Giuliani's Clients May Take Luster From Homeland-Security Im
Giuliani's Clients May Take Luster From Homeland-Security Image
By Henry Goldman and Jonathan D. Salant
April 30 (Bloomberg)
On April 19, New York Governor Eliot Spitzer called for the eventual shutdown of a nuclear power plant 24 miles from New York City, saying it's ``not a smart location'' for a facility he has warned is vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
That assessment was a setback for one of the Indian Point plant's biggest boosters: Republican presidential frontrunner Rudy Giuliani. Giuliani, whose consulting firm advises plant owner Entergy Corp. on security and evacuation plans, last November declared the company a ``model'' of safety.
Indian Point is one of several projects Giuliani has pushed for corporate clients that may clash with his image as a homeland-security expert, a reputation he won as New York's mayor during the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that killed more than 2,900 people.
Some of those associations may haunt him, says Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism chief during the 2001 attacks, when hijackers crashed airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.
``You have no obligation to take on security assessments for people who have insecure facilities,'' says Clarke, who served on the National Security Council under both Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. For a candidate, ``there is a risk that somewhere in your client base something will go very, very wrong.''
Liquefied Gas
Giuliani, 62, is also advising TransCanada Corp. and Shell Oil Co. on a plan to place a 1,215-foot-long barge on Long Island Sound to store liquefied natural gas. Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell, a Republican, is among those opposing the project on safety grounds.
His law firm has lobbied to exempt respiratory-mask manufacturers from lawsuits when equipment fails, a position that has outraged police and firefighters. The firm also represents an oil company controlled by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who has challenged U.S. influence throughout Latin America.
Giuliani, who leads the race for the Republican nomination in every major poll, and his campaign didn't respond to questions about whether his business relationships may become an issue.
Representative Peter King of New York, a Giuliani supporter and the top Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, says the candidate has already established his credibility on public-safety matters.
Ready for Attacks
``Rudy is expecting to be attacked on everything,'' King says. ``I think he's prepared. He knows what the stakes are.''
The former mayor has taken steps to reduce his involvement in business, saying he will leave his New York-based consulting firm, Giuliani Partners LLC, and selling his investment bank, Giuliani Capital Advisors LLC, to Macquarie Bank Ltd. of Sydney. He remains a partner in the Houston-based law firm of Bracewell & Giuliani LLP.
Last month, Giuliani's law firm said he wasn't involved in its lobbying on behalf of Citgo Petroleum Corp., the company controlled by Chavez's Venezuelan government.
The Indian Point nuclear plant, perched on the Hudson River north of New York City, has raised safety concerns throughout its 32-year history. Those concerns turned to alarm after the Sept. 11 attacks, when a jet plane flew past the site minutes before crashing into the south tower of the World Trade Center.
Inadequate
James Lee Witt, a former head of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in a 2002 report that evacuation plans for the surrounding area were inadequate, a conclusion echoed by Democrat Spitzer, 47, when he spoke to reporters after an April 19 breakfast meeting in New York.
Indian Point has had at least eight emergency shutdowns since 2005. On April 15, the plant flunked a Nuclear Regulatory Commission siren test, prompting the commission to recommend a $130,000 fine.
Giuliani's consulting firm had recommended the siren's manufacturer, ATI Inc. of Boston, according to Jim Steets, a spokesman for New Orleans-based Entergy, the second-largest U.S. operator of nuclear power plants.
On Nov. 22, Giuliani backed Entergy's application for a 20- year extension of its licenses, which expire in 2013.
``Indian Point is as safe as a facility can be,'' he told reporters at the time. He said pursuing nuclear energy is one way the U.S. can achieve energy independence. ``There is nothing that produces energy that doesn't carry risk,'' he said.
Seal of Approval
Steets, who says Entergy hired the candidate's firm in 2003, says the company believed that Giuliani's seal of approval ``would go a long way in persuading people'' the company had made the plant safe.
Richard Sheirer, a partner at the consulting firm who ran New York's Office of Emergency Management when Giuliani was mayor, declined to comment on advice given Entergy.
Another Giuliani Partners client is Broadwater, the joint venture of Calgary-based TransCanada and Houston-based Shell that wants to store liquefied natural gas on Long Island Sound. The barge could supply Connecticut and New York with 1 billion cubic feet of LNG a day. Proponents say the project would reduce the costs of storage and transmission, and help spur economic growth.
Last month, a report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, said some studies estimate a terrorist attack on the facility could cause a fireball to extend across an area of more than 2.6 miles.
`Waiting to Happen'
``Broadwater is an accident or attack waiting to happen,'' Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said during an April 17 hearing. ``No consensus exists on even the most basic issue: How large is the danger zone from a large LNG fire?''
The joint venture, Broadwater Energy LLC, says the barge's one-mile buffer zones ``will protect the public from any potential accident or terrorist attack.'' The barge's location - - nine miles from Long Island and 11 miles from Connecticut -- ``provides a very significant safety buffer,'' the company said in a statement.
``Security, safety, and reliability have been top priorities for Broadwater from the outset,'' Eric Hatzimemos, a managing director of Giuliani Partners, said in a statement,
Giuliani has also drawn the ire of police and firefighter groups for backing a campaign by makers of respiratory masks to get immunity from lawsuits if their equipment malfunctions.
