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9/11 Commission Comes to New York

Posted on: Tuesday, 18 May 2004, 06:00 CDT

NEW YORK - After months of focusing on federal failures, the commission probing the Sept. 11 attacks is looking at whether local missteps led to deaths that might have been avoided at the World Trade Center.

An increasingly vocal group of firefighters, relatives of the dead and other New Yorkers has been demanding a probe of the city's emergency response that would assign responsibility for systemic flaws.

"There are questions that have to be answered," said Bill Doyle, who lost his son in the trade center attack. "We can't bring our loved ones back, but we can have peace of mind that someone's being held accountable."

They may be disappointed when the commission investigating the attacks meets Tuesday in a university auditorium in Greenwich Village.

"There's more good news in the story than embarrassment, for sure," said one person who helped produce a pair of reports to be delivered Tuesday morning, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The city's emergency response improvements will be cited as a national model, commission members said.

"They've made their evaluation and made corrections and made their preparations. I think the rest of the country has a lot to learn from the New York experience," said Lee Hamilton, the commission's vice chairman.

"We will be looking at the questions of coordination and communication, and we look back, really, for the purpose of looking forward," Hamilton said Tuesday on NBC's "Today."

The goal, he said, is "trying to correct the problems that arose that day so that we don't repeat the mistakes if another catastrophe should strike."

The commission is expected to describe communication breakdowns between police and fire officials. Commission members and others familiar with its work said it would also seek to dispel what they called misconceptions that cast the city's rescue efforts in a poor light.

Among a host of questions, relatives of the dead want to know why firefighters in the north tower did not hear a police helicopter pilot's warning that it was nearing collapse.

Some fire officials believe that dozens of firefighters may have died because police did not communicate that warning to fire commanders. Police and fire commanders did not work together on Sept. 11 and the departments had incompatible radio systems.

But others who have studied the attacks said that a fire chief in the lobby of the north tower issued an evacuation order about the same time as the helicopter transmission. Firefighters may not have heeded the order, those people say, but the fact that it was issued makes the helicopter issue irrelevant.

Congress established the Sept. 11 commission to examine what led to the attacks and advise ways the government can do a better job of tracking terrorists and responding to an attack. The 10-member bipartisan panel is to issue its final report on July 26.

Last month, commissioners heard from President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, former President Bill Clinton, national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, former mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Mayor Michael Bloomberg are among the witnesses scheduled to testify Tuesday and Wednesday.

While some 2,749 people died, Giuliani has described the efforts of rescue workers on Sept. 11 as the "greatest rescue mission in the history of the United States."

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Associated Press writer Sara Kugler contributed to this report.

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On the Net:

http://www.9-11commission.gov/

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