were unaccounted for.
And at this point I knew of two, and I had heard reports that the Pentagon had been attacked, that the Sears Tower had been attacked, and several other buildings. So I got through to the White House, Chris Henick was on the phone, who was then the deputy political director to President Bush, and I said to him, Chris, was the Pentagon attacked?" And he said, "Confirmed." And then I asked if we had air support? I said, "Have you--do we have air support, do you have jets out, because I think we're going to get hit again." He said that the jets were dispatched twelve minutes ago and they should be there very shortly, and they should be able to defend you against further attacks.
And then he said, "We're evacuating the White House and the vice president will call you back very, very shortly." And I put down the phone, and within seconds got a call in another room from the vice president. I walked over to that room, picked up the phone, the White House operator was on the phone and said Mr. Mayor, the vice president will be on in a moment. And at that point I heard a click, the desk started to shake, and I heard next Chief Esposito, who was the uniformed head of the police department, I'm sure it was his voice, I heard him say, "The tower is down, the tower has come down." And my first thought was that one of the radio towers from the top of the World Trade Center had come down.
I did not conceive of the entire tower coming down, but as he was saying that, I could see the desk shaking and I could see people in the outer office going under desks, and then all of a sudden I could see outside a tremendous amount of debris and it first felt like an earthquake, and then it looked like a nuclear cloud. So we realized very shortly that we were in danger in the building, that the building could come down. It had been damaged. It was shaking. So the police commissioner and I, and the deputy police commissioner, we jointly decided that we had to try to get everyone out of the building.
So we went downstairs into the basement, we tried two or three exits, could not get out, I don't know if they were locked or blocked, we couldn't get out. We went back up to the main floor to see if we could go out the main entrance, but at that point things were worse, there had been more damage done and it was blocked, and then two gentlemen, I believe janitors came up to us and said, there's a way out through the basement, through 100 Church Street. I knew 100 Church Street because that's where the Law Department was located, and we agreed that we would go with him.
So we all went downstairs. We walked through the hallway. We got to the door that he had selected. He opened the door and there was sort of a sigh of relief, and when we walked outside we were in the lobby of 100 Church Street. And then we wondered if we hadn't gone from bad to worse, because when you looked outside at 100 Church Street, what you saw again was a tremendous cloud, debris flying through the streets, and people being injured. And one of our deputy commissioners and one of my former security people were brought in at that point injured, bloodied and injured and obviously in a state of shock from what had happened to them, having been hit by debris.
So the Commissioner and I had to make a quick decision. Do we remain in the building and use that as a place to hold a press conference, to give people information, because there were some press right there? Do we remain here and operate here for a while until the cloud passes, or do we go outside? And the choice that we made was to go outside. And the choice that we made to go outside was because we felt we had, you know, a core of New York City government together at this point: the police commissioner, the head of Emergency Services, three of the four deputy mayors, the commissioner of public health, and that if we went outside we had a better chance of more people surviving than if we stayed in the building where if something happened and the building crashed, you'd virtually have all of city government gone.
And we could communicate better from outside, hopefully be able to get through on radio or on television. So we went outside, grabbed a member of the press. I remember Andrew Kurtzman was the reporter that was there, and I said you know, come with us. And we began making telephone calls as we were marching up, asking people to remain calm, and asking people to go north, which were the instructions that Pete Ganci had given me.
And as I was doing that, I would stop and look at how people were reacting. Here I was asking them to remain calm, I was asking them to go north, I wanted to see how were they evacuating the building, and what I saw was very, very inspiring.
I saw people running. I saw people fleeing, which is exactly what we wanted them to do. I wanted to get them out of the area, but I didn't see people knocking each other over. I didn't see people in chaos. I didn't see people in panic.
I didn't see people hurting each other which you also would expect might happen. And I actually saw acts of people helping each other. Somebody would be running, see somebody fall down, stop and pick somebody up, and the Commissioner and I did that for one man who was having trouble, and put him in the Commissioner's car.
We were able to get through, and now the sequence gets very, very foggy in my own recollection, I'm not sure what happened in sequence, but very shortly after, maybe two or three blocks north of that, we heard another tremendous noise, realized that the second building had now come down, and saw the cloud from the second building come up the streets. And we're trying to determine at this point whether to return to City Hall or to set up operations of city government at the police academy. And we thought of several other sites. The police commissioner recommended that we use the police academy as our command center, because it had all of the communications equipment and it could be outfitted in minutes to be a command center.
And my chief of staff told me that City Hall had been abandoned because it had been hit very, very hard by debris. So we selected the police academy as our command center. We actually, Senator Kerrey, discussed New School as a place to come because we walked right past here, but because the communications equipment was already there, the police commissioner decided on the police academy. We walked up to the firehouse on Houston Street, which is a few blocks north of here, and decided we'd stop there so we could make telephone calls. The police department broke in, not indicating any rivalry between the police department and the fire department, it was the right thing to do, they were not trying to destroy fire department property.
They broke in, and I was able to get through on the telephone now, first to Governor Pataki who expressed his concern for us because he had heard that we were missing, and thought we had been killed. And then said, you know, what help do you need, and I said, well, we need all the help we can get, and this is beyond anything that we've ever dealt with before, George. And he said I've brought out the National Guard, do you want me to deploy them, do you need them? And I as the mayor of New York City, I think I had always resisted having the National Guard, for reasons that an urban environment is so complex, so difficult.
It's difficult enough to police with trained police officers, you really don't want the National Guard. Not because they aren't terrific at what they do but this isn't what they do. But we were in such need at the time, I said absolutely, I need the National Guard and everything else you can send us. And we agreed that they would deploy on Randall's Island so that the police department could train them and deploy them properly, and in essence they could relieve our police officers in the right places.
And then the governor said, you know, I'll meet you, where do you want, where are you setting up, and I said we're going to set up at the police academy, we'll be there in about 15 minutes, and we agreed on something at that point that was very, very helpful. We agreed that we would put our governments together, we agreed that we would in essence sit in the same room in the same place, my commissioners, his commissioners, everybody had to approve things, and we would sit in one room and run the emergency together, and that we would do it at the police academy. And at that point, I was able to reach the White House and the Defense Department again. I was able to make several other telephone calls to the stock exchange because we thought they had been attacked. I reached Dick Grasso to find out if they had been attacked.
We tried to, we had had a number of false rumors of places that were attacked, and the police commissioner was able to make sure that he had deployed his resources to the other places that we assumed we would have secondary attacks. From our briefings intelligence and protocols, we had a group of targets coming out of ten years of analysis of what the terrorists might do, so it was off that list that the police commissioner was deploying resources including ultimately the National Guard.
We then arrived at the police academy and set up a command center at the police academy and the command center at the police academy was complete with everything that we needed, all of the facilities, and were able to have a press conference there about 2:30 in the afternoon in which we could explain to people how the whole thing would be managed from there on in.
Later on I visited the police department, our backup command center, our number two backup command center would have been the police department, 7 World Trade Center was the primary one, the backup was the police academy. The number three would have been MetroTech in Brooklyn which is fully equipped to be a command center. We made the decision to use the police academy because we didn't want to leave this island, we didn't want to leave Manhattan. We thought it would be a terrible statement if city government left the island of Manhattan. But then we realized pretty shortly that the police academy was too small, and we selected Pier 92 as our command center.
