REPORT SHOWS GIULIANI LYING ON STUMP ABOUT TERRORISM, 9/11
Major Media Outlets Ignore Story, Push Myth Fed By Campaign
On October 23, 2007, Village Voice journalist and Giuliani biography Wayne Barrett broke a story that should still be dominating the headlines to this day. According to Barrett, previously secret documents reveal that Giuliani is lying about his past knowledge of terrorism and in particular: about being prepared and vigilant about Al Qaeda before and after 9/11. Giuliani--whose entire campaign is based on the idea that he has been and continues to be 'strong on terrorism'--should be tumbling in the polls as a result of newsroom after newsroom running the story of a GOP front-runner whose 'strong on terror' campaign was revealed as a complete fraud.
Instead, it has barely registered.
Documents Show Giuliani Ignorant, Dismissive Of Terrorism
The Barrett article is cautious, professional, and completely devastating. While some have doubted Giuliani's claim that, as a mayor, he was a long-time expert on global terrorism, Barrett draws on documents that show Giuliani to be a fraud:
In a recent broadside deriding the Clinton administration's response to Al Qaeda, Rudy Giuliani told an audience at Pat Robertson's Regent University: "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." Other tenets of his standard stump speech include the assertion that he's been "studying terrorism" for more than 30 years, and that "the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is that I have more experience in dealing with it" than the other presidential candidates.
However, in private testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, Rudy gave a very different version of how much he knew about terrorism when the World Trade Center was attacked. That testimony isn't scheduled to be released publicly until after the 2008 presidential election, but the Voice has obtained a copy of it. And it reveals a New York mayor who was anything but an "expert on terrorism."
(read the whole piece here)
Several days after the story broke, an intrepid David Schuster interviewed Barrett on Countdown, opening the segment with a poetic reference to Greek mythology:
In Greek myth, Cassandra was the prophet whose warnings were to be cursed never to be heeded until it was too late. In presidential politics, Rudy Giuliani has become the prophet whose warnings he has cursed never to have issued until it was too late. On the campaign trail he talks about his terrorism scholarship before 9/11 and says only he saw the real danger posed by al Qaeda. But in our fourth story
in the COUNTDOWN: A secret document which you were never meant to see until after November 2008 has now been leaked refuting Giuliani's claim with his own words.(read entire transcript here)
In other words: the centerpiece of Giuliani's stump speech, and the claim on which his entire candidacy for president is based--is--a--lie. Interesting story? Raw Story ran with it, but not to the mainstream media. Outside of the blogs and Keith Olbermann's circle of integrity, nobody cared.
How this story was ignored and buried by the mainstream press is an illuminating snapshot of American journalistts who have traded in their professional standards to cozy up to a Republican presidential candidate.
That same night David Schuster broke the story on MSNBC, Chris Matthews on Hardball talked about Giuliani having 'dodged a mob hit back in the 1980s' together with a casual conversation about whether or not Giuliani's terrorism credentials would play in primary states. Nothing about the bombshell that just broke in the Village Voice. Nothing about Giuliani's central platform issue being a lie.
On that same day that Schuster tried to push the Giuliani story into the news cycle, Tucker Carlson lead with this sycophantic dross about the GOP front-runner:
Rudy Giuliani is all over the news today as well, from the story of the mob's decision not to whack him in the '80s to his controversial World Series allegiance with the Red Sox, to the report that a man in
Giuliani's employment is a priest once accused of sexual abuse. America's mayor is making headlines the way only a front-runner can.(full transcript here)
And so on, and so forth.
Several days later, New York Observer columnist Joe Conason penned a follow up piece in an attempt to keep the story about Giuliani's lies about terrorism afloat:
Published in the Oct. 23 issue of The Village Voice -- the New York alternative weekly that has excelled in covering the former mayor for many years -- that scoop revealed the contents of his private testimony before the 9/11 Commission. The previously sealed memoranda summarizing Giuliani's testimony, obtained by reporter Wayne Barrett, show profound contradictions between his stump speech and what he admitted to the commission behind closed doors.
For reasons that remain unclear, the minutes of his private testimony, marked "commission sensitive/unclassified," were nevertheless to be locked away until the convenient date of December 2008. Nobody associated with the 9/11 Commission could explain how or why that decision had been made.
