sisyphusshrugged | try and cast your mind back to when you were all our brothers and sisters

You have to give our guys this: they tried.

The independent federal commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks came to New York yesterday and offered the most detailed public accounting yet of how the heroic response of police officers and firefighters was undermined by poor planning, inadequate equipment, faulty communication and generations-old interagency rivalries.
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At an emotional hearing about a mile from the site of the catastrophe, several members of the commission said the city's emergency-response plan was badly flawed at the time of the attack and suggested that 32 months after the attacks, the nation's largest city remains dangerously unprepared to deal with another terrorist strike.

"I think the command and control and communications of this city's public service is a scandal," said John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member who was Navy secretary in the Reagan administration. The city's disaster-response plans, he added, were "not worthy of the Boy Scouts, let alone this great city."

He said a new emergency-response plan announced last week by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg "simply puts in concrete a clearly dysfunctional system" in which the Police and Fire Departments squabble over control at disaster scenes. The vice chairman of the panel, Lee H. Hamilton, described the mayor's plan as a "prescription for confusion." [Excerpts from the commission's staff report, Page B6.]

The session was the first of two days of hearings in New York that have been billed as the first rigorous public inquiry into the city's emergency response on Sept. 11, when 2,749 people were killed. Under sharp questioning, current and former leaders of the city's Police Department, Fire Department and the Port Authority Police Department defended their performance, sometimes angrily. They insisted that their agencies had cooperated well on the day of the attacks and had since made improvements in preparedness.

Surely under the circumstances we've rallied around them, right? I remember somebody with a bullhorn saying that the world heard their voices.

Apparently he was referring to the world outside Washington.

New York City is expected to receive $96 million in federal antiterrorism aid this year, roughly half the amount it received in 2003, prompting the city's new emergency management commissioner to add his voice yesterday to those urging Washington to change the way funds are disbursed.

The commissioner, Joseph F. Bruno, who took office last month, said it was illogical to base so much of the states' shares of homeland security funds on population, since doing so does not take into account other factors that make some places, like New York City, more likely to be attacked. Currently, states receive the same base amount plus additional funds depending on population.

Testifying at a joint hearing of the City Council's finance and public safety committees, Mr. Bruno cited a statistic often used by critics of the federal allocation formula showing that Wyoming's share comes to $38 per person while New York City's is $5. New York City officials estimate that the city would receive $400 million a year if the formula considered the many likely targets here.

"We've got to have threat-based funding - we need it," Mr. Bruno said. "It's absurd to do it any other way."

A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security in Washington said no one was available yesterday to comment on how funds are allocated to states.

The aid New York expects this year has dropped despite heightened concerns about security at the Republican National Convention in August, and a lobbying effort by members of Congress and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. At the hearing yesterday, Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., chairman of the public safety committee, said the Bloomberg administration "needs to do better" to make its voice heard on the issue.

"Ninety-six million is a ridiculous figure," Mr. Vallone said, adding that the federal funds allocated to New York "aren't sufficient to keep us as safe as we should be."

Speaking to reporters after the hearing, Mr. Bruno defended the city administration, saying that it has been doing everything it could to win more federal antiterrorism money and that "it's illogical to think anything else."

Is it?

It might serve you to know that Mr. Bruno is a wholly owned subsidiary of Great and Good Bush partisan Governor Pataki.

Or the other way around. No-one's quite sure.

I double dog dare Our Fearless Leader to wade into a crowd of firemen with a bullhorn when he gets here.