Lobbying Congress
In July 2005, three months after he joined his law firm, Bracewell & Giuliani was hired by the Coalition for Breathing Safety to lobby Congress to grant the immunity. The firm was paid $312,000, according to congressional lobby-disclosure reports.
``It shows that what the former mayor is truly concerned about is dollars instead of the lives of first responders,'' says Jeffrey Zack, a spokesman for the Washington-based International Association of Fire Fighters.
The exemption would apply only to masks approved by the government's National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. That would include inexpensive disposable masks made by the millions, some of which are only 95 percent effective, according to the institute. ``We don't want 5 percent getting sick or dying and having no recourse in the courts,'' Zack says.
Andrea Mournighan, director of government relations for the National Association of Police Organizations in Washington, says it was ``a little overbroad'' to give manufacturers immunity from liability just because the products met the institute's standards.
Retaliation
Giuliani has said the firefighters and police unions are trying to retaliate against him for holding the line on their wages when he was mayor.
James Hornstein, an attorney for Moldex-Metric Inc., a privately held mask maker in Culver City, California, says the coalition was seeking the lobbying firm's political advice, not Giuliani's clout or reputation. ``Giuliani's name made no difference,'' he says.
Hornstein says that ``a mountain of frivolous lawsuits'' would bankrupt the manufacturers and leave the U.S. without enough masks in a pandemic or bio-terror event. Even so, the coalition is no longer pushing the legislation and Giuliani's firm is no longer lobbying for the group, partner Ed Krenik says.
Republican political consultant Craig Shirley, who advised Bob Dole's 1996 presidential campaign, says Giuliani's involvement with companies linked to safety disputes ``goes to the heart of his candidacy,'' and may put him on the defensive as the campaign wears on.
``It's a distraction he doesn't need,'' says Shirley, who isn't backing any candidate this time. ``The old adage in politics is, `When you're explaining, you're losing.'''
Giuliani's Ties to a Terror Sheikh
Giuliani's Ties to a Terror Sheikh
By Wayne Barrett
The Village Voice
Tuesday 27 November 2007
Giuliani's business contracts tie him to the man who let 9/11's mastermind escape the FBI.
Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city's skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. Although a member of the emir's own royal family had harbored the man who would later be identified as the mastermind of the attack-a man named Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, often referred to in intelligence circles by his initials, KSM-al-Thani rushed to New York in its aftermath, offering to make a $3 million donation, principally to the families of its victims. Rudy Giuliani, apparently unaware of what the FBI and CIA had long known about Qatari links to Al Qaeda, appeared on CNN with al-Thani that night and vouched for the emir when Larry King asked the mayor: "You are a friend of his, are you not?"
"We had a very good meeting yesterday. Very good," said Giuliani, adding that he was "very, very grateful" for al-Thani's generosity. It was no cinch, of course, that Giuliani would take the money: A week later, he famously rejected a $10 million donation from a Saudi prince who advised America that it should "adopt a more balanced stand toward the Palestinian cause." (Giuliani continues to congratulate himself for that snub on the campaign trail.) Al-Thani waited a month before expressing essentially the same feelings when he returned to New York for a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly and stressed how important it was to "distinguish" between the "phenomenon" of 9/11 and "the legitimate struggles" of the Palestinians "to get rid of the yoke of illegitimate occupation and subjugation." Al-Thani then accused Israel of "state terrorism" against the Palestinians.
But there was another reason to think twice about accepting al-Thani's generosity that Giuliani had to have been aware of, even as he heaped praise on the emir. Al Jazeera, the Arabic news network based in Qatar (pronounced "Cutter"), had been all but created by al-Thani, who was its largest shareholder. The Bush administration was so upset with the coverage of Osama bin Laden's pronouncements and the U.S. threats to bomb Afghanistan that Secretary of State Colin Powell met the emir just hours before Giuliani's on-air endorsement and asked him to tone down the state-subsidized channel's Islamist footage and rhetoric. The six-foot-eight, 350-pound al-Thani, who was pumping about $30 million a year into Al Jazeera at the time, refused Powell's request, citing the need for "a free and credible media." The administration's burgeoning distaste for what it would later brand "Terror TV" was already so palpable that King-hardly a newsman-asked the emir if he would help "spread the word" that the U.S. was "not targeting the average Afghan citizen." Al-Thani ignored the question-right before Giuliani rushed in to praise him again.
In retrospect, Giuliani's embrace of the emir appears peculiar. But it was only a sign of bigger things to come: the launching of a cozy business relationship with terrorist-tolerant Qatar that is inconsistent with the core message of Giuliani's current presidential campaign, namely that his experience and toughness uniquely equip him to protect America from what he tauntingly calls "Islamic terrorists"-an enemy that he always portrays himself as ready to confront, and the Democrats as ready to accommodate.
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 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. But there's little question that a security agreement with Qatar's government, or with Qatar Petroleum, would put a company like Giuliani's in direct contact with the ministry run by Abdallah al-Thani: The website of Qatar's government, and the interior ministry's press office, as well as numerous press stories, all confirm that the ministry controls a 2,500-member police force, the General Administration of Public Security, and the Mubahathat, or secret police. The ministry's charge under law is to "create and institute security in this country." Hassan Sidibe, a public-relations officer for the ministry, says that "a company that does security work, they have to get permission from the interior ministry."
