That was a daring claim, considering that prying information out of the Giuliani City Hall required teams of lawyers with the persistence of mules. To cite three of the most prominent examples, he tried to block the release of different batches of public records to the city’s Independent Budget Office, to the city’s public advocate, and to the state comptroller. He was sued on each occasion. He lost every time. He appealed each decision. He lost every appeal.
“So,” Mr. Giuliani said during the debate, looking toward his presidency, “I would be extremely open.”
Source: "Giuliani, Very Open? There’s Always a First Time" By JIM DWYER - NY Times - December 15, 2007
[O]n Oct. 10, 1996, [Rudy Giuliani] stepped on the podium at the Kennedy School of Government to deliver a speech on immigration.
“I’m pleased to be with you this evening to talk about the anti-immigrant movement in America,” he said, “and why I believe this movement endangers the single most important reason for American greatness, namely, the renewal, reformation and reawakening that’s provided by the continuous flow of immigrants.”
Giuliani continued: “I believe the anti-immigrant movement in America is one of our most serious public problems.” It can “be seen in legislation passed by Congress and the president.” (Republicans had just passed a welfare reform law that restricted benefits to legal immigrants.) “It can be seen in the negative attitudes being expressed by many of the politicians.”
“In New York City,” he said, “we recognize this reality. New York City’s policy toward undocumented immigrants is called ‘Executive Order 124.’ ” This order protected undocumented immigrants from being reported when they used city services. Giuliani was then fighting the federal government, which wanted to reverse it.
“There are times,” he declared, “when undocumented aliens must have a substantial degree of protection.” They must feel safe sending their children to school. They should feel safe reporting crime to the police. “Similarly, illegal and undocumented immigrants should be able to seek medical help without the threat of being reported. When these people are sick, they are just as sick and just as contagious as citizens.”
These speeches are the real Rudy. These speeches represent the Rudy who once went overboard and declared, “If you come here and you work hard and you happen to be in an undocumented status, you’re one of the people who we want in this city.”
Source: "The Real Rudy" By DAVID BROOKS - NY Times - November 23, 2007
Mr. Giuliani, who supports abortion rights, has appeased social conservatives by promising to appoint “strict constructionists” to federal benches. Speaking about this judicial philosophy Friday, Mr. Giuliani did not mention abortion, continuing confusion among activists on both sides of the debate about what impact a Giuliani administration would really have on the issue, writes The Times’s Michael Cooper.
Another area of confusion for voters could be Mr. Giuliani’s approach to health care. While he derides “socialized medicine” on the campaign trail, The Times’s Sarah Kershaw points out that he expanded government health care rolls as mayor of New York City.
Source: "The Early Word: Giuliani’s New York Trail" By Sarah Wheaton - NY Times - 11/17/07
Rudolph W. Giuliani, for one, had assailed the flat tax while he was mayor of New York but recently spoke in favor of it without endorsing a specific plan.
Source: "Thompson Calls for Option of a Simplified Income Tax" - By MARC SANTORA - NY Times - November 26, 2007
According to the November 21 Chicago Tribune, as part of his work with Giuliani Partners, the consulting firm created by his 9/11-kindled Midas touch, "Nine days after registering his presidential exploratory committee last November, Rudolph Giuliani appeared in Singapore to help a Las Vegas developer make a pitch for a $3.5 billion casino resort.
"Though the bid ultimately failed, and there was nothing illegal about the involvement, it drew Giuliani into a complex partnership with the family of a controversial Hong Kong billionaire who has ties to the regime of North Korea's Kim Jong Il and has been linked to international organized crime by the U.S. government."
This from Mr. Crimestopper
Source: "Rudy's Numbers Don't Add Up" - By Michael Winship - t r u t h o u t | Perspective - 07 December 2007
On the campaign trail, Rudolph W. Giuliani has made the case that while he believes that abortions are wrong, he thinks the ultimate decision of whether to have them should be up to women, and not the government. But he has also pledged to appoint the kind of conservative judges who might be expected to rule against abortion.