And the reason Pier 92 was selected as the command center was because on the next day, on September 12th, Pier 92 was going to have a drill. It had hundreds of people here, from FEMA, from the federal government, from the state, from the State Emergency Management Office, and they were getting ready for a drill for biochemical attack. So that was going to be the place they were going to have the drill. The equipment was already there so we were able to establish a command center there within three days that was two-and-a-half to three times bigger than the command center that we had lost at 7 World Trade Center. And it was from there that the rest of the search and rescue effort was completed.
One other point and then I'll turn to questions. When you evaluate the performance of the firefighters and the police officers, in addition to the bravery and the heroics that they demonstrated at the time of initial attack, by standing their ground and rather than giving us a story of men--uniformed men fleeing while civilians were left behind, which would have been devastating to the morale of this country, rather than an Andrea Doria if you might remember that, they gave us an example of very, very brave men and women in uniform, who stand their ground to protect civilians.
Instead of that, we got a story of heroism and we got a story of pride and we got a story of support that helped get us through. The second thing that they were able to carry out through I believe a superb command structure, going from Chief Ganci on down, was a recovery effort that was beyond any expectation that anyone could possibly have. If you had asked me the night of September 11, 2001, how many lives we would lose in the recovery effort at ground zero, I probably wouldn't have told you the number, but I would have said to myself at least a dozen people.
We can't put up a building in this city without losing four or five people. And not because they're careless, but because it's exceedingly dangerous. Well the site at the World Trade Center for 4, 5, 6 months was the most dangerous recovery site probably in the history of this country.
There were fires of 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit below the ground. I could be standing here and you could be standing there and I could be describing to you, governor, the site and then a fire would break out in between us and it was just by luck or the design of God that we weren't killed. They carried out the mission under great emotion, under great stress, flawlessly.
And that's because they have a superb command structure, and a structure in which they know how to deal with emergencies. So I would urge you in evaluating their performance to put it in the context of no one ever has encountered an attack like this. No one ever has had to have dealt with the recovery and search effort or anywhere near this dimension, not to mention the family center that had to be created, which no one had ever even heard of before, a family center, which the Office of Emergency Management had developed with the relief of the people of Flight 800.
The family center that they developed and the things that OEM provided for this city. So I will, maybe I'll make a comment at the end, but I think I've covered most of the things that I want to say and I thank you very, very much for your attention.
MR. KEAN: Mr. Mayor, thank you very, very much. The questioning will be led this morning by Commissioner Ben-Veniste followed by Commissioner Thompson.
MR. RICHARD BEN-VENISTE: Good morning.
MR. GIULIANI: Good Morning.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: On Labor Day, September 2001, I took my wife and younger daughter to see the Statue of Liberty and the Twin Towers. After September 11th, I like tens of thousands, maybe millions of others said there, but for the grace of God go I. And we are the lucky ones, the survivors, who must do better in the future to protect our loved ones and our institutions. You and I became friends at the U.S. Attorney's office in the early '70s prosecuting organized crime, labor racketeering, official corruption cases--the world seemed a much simpler place then.
I have followed your career since then with admiration, and while sometimes disagreeing with your decisions never questioned your unwavering dedication to New York City. On September 11, 2001, the City of New York showed what it was made of. The heroism of the firemen and the police officers who risked and in previously unimaginable numbers gave their lives in the quest for saving the lives of others, and your leadership on that day and in the days following gave the rest of the nation, and indeed the world, an unvarnished view of the indomitable spirit and the humanity, of this great city, and for that I salute you.
(Applause.)
There is no question but that on that day, thousands of lives were saved by the heroic actions of the first responders in evacuating the towers and the surrounding areas. Among the most significant of the problems we have seen were ones that reflect barriers between the effective communications between and among the first responders because of equipment that had not been standardized. The country had seen a previous analogy to this in connection with its armed forces which into the '80s did not have standardized communications equipment, ammunition, other things, that made communication between the army, the navy, the air force and the marines, an option during times of emergency.
These were barriers which had grown up in these services which were proud, individual and important sectors of our armed forces. It took strong leadership to butt heads together and to require standardization, to require that we be able to communicate between and among the services. So my first question to you is given the fact that you were no shrinking violet, and given the fact that the differences in the equipment that were used, in the radios and other communication technology over the years, made it obvious that there could not be easy inter-agency communication, what barrier was there that prevented you from ordering standardization?
MR. GIULIANI: No barrier, the technology, and that's reason why there isn't standardization today, and the difference in mission between the fire department and the police department. If I can explain it, the way in which the fire department and the police department communicate is different because generally they have different missions. The fire department communicates, opts for a radio that allows for much less range of communication, but much more accurate communication in a small area, where more people can be on the line, because when they're managing an emergency they need to have as many people on the line as possible, because they're deploying a number of different companies, they're putting them in different places and having people communicate with each other.
The police department communicates by, essentially simplifying it, basically police officer to headquarter, or police officer to dispatcher, because you're largely dealing with a one-on-one mission rather than a major emergency mission. So the general way in which a police department communicates is different than the general way in which a fire department communicates. And when they're in the same emergency, they really have to get on the same frequency in order to be able to communicate with each other.
We had purchased for the fire department radios, I believe the radios came in, in early 2001, I think it was early 2001, I don't remember the exact date, but the radios had come in well before September 11, 2001. We had purchased for them new radios, they had attempted to use them and found them too complicated to use and had withdrawn them and were training people in how to use the new radios. That has proven to be so complex and so difficult that until a few weeks ago they haven't been able to do it. So there are significant difference in the way in which the two of them communicate.
And the best answer is to create an interoperable system so that the police radio can be switched over and be used the same way, again simplifying it somewhat. Generally, a police radio and a fire radio should operate differently because 90 percent of the time, 95 percent of the time, they're doing different things. Police officers are chasing criminals, fire fighters are dealing in mass emergencies. But they should have radios that are interoperable, so that in an emergency, both of them could be switched onto the same channel.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: But in the interim--
MR. GIULIANI: Those radios do not exist today.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: In the interim, would you not suggest that there has to be in place some kind of a system where communications can be synthesized, that even if the radios are not interoperable, that there has to be a level of communication which was not in place on 9/11?
MR. GIULIANI: Well, it was in place, there are, there were--
MR. BEN-VENISTE: But it didn't operate effectively on 9/11?
MR. GIULIANI: It may not have operated but they all had a radio system that would have allowed them to communicate with each other, but they decided that they couldn't use it, that it wasn't operable, that they weren't able to get through. And part of the problem that you'll face, even when you create an interoperable system is that if too many people are trying to communicate at the same time in any channel, they will begin to interfere with each other.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: But at the very top there's got to be some coordination, that's my only point, yeah.
MR. GIULIANI: Yes, absolutely.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Let me move to a second area which we think there's got to be some movement and change, and that is in the area of the 911 emergency response. In the case of 9/11, individuals who were trapped in the building called 911 searching for answers to their immediate distress, and we found that those operators were not in a position to do anything other than receive information. It wasn't an interactive loop which obviously was called for in circumstances of this kind of dire emergency. Had you considered, prior to 9/11, the possibility in a disaster of this kind where people could go for information and receive it?
MR. GIULIANI: I would have to say, seeing what you've observed, or even going through some of this over the last year or two, 911 was overwhelmed, and should it have been larger, should it have been anticipated? Yes, it probably should have, but it wasn't. It was one of those things that was not anticipated. 911 volume, my numbers may be slightly off, but just for purposes of illustration, 911 on any given day does about 30,000--35,000 calls.