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."
Giuliani's lifelong friend Louis Freeh, the FBI head who talked to Giuliani periodically about terrorist threats during Giuliani's mayoral years and has endorsed him for president, was so outraged that he wrote a formal letter to Qatar's foreign minister complaining that he'd received "disturbing information" that KSM "has again escaped the surveillance of your Security Services and that he appears to be aware of FBI interest in him."
Abdallah al-Thani remains a named defendant in the 9/11 lawsuits that are still proceeding in Manhattan federal court, but his Washington lawyers declined to address the charges that he shielded KSM, insisting only that he never "supported" any "terrorist acts." Asked if Abdallah al-Thani ever supported any terrorists rather than their acts, his lawyer David Nachman declined to comment further. 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."
Freeh's letter in 1996 highlighted the consequences of this government-orchestrated escape with a prophetic declaration, saying that the "failure to apprehend KSM would allow him and other associates to continue to conduct terrorist operations." Indeed, had 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.
In other words, as 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.
This startling revelation is not a sudden disclosure from new sources. It has, in fact, been staring us in the face for many months.
The Wall Street Journal reported on November 7 that one Giuliani Partners client the former mayor hadn't previously disclosed was, in fact, the government of Qatar. Quoting the recently retired Bush envoy to Qatar, Chase Untermeyer, the Journal reported that state-run Qatar Petroleum had signed a contract with Giuliani Security "around 2005" and that the firm (of which Giuliani has a 30 percent equity stake) is offering security advice to a giant natural-gas processing facility called Ras Laffan. While the interior ministry wouldn't confirm individual contracts, it did tell the Voice that Qatar Petroleum and security "purchasing" are part of its portfolio.
(The Journal story was followed by a similar piece in the Chicago Tribune last week, which revealed that Giuliani's firm has also represented a complex casino partnership seeking to build a $3.5 billion Singapore resort. The partnership included "the family of a controversial Hong Kong billionaire who has ties to the regime of North Korea's Kim Jong II and has been linked to international organized crime by the U.S. government.")
The Journal story, however, didn't go into detail about the unsavory connections that Giuliani had made in the Middle East. The Journal wrote that it learned about the Qatar contract after reading a speech that Untermeyer gave in 2006, when he said that Giuliani's firm had "important contracts" in Qatar. In fact, Untermeyer-who returned to Texas when he stepped down as ambassador to join a real-estate firm partnered with the National Bank of Qatar-told the Houston Forum that Giuliani's "security company" has "several" contracts in Qatar, and that Giuliani himself "comes to Doha [Qatar's capital] twice a year." Untermeyer's wife Diana spoke at the same event about their daughter Elly, who she said "makes friends with all she meets-other kids, generals, sheikhs, and even our famous American visitors like former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whom she deems 'cool.' "
While it is true that Giuliani hasn't disclosed the particulars of his Qatar business, he and others at the firm have been bragging about it for years, presumably on the assumption that mentioning good-paying clients is the best way to generate more of the same. Giuliani told South Africa's Business Times in June 2006, for example, that he'd "recently helped Qatar" to transform Doha in preparation for the Asian Games, an Olympics- sanctioned, 45-country competition that occurred last December. He was in Johannesburg in part to offer to do the same before South Africa hosts the 2010 World Cup. "They had the same concerns as you," he said at the Global Leaders Africa summit, "and I helped them pull things together. You can see not only how they pulled together physical things that were necessary, such as stadiums, but how they used the plan to improve their security."
Richard Bradshaw, a consulting-services manager for an Australian security firm that played a two-and-a-half-year role in planning the Asian Games, says that "the ministry of the interior is essentially the chief ministry in charge of internal security"-for the games and other matters. Bradshaw says that he "heard the name of Giuliani Partners quoted in this town," but that he knew nothing directly about their Asian Games involvement, adding that "maybe they just dealt with high levels in the government." But Hassan Sidibe, the interior ministry's press officer, says that a special organizing committee handled contracts for the Asian Games and that "the minister of interior was part of that committee."
In addition to specific references to the natural-gas and Asian Games deals, Giuliani Partners has hinted at broader ties to Qatar. A New York Post story in January that was filled with quotes about Giuliani Partners' clients from Michael Hess, a managing partner at the firm, reported that Giuliani himself "has given advice from Qatar to Spain." Another Post story in May reported that Giuliani had made lucrative speeches in 30 countries-which he does in addition to his Giuliani Partners business-and named Qatar as one of those locations. A New York Times story in January, also laced with Hess quotes, reported that Pasquale J. D'Amuro, the ex-FBI chief who replaced Bernard Kerik as the head of Giuliani's security division, "has traveled to meet with executives in Japan, Qatar, and other nations, often focusing on clients who seek the firm out for advice on how to protect against a terrorist attack." Any of these dealings in Qatar that involved security would necessarily connect the firm with the interior ministry run by Abdallah al-Thani.
