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It is inevitable that Republican Presidential candidate Rudolph Giuliani should receive extra scrutiny during this anniversary week. Yesterday CBS' Jeff Greenfield offered his profile. Now John Yang chimes in for NBC recalling the then-mayor covered in dust from the razed skyscrapers: "That day embodies his campaign's central message--strong leadership in times of chaos." At the same time, Giuliani's "penchant for drama opens him up to charges of self-aggrandizement." As for his actual performance as mayor, Yang acknowledged a couple of criticisms: first, Giuliani probably should not have located his emergency command center in the Twin Towers after their bombing in 1993; second, a major factor in the deaths of so many firefighters that day was that Giuliani's FDNY had not equipped them with radios to communicate an evacuation order properly.
NBC stayed in New York City for an In Depth profile by Richard Engel of the covert counterterrorism unit run by the city's police department. The squad has high-flying unmarked helicopters with infrared cameras; it scans cruise ships for radioactive isotopes; it staffs bureaus with spies in ten foreign cities; its scuba diving teams search the hulls of cargo ships in the harbor--and sometimes the police department does old-fashioned police work, like assigning an Arab-speaking Yemenite-American cop to community outreach among the Middle Eastern immigrants of Brooklyn's Bay Ridge neighborhood.
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