Who trusts the judgment of Rudy Giuliani?

Sen. Joe Biden notoriously quipped that for Rudy Giuliani a sentence is "a noun and a verb and 9/11." A bon mot for anyone to be proud of.

Well, Rudy is exploiting 9/11 big time these days, according to a recent NY Times article. Take this little gem regarding the assassination of Benazir Bhutto:

“For me this is a particularly personal experience,” Mr. Giuliani said in Florida as he discussed the assassination of Ms. Bhutto on Thursday, “because I lived through Sept. 11, 2001, and then I lived through the attacks in London a few years later.”

Giuliani, Seeking to Gain Ground, Returns to a Familiar Theme: 9/11, NY Times, December 29, 2007).

Hello! Earth to Rudy. I lived through 9/11 too... as did about seven million other of my fellow New Yorkers - and 300 million other Americans. And we all lived through the attacks in London too. Not to mention the attacks in Spain.

And before that we all lived through Munich and the Achille Lauro, the FALN bombings around Manhattan in the early '80's, the weather underground and SLA of the 70's, Europe's Red Brigade, etc. etc. etc.

Guess what Rudy: BIG F'ing Deal. You lived through it? How does that make the assassination of Benazir Bhutto any more personal to you than any of the other billion's of people on people on this planet who live in these times?

Doesn't he have one advisor with the nerve to tell him how full of himself he sounds? Is Bhutto' assassination more personal to him than even ONE of the millions of Pakistanis who so desperately supported her and her quest to modernize and democratize their country? Can't Rudy find something to say about this great woman than that "her death reminds me to talk about me?"

Again, talking about 9/11, Giuliani had this to say:

“It is part of my life that helps to define me. It isn’t the only part of my life. But it would seem to me that maybe the critics want you to, like, remove a part of your life in which people have every right to draw judgments about how you would handle a crisis, how you would handle a difficult situation, how you would handle terrorism.”

Id.

I don't think anyone, critics included wants Rudy to "remove" 9/11 from their judgment of Giuliani's ability to handle a crisis.

I think that the justified criticism is intead that Rudy's much vaunted judgment was sorely lacking before 9/11, on 9/11, and after 9/11.

Three fast examples:

• Against all advice, he insisted in placing New York City's emergency command center in the basement of the World Trade Center - after it had already been the target of a previous terrorist bombing attemp. This incredible error in judgment left the Police, Firefighters and other emergency workers without a central command center at the time they most needed one (and is very probably the cause of so many firefighters being trapped inside the World Trade Center when it fell.
• He did nothing to intervene in the (still ongoing) dispute between the Police and Fire Departments which refuse to share a joint radio frequency to coordinate with each other in time of emergency.
• He led a photo op "march" away from the Towers, dragging along the heads of the Police and Fire and other mission critical emergency service departments at a time when they should have been in their command offices overseeing their response teams.
• Following the collapse of the towers (on September 11), he publicly supported the idea of "postponing" elections. . . essentially trying to declare himself the indispensable emperor of New York.

Hey Rudy. Even FDR didn't try to suspend elections during WWII. Ike didn't try to suspend elections during the Korean War. For that matter no one suggested suspending elections during the 1960's despite the Vietnam War, a wave of domestic terrorist attacks, urban riots in Watts, Newark and elsewhere and the assassinations of JFK, RFK, MLK, Jr. and Malcolm X.

Then of course, there's the stuff that has nothing to do with 9/11:

Like Giuliani's highly public campaign to shut down one of the most respected museums in the entire country (the Brooklyn Art Museum) because HE was offended by a single painting that he hadn't even seen.

Like the kind of good judgment he showed by holding a press conference to inform his second wife that he was seeking a divorce.

Like the good judgment he showed by using City funds to provide transportation and security for his mistress (now his third wife). Or the good judgment he used by hiding those expenses in in departments that were supposed to be protecting the homeless and most needy New Yorkers.

Or the good judgment he shows by failing to recognize that with 100,000 handgun deaths (yes, that's 100,000) in this country since 9/11 (that's 33 dead to handgun violence for every 9/11 victim), maybe, just maybe, terrorism is NOT America's greatest threat or our most important priority.

Or the good judgment he showed in making Bernard Kerik chief of city police and recommending him to be head of homeland security. The same Bernard Kerik who stashed HIS mistress in an apartment the City supposedly maintained for 9/11 emergency workers. The same Bernard Kerik who is now under federal indictment stemming from various charges of corruption.

Or the good judgment he continues to show by hiring and relying on the advice of Alan Placa.
As reported in the Village Voice, Placa is a defrocked, pedophile priest and worse. Placa was in a position to cover-up not only his own abuse of young boys, but the abuses committed by other priests as well.

Placa was "Often the first person contacted by a victim because of his role as the bishop's top attorney and head of a three-member "intervention team." Suffolk DA Tom Spota put it bluntly: "This is a person who was directly involved in the so-called policy of the church to protect children, when in fact he was one of the abusers." David Clohessy, the national director of the Survivors Network for Those Abused by Priests (SNAP) said Placa "connived to keep desperately wounded child sex victims trapped in silence and shame and self-blame. He is the worst of the worst. He's worse than other child abusers, because he molested and he covered up other investigations." Wayne Barrett, No Wafer for Rudy, Village Voice (June 26, 2007).

