Giuliani's pre-9/11 mentality
Posted: Wednesday, June 18, 2008 11:41 AM by Domenico Montanaro
From NBC’s Domenico Montanaro
The
Obama campaign and the DNC struck back at
Giuliani
for criticizing Obama for pointing out the handling of the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing trial as an example of how to deal with terrorists
in American courts.
In an e-mail, entitled, “Giuliani v Giuliani: 1993 World Trade Center
Bombing Case,” the Obama campaign points out that in 1993, Giuliani
said at the time, per the
New York Times,
March 5, 1994: “Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani declared that the verdict
‘demonstrates that New Yorkers won't meet violence with violence, but
with a far greater weapon -- the law.’”
Also from that day’s
Times:
“Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said he hoped that the verdicts would lessen
tensions rather than increase them. ‘It should show that our legal
system is the most mature legal system in the history of the world,’ he
said, ‘that it works well, that that is the place to seek vindication
if you feel your rights have been violated.’”
The DNC takes its shot at Giuliani with an e-mail with a title,
parroting Joe Biden’s Greatest Debate Hits: “Rudy, ‘Noun, verb, 9/11’
Giuliani returns.”
“Democrats are not going to be lectured to on security by the mayor who
failed to learn the lessons of the 1993 attacks, refused to prepare his
own city’s first responders for the next attack, urged President Bush
to put his corrupt crony in charge of our homeland security, and was
too busy lobbying for his foreign clients to join the Iraq Study
Group,” DNC spokeswoman Karen Finney said. “Rudy Giuliani, can echo the
McCain campaign’s false and misleading attacks, but he can’t change the
fact that John McCain is promising four more years of President Bush’s
flawed and failed policies on everything from energy security and the
economy to the war in Iraq.”
Within the DNC’s research is a quote from Giuliani from CBS Evening News following the trial verdict. First Read was able to find more of the context from the transcript from March 5, 1994.
CBS’s DAVID CULHANE: And for their own safety, the 12 jurors remained anonymous today. One juror did tell reporters it was the overwhelming detail of the five-month prosecution that persuaded them to convict. But at the Jersey City mosque where several of the defendants worshipped, friends described the case as a miscarriage of American justice. New York's mayor disagrees.
Mayor RUDOLPH GIULIANI (Republican, New York City): I think it shows you put terrorism on one side, you put our legal system on the other, and our legal system comes out ahead.
Earlier on the call hitting Obama, Giuliani said, “The real problem is [Obama] having said that in essence, the 1993 situation was really correctly handled by it's being a criminal prosecution, and these people were incapacitated. The reality is that I think most experts on terrorism who are non-partisan would tell you that that was a terrible mistake in not recognizing the full dimension of what we were involved with.”
Giuliani likely would say that his comments came pre-9/11 and perhaps also reflected a limited pre-9/11 mentality. That said, he made the point about the pre-9/11 mentality on the call, but didn’t say he necessarily subscribed to it also.
