Jerry Hauer, the former director of the Mayor's Office of Emergency Management in New York City, has been in a fight recently with Rudy Giuliani over who selected the site for the doomed emergency command center in World Trade Center 7. Mr. Hauer has said recently that Mr. Giuliani is living in his "own reality" by suggesting it was Mr. Hauer's preference. Well, in this clip from 2004, Mr. Hauer says he "absolutely" favored the WTC 7 location:
While this may or may not be a great "gotcha" for the former mayor, it strikes me that blaming someone else for a decision that didn't work out is not quite the "leadership" people are looking for from the "hero of 9/11." He should just defend the decision on its merits, since it was ultimately his.
And, I think, on the merits he'd have a very good case. Hindsight is 20/20. Putting the command center in Brooklyn could have made it very difficult to get to in a different kind of attack (say, one on the Brooklyn Bridge). Putting it underground was impractical (too many water main breaks in New York). And it would have been an ideal location except for one scenario — the World Trade Center falling and compromising WTC 7.
Maybe an attack bringing down the towers should have been the assumption — but it doesn't sound like an assumption many people would have made on September 10, 2001.
UPDATE: Here's Mr. Giuliani talking about Mr. Hauer's recommendation on Fox News:
And here's the transcript of the Fox appearance:
WALLACE: Nine-eleven. No one questions your courage or your leadership in the days after 9/11, but one question has come up that I'm very curious about.
You put the emergency response command center in the World Trade Center in 1997, even though your director of emergency management suggested -- recommended that you not put it there because it had been a target in 1993. Why'd you do that?
GIULIANI: My director of emergency management recommended 7 World Trade Center, and that was...
WALLACE: I have got a copy right here of Jerry Hauer's directive to you. And there were meetings in which Jerry Hauer said that it's a bad idea. And the police chief, Howard Safir, said it was a bad idea.
GIULIANI: Jerry Hauer recommended that as the prime site and the site that would make the most sense, and he recommended it because...
WALLACE: Then why did he say the building -- he said it's not -- the place in Brooklyn is not as visible a target as buildings in Lower Manhattan.
GIULIANI: He recommended that site as the site that would be the best site. It was largely on his recommendation that that site was selected.
And the reason that that site made sense was it was also the location of the customs service, the Secret Service and a number of the federal agencies, some of which I'm not even sure I can mention at this date, that we had to be in contact with.
And we also had backup centers at the police department. In Brooklyn, we had another backup center, and we had a virtual command center. So when that command center was inoperable, within a half hour of September 11 we were able to move -- or within a half hour on September 11 we were able to move immediately to another command center.
So the way you're interpreting it, it was as if that was the one fixed command center. It was not. There were backup command centers, and it was a virtual command center, and it was selected because that's where all the federal agencies were that we would have to be in contact with, including some that would give you the intelligence that you needed during an attack.
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