Placa is also Giuliani' "best friend, business associate, and lifelong link to the church."

In August 2002, Placa was hired as a three-day-a-week consultant at Giuliani Partners, despite allegations that he had groped four minors in Long Island's Diocese of Rockville Center. Despite these charges (and a 2003 Grand Jury report), Placa remains on salary at Giuliani Partners. Michael Hess, the managing partner of Giuliani Partners (and the city's former top lawyer), represents Placa against the ongoing sexual molestation charges .

I could go on, and on.

But here's the question: 9/11 aside, can we really trust the judgments of this man if he is given the awesome power and responsibility of the office of President of the United States?

Memories II - June 2003 - How many more?

Shock and awe indeed! The sheer stupidity of the Bush administration's headlong rush to war is best demonstrated by the idiotic belief that there was no need to plan for what happens after. The problem with the "Mission Accomplished" banner is that the Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld cabal made the mistake of believing that the "mission" ended with the battle for Baghdad. This is a case in which the US planned to win a battle not a war. Having won the battle, victory had been accomplished because it the mission had been defined on terms that were narrowly idealogical and bore no relation whatsoever to the actual tactical or strategic situation.

This did no have to be the case. The French told George Bush he was getting in over his head. So did the Germans and virtually every other important US ally and strategic partner. So did the overwhelming numbers of people who marched to oppose this war - all over the world - before it even began. Bush simply refused to listen to anything.

I noted this on June 25, 2003:

To the Editor

Before the war it was obvious that the US was prepared to win the battles, but unprepared to to win the peace. Today, every headline provides further evidence the Bush administration's failed to consider or prepare properly for our "victory" in Iraq. Thomas Friedman's June 25 op-ed column "Bad Planning" (along with many of his excellent columns) drives this point home.

Iraq is deteriorating daily. Unemploment, malnutrition and disease are rampant. There is no electricity or safe drinking water in large parts of the country.

US troops are teaching democracy to the Iraqis by censoring the press, shooting at demonstrators, enforcing curfews, and arbitrarily entering private homes at gunpoint. Our effort to select those Iraqi's who will form and serve in a new government is about as democratic as an
election in China. Our award of reconstruction contracts to US, rather than indigenus Iraqi, businesses is similarly undemocratic, and of dubious legality.

The Iraqi people, who welcomed us with open arms, grow angrier by the day. The result is increasing casualties and deaths among US troops. It is only a matter of time before more US soldiers will have died trying to maintain the peace, than fighting the war.

The administration claims it had no warning that it would be harder to maintain peace than to oust Saddam Hussein. The truth is that President Bush was informed of this before the war
by our longtime allies, France and Germany, and by the vast numbers of American people who had the courage to demonstrate their opposition.

President Bush ignored the advice of all but the handful of idealogues he had chosen for his cabinet. Were it not for his heedless rush to sound-bites and photo-ops, our sons and daughters in uniform might not now be giving their lives, fighting a losing war against anarchy, starvation, disease, fanaticism and the growing anger of the Iraqi people.

The only question is how many US soldiers are going to die before the American people finally express their anger at this badly planned, and poorly executed debacle.

Four and a half years and nearly 4,000 soldiers later, I am still wondering how long this can go on.

Memories I - A rose by any other name

There are times (when pocketwatches drip from blue skies) being right can seem surreal.

Recently a significant number of news sources reported that the euphemism "enhanced interrogation techniques" favored by the Bush administration is the same term used by Hitler's Gestapo and SS to describe the same torture techniques being used by the Bush Administration today (i.e. waterboarding) and which were declared "tortue" and crimes against humanity at the Nuremburg trials.

As much a surprise as this may have been, it was not the first usurpation of the Third Reich's vocabulary, as indicated in my letter to the editor dated May 27, 2003:

To the Editor:

Donald Rumsfield said " "What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict. It will be of a force and scope and scale that has been beyond what has been seen before." Thurs. March 20, 2003.

Mr. Rumsfield is wrong. The force and scope may be greater than ever before. However this conflict is an uninspired, unoriginal carbon copy of a familiar battle plan.

Blitzkrieg.

Prescience or Common Sense - Revisiting the Iraq War

Before I discovered the joys of blogging, I frequently wrote letters to the editor of the New York Times. I did not write because I wanted to be published. Indeed, the New York Times won't publish two letters from the same author within six months of each other. I believed (and still do) that a paper's editors read every letter and are at least influenced by the volume of letters they receive on any given topic.

Looking back at the letters I wrote concerning Iraq, I keep asking "how is it I saw this coming, but George Bush, and his advisors couldn't see it?" How did they get this war past so many smart people, when they were so obviously wrong or lying about so many things?

Happily, the most recent NIE has likely ended the possibility that Bush will invade Iran. However, it is painfully obvious that he does not intend to end the war in Iraq during the year and 25 days he will remain in office.

With the coming political season a review of some of the Bush administration's outstanding mistakes of strategic and political judgment is warranted. For what it is worth, what follows are letters to the editor of the New York Times that I wrote during the period March 2003 through May 2006.