If there is a more dangerous, more dishonest fraud than Rudolph Giuliani running for president, I don't know of him or her. Yes, Romney is a flip-flopping, lying hack, but even he doesn't have the instinct for authoritarianism and double-talk that "Rudy" has. Testimony that Giuliani gave to the 9/11 Commission (You remember that one, don't you? The one Bush tried to kill?) reveals a far different picture than the false one that Giuliani and his toads have been trying to sell the American people. Giuliani has tried to push the fiction that he was aware of the threat long before it materialized. The record says otherwise. Details can be found here:
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."
Hmmm. An FBI run by close friend and endorser Louis Freeh, who was wasting FBI resources on investigating the Clintons instead of devoting his manpower to fighting terrorism. Here, from Salon in 2002, is an interesting portrait of Freeh, from which I will quote at length:
Freeh was expert in political survival, some say, forging an alliance with top Republicans after he'd turned against the president who appointed him. And though he still wins strong grades from some lawmakers and analysts, the critics say his eight years on the job may have left the agency -- and the nation -- vulnerable.
"If people are looking for a scapegoat, I'd nominate Louis Freeh," says Ronald Kessler, author of "The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI."
It's no secret the FBI suffered a series of embarrassments during Freeh's tenure, some of them deadly. They include the botched handling of the investigations into Waco and Ruby Ridge; the bombing at the Atlanta Olympic Village and the heavy-handed tactics used against Richard Jewell; the breakdown of the FBI crime labs; the inept pursuit of suspected atomic spy Wen Ho Lee; the belated discovery of turncoat agent Richard Hanssen; and the failure to deliver thousands of documents to defense attorneys during the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
The FBI fiascoes seemed to come like clockwork under Freeh, and they continue to roll out to this day. A recently uncovered March 2000 memo reveals that agents mistakenly destroyed evidence gathered in an investigation involving Osama bin Laden.
Yet Freeh has remained largely unscathed.
An episode just last summer showed the continuing esteem he enjoyed on Capitol Hill. During confirmation hearings for Mueller, Sen. Orin Hatch, R-Utah, continued to heap praise upon Freeh, "an extraordinary public servant" who, he said, "accomplished a great deal during his tenure to modernize and restructure the FBI so it can handle the challenges of the future."
And while Mueller took over as director only a week before Sept. 11, critics and press accounts have focused on his role. Freeh has managed to avoid the spotlight. Currently a senior vice chairman for credit card giant MBNA Bank, he has stayed away from the press since September, and he did not return calls seeking comment. Nor did three of his former deputies.
"Freeh is being smart by keeping a low profile. He doesn't want to get involved," says Kessler. "But people who follow the bureau know Mueller is trying to rectify his [Freeh's] problems."
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"He should be asked to testify as well as the rest of the ranking officers," adds I.C. Smith, a retired FBI special agent in charge and 25-year veteran of the bureau. "I'm not a Mueller and Ashcroft fan, but this didn't happen on their watch. It was Louis Freeh's team in place when the [9/11] terrorists were setting up their infrastructure and exploiting the system. He can't avoid that."
Detractors blame Freeh for a leadership style that featured arrogance, cronyism and micromanagement. Since 1994, all new FBI agents have to take a polygraph test, but Smith says Freeh left office without ever submitting to one. He tried to promote to deputy a friend implicated in the Ruby Ridge killing. And he personally approved the use of photographic suspect lineups during the Oklahoma City bombing investigation, a decision usually left to field agents.
Yet thanks in part to his high-profile fights with Clinton, Freeh managed to skate by as director and was never held accountable by the Republican Congress or the Beltway press, two influential groups that today seem indifferent to revisiting Freeh's troubled reign in search for clues to what's gone wrong at the FBI.
Former Clinton administration officials say they recognized the problem. But Clinton, crippled by the self-inflicted wounds of a sex scandal, refused to take action against the FBI director.
"We viewed Freeh as a guy who was wholly incompetent but who held on to power by making himself useful to the press and Republicans on the Hill," says one Clinton White House aide. "He was a political opportunist who played Clinton, and he's managed to escape the judgment of history for his mismanagement of the FBI."
Freeh: an incompetent, arrogant liar. It figures that he and Giuliani would form an alliance. Like attracts like, after all.
Yes, these are the people who will "keep America safe", the people who "understand terrorism", the people who are the only hope for our country. I've said it repeatedly and I'll say it again: Giuliani and his henchmen are downright dangerous to the survival of this country as a democratic republic. Giuliani is a liar and a bungler of the first order. He has consistently run on the mangled and burned corpses of the 9/11 dead, using their deaths in a disgusting, self-serving manner to advance his personal ambitions. He MUST BE STOPPED. We cannot allow four more years of Republican executive branch dictatorship in this country. I will continue to pepper away at this "Little man in search of a balcony" to use Jimmy Breslin's wonderful phrase. How about you?
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