http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0732,barrett,77463,6.html/5
August 7th, 2007
BIG LIE
4.
'Democrats do not understand the full nature and scope of the
terrorist war against us.'
Giuliani blames what he calls Bill Clinton's "decade of denial" for
the mess we're in, and uses it to tarnish the rest of Clinton's party.
"Don't react, kind of let things go, kind of act the way Clinton did
in the '90s" is his favorite way of characterizing the Democratic
response to the threat of terrorism.
"We were attacked at Khobar Towers, Kenya, Tanzania, 17 of our sailors
were killed on the USS Cole, and the United States government, under
then-president Clinton, did not respond," Giuliani told the rabidly
anti-Clinton audience at Pat Robertson's Regent University.
"It was a big mistake to not recognize that the 1993 bombing was a
terrorist act and an act of war," he added.
"Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn't hear it. I thought it was
pretty clear at the time, but a lot of people didn't see it, couldn't
see it."
This is naked revisionism—and not just because of his own well
established, head-in-the-sand indifference to the 1993 bombing.
It's as unambiguously partisan as his claim that on 9/11, he looked to
the sky, saw the first fighter jets flying over the city well after
the attack, and thanked God that George W. Bush was president.
Bob Kerrey, the former Democratic senator who sat on the 9/11
Commission, put it fairly:
"Prior to 9/11, no elected official did enough to reduce the threat of
Al Qaeda. Neither political party covered itself in glory."
Giuliani's lifelong friend Louis Freeh, the former FBI head who has
endorsed him for president, wrote in his 2005 autobiography that "the
nation's fundamental approach to Osama bin Laden and his ilk was no
different after the inauguration of January 21, 2001, than it had been
before."
As Bob Kerrey noted, the five Democrats and five Republicans on the
9/11 Commission said much the same thing. Freeh added that both
administrations "were fighting criminals, not an enemy force" before
9/11, and Giuliani is now making precisely the same policy point, but
limiting his critique to Clinton.
Even the fiercely anti-Clinton Freeh credited the former president
with "one exception," saying his administration did go after bin Laden
"with a salvo of Tomahawk missiles in 1998 in retaliation for the
embassy bombings in East Africa."
The best example of Giuliani's partisan twist is the USS Cole, which
was attacked on October 12, 2000, three weeks before the 2000
election.
The 9/11 Commission report found that in the final Clinton months,
neither the FBI, then headed by Freeh, nor the CIA had a "definitive
answer on the crucial question of outside direction of the attack,"
which Clinton said he needed to go to war against bin Laden or the
Taliban.
All Clinton got was a December 21 "preliminary judgment" from the CIA
that Al Qaeda "supported the attack."
A month later, when the Bush team took office, the CIA delivered the
same "preliminary" findings to the new president.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told the commission "there
was never a formal, recorded decision not to retaliate for the Cole"
by the Bush administration, just "a consensus that 'tit-for-tat'
responses were likely to be counterproductive."
Rice thought that was the case "with the cruise missile strikes of
1998," meaning that the new administration was deriding the one
response that Freeh praised.
Bush himself told the commission that he was concerned "lest an
ineffective air strike just serve to give bin Laden a propaganda
advantage."
With all of this evidence of bipartisan paralysis, Giuliani has
nonetheless limited his Cole attack to Clinton.
It is all part of a devoutly partisan exploitation of his 9/11 legend.
Though Giuliani volunteered to execute bin Laden himself after 9/11,
he's never criticized Bush for the administration's failure to capture
him or the other two top culprits in the attack, Mullah Omar and Ayman
al-Zawahiri, a silence more revealing than anything he actually says
about terrorism.
The old evidence that Bush relied on Afghan proxies to capture bin
Laden at Tora Bora, and the new evidence that he outsourced him to
Pakistani proxies in Waziristan, evokes no Giuliani bark.
Imagine if a Democratic president had done that—or had said, as Bush
did, that "I just don't spend that much time" on bin Laden.
At the Republican National Convention in 2004, Giuliani began his
celebrated speech by fusing 9/11 and the Iraq War as only he could do,
reminding everyone of Bush's bullhorn declaration at Ground Zero that
the people who brought down these towers "will hear from us," and
declaring that they "heard from us in Iraq"—a far more invidious
connection on this question than ***** Cheney has ever made.
Giuliani even went so far, in his 2004 testimony before the 9/11
Commission, to claim that if he'd been told about the presidential
daily briefing headlined "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.,"
which mentioned New York three times, "I can't honestly tell you we
would have done anything differently."
Pressed about whether the city would have benefited from knowing about
a spike in warnings so vivid that the CIA director's "hair was on
fire," Giuliani just shrugged.
He'd seen many close friends buried after 9/11, but his answer had
more to do with the November election than the September attack that
took their lives.
"They don't see the threat," he derides the Democrats wherever he
goes, ridiculing even their adjectives.
"During the Democratic debates, I couldn't find one of them that ever
mentioned the words 'Islamic terrorist'—none of them," he contends.
"If you can't say the words 'Islamic terrorists,' then you have a hard
time figuring out who is our biggest enemy in the world."
In fact, during the three Democratic debates, the candidates referred
to "terrorism," "terrorists," or "terror" 24 times—only the modifier
was missing, though John Edwards did warn in June that "radical Islam"
could take over in Pakistan.
By focusing on "radical Islam" as opposed to "Islamic terrorism," the
Democrats may actually be avoiding any suggestion that America is
engaged in a war against Islam—and even Giuliani would concede that
Osama bin Laden is a perversion of Islam.
Indeed, though Giuliani is claiming that he's been "studying" Islamic
terrorism since 1975, a search of Giuliani news stories and databases
reveals that the first time he was cited using the term was in his May
2004 testimony before the 9/11 Commission:
He made a passing reference to the sarin-gas drill and said it
simulated an "Islamic terrorist attack."
If the use of this term is a measure of a leader's understanding of
the threat, what does it say about Giuliani's own decade of denial
that he never used it in the '90s, when he was the mayor of the only
American city to have experienced one?
__________________________________________________
Harry
.
|
