Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani said he and then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik went on ''gut'' and ''instinct'' in the moments immediately after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, telling Newsmax on Friday that without information, he asked God to ''please make it right.''
Giuliani said he concluded he would have to improvise after seeing a man jump from the 100th floor of one of the towers because, while the city had been training for a possible attack by Islamic terrorists since the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, it didn't have a contingency for planes being used as missiles.
''I grabbed my police commissioner Bernie Kerik and I said, 'Bernie, this is beyond anything we've done before,''' he told ''Spicer & Co.'' on the eve of the 20th anniversary of the attacks. '''And we're just going to have to make it up. We're going to have to go with our gut.
''And then we don't want to delay, because delay is the worst thing you can do in an emergency, so sometimes we're going to go with less than all the information we need. We have to go on our gut. And then how about we say a little prayer? And we say, God, you please make it right?'''
Giuliani called New York City ''basically a major emergency every week and a catastrophic one every two weeks.''
And while he and his administration had been informed repeatedly by the FBI of impending terrorists' intentions, they were more expecting a ''ground attack, the kind of attacks that were going on at that time in Israel, certainly not airplanes being used as missiles attacking our buildings.''
''I can't tell you how often I made a decision, and I said, 'Dear God, please make it right,''' Giuliani said.
Giuliani was widely praised for his deliberate and calm demeanor during the attacks that killed more than 2,600 in New York and its aftermath, earning the title ''America's mayor.''
But at least in the initial minutes and hours, his appearance was more for the public than a true reflection of what was going through his mind.
''I think it was more projecting for others,'' Giuliani said. ''You know, I had been through a lot of emergencies at that point. This was obviously much worse than any of them.''
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