Peter Boyer, whose New Yorker profile of Giuliani appeared this August, quoted D'Amuro and Giuliani about the expertise and work of Ali Soufan, an Arabic-speaking Lebanese-American who also left the FBI to become the international director of Giuliani Security. Both D'Amuro and Giuliani said that Soufan, the lead investigator in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, had been spending "most of his time" in a Persian Gulf country that is a Giuliani client. Boyer didn't identify the country, but another source familiar with Soufan's assignment has confirmed that Soufan has, until recently, been based in Qatar. "The firm has helped the country with training, and with a revamping of its security infrastructure," Boyer wrote. "The locale is an ideal listening post for someone whose expertise is unraveling the tangle of international terror." Soufan was the firm's point man with the royal family, according to another former FBI operative, even providing security advice for Her Highness Sheikha Mozah bint Nasser Al Missned, the emir's favorite of his three wives.
Gulf States Newsletter, a respected news publication in the region, used similar language this October to describe the firm's business in Qatar. Closing a lengthy piece of boosterism that assessed who was getting security contracts in Qatar, the newsletter cited a sole example "in the field of high-end consultancy," namely what it called "well-partnered players like Giuliani Associates." It said the firm had, "through a combination of luck and good positioning, become trusted partners" of the Qatari government. The "key lesson for any security sector incomer," concluded the newsletter, is that "in Qatar it is necessary but not sufficient to be technically competent. As ever, it may be who you know, not what you know, that wins the day."
Despite this ample supply of evidence, Sunny Mindel, the firm's spokeswoman, denied in a November 11 Post story that Giuliani Partners "had any ties to Qatar Petroleum." Mindel may have meant that the company's business in Qatar had come to an end, parsing her verbs carefully, or she may have been denying that the contract came directly from the petroleum entity, suggesting that the government itself paid for this security advice. Mindel's elusive answers are consistent with other efforts by the company to conceal the Qatar deals, even as Giuliani and others have occasionally talked openly about them. These efforts suggest that Giuliani is aware the association could prove disquieting, even without the embarrassing connection to the notorious KSM.
The best example of how Giuliani's Qatar ties could prove disastrous for his presidential candidacy occurred a year ago, at the opening of the Asian Games on December 1, 2006, eleven days after Giuliani registered his presidential exploratory committee. Ben Smith, then of the Daily News and now with Politico.com, obtained a detailed internal memo from the Giuliani campaign in January, and it contained a travel schedule. Smith wrote that "Giuliani spent the first weekend in December in Doha, Qatar, at the Qatari-government sponsored Asian Games, on which he had reportedly worked as a consultant." Giuliani's calendar indicates that he arrived in Qatar on December 2 and left on December 3, heading to Las Vegas to address the state's GOP. The Qatari government spent $2.8 billion to host the games, building a massive sports complex with security very much in mind. "We have 8,000 well-trained security members and the latest technology that were used in the Olympics," said a security spokesman.
On December 1, the day before Giuliani arrived, the emir's special guests at the lavish opening, attended by 55,000, were Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Palestinian prime minister Ismail Haniyeh and Syrian president Bashar Assad, all of whom are Qatar allies and were pictured sitting together on television. Giuliani's presence that weekend wasn't noted in news coverage at the time, even though his firm had apparently provided security advice for an event that included Ahmadinejad, whose country Giuliani has since promised to "set back five years" should it pursue its nuclear program. Ahmadinejad was later assailed by opponents in his own country for watching a female song-and-dance show that was part of the opening extravaganza. The presence of Hamas's Haniyeh, who attended private meetings with the emir while Giuliani was in Qatar, might also have been embarrassing to Giuliani, since Qatar agreed to pay $22.5 million a month to cover the salaries of 40,000 Palestinian teachers, as well as to create a bank in the territories with a $50 million initial deposit. This break in the boycott against Hamas orchestrated by the U.S. and Israel prompted a stern rebuke from the State Department on December 5.
While Qatar's emir has allowed the U.S. to locate its central command and other strategic facilities in the country, including the largest pre-positioning base in the region, his government was also the only member of the U.N. Security Council to oppose the July 2006 resolution that called on Iran to suspend all nuclear research and development activities. Indeed, Iran and Qatar share the North Field/South Pars natural-gas deposit off the Qatari coast, the very one that includes the Giuliani-advised Ras Laffan project. Similarly, the emir praised the Hezbollah resistance in Lebanon during the 2006 war with Israel, calling it "the first Arab victory, something we had longed for," and he visited southern Lebanon after the war, meeting with families and giving away $250 million to rebuild destroyed homes. While Qatar had allowed Israel to open a small trade mission in Doha amid much fanfare in the mid-'90s, it had virtually shut down the office by 2000, and the last of the Israeli envoys left in 2003.
Also, Saddam Hussein's wife, Sajida Khayrallah Tilfa, lives in Qatar, in defiance of an Interpol arrest warrant and her appearance on the Iraqi government's 2006 most-wanted list for allegedly providing financial support to Iraqi insurgents, according to an October 2007 report by the Congressional Research Service. Invited with her daughter to Qatar by the deputy prime minister, she has not returned to Iraq despite an extradition demand issued months before Giuliani's December visit.