When they get up around 50 to 55,000, they are at capacity or beyond capacity. And I think they were well over 55,000 that day, and I don't think anyone ever anticipated that they would have to deal with an emergency of this kind. So some of the things that now have emerged, that they should have had more information, that there should have been updates, I suspect what was happening was they were so overwhelmed with calls, just getting to the next call, and getting to the next call, and getting to the next call, and getting to the next call, they, even the supervisors didn't have the time to impart information.
Number one, they weren't trained that way, they should have been but they weren't. And number two, even if that would have been their instinct, they were so overwhelmed that they weren't able to do it.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Well this is an area that we feel there can be, and there should be a solution.
MR. GIULIANI: Absolutely.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Final question, Rudy, when you and I were prosecutors and dealt with both the FBI and the New York PD, we saw that there was a level of, for want of a better word, arrogance at the FBI, it was a one way street, they did not interact, they were happy to receive information, but didn't give it. Things have changed somewhat now. In the world that we live in now, facing the potential of other terrorist attacks, it seems a no-brainer that as a force multiplier the FBI needs to trust more. It needs to disseminate more. It needs to utilize the vast resources of police departments such as the City of New York. I'd like to get your comments on that.
MR. GIULIANI: There's no question about that, the FBI would be even more effective, or to the extent that the FBI utilizes state and local law enforcement, the FBI takes what is a relatively small law enforcement organization, and multiplies it dramatically. The New York Police Department is larger than the FBI. It's a larger police agency than the FBI, so if you want to know about New York City, you've got to work with the New York Police Department.
Now the FBI learned that lesson after we left the United States Attorneys Office but some long time ago, long before I was the mayor or the United States Attorney, when they established the Joint Terrorism Task Force, which is by no means again perfect, but a lot better than many other cities and states have available to them, and as a concept that should be replicated elsewhere. Other cities that are under threat, and you know, we believe the threat is largest in New York, or greatest, but the threat is everywhere, should have a joint terrorism task force.
And the FBI should be sharing information with the local police and the state police, and the resistance is a fear, because I've heard this expressed including at times when I was trying to get information from the FBI, for myself and for my Police Commissioner, and this is after September 11 and during the time of heightened emergency, I was told that if we give the information to the police, then it will be leaked.
Well, every once in a while the FBI leaks, and the reality is you know, I don't want to say anything but every once in a while, you know, so my response was that either give it to me now or I'll read it in the New York Times in two or three days. But let's share it with state--we don't, we've got to trust our state and local police. The FBI is a great law enforcement organization. The New York Police Department is a great law enforcement organization. The Chicago Police are a great law enforcement organization. They've got to have information to operate.
And the dispute there was not so much not being alerted, we would get alerted, but what I wanted was the information. I wanted, the question was, give us the words, because I need the words, I need to know what you know, because I don't need to know it as the mayor, but my police commissioner needs to know it, and there's 50 guys who do terrorist work need to know it, because they may be able to see in a word something that says bridge to them, or tunnel, or if I may I'll give you the illustration. It was several, and I think I shared this with Bob Kerrey when he visited with me, and John Lehman.
It was several weeks after the attack, and it was after the anthrax attack, which followed the first attack, and the country was put on a higher, on a much higher alert. And the Police Commissioner and I were sitting in my office, and we were trying to figure out what to do now that we were on a higher alert. We were on the highest alert we could think of being on. So I called and asked, could you give me the words that provoked this higher alert so that my Police Commissioner and I can make some choices, because we can't cover everything, but maybe we can make some calculated risks which we realized, you know, there's always a risk.
And after about four or five hours of going back and forth and getting a further clearance, they gave the information directly from the CIA to our Police Commissioner, who was able with his staff to make choices about what we should emphasize. Should we put more people at subways? Did it sound like, if there was going to be an attack, it was going to be a subway attack, a tunnel attack? Did it sound like it was going to be another building attack? Did it sound like it was going to be an attack on a synagogue or on a church? These people are experts at this and the more the FBI shares this information, and the more we break down this fear, you know, somebody's going to get credit, or somebody's going to leak something. We really shouldn't worry about the leak part, it comes out anyway so you might as well give it to law enforcement early.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: I agree, thank you Mr. Chairman, thank you very much.
MR. GIULIANI: Thank you.
MR. KEAN: Thank you.
Governor Thompson.
MR. JAMES R. THOMPSON: Mayor Giuliani, I'd like to associate myself, and I think probably every member of the panel does, with Commissioner Ben-Veniste's opening remarks considering your extraordinary leadership not only for the City of New York during crisis but for the nation as well in setting an example for all of us. And I'd like to take up on your opening statement and simply express my opinion that we here on this commission are not engaged in a search for blame. We're not engaged in a search for villains, we're engaged in two things.
One, what actually happened as best we can determine it? And two, what lessons can we learn from what happened and the response to it that hopefully will lessen the chance that it will happen again, or in such great numbers? All of us realize that it will happen again in some fashion somewhere, probably not in the same way, as we observed yesterday, the enemy is versatile, smart, entrepreneurial, and they don't fight the same war twice as we sometimes do.
We can't do that and carry the country with us in support of reform if we're seen as people who judge solely in hindsight, second guessing decisions of people who stood in the thick of battle with debris and bodies falling from the hundredth floor and had to make split-second decisions on rescuing and helping as many people as possible. In my view it would dishonor the memory of those who died on September 11, if we don't learn those lessons and teach them to the country in hope for their support.
(Applause.)
I would rather honor the memory of those who died by moving forward, helping save other Americans. Now could you give us a description of the particular kinds of information you either did or did not receive from the FBI during the summer of 1991 (sic), with particular reference, and the Commission has devoted many hours to this, information that was received or not received about Usama Bin Ladin or al Qaeda during this period of extraordinary high chatter than the FBI, the CIA have previously testified about during that summer that preceded September 11th, 2001?
MR. GIULIANI: The information that I received in the summer or in the period, you know, leading up to September 11, 2001 would be not terribly different to the information that I received over the, maybe two or three years prior to that, going back to '97, '98 with the terrorist bombing case and the terrorists that were brought to New York to be prosecuted in the southern district of New York.
From that point on we would receive fairly regular briefings that the city was on alert, that there were dangers, that there were risks. Most of my briefings would come from the police, and most of them would occur during the regular meeting I had each week with the Police Commissioner, which included a written report and an oral presentation either from the Commissioner or from the deputy commissioner or one of the people that was an expert on this.
And then every once in a while, but I can't remember this increasing particularly in 2001, but every once in a while it would include a briefing by John O'Neill from the FBI who would come over after having maybe told the police department that he wanted to reiterate something of importance, that he would tell me. And sometimes it would come from Louis Freeh, who would call me from Washington to say they wanted to brief me on something.
But that was not particularly different in 2001 than it was in '98, '99, 2000, and beginning back then, we would continuously get alerts and advice about things that we should do, like to close down the area around the courthouse, because there was a fear that there would be a bombing at the courthouse in retaliation for holding the terrorists in the Metropolitan Corrections Center. So we did that. We closed the streets around the courthouse and put up barricades.
And then specific warnings about the stock exchange and about City Hall, and we put up barriers around all of those places. And then sometimes there'd be an arrest that had been made, and during the arrest things were seized from the terrorist. And the things seized from the terrorist would include plans, that sometimes would be the plans for New York City subways, New York City tunnels.
