Emotions run high at 9/11 hearing

NEW YORK -- The Sept. 11 Commission wanted to focus yesterday on lessons learned that could improve the response to a future terrorist attack, but emotional relatives of those killed in the World Trade Center destruction wanted them to talk more about what went wrong 2 ½ years ago.

In the second day of hearings on the emergency response effort during the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the commission staff reported that 85 percent of the nation's critical infrastructure is controlled by the private sector and proposed voluntary emergency preparedness standards for companies to plan evacuations, communications, and how to quickly resume operations after a major attack.

But those forward-looking suggestions were overshadowed by emotional outpourings from family members in the audience, who interrupted the testimony of former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani to denounce the commission for spending too much time praising him instead of asking tough questions about what went wrong on the day of the attacks.

"Three thousand people murdered does not mean great leadership . . . Let me ask the real questions!" one man shouted before being escorted from the hearing. Others chanted, "Talk about the radios!" -- a reference to lingering questions over why some firefighters who perished in the second tower apparently never heard a warning to evacuate.

"I felt there were a lot of questions that were not asked today," Maureen Bosco, whose son Richard Bosco was among the nearly 3,000 people killed in the collapse of the twin towers, said after the hearing.

In contrast to the tough questioning during previous hearings that examined the performance of such agencies as the Federal Aviation Administration, the FBI, and the CIA, the tone struck by both the commission and its staff was comparatively gentle as they assessed the city's leaders and its fire and police departments, which lost 403 in the rescue effort.

No commissioners asked Giuliani why he decided to put New York's emergency operations center on the 23d floor of a building near the twin towers instead of far away from any likely target, even though that was a topic of discussion the previous day. The center had to be evacuated early in the crisis and was useless during the rescue effort.

In addition, the commission's staff reports shied away from offering judgments about the performance of the city's emergency responders.

The staff inadvertently handed out an early draft of an interim report to some reporters in the morning, disclosing that they had decided to strip out many critical comments they initially intended to make. For example, they deleted a comment that said that leaders of the city's fire and police departments, which have historically been rivals, never communicated during the crisis.

The final draft did, however, push the idea that the city must overhaul its emergency planning to integrate its command system for the two agencies, so that they can share information about the situation instead of working from separate headquarters.

Giuliani's testimony was dominated by a narrative in which he recounted what he saw and did on the morning of the attacks. Emotional hecklers interrupted when he suggested some heroic firefighters stayed inside the towers after the evacuation order to assist civilians. After the shouting, the former mayor looked down and murmured that their feelings were understandable. "When you undergo the losses, it's very understandable," he said.

After the hearing, commission chairman Thomas Kean pointed out that the panel had already questioned Giuliani behind closed doors.

"What people forget is that we've met with every one of these witnesses for hours and all the questions have been asked already," he said. "We've been accused in the past of being too tough on witnesses. . . . We do our best."

Giuliani said federal officials never told him about the surge in intercepted Al Qaeda "chatter" about a coming attack, but said it might not have made a difference if that information had been shared because the city had been on high alert for terrorism for several years.

"I can't honestly tell you we would have done anything differently," he said. "We were doing at the time all that we could think of, consistent with the city being able to move, to protect the city."

New York's current mayor, Michael Bloomberg, strongly denounced criticism of the city's emergency workers, saying it was amazing the rescue worked as well as it did.

An estimated 25,000 civilians who were in the towers made it out safely that morning. Most of those who died were trapped in floors above where the fires raged, and nothing could be done for them.

"Using hindsight, self-styled experts will always be able to say we could have done things differently, but in the real world you experience the fog of war with sirens wailing, communications systems overloading, and rumors of all sorts flying about," Bloomberg said.

He urged the commission to push Congress to change the way it distributes homeland security funding, which he called "pork barrel politics at its worst" and said had resulted in New York getting $5.40 per person, while rural Wyoming got $38.50 per person in the 2004 federal budget.

He pointed out that the Bush administration changed that formula to direct more funds to seven highest-risk areas in the country in its proposed 2005 budget, but Congress has now added 73 other areas to the high-risk list, further diluting New York's share, even though it, along with Washington D.C., is far more likely to be attacked again, according to the commission.