Another potentially uncomfortable Giuliani visit to Doha also stayed under the radar. On January 16, 2006, Giuliani visited the Aspire Academy for Sports Excellence and the Aspire Zone, the largest sports dome in the world, built for the Asian Games as well as future international events (including the Olympic Games, which Qatar hopes to host someday). Giuliani praised the academy, which he called "a fantastic achievement," adding that he was "looking forward to seeing it develop in the coming years." Aspire's communications director says that Giuliani "spent more than an hour and a half" touring its facilities, adding that the former mayor "spoke very eloquently." But even putting his stamp of approval on such apparently benign facilities could come back to bite Giuliani: The academy, a $1.3 billion facility designed to move Qatar into the top ranks of international soccer, has been denounced in unusually blunt terms by Sepp Blatter, the head of world football's governing body, FIFA. Blatter called Qatar's "establishment of recruitment networks"-using 6,000 staff members to assess a half-million young footballers in seven African countries and then moving the best to Qatar-"a good example of exploitation."
The Aspire facilities were part of the Asian Games security preparations that Giuliani told the Business Times his firm had participated in planning, since the dome allowed 10 sports to be staged simultaneously under one roof. But even the notice of Giuliani's January appearance, which was posted on the website of an English newspaper there, made no mention of his consulting work for the government. The ex-FBI source says that Giuliani's secretive security work in Qatar-which also includes vulnerability assessments on port facilities in Doha and pipeline security-would necessarily have involved the interior ministry.
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 so mistrusted the Qataris that he plotted an extraordinary rendition, but the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department said they couldn't pull it off. Then he asked the ambassador to "obtain the Emir's approval for a snatch, without the word getting to anyone else." Despite assurances that "only a few senior officials knew about our plan, KSM learned of it and fled the country ahead of the FBI's arrest team's arrival," Clarke concluded in his book, Against All Enemies. "We were of course outraged at Qatari security and assumed the leak came from within the palace." 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."
Even earlier than the Los Angeles Times report, ABC News' Brian Ross reported that Abdallah had warned KSM, citing American intelligence officials, and added that KSM had left Qatar "with a passport provided by that country's government." Ross didn't limit his broadside to Abdallah, saying that "there were others in the Qatari royal family who were sympathetic and provided safe havens for Al Qaeda." A New York Times story in 2003 said that Abdallah "harbored as many as 100 Arab extremists on his farm." The story also quoted Freeh as saying that KSM had "over 20 false passports at his disposal" and cited American officials who suspected Abdallah of tipping him off. However, the Times story also quoted a Qatari official who claimed that Abdallah "always provided support for Islamic extremists with the knowledge and acceptance of Qatar's emir."
Indeed, the Times reported in another 2003 story that after 9/11, KSM was said by Saudi intelligence officials to have "spent two weeks hiding in Qatar, with the help of prominent patrons." Abdul Karim al-Thani, a royal family member who did not hold a government post, was also accused in the story of operating a safe house for Abu Massab al-Zarqawi, who later became the face of the early Iraqi insurgency but was depicted then as an Al Qaeda operative moving from Baghdad to Afghanistan. Abdul al-Thani, according to a senior coalition official, provided Qatari passports and a million-dollar bank account to finance the network.
Other connections between Qatar and terrorism have been reported in the press. Newsweek identified an Iraqi living in Doha and working at Abdallah's Islamic-affairs ministry as being detained by Qatar police because of the ties he had to 9/11 hijackers-yet he was released even though phone records linked him as well to the 1993 bombers and the so-called "Bojinka" plot hatched in Manila to blow up civilian airlines. A Chechen terrorist financier harbored in Qatar was assassinated there by a Russian hit squad in 2004. Yousef Qardawi, a cleric with a talk show on Al Jazeera and ties to the emir, issued a fatwa against Americans the same year. An engineer at Qatar Petroleum carried out a suicide bomb attack at a theater popular with Westerners in early 2005, killing one and wounding 12.
Finally, the long-smoldering question of whether Osama bin Laden played a role in the 1996 bombing of the American barracks at Khobar Towers-funneling 20 tons of C-4 explosives into Saudi Arabia through Qatar-resurfaced in a story based intelligence reports and endorsed by none other than Dick Cheney. In 2003, Steven Hayes of The Weekly Standard wrote a celebrated story based on a 16-page Defense Department intelligence assessment. The thrust of the story was to advance the administration's thesis about Al Qaeda's ties to Iraq, but Hayes also found that in 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 2007 CRS 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. Bill Gertz and others have been writing for years that the path to the carnage at Khobar led through Doha.
The Khobar attack closely followed an unsuccessful coup attempt against the emir on February 20, 1996, which Qatar officials, in later criminal prosecutions, formally accused Saudi Arabia of fomenting. Analysts in the region have suggested that any use of Qatar as a launching pad for the Khobar attack so soon after the coup attempt was likely to have been approved at the highest levels of the government. In October 1996, within months of both the KSM escape and the Khobar bombing, Abdallah al-Thani got his first major promotion, elevated by the emir to Minister of State for Interior Affairs, a cabinet position.
All of this evidence of Qatar's role as a facilitator of terrorism-reaching even to the emir himself-was reported well before Giuliani Partners began its business there "around 2005." Yet even the New York Times story, filled with quotes from Giuliani's friend Freeh, didn't deter him. Nor did the firm's retention of D'Amuro and Soufan, two ex-FBI counterterrorism experts who certainly knew the terror landscape of Qatar.
