Giuliani says he used "intensive questioning"

An interviewer asked presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani whether he knew more about torture than his opponent John McCain. Giuliani replied:

MR. GIULIANI: I can't say that I do but I do know a lot about intensive questioning and intensive questioning techniques. After all, I have had a different experience than John. John has never been - he has never run city, never run a state, never run a government. He has never been responsible as a mayor for the safety and security of millions of people, and he has never run a law enforcement agency, which I have done.

Now, intensive questioning works. If I didn't use intensive questioning, there would be a lot of mafia guys running around New York right now and crime would be a lot higher in New York than it is.  Intensive question has to be used.  Torture should not be used.  The line between the two is a difficult one. [Bloomberg]

Does he mean that he abused prisoners a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York? I wonder if Giuliani's loose talk could result in investigations of some of his old work as AUSA between 1983 and 1989.

Speaking of the mafia... Maybe Giuliani should have asked a few more questions of his buddy Bernie Kerik. Giuliani testified in 2000 that his aide told him about Kerik's ties to an allegedly mafia-linked company. In 2006, Kerik pleaded guilty to allowing the company to do $165,000 worth of free work on his Bronx apartment.

Update: Joe Conason questions some of Giuliani's more overblown claims about his record on terrorism, with the help of formerly sealed testimony obtained by Wade Barrett of the Village Voice. On the campaign trail, Giuliani claimed that the threat of Osama Bin Laden was obvious to him before 9/11, however he testified to the 9/11 Commission that he wasn't even briefed about Al Qaeda until after the attacks.

Barret notes that Giuliani and Mukasey go back a very long way.

Comments

[cfrost]

It'd be nice if someone pinned Hizzoner Benito Rudy Giuliani down so he could tell us exactly what "intensive questioning" is. What are the chances of that?

[Windypundit]

You know, Rudy held his shit together a lot better in the face of disaster than some other public officials in recent memory, but still...somebody needs to point out to him that he lost 9/11. 2600 dead New Yorkers is not a victory.

[The Phantom]

Yeah, Windy

He should have used the New York City Air Force to prevent the two airplanes from crashing into the World Trade Center.

He lost 9/11?

Dope.

[The Phantom]

Yeah, Windy

He should have used the New York City Air Force to prevent the two airplanes from crashing into the World Trade Center.

He lost 9/11?

Dope.

[Lindsay Beyerstein]

The issue is whether Giuliani is lying about his record on the campaign trail.

I'm not criticizing Giuliani for not knowing about Al Qaeda before 9/11. If he didn't know, the fault goes all the way to the top. The president and his most senior advisers failed to apprehend the threat. If White House didn't call up the mayor of NYC and make sure he'd heard of Al Qaeda, the fault lies with the White House and the national intel community. Nobody should expect the mayor of New York to be doing his own comprehensive overseas intelligence-gathering.

But facts are facts. Giuliani's own testimony belies the notion that he was some kind of visionary wrt to the Al Qaeda threat in advance of 9/11.

[The Phantom]

I don't know him to be any sort of visionary as respects Al Queda...but he was very concerned about terrorism, in the aftermath of the 1993 bombing.

I read recently where he thought NY would be hit again, and Giuliani thought this time it would be a chemical or biological attack. After the gas attack on the Tokyo subway, this made a lot of sense. Neither he nor the other levels of government predicted the nature of the actual attack--and I can't kill the guy for that.

I remember widespread mockery of his plan to build a command center. Not of the location in Seven WTC--that's mostly Monday morning lies and bullshit --but of the building of a command center at all Rudy's Bunker, they hooted. What do we need a place like that for?

Working in lower Manhattan through Rudy's entire tenure as mayor, I saw what looked to me to be many more NYPD drills, and more FDNY drills, especially outside the World Trade Center. Going in and out of the building in the morning and at lunchtime, I often saw drills.

What actually transpired was far outside of my imagination..and, I imagine, his. I do not criticize him for that.

[cfrost]

Blaming Giuliani for 9/11 is stupid and, if pursued any further, guaranteed to be counterproductive. And one can Monday morning quarterback his performance in the weeks after 9/11, but in general, he did what any responsible mayor should do: keep the water, subways, garbage pickup, employee checks, etc., coming. He also, to his credit, did not succumb to panic and start mass arrests of swarthy people with accents, which he could very easily have done, with the full support of most Americans, including G. W. Bush. I also can find no fault with his preparing a command center or bunker or whatever the hell it was. The WTC was attacked in 1993, and NYC being what it is, it was not unreasonable to expect the city to be targeted a second time. His choice of locating it in # 7 WTC was, in hindsight, unfortunate, but then Lincoln in hindsight should have curled up at home with a good book instead of going out to catch a play.

My problem with Giuliani is that he’s the quintessential careerist. If he actually has a coherent political philosophy, as opposed to opportunistic self-promotion, it’s pretty difficult to discern. Anyone running for president of the US is going to be something of an egotistical, throat-cutting, blowhard, but I’m not getting the impression that he’s much more than that. He’s smart, but it’s intelligence that looks more like cunning than the kind of mind characterized by wide-ranging curiosity, balance, and a proper appreciation of the terrible contradictions and ghastly choices the president has to live with. He just looks like the kind of guy that will get to the top of the professional ladder no matter who he has to push off to do so, without thinking much beyond the next rung.

