Over the last 24 hours, much of the political world has been pondering Rudy Giuliani’s misuse of resources to help cover-up his taxpayer-financed excursions with his mistress. In light of all the lingering questions, perhaps it’s best to pause for a moment — and shift our attention to another Giuliani scandal that’s just starting to emerge today.
The Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett and ABC News both have very damaging reports today on Giuliani’s secretive consulting firm striking up a business relationship with a Qataran emir accused of sheltering dangerous terrorists, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
Contracts awarded to Rudy Giuliani’s private security firm in the Gulf state of Qatar were overseen by a government minister suspected of harboring the al Qaeda terrorist who planned the 9/ll attacks, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, according to security consultants in the region.
New revelations about the extent of the contracts could pose a problem for a presidential contender who says he is the most qualified candidate to combat Islamic terrorism.
Since 2005, Giuliani Partners and its Giuliani Security & Safety (GS&S) unit has provided security consulting and advice in Qatar through contracts overseen by the country’s Interior Ministry, which is currently run by a member of the royal family who has long been accused of supporting al Qaeda, according to security consultants familiar with the area.
The current interior minister, Sheik Abdullah Bin Khalid al-Thani, was suspected of sheltering Mohammed at his farm and tipping him off to the arrival of CIA and FBI teams coming to arrest the al Qaeda strategist back in 1996, according to the National Security Council’s former chief counterterrorism adviser and ABC News consultant Richard A. Clarke, former CIA agent Robert Baer and a 2004 Congressional Research Service report.
Worse, Giuliani’s client is “also believed to have welcomed Osama bin Laden on two visits to the farm, according to an Oct. 10, 2007 CRS study.”
Giuliani has insisted that he must keep his client list secret and hidden from any and all public scrutiny. I think we’re staring to get a sense of why that is.
As Digby put it, “[Giuliani] is running almost entirely as an islamofasicst terrorist fighter. And here he is, after 9/11 kissing up to supporters of Osama bin Laden. For profit…. He’s been raking in millions selling ‘security’ to terrorist sympathizers. When you think about it, it makes perfect ‘Shock Doctrine’ sense.”
More from Barrett’s stunning piece:
Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city’s skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. Although a member of the emir’s own royal family had harbored the man who would later be identified as the mastermind of the attack—a man named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials, KSM—al-Thani rushed to New York in its aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, principally to the families of its victims. Rudy Giuliani, apparently unaware of what the FBI and CIA had long known about Qatari links to Al Qaeda, appeared on CNN with al-Thani that night and vouched for the emir when Larry King asked the mayor: “You are a friend of his, are you not?”
“We had a very good meeting yesterday. Very good,” said Giuliani, adding that he was “very, very grateful” for al-Thani’s generosity. It was no cinch, of course, that Giuliani would take the money: A week later, he famously rejected a $10 million donation from a Saudi prince who advised America that it should “adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause.” (Giuliani continues to congratulate himself for that snub on the campaign trail.) Al-Thani waited a month before expressing essentially the same feelings when he returned to New York for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly and stressed how important it was to “distinguish” between the “phenomenon” of 9/11 and “the legitimate struggles” of the Palestinians “to get rid of the yoke of illegitimate occupation and subjugation.” Al-Thani then accused Israel of “state terrorism” against the Palestinians. […]
In retrospect, Giuliani’s embrace of the emir appears peculiar. But it was only a sign of bigger things to come: the launching of a cozy business relationship with terrorist-tolerant Qatar that is inconsistent with the core message of Giuliani’s current presidential campaign, namely that his experience and toughness uniquely equip him to protect America from what he tauntingly calls “Islamic terrorists”—an enemy that he always portrays himself as ready to confront, and the Democrats as ready to accommodate.
The contradictory and stunning reality is that Giuliani Partners, the consulting company that has made Giuliani rich, feasts at the Qatar trough, doing business with the ministry run by the very member of the royal family identified in news and government reports as having concealed KSM—the terrorist mastermind who wired funds from Qatar to his nephew Ramzi Yousef prior to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and who also sold the idea of a plane attack on the towers to Osama bin Laden — on his Qatar farm in the mid-1990s.
Giuliani’s only hope is that traditional news outlets are too lazy, negligent, and distracted by haircuts and cleavage to turn this into the frenzy it deserves to be.
Come to think of it, if Giuliani is prepared to make that gamble, it’s probably a safe bet.