Rudi Giuliani, Michael Gorumba, and What the Talmud Teaches

Starting back in 2004 and 2005, Ray Ubinger, along with other researchers, analyzed the Naudet brothers/James Hanlon-produced documentary film, 9 11, and laid out a case that it constituted a coded portrayal of a sinister subtext underlying the attacks of September 11, 2001. Ubinger calls it "a snuff film."

In a December, 2005 thread at Democratic Underground, Strange Death of Michael Gorumba, he spells out this position:

"I posit that the Naudet-FDNY team had Michael Gorumba MURDERED (on August 28, 2001), maybe with a heart-attack-mimicking drug, for the specific purpose of advancing the plot and increasing the dramatic tension of the Naudet movie."

adding for good measure

"I am confident that Joseph Pfeifer and Jules Naudet had direct involvement in a murder against Mychal F. Judge, or/and filming Mychal F. Judge being murdered, inside WTC-1 on 9/11. I am strongly suspicious that James Hanlon and Eddie Fahey helped Pfeifer and Jules Naudet in this."

I subsequently looked into the case of Father Mychal Judge, and I am equally as confident as Ubinger that Judge's death was a premeditated, sacrificial murder executed by members of the New York City Fire Department for its value as public relations, and for the purposes of storytelling.

I hadn't looked into the death of Firefighter Michael Gorumba before now. He was the young probationary firefighter who died a line-of-duty death fighting a fire on Staten Island on August 28, 2001---just 13 days before the epochal attack that killed a further 343 of his brothers---and the story of his death serves in the film as a stylistic presage, or coded premonitory of what is to come.

In the DU thread, Ubinger mentions that

"He was reportedly found dead, alone in the firetruck, by a PLAINCLOTHES COP who just HAPPENED to be (wink, wink) passing by the scene of the fire."

In studying the media record available online, this reference remained a mystery to me---until recently, when by chance, I came upon a copy of the journalism that records it: an article in the Staten Island Advance from August 29, 2001, headlined, "Firefighter Felled By Apparent Heart Attack At Auto Shop Blaze," by Frank Donnelly and Ryan Lillis.

This article is both a primary and singular source for new information like this, elements which call into question the known media reporting on the event, and I have no doubt it was effectively suppressed by an active and determined agency for these past nine years. Its veracity can be judged by the standards of professional journalism, but in its effect it does more than further disintegrate the official narrative. By coming to light as it does now, it challenges our presumptions of how truth and reality can be known, which may be the ultimate lesson we have to learn from 9/11.

I have assembled a worksheet on Michael Garumba aimed at determining the facts of his death, as well as several other highly publicized uniformed-service fatalities, which taken together buttress a central point--- that the publicized demarcation between an individual's life and death can be manipulated by governments and authorities working in conjunction with a cooperative corporate media. In other words, death can be faked for political ends; with mock funerals for people still living but remaining in seclusion; or, with the help of agents and actors playing the roles of survivors and "family members," simulating the death of computer generated identities for consumption second-hand in newspapers and on television.

And nothing was more politically motivated than the 3,000 deaths on 9-11.

If death is faked to serve manipulative agendas, so are many aspects of life put to such use. Another reference from Ubinger's DU thread hints at this:

"In an intriguing side note, Rudy Giuliani scored political points by arranging for himself to give away Gorumba's sister at her wedding on September 15, 2001."

Ubinger is mistaken to classify Giuliani's performance following 9/11 as a political victory. The effect of his role was far deeper and more psychologically profound than that. A traumatized public needed a heroic leader to guide them in the aftermath, and who better to play the role than a foreknowledged participant who hadn't undergone the same traumatization process? A key player in front of the camera who likely had been given ample time and unlimited resources to prepare and rehearse for his role.

Not only was Giuliani immune from the psychic scorch of the millennial attack affecting the public, he was part of the operational planning, which for a scheme on the scale of 9/11 didn't stop when the second tower came down, or the third, for that matter. A road map for the aftermath was clearly set in place, at least until the Iraqi people stood up to the corruption of the American military occupation under Paul Bremer, and the tattered plans had to be recalibrated.

So the wedding of Michael Gorumba's sister, scheduled for the Saturday four days after the attacks, and the larger circumstances which necessitated a surrogate's role of escorting the bride down the aisle (in addition to her brother's death, her father and grandfather had both died within the year, with some accounts placing their deaths within the preceding few months,) afforded an opportunity that could function as a turning point, between the despair of the still yet undetermined losses, and a promised return to a hopeful normalcy. And what is more hopeful than a wedding?

Nothing in the 9/11 narrative has the fingerprints of psychologists and scriptwriters all over it as much as does Giuliani's wedding interlude.

And nothing could provide a more just irony than Giuliani, the man who informed his second wife he was leaving her by way of a city hall press conference, being fitted into such shoes.

It doesn't take the return of a prodigal-son newspaper article to make this case either. The record is replete with glaring inconsistencies and garish performances, which might have worked as public relations spin under the emotional shock of the moment, but it is startlingly galling to witness now.

A bride whose determined mother insists a wedding go forward two weeks after the sudden death of her 27-year-old, only son, with the loss of both her husband and father still fresh in memory, wouldn't let a little thing like 9/11 intervene, would she?

Is it normal to travel from this



to this, but while also sharing the communal experience of September 11th, only four days before?



Did this service that Giuliani volunteered to perform really require the presence of an international press corps there to record it? Supposedly, Giuliani's arrival outside the church caused the crowds gathered there to begin a chant of "USA! USA! USA!" that could be heard inside. His actual entrance as he walked down the aisle gave rise to spontaneousness applause by the attendees. Who exactly was doing whom a service in this scenario?

