As a presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani signature campaign issues are counter-terrorism and national security. His pitch consists of two main prongs — his performance on 9/11, and his expertise on what he describes as “Islamic terrorism.” Combined, Giuliani says that he, and he alone, understands the threats against the United States.
He’s used this con game to propel himself to the top of the Republican presidential race, but it’s always been a rather transparent deception. The first prong — his response to terrorism on 9/11 — has already been thoroughly debunked. Today, the WaPo’s Alec MacGillis has a devastating front-page piece on the second prong.
The former New York City mayor exhorts America to fight back in what he calls the “terrorists’ war on us” and accuses Democrats of reverting to their “denial” in the 1990s, when, he said, President Bill Clinton erred by treating terrorism as a law enforcement matter, not a war.
Democrats, he said in July, have “the same bad judgment they had in the 1990s. They don’t see the threat. They don’t accept the threat.”
It is a powerful message coming from the man who won global acclaim for his calm and resolve after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. But it is undercut by Giuliani’s record as mayor and by his public statements about terrorism since the 1990s, which document an evolution in thinking that began with a mind-set similar to the one he criticizes today.
Quite right. Giuliani’s basic pitch is that it’s foolish and irresponsible to consider counter-terrorism a matter of law enforcement and intelligence gathering. In the ’90s, when Islamic radicals would launch smaller domestic attacks, reckless Dems failed to recognize the broader threat. Unlike some Johnny-come-lately candidates, he’s been “studying Islamic terrorism for 30 years.”
In each instance, Giuliani’s pitch turns reality on its head.
On law enforcement and intelligence gathering, for example, Rudy Giuliani always embraced the same line as Democrats.
Giuliani expressed confidence that Islamic extremism could be contained through vigorous investigation by law enforcement agencies and prosecution in the court system — the same approach he now condemns.
His public warnings about the threat were infrequent. To the extent that he mentioned terrorism in his aborted run for the Senate in 2000, for example, it was to call for more spending on intelligence. Even in the weeks after Sept. 11, he framed the attacks in the language of crime, describing the hijackers as “insane murderers” and calling for restoration of the “rule of law.”
On recognizing the broader threat, Giuliani downplayed the significance of terrorism and urged others to do the same.
As terrorist incidents occurred sporadically in the 1990s, Giuliani sought to keep them in perspective. He urged against publicizing terror drills, to avoid needlessly scaring New Yorkers. He resisted branding as terrorism smaller-scale acts of Islamic violence in the city.
In late 1999, as authorities scrambled to unravel a worldwide “millennium plot” and a top former FBI official advised people not to attend the New Year’s Eve festivities in Times Square, Giuliani warned against overreacting. “I would urge people not to let the psychology of fear infect the way they act.”
Instead of “studying Islamic terrorism for 30 years,” Giuliani is exaggerating.
On the campaign trail, Giuliani particularly stresses the time he spent as U.S. attorney investigating Yasser Arafat for his role in the death of a wheelchair-bound New Yorker, Leon Klinghoffer, in the 1985 hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro. “I investigated Yasser Arafat before anybody knew who he really was,” Giuliani said in Las Vegas.
But prosecutors who led that case say Giuliani overstates his role. He assisted in the later, failed attempt to evict the Palestine Liberation Organization from its New York office, but the investigation of an Arafat link to the ship hijacking was handled by the Justice Department in Washington, say former Justice officials, including Stephen Trott, now a federal appeals judge.
Jay Fischer, a lawyer who represented the Klinghoffer family, said he never talked with Giuliani about the case. “When I heard [him] just in the last six months making a speech that he knew about terrorism because he had led the investigation, I recall turning around to my wife and saying, ‘That comes as news to me,’ ” Fischer said.
On the 1993 WTC attack, Giuliani is guilty of exactly what he’s accused others of doing.
As he campaigns for president, Giuliani describes the 1993 attack as having been forefront in his mind throughout his mayoralty, saying it was others who failed to reckon with the blast.
“Islamic terrorists killed Americans. Slaughtered Americans. Bombed the World Trade Center. Bombed it,” he said in July. “You know what the reaction of the Clinton administration at the time was? It was a crime. It was another group of murders. . . . Well, it wasn’t just another group of murders.”
But the 1993 attack also receded on City Hall’s radar screen. During Giuliani’s search for a police commissioner, terrorism did not come up, according to four candidates and three members of the hiring panel interviewed by Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins, authors of the 2006 book “Grand Illusion.” Giuliani never asked his successor as U.S. attorney about the cases against the attackers or about other terrorism cases, said a source familiar with the office who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Securing the World Trade Center against another attack also got little attention from City Hall.
In 2004, when he became a Bush-Cheney surrogate, Giuliani’s strident rhetoric went overboard, insisting that Islamic terrorism was part of an existential war for survival that “Clinton and others had failed to recognize.” If he includes himself among the “others,” his attack might have more of a ring of accuracy.
How this guy is taken seriously as a presidential candidate continues to astound me.