The Voice article discloses the embarrassing contents of a 15-page "memorandum for the record," prepared by a commission attorney on April 20, 2004, which quotes Giuliani explaining that he knew little about Osama bin Laden's organization until "after 9/11," when "we brought in people to brief us on al Qaeda." He recalled no such briefing earlier, which was "a mistake," he acknowledged, since "if experts share a lot of info," that would mean a "better chance of someone making heads and tails . . . [of the] situation."
(full article is here)
Conason wrote a fantastic piece, driving the story even further to the heart of the matter: 'embarrassing' documents about Giuliani's pitiful lack of preparation on terrorism leading up to 9/11, somehow hidden from the public--by somebody, for reasons unexplained.
And yet, even with Conason's keen eye, the kind of story that the Barrett piece should have become never happened because it never exploded into a full media firestorm. Investigative stories that shake down campaign myths and manufactured images about a candidate do not just hit the ground fully formed. They need the full attention of the media to gestate, to grow as large as the facts they contain.
Think of the headline that could have been, would have been--that should have been by this point, several weeks on from the Barrett story: "Mysteriously Classified Documents Show Giuliani Bungled Terrorist Prep Years Before and After 9/11." Now that is the story that brings down a campaign. That, is, the story.
Who might have the power and the access to keep documents hidden--documents potentially damaging to the entire idea of Rudy Giuliani as an 'expert' on terrorism? Does Giuliani have strong ties with anyone in the White House?
It may seem vague, even foggy at first. But a pretty obvious quid pro quo narrative begins to take shape once we sit with the Barrett story for a while. More than any other candidate in the Republican field, Rudy Giuliani is up to his chin in the Bush political dynasty. Rudy Giuliani is not just the leading candidate in the GOP field. My goodness, he is the last hope for George W. Bush to somehow not be prosecuted for one of a thousand Constitutional infractions committed while in office. Forget 'America's Mayor.' Rudy Giuliani is George W. Bush's 'get out of jail free' card.
And Dick Cheney's.
And Karl Rove's.
And Condi Rice's.
And Don Rumsfeld's.
More than just the constant 9/11 drumbeat and the saber rattling on Iran, Rudy Giuliani has literally wrapped himself in the exact Rove mantle that elected George W. Bush to executive office over and over and over again. And while the entire liberal establishment questioned the efficacy of Giuliani's campaign as "too liberal" for the religious base of the Republican party, the Rover machine quietly recreated the exact same phony image of Giuliani in the press that George W. Bush has worn for years: strong on terror, nice to have a beer with.
Rudy Giuliani is not strong on terror--ignorant of how little he knew long after it was too late.
Rudy Giuliani is a nasty person--divorced multiple times, children disown him.
Yet, somehow, the likes of Chris Matthews and Tucker Carlson and just about every other mainstream media figure are busy constructing this pre-fab Rove, cookie-cutter image of a winning Presidential formula: kills terrorists, nice smile.
Giuliani's Campaign Based On Lies Concealed By Powerful Friends
Just as George W. Bush's 'strong military' campaign depended on powerful allies hiding his AWOL record in the National Guard, it seems that Giuliani's 'strong on terror' campaign depends on powerful friends hiding his past ignorance and recklessness on all things having to do with terrorism.
Somehow, we are now in a media environment where very few journalists are willing to play with such dangerous assertions. Powerful people stand behind Rudy Giuliani's bid for the presidency--the kind of people who managed to destroy the careers of journalists who dared to mention the unmentionables in George W. Bush's past. It is unlikely that mainstream journalists will soon find the courage needed to dig up the truth and present it on the level of Barrett, Schuster and Conason.
And so, Americans are left with no choice but to do the work themselves--to rally behind good investigative journalism and shine a light on the candy floss that passes itself off as reporting the presidential campaign.
Hence, the Barrett story about Giuliani cuts through the campaign chatter to a point far deeper and far more important--a point that is rarely spoken, but so close to the surface in America's collective mind. What America wants in the next election is not just a leader to pull the country out of the sewer of violence, illegality and profligate spending set upon us by the Bush administration. We want a president whose election will send a gale-force wind through the American media--scattering all the garbage that has accumulated over the past political cycle and leaving behind a renaissance of American journalistic integrity.
God knows that will not happen if Rudy Giuliani is elected. On the other hand, it just might happen--possibly--if he is not.
(cross posted from Frameshop)