Very often it would be the stock exchange, public buildings at City Hall or whatever. So those were thought of as the primary target and it seemed to me that information, that protocol that the FBI and the police developed came largely from what they were seizing from terrorists or suspected terrorists, and I assume, because I'm not, I wasn't privy to this part of it, I assume from what they were hearing on their interceptions.
But there was no--we were on high alert from about '97, '98 on. Probably the most briefings I received, and the most information came in the buildup to the millennium celebration in 2000, where I received four or five separate briefings about possible terrorist plans to attack that celebration. And we went through drills and exercises and deployed thousands of police officers and did background checks because there was a question about whether to cancel it or not.
I think the one in Seattle was cancelled. And we decided to go forward with it but with some real risk attached to it. But there was nothing particular in that summer of 2001 that was any different than you know, in the four or five years before.
MR. THOMPSON: You've faced many decisions as the chief executive and you understand how chief executives function. We've heard in these hearings, and even more in our private interviews about the difficulty of chief executives, whether President Clinton or President Bush or President Reagan or President Bush again, getting briefings on every conceivable subject that falls within a president's jurisdiction and having to sort of prioritize the issues of the day and make decisions on those.
We've heard about the August 6 PDB that President Bush received, and we've heard about the PDBs that President Clinton was privy to, and decisions that were made on the basis of intelligence. Can you give us just a perspective, as a former chief executive, on the difficulties or challenges that chief executives face in dealing with everything at once every day?
MR. GIULIANI: Well I think that now when you go back over a report, and you know the end of the story, which is a horrible one, but you know the end of the story, the reports that are relevant become much more obvious than before you know the end of it. And part of the reason for that is because you're given so much information. At all different levels, I mean the FBI and the CIA and the other intelligence agencies collect enormous amounts of information, then they distil that information and they pass on a smaller amount, but still an enormous amount of information.
As the mayor of New York City, I was probably warned about threats to New York City, I can't give you like an accurate or scientific number, I'll give you one for rhetorical impact. Once a day, or five times a week, it was not unusual for me to receive a phone call from Police Commissioner Bratton or Police Commissioner Safir or Police Commissioner Kerik, and say, I have to talk to you on a secure phone, or I need to meet with you. And to give me a warning about a threat, something that was going to happen to the city.
So I imagine with the president, you would multiply that out many, many times so now that we hear the word threat, and it's attached to something that appears to be connected to September 11, it jumps out at us. At the time, it has to have melded together with hundreds of other things that were of equal or more importance. So when I look at these reports, I don't--they don't seem to me to be the kinds of things that would jump out at you, to be so terribly unusual.
MR. THOMPSON: Let's turn our attention to the FBI for a moment, I'm sure you're acquainted somewhat at least with the efforts Director Mueller has made to reform the FBI and to change the focus of its mission from strictly law enforcement to law enforcement and intelligence and to change the culture of the FBI to reward intelligence successes in the same way that they reward or have rewarded traditionally law enforcement successes in dealing with their agents.
Give us your assessment of how well you think he's done so far. But also give us your assessment of what structural changes we may need to recommend concerning the FBI or the CIA for that matter, because neither Director Tenet nor Director Mueller will, despite good intentions, always be there. And we need to tell the Congress and the American people how the collection and dissemination of intelligence for the defense of this nation should be handled in the future?
MR. GIULIANI: Well I think it would be very, very valuable to recommend the creation of joint terrorism task forces in all major cities in the country, so that the FBI and the police are working together as partners. When Rick Ben-Veniste asked me that before, and I referred to the joint terrorism task force that was established in the late 1970s, the real benefit of it is that the police officer, police detective and the FBI agent are partners. They sit in the same office. They go out and investigate the same case.
So it doesn't mean you'll always get all the information you want, and it doesn't mean that the director doesn't have to break down even barriers there. But at least you're doing at a level of trust and cooperation that is beyond, you know, a lot of it throughout the United States. That would be an excellent mechanism to kind of assure that the information is flowing.
That also presents to the FBI in a compelling way the need for the two way street of cooperation. There was a case, I don't know if Commissioner Kerik described this yesterday, but there was a case about a year, year-and-a-half before September 11, 2001, in which the joint terrorism task force foiled an attack on the New York City subways by terrorists who had plans for the subways, the tunnels, the bridges. That case happened because a citizen noticed something suspicious and went into a police precinct and described it to a cop who decided and evaluated what the citizen said, that it was suspicious, and then brought in the joint terrorism task force.
But it happened because of good old fashioned police work. I don't know, it may have happened anyway, but I'm not sure it would have happened if you didn't have that joint terrorism connection where the police worked very closely with the FBI. That would help a lot.
I think that the director has made great strides in opening the FBI up, and I think he's moving them in exactly the right direction. And the only advice from my limited perspective that I can offer with regard to the CIA and intelligence gathering is, and this is a belief more than it is something I can prove, I think if we had more human intelligence, and we didn't rely just on interceptions, but we had human intelligence to inform the vast mounds of information that we get, we'd better be able to interpret it and to figure out priorities.
When you asked me before about the amount of information that comes in to intelligence analysts, who can put it on, is this big, and it all says threat, and it all says bad people who want who want to do terrible things. To figure out which one you should concentrate on, you need an interpreter, and the interpreter is human intelligence. Somebody inside these organizations, that's the way we investigated organized crime, and that's the way we investigated drug operations. You infiltrate them, and then the interceptions make sense to you.
I think we fell in love with our technology, and I think we felt we had so much technology that that made us secure, and we moved away, and I'm not talking about this president or the last one, or the last one, but for some time we moved away from the tough, more difficult and dirty work of human--infiltrating organizations. And if you had infiltrated organizations, then maybe the communiqué, you wouldn't just rely on a briefing, somebody would point it out to you and say that's the important one.
MR. THOMPSON: Thank you Mr. Mayor, thank you Mr. Chairman.
MR. KEAN: Mr. Mayor, just one thought or one question. New York City on that terrible day in a sense was blessed because it had you as a leader. It had somebody who was a great, great leader to take charge of a terrible, terrible event. You also had as you've told us, some of the best people in the country to call on, who worked for you and worked for the city.
This commission is charged with making recommendations for the nation, in a sense, and the cities, the rest of the cities in this country are not going to have a Mayor Giuliani. They may have a good man or woman, but they're not going to have you. They're not going to have the kind of people that you had to call on on that day to help you in this city. And we've got to make recommendations that also affect them and can make their cities safer.
Have you got any thoughts about what kind of recommendations we could make, based on your experience that would be across the board so that we could tell mayors of other cities who are good mayors but not you, have great people but not very great people--
MR. GIULIANI: The other cities have equally effective mayors and police departments and maybe more effective than me, and this isn't about particular individuals. It really isn't. It's about people who seek out this work and I think New Yorkers, you know, I was very blessed to have an unbelievably capable fire department and police department, I mean beyond anything I would ever be able to describe to you. There's no way I can describe to you how effective the New York City Fire Department, the New York City Police Department is.
And I'm not talking just on September 11, I'm talking about the hundreds of times I've been in hospitals or emergency rooms with their families, men and women who put their lives at risk to protect other people. So I was very blessed to have terrifically effective people and rested on their shoulders. So it's not about me. And I think our people are special, and I think New Yorkers are special, so I can't help that.
I'm a New Yorker. I can't help it, I'm a New Yorker, I think they're special and I asked them that night when I was standing at the police academy, knowing that I had lost so many of my own friends and loved ones, and there'd be more to come, I asked them to give the country and the world a demonstration of how people react to terrorism, by emerging stronger. And they've emerged even stronger, and Mayor Bloomberg has carried on everything I was doing and done even more, and so has Commissioner Kelly.
