NEW YORK, Sept. 24 (UPI) -- New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, widely praised for his handling of the aftermath of the World Trade Center towers attacks, said Monday he hasn't had time to think about his political future.
Giuliani finishes his second term Dec. 31 and by law cannot have a third term. But that could be changed.
Two planes plowed into the twin towers in Lower Manhattan Sept. 11, the day the city was holding its mayoral primary. That primary is now set for Tuesday.
"I have not had time to think about, it," he told reporters asking about the possibility of staying on in City Hall. "I really can't talk about it. My concentration has been on these things (the disaster) and not on that and as soon as I have time I will think about it and I will talk to the people I trust the most and get their advice and then I will make a statement."
Giuliani said the number of missing and presumed dead had risen to 6,453, with 276 bodies recovered.
"I believe it is certainly the time to say that the chances of finding anyone would now involve a miracle and miracles have happened," Giuliani said. "It would be unfair to offer any broad hope to people.
Calling it a "delicate" subject, the mayor said the city was setting up a procedure where people who lost loved ones in the terrorist attack on the Twin Towers could apply beginning Wednesday for death certificates, even without recovery of the remains.
"We will set up teams of lawyers who are donating their services free of charge that would help prepare the papers that are necessary to put before the court if you want a death certificate," he said.
"There are some people, some families that have asked us about that and wanted to know what the process is and there are others who don't, but we will leave it up to the families."
"What they should know is that the rescue operation, the relief operation, is being conducted the same way it has been done in the past," he said, explaining, "because the kind of things we had to do to recover human remains, which means we have to do it carefully, we have to do it sensitively," he said.
He said the city was returning to normal, but with more car traffic than usual while the subways were not up to capacity. He appealed for more to take mass transit.
As for how Washington was handling the overall investigation into the attacks on the center and the Pentagon, Giuliani, the former U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said, "The president and the attorney general and the FBI are proceeding in exactly the right way. They are being very careful. They are organizing. They are very patient. They are collecting an enormous amount of information."
"If you can take away the resources of a terrorist group or you can limit it in much the same way we use to take away the financial resources of organized crime families, that is often as important as arresting them, because if you arrest them and leave their financial resources behind somebody else can come along and just keep operating the organization," he said.
"Maybe the person won't be as effective maybe the person won't be as charismatic but all the resources would be there for that person to reestablish the organization," the mayor said. "If you can do both you can find the people who did it but you can also take away all their financial resources then you can really crush them."