Soufan, in fact, was the primary investigator who assembled the case against the terrorists who bombed American embassies in Africa in 1998. And the testimony in that 2001 trial established that the Qatar Charitable Society, a nongovernmental agency that is said to "draw much of its funding from official sources," helped finance the attack. Daniel Pipes, a foreign-policy adviser to the Giuliani campaign, has branded the Qatar Charitable Society "one of bin Laden's de facto banks." Reached at home and asked about his work in Qatar, Soufan declined to comment.
Even the revelations about Khobar Towers didn't slow Giuliani down, though he's subsequently made the bombing a central feature in his stump-speech litany of the Clinton administration's failings. Giuliani also ignored an official State Department report on terrorism for 2003-released in mid-2004, just before his firm began doing business in Qatar-which said that the country's security services "monitored extremists passively," and that "members of transnational terrorist groups and state sponsors of terror are present in Qatar." The report added that Qatar's government "remains cautious about taking any action that would cause embarrassment or public scrutiny" when nationals from the Gulf countries were involved. (Later reports issued by the new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, moderated the department's Qatar assessment.) Also in 2004, Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute who works with the Defense Department, wrote that a "Wahhabi clique" tied to extremists "is still in charge [in Qatar], and seeded the security establishment with personnel of their choosing." But even this strong, specific warning didn't deter Giuliani Partners' interest in Qatar.
Presumably, Giuliani's rationale for doing business there was that Qatar had become an American ally, hosting up to 40,000 troops. The CRS report put the complexity of the relationship well, noting that American concerns about Qatari support for terrorists "have been balanced over time by Qatar's counterterrorism efforts and its broader, long-term commitment to host and support U.S. military forces." In a footnote, the CRS report adds that the emir may finally be downplaying Abdallah al-Thani's influence, even as he reappointed him this year. The U.S. government may have to be satisfied with that suggestion of progress; it does not have limitless military options in the Middle East. (The emir, for his part, once reportedly explained his willingness to host U.S. forces by saying: "The only way we can be sure the Americans will answer our 911 call is if we have the police at our own house.")
Giuliani Partners, however, has a world of choices, quite literally. Some American companies who do business in Qatar, like Shell and ExxonMobil, have to chase the gas and oil wherever they are. But a consulting company with instant name recognition like Giuliani's-and which claims to carefully vet its clients-can be both profitable and selective. Moreover, it's the only American company known to be providing security advice to Qatar; the rest hail from Singapore, Australia, and France. A company headed by a man who has known that he would make this presidential run for years-and with 9/11 as its rationale-could have chosen to make his millions elsewhere. Especially a candidate who divides the world into good guys and bad guys, claims that this war is a "divine" mission, and shuns complexity. For that kind of a candidate, Qatar may become one Giuliani contradiction too many.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Go to Original
Giuliani Billed Obscure Agencies for Trips
By Ben Smith
The Politico
Wednesday 28 November 2007
As New York mayor, Rudy Giuliani billed obscure city agencies for tens of thousands of dollars in security expenses amassed during the time when he was beginning an extramarital relationship with future wife Judith Nathan in the Hamptons, according to previously undisclosed government records.
The documents, obtained by Politico under New York's Freedom of Information Law, show that the mayoral costs had nothing to do with the functions of the little-known city offices that defrayed his tabs, including agencies responsible for regulating loft apartments, aiding the disabled and providing lawyers for indigent defendants.
At the time, the mayor's office refused to explain the accounting to city auditors, citing "security."
The Hamptons visits resulted in hotel, gas and other costs for Giuliani's New York Police Department security detail.
Giuliani's relationship with Nathan is old news now, and Giuliani regularly asks voters on the campaign trail to forgive his "mistakes."
It's also impossible to know whether the purpose of all the Hamptons trips was to see Nathan. A Giuliani spokeswoman declined to discuss any aspect of this story, which was explained in detail to her earlier this week.
Asked about this article after it was published on Wednesday, Giuliani said: "It's not true."
He said he had 24-hour security during his eight years as mayor because of "threats," adding: " I had nothing to do with the handling of their records, and they were handled, as far as I know, perfectly appropriately."
The practice of transferring the travel expenses of Giuliani's security detail to the accounts of obscure mayoral offices has never been brought to light, despite behind-the-scenes criticism from the city comptroller weeks after Giuliani left office.
The expenses first surfaced as Giuliani's two terms as mayor of New York drew to a close in 2001, when a city auditor stumbled across something unusual: $34,000 worth of travel expenses buried in the accounts of the New York City Loft Board.
When the city's fiscal monitor asked for an explanation, Giuliani's aides refused, citing "security," said Jeff Simmons, a spokesman for the city comptroller.
But American Express bills and travel documents obtained by Politico suggest another reason City Hall may have considered the documents sensitive: They detail three summers of visits to Southampton, the Long Island town where Nathan had an apartment.
Auditors "were unable to verify that these expenses were for legitimate or necessary purposes," City Comptroller William Thompson wrote of the expenses from fiscal year 2000, which covers parts of 1999 and 2000.
The letter, whose existence has not been previously reported, was also obtained under the Freedom of Information Law.
Long Island Bills
The receipts tally the costs of hotel and gas bills for the police detectives who traveled everywhere with the mayor, according to cover sheets that label them "PD expenses" and travel authorizations that describe the trips.
New York's mayor receives round-the-clock police protection, and there's no suggestion that Giuliani used his detail improperly on these trips.