And I think all these American cities have, you know, have certainly among their fire departments and police departments they have extraordinary people. I did worry, and do continue to worry that maybe because of, you know, the resources we have and the size that we have, that it isn't the same way in a lot of other places. I mean big cities, and this would also be true of Chicago, it would be true of Los Angeles, it would be true of the big cities.
Big cities are better prepared for this than smaller places, because we deal with emergencies all the time, and we're much better prepared for physical disaster, because while we were all sleeping, after your hearing last night, to this morning, the New York Fire Department probably saved you know, dozens of people and put out ten fires and the police department were probably engaged in emergency missions, they just--while we talk about it and opine about it, they just do it.
And they're terrific at it and I think other--
MR. KEAN: I guess what I was looking for was systems, a change in systems that we could recommend to other places in the country based on your experience?
MR. GIULIANI: I think the most important recommendation that I would make, put on the top of the list, is to have OEMs, that cities should have Offices of Emergency Management. The Office of Emergency Management that we established in '95, '96, was invaluable to us. We would not have gotten through, when I say September 11, I don't just mean the day, I mean the months after that, and then the anthrax attack that followed it, which people tend to forget about.
Within a month of September 11 we were attacked by anthrax, and then a month later we had a plane crash that in and of itself would have been the worst catastrophe of the year in Rockaway. Without the Office of Emergency Management, training us, doing drills, doing exercises, we would not, even with a very good police department and fire department, we would not have been able to handle all of that. And I know Chicago initiated an Office of Emergency Management within months of September 11, 2001, because Mayor Daley thinks in terms of, how do I prepare my city.
And I would think that would be something along with a joint terrorism taskforce, if cities had that, it would help them a lot in bringing together these resources, even in a city like New York as you found out, with a very large police department and a very large fire department, not everything can be coordinated.
MR. KEAN: Congressman Roemer?
MR. TIMOTHY J. ROEMER: Thank you Mr. Chairman, I too want to join, Mayor, in thanking you for your time this morning and particularly your brave and courageous leadership on September the 11th, when many of us, I served in government, in Washington D.C. on that day, and we constantly saw the replaying of the planes crashing into the two towers, and that brought a potential sense of devastation and insecurity to many people.
At the same time people would see the video of you marching down the streets of New York City showing calm and showing leadership, that I think had a ripple effect not just in New York City but to people, leaders in Washington and around the country. So for that we're very grateful and we're very grateful to the leadership that other people here in this city showed. Let me ask you a direct question, I hope it's fair, very direct, about something that this commission has spent a great deal of time on, and that's the presidential daily brief of August 6, 2001, to the president.
In this document it says Bin Ladin determined to strike in U.S., and it's only about a page and a paragraph. And in this document which we've agreed did not tell the president that something was going to happen in New York City, or there were going to be airplanes coming into the World Trade Centers, it does mention New York City or the World Trade Center three times in this document.
(Applause.)
Please. It says that Bin Ladin and his followers would follow the example of the World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef and bring the fighting to America. It talks about a clandestine source in 1998 that a Bin Ladin cell in New York was recruiting Muslim American youth for attacks. And it says, it mentions the recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York City. Now again Mayor, there's nothing to say that you should have known about something happening on September the 11th. But it mentions New York, and we all know since 1993, 1997 when you mentioned the incident then, that New York was something that was very precious to us and a target by the terrorists.
I want to know, why is it the CIA and FBI were not sharing more of this with you, because you've said to us just this morning, that you didn't get an increased warning from the CIA and the FBI. It was pretty steady from '97 through the millennium, through the spring and summer of 2001, pretty steady, it was always pretty high. But we have people in Washington, CIA director and others, saying their "hair was on fire," this is a spike in warnings. One, why didn't we get better communication of this spike in warning in the spring and summer with the likely target of New York, to help you a little bit more, if possible?
And two, what specifically can we do in these instances in the spring and summer to try to fortify and protect and prepare, not knowing particularly A, B and C, when where and who's going to do it, but how do we try to prepare our people, our sites, and the city for something that happened that day and is probably going to happen again?
MR. GIULIANI: I don't know that I can really answer the whole question, I'll try. 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 would have done anything differently. I mean I don't--we were doing at the time all that we could think of that was consistent with the city being able to move and to protect the city.
In fact for some time, we had been heavily criticized for doing too much, including closing down City Hall and closing some of the areas around public buildings. So some of that would have sounded a great deal like the information we were getting already in '98 and '99 and 2000, that New York City was the target.
I have to say that in the briefings that I got, and this is all now recollection more than anything else, but I think the police plan reflects that. Probably if we were to list the number one thing repeated as a target, it was the subways, tunnels and bridges, largely because when arrests were made, those are the things that would be seized. And then public buildings would be second.
So it may or may not have led to increased security at some of those buildings. But I do think, and again this is hypothetical and it's an interpretation, I do think that the interpretation would've been more in the direction of suicide bombings than aerial attack. Because in all the briefings that I received, the two areas that were emphasized were bombings, meaning suicide-type bombings, or an area that we haven't talked much about, but we should talk more about if we're looking toward the future, which is biological and chemical attack. So I don't know what it is that we would have done differently if we had been given the information, but we weren't given it.
MR. ROEMER: We've heard--okay. I will not be able to follow-up on that. I appreciate your answer, but I think the chairman wants to move onto the next one. I have several follow-ups.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
THOMAS KEAN: Senator Kerrey.
MR. BOB KERREY: Mayor, let me--at the beginning-- respectfully disagree with two things you said at the start. And it may not be a disagreement, it may just be me seeing the world slightly different than you do. First of all, I don't believe it's an either/or choice of being angry at those who perpetrated this crime and feeling anger toward those with responsibility.
(Applause.)
And at the same time, I think one of the most remarkable things that you did during this whole period of time was help us channel our own anger, because one of the problems with anger is that it becomes its evil twin in a hurry and becomes hatred. And the thing that I believe unified us on that day, in addition to your words and your leadership, was that all of a sudden it was no longer us and others. I mean, it wasn't just Americans who died on 11 September. Some of the people you pointed out was New York City strengths. Our immigrant community died on 11 September, including, I think it's fair to guess, undocumented people as well.
It wasn't just Christians and Jews. It was Christians, Jews and Muslims, and dare I say it, probably people who didn't believe in God, who just came to work and were trying to do what people do when they do their job. And all of a sudden--and for the rest of my life I'll never be able to see Port Authority Police, Fire, New York City Police Department, or for that matter, police people and fire department and Port Authority people anywhere and see them any differently than I do now, which is they're special people. And strangers became different.
All the obituaries that were in the newspapers and all the funerals that you went to, you personalized people that previously had been strangers. And that's, I think, where the unity came from. We didn't see it as us versus them. We didn't see the other any longer. We saw the humanity.
We reflected and let our anger subside a bit to see the humanity in other people at the moment that we may even be disagreeing with them. And I do praise you highly, especially for going to all those funerals. That had to be a terrible pain to do that. But you allowed us to grieve, and through our grief understand the full dimension of this loss and to unify as a nation.
I mean the word "damn" got dropped from our Yankees for a short period of time because the country did no longer see New York City as a strange and alien place. They saw it as a part of their country, as a part of their world indeed, because it was all over the world that people were feeling the humanity and the loss of humanity in New York City.
