Exploiting 9/11
James Chamblee
continues to shamelessly exploit 9/11. If the real truth ever comes out not
only won't he be seen as a "hero" but he will be viewed as one of the
terrorists. America, you are being conned big time. See
http://baltech.org/lederman/ for the Giuliani-9/11 story and his real part
in it.
NY Times
May 12, 2002
A Mayor's Recollections of an Unforgettable Day
By ADAM NAGOURNEY
We were into something different than any of us had ever prepared for, or
any of us had thought we would live through. I realized I was in some kind
of horrible, awful, horrific human experience.'' - Rudolph W. Giuliani
IT was silent in the editing booth overlooking Bryant Park - a glass corner
office on the 26th floor of the Grace Tower - as a handful of editors and
producers settled back to watch the former mayor of New York speak those
words on a television monitor attached to a bank of computers. It remained
absolutely quiet for the next 60 minutes, except for the sound of scribbling
on pads, through a relentless and riveting succession of video and still
pictures, narrated by Mr. Giuliani and his former City Hall aides as they
again lived the events of Sept. 11.
The HBO documentary being edited that April evening, ``In Memoriam: New York
City, 9/11/01,'' had begun five months earlier at City Hall, in the form of
a project Mr. Giuliani proposed amid the tumult engulfing his city. He and
his senior aides, Mr. Giuliani said, needed to set down their detailed
recollections of what happened on Sept. 11 - ``of getting the city to the
end of that day and the beginning of the next,'' as he described it in an
interview - in a videotaped oral history. It needed to be completed before
memories began to fade or to become confused by other accounts of the day.
Mr. Giuliani likened it to the oral histories he had seen of Holocaust
survivors.
Yet what makes ``In Memoriam,'' which will have its premiere on May 26 at 9
p.m., stand apart is what appears on the screen to accompany the soundtrack
provided by Mr. Giuliani and familiar figures like Bernard B. Kerik, the
former police commissioner, Thomas Von Essen, the former fire commissioner,
and Judith Nathan, his companion.
Faced with the numbing abundance of news coverage - the familiar images of
planes exploding into the towers, of buildings collapsing, of men and women
fleeing the site and firefighters and police officers rushing into the heat
of it - the producers turned to the public to provide the pictures. The
documentary is largely made up of videotape shot by 118 people who were in
the vicinity of the World Trade Center that morning. They responded to word
of mouth, advertisements HBO placed in community newspapers and Web
postings.
There is, inevitably, some familiar network news footage, collected from 16
news organizations. But three-quarters of the hourlong documentary is
contributions from people like Jim Huibregtse, a professional still-life
photographer who had his video camera with him that morning because he was
taking his son to his first day of preschool on Greenwich Street. Or Jon
Alpert, an independent filmmaker who made his way to ground zero and stayed
there for 12 hours, helped by the fact that he wasn't an accredited member
of the news media: since he did not have a police pass, no one thought to
eject him.
There is a particular intensity to this unpolished photography. As a
camcorder follows a man plummeting down the side of one tower, someone
standing to the side of the photographer shouts in indignation: ``Come on,
don't take pictures of that! What's the matter with you?'' The abundance of
angles and perspectives - from nearby apartment terraces and roofs, from the
street, from across the water in Brooklyn and Staten Island and from a
police helicopter flying over the smoking towers - is edited into a jarring
chronology sure to catapult anyone who was in New York back to that bright
and sunny morning.
``Some of it is very difficult to watch,'' said Brad Grey, Mr. Giuliani's
agent and a producer of the documentary. ``But it should be if we are to
realize the original intent of this - which was to create a real, historic
record of what happened so that generations to come can learn from it and
understand it.''
Even Mr. Giuliani said he found parts of ``In Memoriam,'' which includes a
warning that it ``might be difficult for some viewers,'' hard to sit
through. ``For someone who was an eyewitness, it puts you there,'' he said.
``It puts you there at what the cloud looked like, what the shock of its
coming down was like. It shows the crowd about the way I remembered, which
was frightened, running away and moving away, but not chaotic and not
panicked.
``You know, it's very sad, and it's very oppressive in a way. But that's
what the day was like.''
Mr. Giuliani said watching the documentary stirred the most disturbing
memories of that day: of when he pulled up next to the north tower and saw
people jumping to the ground around him. ``When I see that scene of a man
jumping - which looks like the first one that I saw - it brings back all
that sense that this is something surreal, but it isn't, because you're
living through it,'' he said.
As it turned out, HBO found a video clip of Mr. Giuliani taken, it seems, at
that very moment. His head drops as it follows the trajectory down the side
of a tower, then snaps to the side, his face an expression of unimaginable
distress.
``In Memoriam'' begins with the assertion that the Sept. 11 attack was ``the
most documented event in history''; by the end of the documentary, that
seems incontrovertible. HBO collected close to 1,000 hours of film and tape,
so much material that editors could not log it all.
``It wasn't like a thought, a brilliant thought,'' said Sheila Nevins,
executive vice president for original programming at HBO, barefoot on a
couch and staring at the three screens in front of her. ``It was like an
accidental happening. It was like, `I can't do what they're doing because
they did it. So what can I do that they're not doing?'''
Ms. Nevins approached Mr. Giuliani with more than a little trepidation, her
impression largely informed by her Manhattan friends and associates' opinion
of him - or rather, their pre-Sept. 11 opinion. She burst out laughing when
asked if she had voted for Mr. Giuliani, recalling his attempt to cut off
money to the Brooklyn Museum of art when it presented an exhibition he
considered blasphemous.
``No, no, no, no, no,'' she said. ``I went to the Brooklyn Museum in spite
of him. So, no, no, no, not at all. And I told him.''
More than that, Ms. Nevins wondered if Mr. Giuliani would be able to carry
the weight of the documentary, as its principal narrator. ``When we went
down the first time to meet him, I thought, what did I get myself into?''
she said. ``What if he is no good? What if he can't speak? What if he's
mean? But he brought an energy to his story that was appropriate to the
event.''
``In Memoriam'' contains some disturbing imagery, and the HBO editors were
debating until the very last moment what the public could endure watching
this soon after the event. While there are repeated shots of bodies tumbling
to the ground, Ms. Nevins said the editors used wide angles, blurred the
faces and drained them of color. ``We left out a lot of stuff,'' she said.
``We left out people waving in the building. The shots of the people in the
windows. Three people jumping together, holding hands. And one shot, which
will probably be an historical shot one day, with a hand on the street and
people running away from it.''
What remains is no less devastating. In one set of interviews, Beth Petrone,
Mr. Giuliani's longtime personal assistant, talks about being on the steps
of City Hall as she watched a tower collapse, certain that her husband,
Capt. Terence S. Hatton of the New York Fire Department, had just died
before her eyes. She recalls grabbing at the dust that fell to the ground
around her, convinced that her husband's remains were in her hand. Later,
she talks about learning that she was pregnant, and speaks of her pregnancy
as a gift from God and her late husband.
``Do you think it's too depressing?'' Ms. Nevins inquired, untangling her
legs off the couch, after a screening.
It is a question Mr. Giuliani was wrestling with a month later. ``It will be
for a lot of people,'' he said. ``And the way you almost have to think about
it is, it is being done for history. And it may be too intense right now.
But it may be exactly what we need a year or two from now to remind
ourselves what this was all about.''
The former mayor paused. ``The fact is, sometimes when I look back at it, it
actually was more horrible than they've captured it. Despite the fact that
it's very, very disturbing, and very jolting, the actual event was even
worse than that.''
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