Many of the receipts are from hotels and gas stations on Long Island, where Giuliani reportedly began visiting Nathan's Southampton condominium in the summer of 1999, though Giuliani and Nathan have never discussed the beginning of their relationship.
Nathan would go on to become Giuliani's third wife, but his second marriage was officially intact until the spring of 2000, and City Hall officials at the time responded to questions about his absences by saying he was spending time with his son and playing golf.
The receipts have languished in city files since Giuliani left office, apparently in part because of City Hall's decision to bill police expenses to a range of little-known city offices.
"There is no really good reason to do this except to have nobody know about it," Carol O'Cleireacain, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who was budget director under Giuliani's predecessor, David Dinkins, said of the unusual billing practices.
A Giuliani spokeswoman, Sunny Mindel, declined to comment on any aspect of the travel documents or the billing arrangements.
A Giuliani aide who would speak only on the condition of anonymity denied that the unorthodox billing practices were aimed at hiding the expenses, citing "accounting" and noting that they were billed to units of the mayor's office, not to outside city agencies.
The aide declined to discuss Giuliani's visits to Long Island.
The trips themselves were a departure for a mayor who had prided himself on spending every waking moment in the city and on the job, and offer a glimpse into the dramatic and controversial finale to his tenure in office.
Receipts show him in Southampton every weekend in August and the first weekend in September of 2001, before the terror attacks of Sept. 11 disrupted the routines of his city.
Both the travel expenses and the appearance that his office made efforts to conceal them could open Giuliani to criticism that his personal life spilled over into his official duties and his expenses grew in his final years in office.
It is impossible to say which of the 11 Long Island trips indicated by credit card receipts were to visit Nathan and which were for other purposes.
Eight of those trips, however, were not noted on Giuliani's official schedule, which is now available in the city's municipal archive and contains many details of Giuliani's official and unofficial life.
The billing practices, however, drew formal attention on Jan. 24, 2002, when Thompson, the city comptroller, wrote the newly elected mayor, Michael Bloomberg, a confidential letter.
One of his auditors, he wrote, had stumbled upon the unexplained travel expenses during a routine audit of the Loft Board, a tiny branch of city government that regulates certain apartments.
Broadening the inquiry, the comptroller wrote, auditors found similar expenses at a range of other unlikely agencies: $10,054 billed to the Office for People With Disabilities and $29,757 to the Procurement Policy Board.
The next year, yet another obscure department, the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, was billed around $400,000 for travel.
Increasing Costs
"The Comptroller's Office made repeated requests for the information in 2001 and 2002 but was informed that, due to security concerns, the information could not be provided," said Simmons. Thompson took office in 2002.
Thompson also warned that travel costs had increased by 151 percent in Giuliani's final fiscal year, to more than $618,000, a number which also includes police security on campaign swings for Giuliani's abortive 2000 Senate run and trips to Los Angeles by Donna Hanover, who remained Giuliani's wife and the city's official first lady, in the fall of 2000.
Most of that travel also was billed to obscure agencies, though portions - much of it trips to and from Washington by Giuliani deputies - were accounted for more conventionally, with a more visible charge to the mayor's office.
Thompson suggested Bloomberg "review ... the cost of mayoralty travel expenses, given your administration's focus on fiscal constraints."
A spokesman for Bloomberg, Stu Loeser, said: "When we received the letter from the comptroller, we referred the matter to the Department of Investigations, as we would in any case like this."
A spokeswoman for the Department of Investigations declined to comment.
The executive director of the Loft Board referred Politico to Bloomberg's office for comment.
The first trip to Southampton appearing in the travel documents runs from Aug. 31 to Sept. 1, 1999.
Four police officers spent the night at the Atlantic Utopia Lifestyle Inn, according to an approval request for official out-of-city travel, billing the city $1,016.20.
Giuliani's private schedule, available from the municipal archive, lists no events on Long Island that day.
The New York Post reported the following year that Giuliani "had long weekend visits with gal pal Judi Nathan at her Southampton, L.I., condo last summer, according to neighbors who said the mayor did little to conceal their relationship."
The neighbors called their relationship and their time in Nathan's two-bedroom condo overlooking Noyack Bay "an open secret."
"Several residents of the condo sometimes asked Giuliani's driver and members of his security entourage to turn off their car engines," the Post reported.
That first trip was followed by at least 10 more, according to the travel and credit card documents.
One of those trips, on Aug. 20-21, 1999, included a fundraiser on the evening of Aug. 21. Giuliani's four-man detail arrived 24 hours early, billing the city $1,704.43 at the Southampton Inn, according to their approval request.
More trips followed in the summer of 2000, after the mayor's affair with Nathan became public and they were seen together publicly in Southampton. The trips accelerated in the summer of 2001, when he visited Southampton every weekend in August, as well as on Sept. 2.
Many of the trips show expenses only for gas, though his police detail billed the city $1,371.40 for the nights of Aug. 3-4, 2001, at the Village Latch Inn in Southampton.
Giuliani's police detail also spent a night in Palm Beach, Fla., according to the bill for the American Express card under Giuliani's name. The detectives spent $1,714.99 at The Breakers, a sprawling hotel and resort.
There is no indication that Nathan visited Palm Beach. Giuliani's aide did not recall the trip.
The 2001 travel expenses were billed to the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, a little-known unit of the mayor's office involved in programs that provide lawyers to poor defendants.