Only Giuliani Partners knows for sure.



I've spelled out the anomalous detail more fully here. But evidence of the writerly nature of this piece of the 9/11 narrative comes from another source---Mr. Giuliani himself.

He wrote about his experience in walking Miss Gorumba down the aisle in a first-person account that was included in a book Marlo Thomas edited, called, 'The Right Words at the Right Time." Published in 2004, it is a compilation of feel-good vignettes written by bold-face names, and Giuliani's fits in very nicely here. The beginnings of his story are available online at Google Books, and I've extracted small samples from the copyrighted work under provision of the Fair Use Act.

Because a problem presents itself. I found a second version of Mr. Giuliani's story online, on a page from the website of the Beth Tzedec Congregation of Toronto. Called Weddings and Funerals, Yom Tov and Yizkor, although no author's attribution is given, the page says it is copyrighted 2008, by the Beth Tzedec Congregation itself. I've also excerpted brief passages from it for the purpose of a comparison.

For it appears that one party is plagiarizing the other, in a classic case where long stretches are lifted directly from the same source, and while both follow an identical development, enough variation exists to hint that an attempt at disguise has been made.

EXAMPLE 1:

From: 'The Right Words at the Right Time, by Marlo Thomas & Rudolph Giuliani
Think about it. At this very moment I have two things in front of me: dealing with my son's death---which I have to do and will do---and dealing with my daughter's wedding. I choose to focus on the wedding. Why? Because life is a combination of great tragedy and great beauty. This family will deal with our tragedy. But we will also celebrate the beauty of this wedding with even greater joy.
**************************************
She told him: at this moment I have two choices in front of me: dealing with my son’s death — which I have to do and which I will do---and dealing with my daughter’s wedding. I choose to focus on the wedding because, she said, life is a combination of great tragedy and great beauty. We will deal with our tragedy. But we will also celebrate the beauty of this wedding and we will do so with even greater joy.”
From: Weddings and Funerals, Yom Tov and Yizkor, Beth Tzedec Congregation of Toronto,

EXAMPLE 2:

From: 'The Right Words at the Right Time, by Marlo Thomas & Rudolph Giuliani
The next day, I went to the wake. Mrs. Gorumba approached me with her daughter by her side. "This girl has lost all of the male relatives in her life," Mrs. Gorumba began, "and there's no one left to give her away on her wedding day. Even before this tragedy, our family admired you, so I want to ask you a favor: Could you walk my daughter down the aisle?"
"I would be honored," I told Mrs. Gorumba. I also said what was in my heart: "This was one of the most beautiful things anyone had ever asked of me.
**************************************
At the wake, Mrs. Gorumba came over to him, with her daughter. She said to him, “We have a favour to ask. My daughter has lost all of the male relatives in her life. In ten months she has lost her father, her grandfather, and now her brother. We have no one left in the family to walk her down the aisle. Our family has always admired you. I would like to ask you a favour. Would you walk my daughter down the wedding aisle, please?” Giuliani told her that this was one of the most beautiful things that anyone had ever asked him to do in his whole life. And he promised that he would be there.
From: Weddings and Funerals, Yom Tov and Yizkor, Beth Tzedec Congregation of Toronto,

I believe this represents the presence of a master underlying narrative script, which both versions use as their foundational source. I have long suspected that these sorts of scripts underlie the work of almost all the journalism written about 9/11. Thousands of such words could be churned out overnight, under the same conditions of shock and dismay then affecting the public. The authorial voice is remarkably consistent across different continents, with the same sappy sentimentality and lack of journalistic rigor crossing over socio-economic and educational divides. The message always stays on point, but nothing ever adds up or develops. It's as if they threw paint at a wall and saw what sticks and nobody ever called them on it.

I suppose it's possible, if unseemly, for the anonymous writer from the Toronto congregation to have lifted long sections from a 2004 copyrighted work to include in his or her own copyrighted work in 2008, but what links the two efforts is a deeper ideology, and definable agenda.

The well spring for the synthetic narrative development known as Giuliani's wedding march is unwittingly telegraphed at the close of the Beth Tzedec page, when wisdom from the Talmud is quoted:

"If a wedding procession arrives at a crossroads at the same time as a funeral procession, which goes first? The wedding procession. We always choose life."

Giuliani's wedding performance on September 15, 2001 was as much an intersection in our emotional manipulation as any literal traffic jam the Talmud proposes. So rather than being an intriguing side note to the murder of Michael Gorumba, as Ray Ubinger suggests, the story of the sister's wedding can be situated more centrally in the plot.

Michael Gorumba, with domestic partner Lori Campbell, and their son Andrew.



Time to memorialize the dead.







News articles on the LODD of FF Michael Gorumba, with full text and links to sources.

See also: www.spingola.com

"The Naudet film contains not one reference to the Fathers' Day fire: because it happened in June, just after they started filming, maybe it just was not as convenient to a Naudet script."

Not only was it not convenient---it was highly inconvenient!


Five years later, September 15, 2006, when Giuliani was running for President, he wrote a different version of the story on his presidential blog, Giuliani Blog-On the Road to the White House, "Rudy - Now More Than Ever: Promises Kept," Rather than asking him directly, an intermediary was involved:

"[Gail] Gorumba asked New York Fire Commissioner Tom Van Essen if he would ask Mayor Giuliani if he would do the honors.

"I would be honored to do it" Rudy replied instantly."