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Thursday, October 25, 2007

Exploding the Rudy Mythos
Posted by Jill | 11:05 PM
Crooks and Liars has a segment from tonight's Countdown that if this country were populated by thinking human beings instead of reptilian brains would topple any hopes Rudy Giuliani had of becoming the next president. On tonight's show, David Shuster showed footage of Rudy Giuliani outright lying about his pre-9/11 terrorism concerns -- lies that fly in the face of his testimony before the 9/11 Commission. Wayne Barrett gives the details, and his story in the Village Voice should be read by anyone even remotely considering voting for this guy.

As if Giuliani's judgment in hiring a corrupt criminal like Bernard Kerik as his police chief and recommending him for the post heading up the Department of Homeland Security and in having a pedophile priest working for his campaign weren't bad enough, he's now engaged in an appalling campaign of revisionism:

A 15-page "memorandum for the record," prepared by a commission counsel and dated April 20, 2004, quotes Giuliani conceding that it wasn't until "after 9/11" that "we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda." According to the memorandum, Giuliani told two commission members and five staffers: "But we had nothing like this pre 9/11, which was a mistake, because if experts share a lot of info," there would be a "better chance of someone making heads and tails" of the "situation." (Such memoranda are not verbatim transcripts of the confidential commission interviews, but are described on the cover page as "100 percent accurate" notes taken by staffers, stamped "commission sensitive/unclassified" on the top of each page.)

Asked about the “flow of information about al Qaeda threats from 1998-2001,” Giuliani said: “At the time, I wasn’t told it was al Qaeda, but now that I look back at it, I think it was al Qaeda.” He also said that as part of one of his post-9/11 briefings, “we had in Bodansky, who had written a book on bin Laden.” Giuliani was referring to Yossef Bodanksy, the author of Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, which was published in 1999 and predicted “spectacular terrorist strikes in Washington and/or New York.” Giuliani wrote in his own book, Leadership, that Judi Nathan got him a copy of Bodansky’s prophetic work “shortly after 9/11,” and that he covered it in “highlighter and notes,” citing his study of it as an example of how he “mastered a subject.” Apparently, he also invited Bodansky to address key members of his staff.

Giuliani attributed his pre-9/11 shortcomings in part to the FBI, which was run by his close friend (and current endorser) Louis Freeh, and to the Joint Terrorism Task Force, an FBI-directed partnership with the NYPD. "We already had JTTF, and got flow information no one else got," he explained. "But did we get the flow of information we wanted? No. We would be told about a threat, but not about the underlying nature of the threat. I wanted all the same information the FBI had, and we didn't get that until after 9/11. Immediately after 9/11, we were made a complete partner." He added: "Without 9/11, I never would have been able to send an adviser to FBI briefings."

Tom Von Essen, who was Giuliani’s fire commissioner and is now a partner in his consulting company, Giuliani Partners, was asked at a confidential interview on April 7, 2004, what information he had “re terrorism prior to 9/11” and said: “I was told nothing at all.” Bernard Kerik, the police commissioner on 9/11, who also later joined Giuliani Partners, appeared to contradict Giuliani, insisting in his April 6 private appearance: “I never had a problem with the FBI.” Kerik, who did not become commissioner until August 2000, testified, however, that he did have a problem with his own department. “When I took over,” he said, “I was not happy with NYPD’s intelligence in general.” He said the intelligence division “had more to do with fighting criminal activity than terrorism” and that “within 3-4 months, I directed a total merger of NYPD intelligence.” In other words, Kerik indicated that he’d begun a reorganization of the department’s counterterrorism intelligence operations in 2001, as the Giuliani administration entered its final year—hardly a testament to its urgent understanding of the threat.


Rudy Giuliani is a charlatan, a snake oil salesman, and s complete poseur. That some readers of this very blog are considering voting for this aspiring fascist is sad -- and indicative that there is much more work to be done exposing the real Rudy Giuliani to American voters.

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