Yesterday, Mayor, we had three of your former commissioners before us, and Commissioner Kerik in his testimony said the city, through OEM, had conducted coordinated plans for many types of emergencies, including one simulating bio-chem attack, mass transit, actual emergencies like blackouts, building collapses, storms, plane crashes, et cetera. And when I asked the question, was there a scenario analysis done for the possibility that a plane could hit one of these 1,350 foot towers, I got the answer, "no." And I'm not sure that's correct, because, like now, I had five minutes to do it, so I didn't have a chance to follow. To the best of your knowledge, was there a scenario analysis done for the possibility that a plane taking off from one of the airports in this area could hit the World Trade Center accidentally?
MR. GIULIANI: I don't recall one that would be done. I recall a number of field exercises and tabletop exercises. There was one done involving an actual field exercise involving a plane crash in which state and local and different county organizations had to respond to it to see if we could work together with Nassau County, the Port Authority. There was one done involving a sarin gas attack right near the World Trade Center that involved the Port Authority, and there were many done involving building attacks, building fires, building collapses. But I don't recall one involving an aerial strike on a building.
MR. KERREY: Among the--there were eureka moments for me where I discovered something on this commission. I was listening to flight attendant Betty Ong on American Airlines flight 11, when she was talking to the ground. People on the ground, American Airlines and federal officials, were surprised that the plane had been hijacked. In fact, argued with her, said, are you sure it isn't air rage?
Don't you think the FAA should have told the Port Authority at some point during this whole entire period--I mean, take '98 through 2001, because our staff has concluded that at least the Counterterrorism Center at CIA should have done some scenario analysis about hijacking, since it was mentioned in some of the things that we had picked up. No specific plan was detected, but don't you think that the FAA or somebody at the federal level should have engaged in some scenario analysis about the possibility of a hijacking and begin to think about that as a possible threat against the United States.
MR. GIULIANI: I imagine in hindsight it would have helped, sure. I mean, it would have. But they didn't. So I don't know how to evaluate how they make decisions or what it is that they decide on. Sure, if somebody had said this is a possibility, then there would have been an exercise done based on it. But no one thought of it and we didn't think of it.
We thought of a lot of things. We had plans for anthrax. We had plans for smallpox. We had plans for terrorist bombings. We had plans for dirty bombs, airplane crashes. But in all that thinking that we did, we had never come up with the thought that there would be planes used as missiles, attacking buildings. Whether others should have done it, I don't know. I don't know if I can really judge that, Senator.
MR. KERREY: Thank you.
MR. KEAN: Commissioner Lehman.
MR. JOHN F. LEHMAN: Thank you.
Mr. Mayor, there is no question that your leadership and your firm grip and presence in your moveable command post made a huge difference on that day. There was no question to the world that the captain was on the bridge. But there is a tradition in the Navy, learned over centuries, that sometimes the captain is not on the bridge and that there has to be a clear and unambiguous succession of command authority in the event the captain is ashore when the attack comes, or the captain is killed in the event, and particularly when there are multiple crises around a battle or a ship. And one of the problems that our staff and we see in the new Incident Command System that has just been promulgated on Friday is that it's really a formula for negotiation between strong and powerful and heroic agencies as to who's going to be in charge at the time.
And I think Ray Kelly yesterday explained it very well, that this is a system based on a very strong mayoral system, and in a way it's modeled on you being on the bridge. We have a very strong mayor now. There have been times in the past--in fact frequent times--when we have not had very strong mayors.
And many cities around the country do not have a strong mayoral system, even if the incumbent is strong. But more importantly than that, below the mayor there does not seem to be in a situation like we are trying to plan for. They're coming back and they may and probably plan to do multiple events to maximize confusion and maximize casualties.
The problem is even with a strong captain on the bridge, this plan does not provide clear unity of command. It's a negotiating document. And I would like your personal view on whether it's not time, given the increased level of the threat from a very sophisticated enemy, that New York break from its long and successful tradition of working together with independent agencies to adopt a more clearly defined and unambiguous command and control system above--I'm not saying within, although there are some issues there, but much less strong --but among the agencies, Port Authority, Fire Department and Police?
MR. GIULIANI: First of all, I believe that Mayor Bloomberg and Commissioner Kelly and the Commissioners you saw here yesterday, Commissioner Scoppetta, Commissioner Bruno, have done a lot, learning from the things that happened on September 11, 2001, to improve the readiness of the city. In fact, I think they've done exceptionally good work in doing that. And I think this protocol, matrix, is an attempt to try to improve on the one that we did the two or three years earlier; I've forgotten exactly when it was put out. But I went through so many drafts of that that when I see it now, I can't remember which was the last draft and which--it took us about three years to develop that.
First of all, the line of authority is clear. The mayor is in charge. All of these agencies are mayoral agencies. In the same way the president of the United States is commander-in-chief, the mayor is in charge. That's why people elect the mayor, so they get the choice of whether they get a strong captain or a weak captain or a lieutenant or whatever. The people get the choice of who they select. And maybe now in the new era that we're in this will be something that people think about, you know, when they make the choice. But at least they get the choice of who is in charge.
There's a deputy mayor who succeeds the mayor immediately if the mayor is sick, injured, hurt or missing and that deputy mayor is designated. In my case it was Joe Lhota, who was there right at the scene. He was the second person to come up to me, with the police commissioner, at the time, and he was ready to take command if anything happened to me. And then there's a line of succession after that. So there's never any--and this was true not only of my administration but of Mayor Dinkins' administration, Mayor Koch, and I think it--
MR. LEHMAN: But suppose there were three other events simultaneously?
MR. GIULIANI: Well, I mean that--if there were three other events simultaneously, then you have the best police department in the country, usually with a police commissioner who's among the three or four very best police professionals in the country because the New York City Police Department draws the best people. I mean, I never had trouble finding a really great police commissioner. The real problem I had was selecting between the 10 that wanted to be police commissioner.
MR. LEHMAN: But why shouldn't there be an automatic--
MR. KEAN: This is the last--
MR. LEHMAN: This is my final--I'm from New York too, so-- (laughter)--why shouldn't there be a formula so that before that can be arbitrated, there's an automatic system for who's going to be in charge until a decision otherwise on the scene--I'm not talking about at the top--but on the scene of multiple incidents?
MR. GIULIANI: I think that because incidents are complex that's why you need OEM, and that's why I created OEM, to--
MR. LEHMAN: But it doesn't have the authority. That's the problem.
MR. GIULIANI: Yes, it does. It has the--
MR. LEHMAN: It can dictate who's going to be in charge?
MR. GIULIANI: Yes. Yes, it has the authority to decide who's in charge until the mayor gets there, and then I guess somebody could argue it. That never happened. The way the system was arranged--and I know my system better--but I think this one is very similar. Most emergencies have a department that's in charge.
A typical criminal case, the police are in charge. A typical fire, the Fire Department is in charge. Where it gets complicated is let's say--and I remember where this emerged. It emerged from the sarin gas attack that we simulated near the World Trade Center and the question was--this was a political rally attacked by Islamic terrorists, sarin gas attack, a thousand people down.
And the question was, who's in charge? The terrorists were in the crowd still releasing the sarin gas. Well, the Police Department is in charge while it's still a criminal case, a terrorist case. Now the terrorists are arrested. They're now out and now you've got a thousand victims that have to be saved, the Fire Department is in charge. And OEM has to determine that decision.
