More Giuliani 9/11 Lies Exposed, He Only Spent 29 Hrs. Total at Ground Zero

Posted by Adam Howard at 12:00 PM on August 17, 2007.

The New York Times reports that Rudy Giuliani has massively overstated, (surprise, surprise) the amount of time he put in at Ground Zero in the days and months following the terrorist attacks on September 11th. The article says:

A complete record of Mr. Giuliani's exposure to the site is not available for the chaotic six days after the attack, when he was a frequent visitor. But an exhaustively detailed account from his mayoral archive, revised after the events to account for last-minute changes on scheduled stops, does exist for the period of Sept. 17 to Dec. 16, 2001. It shows he was there for a total of 29 hours in those three months, often for short periods or to visit locations adjacent to the rubble. In that same period, many rescue and recovery workers put in daily 12-hour shifts.

As the folks at Talking Points Memo point out, that's a roughly 10 hours a month average compared to the average rescue workers, who typically averaged more than 400 hours on the site. We recently reported on what should go down as a fatal gaffe from Giuliani, where he boasted that he "spent as much time [at Ground Zero] as anyone...I was here five, six times a fay for four months. I kind of thought of it as living here." He then proceeded to say that in essence he too was a 9/11 worker.

A Queens first responder, Marvin Bethea, had the perfect retort: "Standing there doing a photo-op and telling the men, 'You're doing a good job,' I don't consider that to be working."

Long-time New Yorkers, or people like me who grew up in Jersey watching him make an ass of himself from nearby, have long suspected that Giuliani's vicious mean streak, his thin skin, his love of exaggeration and self congratulation and his blindness to the realities right in front of him would make him an enormously embarrassing presidential candidate, doomed to fail. But apparently lying about your response to the worst terrorist attack in our nation's history is a surefire way to become the GOP nominee.

Tagged as: 9/11, election08, giuliani, 9/11 rescue workers

Adam Howard is the editor of PEEK.