Group's leader says image as a Sept. 11 hero is a myth
 
By Ken Herman
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Copyright 2007 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

WASHINGTON — Meet Harold Schaitberger, a man on a mission to derail GOP front-runner Rudy Giuliani's presidential campaign by puncturing what he sees as the myth of the former New York mayor as a Sept. 11, 2001, hero.

Schaitberger, general president of the International Association of Fire Fighters, succeeded Wednesday in helping to make Giuliani the topic of the day, even though he skipped the organization's presidential forum.

The association's members heard from 11 candidates from both parties and won't pick a favorite until Labor Day. But it has singled out one not likely to get the money and muscle that comes with the endorsement.

It's "incredible," Schaitberger told reporters, that "the foundation of [Giuliani's] candidacy is on the back of 9/11. And I believe that is a pretty shaky foundation once some of the facts and the truth are known."

Earlier this week, Giuliani sought to play down the association's animus toward him.

"The firefighters are my heroes from the time I was a little boy," he said.

"As far as any particular union is concerned, they have lots of agenda items," he said. "But I think that I have a real bond with firefighters. Unions — some agree, some disagree, and some have different agenda items. Some tend to be heavily Democratic unions, so you're going to have all kinds of agendas there."

Some firefighters believe Giuliani left them ill-equipped to respond to the 9/11 attacks and turned his back on first responders' remains in the rubble.

Schaitberger ascribes nefarious motives for Giuliani's November 2001 decision, later partly reversed, to end the search for remains. It was not coincidental, he said, that Giuliani's decision came "within two days after retrieving the gold and the assets of the Bank of Nova Scotia" from the debris.

The bank had a vault under one of the towers.

It was then, Schaitberger said, that Giuliani had "an epiphany that the workers on the pile were at risk." It was then, he said, that Giuliani opted for a "scoop-and-dump-it" operation that took remains to a dump site.

In Iowa, where GOP caucus voters will be among the first to pass judgment on Giuliani, anything that questions his hero status is potentially problematic, according to University of Iowa political scientist Peverill Squire.

"For the most part, his image here is really built around his response to 9/11," Squire said.

"It's hard to go up against firefighters," Squire noted. "That's not a battle that any politician wants to fight."

Giuliani is fighting it cautiously, saying nice things about firefighters, ascribing political motives to Schaitberger and responding with endorsements from South Carolina firefighters and a letter from a retired New York firefighter whose son died in the World Trade Center.

"There is no one who respects firefighters and first responders more than Rudy Giuliani," Lee Ielpi said in the letter released by the Giuliani campaign.

The letter called the association's claims "offensive and inaccurate."

Giuliani was invited to Wednesday's forum. After initially accepting, he canceled last week, citing scheduling conflicts, according to Schaitberger.