So if there were an attack in this building right now, if something happened in this building and the terrorists were in this building or we were being held hostage or whatever, everybody would arrive, it would be clear that the Police Department was in charge. The chief of the Police Department would be outside and he would be directing the situation. Once the terrorists or hostage-takers were taken out and this building became a rescue mission, we had all been injured with biological attack or chemical attack, now the Fire Department would take over. And I saw several hundred of these and they never proved to be a problem.
One thing--I know you're a New Yorker, I'm a New Yorker-- I'll tell you one thing, and you know this about New York--and Rick is--they handle big things brilliantly. There was not a problem of coordination on September 11, 2001, because it was bigger than everybody involved in it, so nobody was asserting ego. You know, the Fire Department should take over, the Police Department, the mayor should be in charge--everyone sublimated their ego to how big it was. They're terrific at big emergencies. Where the problems occur that you've reported and found, it's in the smaller situations where they have time to debate who's better, who's more effective.
I come from a family of four uncles who were police officers and one who was a firefighter, so I know this from the time I was two years old. And if it's a big emergency they will all be in there helping each other and assisting each other. If it's an extraction from a car, they're going to race to get there because the Police Department feels they can do it better and the Fire Department feels they can do it better. And that's why you need an OEM. You want to retain this tremendous pride, like the Marine Corps has or like the FBI has. At the same time you want to be able to use it correctly.
I mean, the only thing I would recommend--and I think the present mayor is doing this, I think Mayor Bloomberg is doing this --you've got to have a very strong OEM so that if Jerry Hauer, who's going to be here later--I had two OEM directors. One was Jerry Hauer, the second one you saw yesterday, Ritchie Sheirer. If they arrived at an emergency and there was any doubt, they had the authority to say, Police Department in charge, Fire Department in charge. I would usually arrive there, or my deputy mayor if I wasn't--if I was sick or I wasn't around, and then if they had a problem with that they could raise it with the deputy mayor, but he would always support the head of OEM. So I mean I think that is the best way to handle it in New York.
MR. LEHMAN: Thank you.
MR. KEAN: Senator Gorton.
MR. SLADE GORTON: Mayor Giuliani, in your graphic description of your day, you remarked on one incident that leads me to a series of thoughts on which I'd like to have your comment. You said that instantly when you arrived there and spoke to the fire chief in charge you said, "Gosh, can you get a helicopter up to the top and rescue anyone?" and he said, "No. Look at the flames. We can rescue people below the impact area." Now that reference, I guess, was to Tower Number One, but presumably exactly the same doctrine applied to Tower Number Two. Four people did manage to get down, but there obviously wasn't any way for your first responders to get above that area and to save anyone.
That's the part of your narrative that caused me to this thought. Our chart shows that 2,602 people lost their lives in those two towers that day. Ten of them, of course, were hijackers. 147 were passengers in the two airplanes. A horrendous 403 were either your firefighters or police officers or Port Authority police officers.
And my arithmetic--that tells me that that means that 2,042 civilians who were in the towers at the time lost their lives. I'm not sure, but perhaps you can tell me whether or not there was any breakdown as to how many of those people were above the impact areas and how many were below? My own estimate, and you can tell me if you think I'm wrong, is probably fewer than 100 of them were below the impact areas. In other words, the overwhelming majority there was no way for you or your people to get at at all.
Now, if I'm right on that and if I'm right on the estimates that you've made that some 25,000 people were evacuated from those two towers, that tells me that your first responders, at the terrible price of 403 lives of their own, saved or managed the saving of over 99.5 percent of the people they could conceivably have saved, which is absolutely remarkable, you know, overwhelmingly remarkable. No matter what kind of criticisms there are, after the fact, on the way in which it was made. Am I correct in that estimate? Would it be accurate to say that your people saved, at this cost of 403 of their own lives, 99.5 percent or more of the people they could conceivably have saved?
MR. GIULIANI: I don't know if that would be the exact percentage, Senator. But the reality is that they saved more lives than I think anyone had any right to expect, that any human beings would be able to do. Done differently with different people, and people that may be unwilling to be as bold as they were, you would have had a much more serious loss of life. And their willingness, the way I describe it, to stand their ground and not retreat, and even their interpretation of an evacuation order - and I know some of them.
I know one firefighter whose family has explained this to me. He was in the North Tower. He was evacuating people. He was given an evacuation order. He told his men to go, sent them down, they got out. But he was with a person in a wheelchair, and an overweight person having a hard time getting down, so he stayed with them.
So how did he interpret that evacuation order? He interpreted that evacuation order, "I'll get all my men out, but I'm going to stay here and help these people out." And the fact that so many of them interpreted it that way kept a much calmer situation and a much better evacuation--
(Voices raised from audience.)
--and these people--
MR. KEAN: Please.
MR. GIULIANI: These people's--
(Voices raised from audience.)
MR. GIULIANI: These people--
AUDIENCE VOICE: Talk about the radios.
MR. KEAN: I would please ask--
(Voices raised from audience.)
MR. KEAN: I would ask--
(Voices raised from audience.)
MR. KEAN: --you please to restore order.
(Voices raised from audience.)
MR. KEAN: You are simply wasting time at this point, which should be used for questions. Please. Thank you.
MR. GIULIANI: Well, it's understandable--
MR. GORTON: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think--
MR. GIULIANI: Senator, it's an understandable--
MR. GORTON: --that record is absolutely extraordinary.
MR. GIULIANI: And when you undergo the losses it creates, it's very understandable.
MR. GORTON: Thank you.
(Voices raised from audience.)
MR. KEAN: Commissioner Gorelick. If you want to continue to remain in the hearing--
(Applause.)
MR. KEAN: --I would ask you please to be in order.
(Applause and voices raised.)
MR. KEAN: Commissioner Gorelick.
MS. JAMIE S. GORELICK: I have--
AUDIENCE VOICE: Put one of us on the panel. Just one of us on that panel.
MR. KEAN: I would ask you all please--
(Applause.)
AUDIENCE VOICE: Just one of us.
MR. KEAN: I understand your feelings. I also understand that this hearing has to continue in an orderly manner. I would ask you to conduct yourselves that way, please.
MS. GORELICK: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
The questions I have, Mr. Mayor--and, again, thank you for your appearance here today, are to follow up on the questions that Commissioner Lehman was asking. I appreciate your overarching statement that there has been continuity between your administration and your successor's. But you made two choices that are, in fact, different from your successor that I would really like to explore and drill down on. One is in this command matrix.
The fact of the matter is, and however long it took you to arrive at your matrix, when you issued it in 1996 it had, to use the basketball vernacular, very few jump balls. You basically said, in this type of incident "X" is going to be in the lead. Now, that may have changed in the course of an emergency. You know emergencies are dynamic, the role of the Incident Commander might change, but you have a presumptive leader in each situation.
In the procedures that were issued last week, nearly every-- in fact every significant incident has at least two and in some instances as many as five agencies listed as the primary agency. That's a difference. Now, in response to Commissioner Lehman you said, well, that's why you have OEM. But, in fact, the second difference between your policies and your successor's is that in your policies the Office of Emergency Management is the on-scene interagency coordinator and does have the capacity--or did have the capacity that you describe.
In a New York Times op-ed piece, Jerry Hauer who ran, as you noted, your OEM at the beginning, says--is highly critical of Mayor Bloomberg's decision to essentially downgrade and change the role of OEM from a highly operational element that's an extension of the mayor to, in his words--and I think here he's quoting Director Bruno--to a think tank.