Kelli Conlon of Naral Pro-Choice New York, recalled that Mr. Giuliani had put her on his transition team when he was elected mayor and issued proclamations to mark the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. But Ms. Conlon said she was troubled to hear him say that he would appoint justices in the model of Justices Scalia and Clarence Thomas.
“Obviously, judges in the mold of Thomas and Scalia are going to overturn Roe v. Wade, no doubt,” she said in a telephone interview, adding that her group was uneasy about Mr. Giuliani’s recent statements. “We really feel like, out of the glare of the cameras, we have to sit down with him and his colleagues and ask, which is the real Rudy Giuliani?”
Mr. Giuliani, a former supporter of gun control, praised a recent federal court decision overturning a gun-control law.
Source: "Giuliani Vexes Audiences With His Abortion Views" By MICHAEL COOPER - NY Times - November 17, 2007
He began his tenure in City Hall vowing to curb the role of government in health care. He removed large numbers of people from welfare. He tried, but failed, to sell off New York City’s public hospital system. And he discouraged New Yorkers from enrolling in Medicaid, the government health program for the poor, telling city health officials that the program was a “bad idea.”
But in the spring of 2000, during his second term and soon after he received a diagnosis of prostate cancer, he suddenly announced that the city would embark on one of the most aggressive efforts in the country to enroll children and adults in public health programs like Medicaid and Child Health Plus, the state insurance program for children.
Mr. Giuliani’s critics say that his changing views and policies on health insurance during his eight years in City Hall are a prime example of the kind of political expediency that has defined him as a mayor and now as a presidential candidate. His current market-based proposals on health care — which would give consumers tax benefits to buy their own insurance and the poor some combination of tax refunds and vouchers — seem to have him campaigning against his own record in some ways, they say.
“It’s not the first issue he’s done a 180 on,” said Fran Reiter, a Democrat who was a deputy mayor under Mr. Giuliani and ran his 1997 re-election campaign. “I think it’s hard to ask people to judge you on your record when you’ve now walked away from what is a very clear record when you were mayor.”
Mr. Giuliani’s effort as mayor to triple the number of New Yorkers with health insurance through government programs appears nowhere in his own description of his record on his presidential campaign Web site.
In an interview last month on New Hampshire radio, Mr. Giuliani said that expanding the children’s program was a “typical Democratic, Clinton kind of thing” and that enrolling more children “is not just a beginning, it’s a big step in the direction of government-controlled medicine.”
In 2000, Mr. Giuliani struck a very different note in announcing his effort to enroll as many as one million more city residents in government health programs.
Health care advocates said the enrollment efforts, which added 330,000 New Yorkers to the programs in the first two years, were a welcome surprise.
“Suddenly after he got cancer he became a real proponent of enrolling people in Medicaid,” said David R. Jones, who was a member of the board of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation under Mr. Giuliani. “He really went the other way, and now he’s moving another way again.”
[I]n Mr. Giuliani’s first term, in setting out his complaints that the city was paying too much for Medicaid, he wanted the board [of the city’s Health and Hospitals Corporation] to state publicly that Medicaid was a “bad idea.”
Source: Giuliani Expanded Public Health Care as Mayor" By SARAH KERSHAW - NY Times - November 17, 2007
… and then there are the statistics that he makes up
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Discussing his crime-fighting success as mayor, Mr. Giuliani told a television interviewer that New York was “the only city in America that has reduced crime every single year since 1994.” In New Hampshire this week, he told a public forum that when he became mayor in 1994, New York “had been averaging like 1,800, 1,900 murders for almost 30 years.”
New York averaged 1,514 murders a year during the three decades before Mr. Giuliani took office; it did not record more than 1,800 homicides until 1980.
- When a recent Republican debate turned to the question of fiscal responsibility, he boasted that “under me, spending went down by 7 percent.”
And Mr. Giuliani’s own memoir states that spending grew an average of 3.7 percent for most of his tenure
- Mr. Giuliani said, “I lowered, argued for lowering, and got the hotel occupancy tax lowered by 33 percent. And I was collecting $200 million more from the lower tax than the city had been collecting from before I was mayor from the higher tax.”
