Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Giuliani's Record on Terrorism   [Ramesh Ponnuru]

So I finally read Wayne Barrett's Giuliani takedown in the Village Voice (I linked to it a while ago). It goes through Giuliani's "five big lies about 9/11." The first three are, if true, pretty devastating. It appears that Barrett's reporting was pretty meticulous. But he does have an axe to grind—see this Barrett hit on Giuliani's personal life, for example—so I'm not sure whether he is leaving anything out that exculpates Giuliani.

So I went on technorati to see if anyone else had put out a defense of Giuliani. I didn't find one. I did, however, find that a bunch of liberal blogs had seized on something in the article that completely escaped me: Barrett's insinuation that Giuliani placed the emergency-command center where he did, contrary to some advisers' strong objections, because it would be convenient for trysts. The blogger at Dogtown Commons makes a reasonable point against this insinuation:

Since Barrett, Mark Kleiman and others consider the “walking distance” explanation so silly, they reason that he must have wanted the command center near city hall so that he could use it as a vanity project and “love shack,” in Kleiman’s words. I’m not normally inclined to defend Giuliani about anything, but why is the “walking distance” excuse considered so obviously laughable? Emergencies are emergencies: you can’t count on roads being clear and passable, you can’t count on subways running, you can’t count on helicopters being able to take off, fly and land (never mind last week’s freak tornado, what about hurricanes or rocket-propelled grenades?) With the emergency command center several miles away and across a river at MetroTech in Brooklyn, as it is now and as some of Giuliani’s people recommended at the time, isn’t it just that much harder for the mayor and other top officials to get there in an emergency?

 It would be nice if the Giuliani camp put out its side of the story. If he wins the nomination, we are going to be hearing a lot more about Barrett's allegations.

08/21 07:06 PMShare