He’s amply demonstrated that he’ll pander to whichever interest group he thinks will help him. Not that that’s unusual with politicians, but the tail-wagging, boot-licking display for the Christian mullahs, and now his claiming to the NRA that on 9/11/01 the scales fell from his eyes on the road to the Damascus rifle range, smacks not so much of ordinary political deal-cutting, but of outright whoring. Particularly after the GOP’s 2004 John Kerry flip-flop jihad. Jesus Rudy, have some self-respect. You’re a New Yorker for God’s sake. The Republicans were supposed to have a big tent. America’s Mayor can’t get in except on his belly with an embarrassing display of whimpering self-abnegation? You’re supposed to be tough. Your whole campaign is built around your balls. What happened?

My other problem with Giuliani (and this is more important) is that he doesn’t seem to have the internal civil rights compass that any American citizen is supposed to come factory-equipped with. He just doesn’t seem to get the idea that human rights are just that: rights - inalienable, refractory, adamantine, untouchable. He doesn’t seem to get the idea that human rights, the rights of man, are an end in itself, that they’re the absolute rights of the governed and completely beyond the domain or custody of the government. He apparently thinks (along with a lot of the Bush/GOP crowd these days) that human rights are negotiable, that they’re just a bone to throw to the candy-assed whiners who don’t want to win the war on terror, or crime, or child molesters, or drugs, or pornographers, or whatever monster-of-the-month. He’s as aggressive as the baby-killing ferrets of urban myth that he hates so much, and I rather doubt that he will let trifles like human rights get in his way.

[Dock Miles]

>He just doesn’t seem to get the idea that human rights are just that: rights - inalienable, refractory, adamantine, untouchable. He doesn’t seem to get the idea that human rights, the rights of man, are an end in itself, that they’re the absolute rights of the governed and completely beyond the domain or custody of the government

Right on. This is an insanely pervasive problem. The perverse notion that accepting it is a sign of weakness rather than strength is the common madness of the times.

[The Phantom]

cfrost

Well, I certainly agree with your first paragraph. And a lot of people don't. The standard of conversation at a lot of places- Huffington Post comes to mind -is of a standard that people go crazy anytime that "Ghouliani" is mentioned...there is extensive discussion about the "unbelievable" decision to put the "bunker" in 7WTC, etc etc.

Giuliani does have a consistent record of fighting crime, both of the street and organized crime types. If I were him, I'd make this the main campaign theme, rather than anything to do with 9/11, which is understood by immense numbers of Americans, and does not need to be said.

I despise the NRA and don't like the pandering to them, but--no Democratic or Republican candidate is going to initiate any gun law changes. They'll all stick to the misinterpretation of the Second Amendment. It sucks, but he is not the only one singing that tune.

As respects human rights, that's a long conversation that I won't enter into here. Other than to say that the most important human right is to be safe in your home and in your home town, and Rudy was the instrument of change in effecting a radical improvement in safety in the city in which I live.

It is interesting that some of the greatest reductions in the murder rates etc come in neighborhoods where Rudy was and is unpopular. So by now there may be a couple of thousand people who hate Rudy the terrible "fascist" but who owe their lives to him! Which is quite wonderful.

[ripley]

it's not wonderful. It's banal. Destroying people's human rights (or certain scapegoats' human rights) may in fact save lives. But it doesn't protect their rights. this is not a new observation, nor is it some huge contradiction that a sensible person can make anything out of.

also, the fact that firefighters died because they didn't get the new radios because Giuliani's administration didn't approve it, even after numerous requests and assessments point out how inadequate they were... he even knew about those old defective radios from when the WTC was bombed in 1993!

That tells me all I need to know about his 'preparedness.' apparently if it DOESN'T involve curtailing human rights or restricting civil ones then Giuliani is not interested.

Plus, he thinks he's living in The Sopranos.

[Windypundit]

He should have used the New York City Air Force to prevent the two airplanes from crashing into the World Trade Center.

Duh. That terrorists crashed airplanes into the World Trade Center is obviously not Giuliani's fault, but I just don't see how it gives him anti-terrorism credibility either.

Sure, he's had experience with what terrorists are capable of. So what? Everybody in New York could say that.

[David Grenier]

I love watching Mitt and Rudy talk about executive vs. legislative experience as if the general public gives half a shit. It's political operative inside-baseball. Yes, its true that Governors are much more likely to become President than Senators, but its got a lot more to do with the fact that you can easily dig through a Senator's record and find tons of shit to nail him/her on (stuff they voted for/against) than it is to do the same with a Governor. So basically it makes negative advertising easier, and we've seen over and over how effective that is.

It's not like 99% of voters out there are going into the ballot box saying, "Seeing as the President is an executive position, I prefer an executive over a legislator."

Every time Mitt or Rudy talk about how the Senators on either side of the aisle "have never run anything" it strikes me as being narcissistic, desperate, and incredibly out-of-touch.

[The Phantom]

ripley

The radios are another canard. There were immense technical problems at play here. If you blame Rudy, then you should also blame Dinkins and Ed Koch and...
Mike Bloomberg...the type of radios that NYPD, FDNY and other first responders needed first became available here this year...that's how hard the problems were to solve.

There's no other US city that had the problems than NYC had--preexisting, incompatible radio systems, run by departments with a history of not working together that well, in a city with very tall buildings, narrow streets, and oh yeah a subway system that millions use daily.

A Department of Homeland Security scorecard gave Chicago and Cleveland lower ratings than NYC as respects their communications systems.

This was a systems problem that took decades of work to solve.