In fact, the increase in revenues from the hotel occupancy tax was just over a quarter of what Mr. Giuliani asserted — the city’s hotel tax revenues grew by roughly $58 million during his term, according to the city’s Independent Budget Office — and a booming economy, as well as the reduction in crime Mr. Giuliani helped produce, probably played a part.
- Mr. Giuliani erred at a Republican debate when, while calling for tort reform, he said that 2.2 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product “is spent on all these frivolous lawsuits.”
That statistic, the group reported, came from a study that pegged the cost of all civil claims at 2.2 percent of the G.D.P., without judging whether the cases had merit or not.
- Mr. Giuliani, who has had prostate cancer, asserted that his chances of surviving prostate cancer in the United States were 82 percent, while his chance of surviving in England would have been only 44 percent. His point was that the American health care system is far superior to England’s government-run system, which he refers to as “socialized medicine.”
The Office for National Statistics in Britain said that the true five-year survival rate was 74.4 percent — still lower than in the United States, but by a much smaller margin. Mr. Giuliani stood by the statistic, however, and kept using the advertisement, though it has since gone off the air.
- Another radio advertisement that Mr. Giuliani ran over the summer stated that as mayor he “turned a $2.3 billion deficit into a multibillion-dollar surplus.”
That was also misleading. According to independent fiscal monitors, Mr. Giuliani did have to close a $2.3 billion deficit in his first budget, and did accumulate a multibillion-dollar surplus during his tenure. But by Mr. Giuliani’s last full fiscal year in office, the city was spending more than it was taking in in revenues, and Mr. Giuliani ended up spending almost all of the surplus to balance his final budget.
Source: "Citing Statistics, Giuliani Misses Time and Again" By MICHAEL COOPER - NY Times - November 30, 2007
… and finally, his fight against the terrorists.
[A]s incredible as it might seem, Rudy Giuliani-whose presidential candidacy is steeped in 9/11 iconography-has been doing business with a government agency run by the very man who made the attacks on 9/11 possible.
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 [Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials] 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.
This royal family member is Abdallah bin Khalid al-Thani, Qatar's minister of Islamic affairs at the time, who was later installed at the interior ministry in January 2001 and reappointed by the emir during a government shake-up earlier this year. Abdallah al-Thani is also said to have welcomed Osama bin Laden on two visits to the farm, a charge repeated as recently as October 10, 2007, in a Congressional Research Service study. Abdallah al-Thani's interior ministry or the state-owned company it helps oversee, Qatar Petroleum, has worked with Giuliani Security & Safety LLC, a subsidiary of Giuliani Partners, on an undisclosed number of contracts, the value of which neither the government nor the company will release.
What's most shocking is that Abdallah al-Thani has been widely accused of helping to spirit KSM out of Qatar in 1996, just as the FBI was closing in on him. Robert Baer, a former CIA supervisor in the region, contends in a 2003 memoir that the emir himself actually sanctioned tipping KSM. The staff of the 9/11 Commission, meanwhile, noted that the FBI and CIA "were reluctant to seek help from the Qatari government" in the arrest of KSM, "fearing that he might be tipped off." When Qatar's emir was finally "asked for his help" in January 1996, Qatari authorities "first reported that KSM was under surveillance," then "asked for an alternative plan that would conceal their aid to Americans," and finally "reported that KSM had disappeared."
The Congressional Research Service report summarized the evidence against him: "According to the 9/11 Commission Report and former U.S. government officials, royal family member and current Qatari Interior Minister, Sheikh Abdullah (Abdallah) bin Khalid Al Thani, provided safe harbor and assistance to Al Qaeda leaders during the 1990s," including KSM. While numerous accounts have named Abdallah as the KSM tipster, the report simply says that "a high ranking member of the Qatari government" is believed to have "alerted" KSM "to the impending raid."