He says that--I'm quoting Hauer here, "Mayor Bloomberg continues to undermine the city's ability to deal with crises by weakening the role of the coordinator." And I won't quote at length, but I know that you're going to be loathe to criticize your successor. But it's important for us to understand on the ground in a city like this what the proper model should be, because we will be making recommendations about this. And so I would like to ask you whether you believe the policies and procedures you've set out are better or not, and what your reasons might be?
MR. GIULIANI: Well, I believe that the part of it that Jerry was incorrect about is that OEM still has the authority to make the choice as to which agency is in charge. And that's critical. That's the critical part of it. Whether more agencies are selected as possible incident commanders, because the situation is more complex or because on analysis after they've looked at all of this, they've decided that there are--if you gave me a copy of it, it probably would help. If I could just see it?
MS. GORELICK: Sure, let me--
MR. GIULIANI: Because I'm really not as familiar with that, obviously, as I am my own.
MS. GORELICK: This is yours. I'm sorry, this is Mayor Bloomberg's and this is yours.
MR. GIULIANI: Okay.
MS. GORELICK: And you can see the difference here.
MR. GIULIANI: Okay. Well, the one thing that I would clarify in this is that OEM has the authority--meaning the new united command matrix, that OEM has the authority to make the decision if there's any confusion about who's in charge. I mean, the citywide public health emergency--it is possible that any one of those five agencies, depending on the kind of citywide health emergency, could be in charge of it, whether it's HHC or NYPD, FDNY, the Department of Health. So OEM would have to make that choice. That's the thing I would clarify in this if there's any ambiguity about it.
MS. GORELICK: Yes, because I would note that in the procedures issued by Mayor Bloomberg--and, frankly, it is consistent with the impression we were left with in the testimony yesterday, OEM responds to multi-agency incidents, participates in the command, coordinates resources from emergency support functions, relays information and supports logistic needs. It has, shall we say, a rather less affirmative, aggressive, operational sense than it does in your more straightforward language? And maybe it is an issue of clarification or maybe it is a choice?
MR. GIULIANI: But in terms of my opinion of it, I would think that's the thing that would have to be clarified because when--a power outage. NYPD, FDNY are the possible Incident Commanders. It really is going to depend on whether or not there's any suspicion of terrorism or criminal activity, or whether it's just a straight blackout that we're dealing with. And if there's any confusion between the police and the fire and the mayor isn't available, then somebody has to decide that. That has to be OEM.
MS. GORELICK: So--
MR. KEAN: Last question.
MS. GORELICK: Yes, sir.
So just to clarify, your concern is not with the listing of multiple agencies, which is different from the plan that you put in place, but ensuring that there is a mechanism that is quite clear for determining who gets the lead if numerous agencies do show up as listed in the--
MR. GIULIANI: Correct. The agencies that are listed as alternatives all make sense. Aviation incident: Police Department, Fire Department or Port Authority. Depending on the aviation incident, it has to be one of those running it. The real question is if there's any dispute, you want to know immediately who's in charge and that has to be OEM's responsibility.
MS. GORELICK: Thank you very much.
MR. GIULIANI: Thank you.
MR. KEAN: Commissioner Fielding.
MR. FRED F. FIELDING: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Mayor Giuliani, as your friend of years I'm very pleased to join with my fellow commissioners and join in their words and also my own personal admiration for you over the years. Not just for your public service over the years but for the inspirational performance that you gave too on that day after the attack as the symbol of resilience of not only New Yorkers but all Americans, and I'm very pleased and proud to say that to you. I'm, I think, the cleanup hitter here, so there are a couple of things I want to catch on.
But first of all, there's some confusion in my mind and others' as to the relationship between OEM and the Port Authority. For instance, if the Port Authority at Newark heard that there was a plane headed for Manhattan, could they communicate to the command center of OEM?
MR. GIULIANI: Yes. The Port Authority did have and I'm sure continues to have direct communication with OEM and frequent communication with OEM. We did exercises and drills with the Port Authority on a fairly frequent basis, including simulating a plane crash for this very reason, to make sure that the Port Authority, the Police Department, the Fire Department, the Nassau County people could all respond correctly. So they have direct communication with OEM. And the building, the World Trade Center, I think--you'll have to check with others that know the statistics, I think it may have been the most responded to building in the city. So they were--the police, the fire and the Port Authority were used to working together in that building. They do it, like, seven or eight times a day.
MR. FIELDING: Now, following up on something Governor Thompson asked you, my question is slightly different. Despite all of Bob Mueller's good efforts, and he's really grasped the situation and is dealing with it, in anybody's mind who observes him, from your background in law enforcement and as a mayor and in your various public services do you think that given the role traditionally, culturally of the FBI and its strong emphasis on law enforcement that that's an organization that can indeed not only perform law enforcement, but also counter terrorism? Or would it be, in a perfect world, a better thing for us to consider putting that task and separating those tasks?
MR. GIULIANI: That's a very--that's a debate that has pros and cons and it's very difficult to decide which is a better way to do it.
MR. FIELDING: But it's our messy debate and we need your help.
MR. GIULIANI: (Laughs.) But you have to decide it and do it. I would say that there's probably more gained than lost by having it in the same agency. By having the criminal investigation and the counterintelligence for domestic purposes in the same agency. And that if we figure out how to have them communicating better so that we don't have the "wall" and we don't have the separation and we have, you know, sharing of information, we're probably going to gain a lot more from that. If it were just a separate domestic counterintelligence agency, I think it would be kind of isolated in terms of its ability to realistically pick up what's going on.
When I was asked earlier by some of the other panel members about the work between the FBI and the local police, the FBI--and I'm sure the director understands this, but they have to accomplish it--has to think of the local police as arms of the FBI because very often they're the ones who can pick up the intelligence that's going to trigger the possibility of an attack, like the one I mentioned. And there are probably, you know, half-a-dozen others where the initial information came about because of good street police work. So if you had just an intelligence agency that was separated from the law enforcement agency, I think it would tend to become even more isolated than the situation we've had with the FBI. The idea of having those relationships with police departments is a valuable part of their intelligence gathering.
MR. FIELDING: Okay, thank you. One follow up question and one final question, excuse me. We haven't talked about the aftermath of 9/11, but I know that FEMA had a major role in the city, and I guess at one point there must have been some question as to whether there needed to be a federalization of the cleanup effort. And we really could use your comments on what happened because we've had no information on that.
MR. GIULIANI: Well, the reason the city of New York is such a remarkable place and I have such strong feelings about all these people in the Fire Department and the Police Department and OEM and elsewhere is they weren't attacked once. They were attacked in two months three times, with attacks that would be considered historic in nature in terms of proportion. First, the attacks of September 11, 2001, then anthrax in NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, the governor's office, my office, a number of places--a new component--first time America ever, ever had to deal with that. And then just a month later we had an airplane crash in Rockaway, tragic, horrible airplane crash that at least in the initial moments appeared to be a terrorist attack.
FEMA was remarkably helpful and played exactly the right role. Joe Allbaugh came here within 24 hours. He took over the Javits Convention Center, they deployed search and rescue operatives from Indianapolis, from Chicago, from Baltimore, from Phoenix, Arizona. We had--Governor Thompson will appreciate this. We had Chicago police officers directing traffic in New York City. I don't know where they sent the people, but you know--(laughter) --they were directing traffic in New York City.
And we got tremendous help from FEMA and could not have gotten through it without all of that help. And they made the right decision for New York. It might be a different decision some place else. Because you have all these resources, at that time a 40,000 police departme |