A case officer in the CIA's Directorate of Operations for nearly 19 years, Robert Baer-who calls Qatar "the center of intrigue in the Gulf"-laid out the KSM escape story in his 2003 book, Sleeping with the Devil. His source was Hamad bin Jasim bin Hamad al-Thani, a close relative of the emir who was once the finance minister and chief of police. (An exile living in Beirut in 1997 when Baer began a relationship with him, Hamad al-Thani has since been captured by Qatar and is serving a life sentence for attempting to overthrow the emir.) Hamad told Baer that Abdallah al-Thani, whom he described as "a fanatic Wahhabi," had taken KSM "under his wing" and that the emir had ordered Hamad to help Abdallah. He gave 20 blank Qatari passports to Abdallah, who he said gave them to KSM. "As soon as the FBI showed up in Doha" in 1996, the emir, according to Hamad, ordered Abdallah to move KSM out of his apartment to his beach estate, and eventually out of the country. "Flew the coop. Sayonara," Hamad concluded.
Baer's account of how KSM got away is the most far-reaching, implicating the emir himself. Since KSM "moved his family to Qatar at the suggestion" of Abdallah al-Thani, according to the 9/11 Commission, and held a job at the Ministry of Electricity and Water, Baer's account is hardly implausible. The commission even found that Abdallah ah-Thani "underwrote a 1995 trip KSM took to join the Bosnia jihad." Bill Gertz, the Washington Times reporter whose ties to the Bush White House are well established, affirmed Baer's version in his 2002 book, Breakdown. Another CIA agent, Melissa Boyle Mahle, who was assigned to the KSM probe in Qatar in 1995, said that she tried to convince the FBI to do a snatch operation rather than taking the diplomatic approach, concerned about "certain Qatari officials known for their sympathies for Islamic extremists." Instead, "Muhammad disappeared immediately after the request to the government was made," making it "obvious to me what had happened." Louis Freeh's book says simply: "We believe he was tipped off; but however he got away, it was a slipup with tragic consequences." Neither Mahle nor Freeh named names.
[Counterterrorism czar Richard] Clarke noted that "one report" indicated that KSM had evaporated on a passport supplied by Abdallah al-Thani's Islamic-affairs ministry. When Clarke was told by the Los Angeles Times in 2003 that Abdallah had been elevated to interior minister, he said: "I'm shocked to hear that. You're telling me that al-Thani is in charge of security inside Qatar. I hope that's not true." Having just left the Bush administration, Clarke added that Abdallah "had great sympathy for bin Laden, great sympathy for terrorist groups, [and] was using his personal money and ministry money to transfer to al Qaeda front groups that were allegedly charities." The Los Angeles Times quoted "several U.S. officials involved in the hunt" for KSM who fingered Abdallah as "the one who learned of the imminent FBI dragnet and tipped off Muhammad."
[I]n a January 1996 visit to Qatar, Osama bin Laden "discussed the successful movement of explosives into Saudi Arabia, and operations targeted against U.S. interests" in Khobar and two other locations, "using clandestine al Qaeda cells in Saudi Arabia." The [October 2007 report by the Congressional Research Service] study says that it is "unclear" if those conversations were "related to the preparations for the June 1996 attack" that killed 19 servicemen, but that the "Qatari individual" who reportedly hosted bin Laden for these discussions was none other than Abdallah al-Thani.
[Giuliani Partners is] the only American company known to be providing security advice to Qatar; the rest hail from Singapore, Australia, and France.
[H]ad KSM, who was even then focused on the use of hijacked planes as weapons, been captured in 1996, 9/11 might well have never happened.
Source: "Giuliani's Ties to a Terror Sheikh" By Wayne Barrett - The Village Voice - 27 November 2007
Mr. Giuliani was a husky young assistant federal prosecutor who was almost painfully hungry to make his mark in 1974. That was the year that he prosecuted United States Representative Bertram L. Podell of Brooklyn on conspiracy charges.
Mr. Giuliani described going at him like a boxer during the trial. “The next day, withering under continued cross-examination,” Mr. Giuliani wrote in his 2002 book, “Leadership,” “he asked for a recess, during which his lawyer told us he had decided to plead guilty.”
The recollections of the congressman’s lawyers are less dramatic. They had already reached a tentative plea deal, they said, and were simply awaiting Justice Department sign-off when Mr. Giuliani began his cross-examination. The deal went through during a recess.
Source: "A Crime Buster, With His Eye on the Future" By MICHAEL POWELL - NY Times - December 10, 2007
Source: Daniel Rosenbaum for The New York Times - 11/17/07