None of the 2001 trips to Southampton appear in Giuliani's official schedule. However, the schedule does contain a potential clue to his destination. Before three of them, Giuliani paid a visit to his barber, Carlo Fargnoli, on York Avenue near the mayor's official residence, Gracie Mansion.
---------------------------------------------------------
Politico intern Kate Linthicum contributed to this article.
taxpayers picked up tab for Judith Giuliani's visit to kin
City taxpayers picked up tab for Judith Giuliani's visit to kin in Pennsylvania
BY MICHAEL SAUL and DAVID SALTONSTALL
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Saturday, December 1st 2007, 4:00 AM
Rudy and Judith Giuliani enjoy the perk of flight on Air Force One in 2004.
In the fall of 2001, city cops chauffeured Rudy Giuliani's then-mistress, Judith Nathan, to her parents' Pennsylvania home 130 miles away on the taxpayers' dime.
Records show that city cops refueled at an ExxonMobil station down the road from Nathan's childhood home in Hazleton on Oct. 20, 2001, while Giuliani stayed behind in New York attending 9/11 funerals.
A similar receipt pops up at a different Hazleton gas station two months later, when Nathan apparently went home for a pre-Christmas visit with her parents.
The records show that - in addition to using City Hall funds to take Giuliani and Nathan to 11 secret trysts in the Hamptons, as has been previously reported - taxpayers were paying to ferry Nathan on long-distance trips without Giuliani, now a Republican contender for President.
Aides to the presidential hopeful insisted Friday that all the expenses were legitimate - although Mayor Bloomberg's gal pal, Diana Taylor, happily goes without police protection.
Neighbors from Nathan's old town said Friday that explains the burly men they remember seeing with her in the fall of 2001 when she visited her parents.
"They looked like [cops], clean-cut and well-built," recalled Madeline Kowalski, 48.
The receipts, first revealed by Politico.com and obtained by the Daily News, also show that the obscure accounts that covered the cop expenses were put to other surprising uses.
Giuliani's Community Assistance Unit doled out pricey meals, Broadway tickets - even tickets to Yankee games - to victims of the melee that followed the Puerto Rican Day Parade in 2000.
Giuliani advisers insisted that the manner in which the travel and other bills were paid - by scattering expenses across several little-known mayoral agencies - was appropriate and not an attempt to obscure anything.
"At what point do we acknowledge that this was just a cheap political hit and that the premise of the original story has been proven false?" said Giuliani adviser Anthony Carbonetti. "Nobody was trying to hide anything."
Aides dismissed questions about Nathan's security detail as old news, since it was reported in 2001 that the NYPD granted her full-time protection that year after an unspecified threat was allegedly made against her. The detail was approved by Giuliani pal Bernard Kerik.
At the time, it was not uncommon to see Nathan being chauffeured around the city in an undercover Dodge with two detectives, who sometimes even helped to walk her dog.
As for the tickets, Carbonetti said they were "a token of goodwill from the city."
The expenses were all paid with a City Hall American Express card funded with money from mayoral office units that had nothing to do with travel or security.
One document dated June 26, 2000, shows how money from five such offices - the Mayor's Office of People with Disabilities, the Community Assistance Unit, the Assigned Counsel Administrative Office, the Loft Board and the mayor's liaison to the United Nations - was used to prepay an American Express account to the tune of $60,000.
That card was in turn used to pay for many security-related costs on trips taken by Giuliani, Nathan, Giuliani's children and, until their marriage dissolved in 2001, First Lady Donna Hanover.
Carbonetti said that the document - dated four days before the end of the city fiscal year - simply showed how unused money from agencies was being used to prepay bills.
"It's fiscally responsible to anticipate predictable expenses and prepay them," he argued.
As for Hazleton, the Giulianis are buying more than gas there these days. On Nov. 1, records show, the couple purchased Nathan's childhood home from her parents for an unspecified sum.
[email protected]
With Mike Jaccarino, Kirsten Danis and Heidi Evans
Judith Nathan got security earlier
Friday, December 07, 2007
Judith Nathan got security earlier
BY MICHAEL SAUL, HEIDI EVANS and DAVID SALTONSTALL
New York DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Witnesses claim Judith Nathan received a full-scale valet service at Nathan's beck and call well before the affair became public.
Judith Nathan got taxpayer-funded chauffeur services from the NYPD earlier than previously disclosed - even before her affair with then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani was revealed, witnesses and sources tell the Daily News.
"It went on for months before the affair was public," said Lee Degenstein, 52, a retired Smith Barney vice president who formerly lived at 200 E. 94th St., Nathan's old building.
"It was going on longer than anybody thought," added Degenstein, who, along with others in the neighborhood, said they often saw Nathan hopping into unmarked NYPD cars in early 2000, before the affair was revealed that May.
When pressed by The News Thursday, aides to the Republican presidential hopeful conceded that Nathan got police protection "sporadically" before December 2000 - the previously acknowledged beginning of her taxpayer-funded detail.
Then-Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik said in January 2001 the NYPD assigned Nathan round-the-clock protection the month before because of an unspecified threat against her on a streetcorner near her home. He insisted at a news conference she had no guards until then.
Thursday, Giuliani aides changed their story. They said Nathan had received previously undisclosed "threats" earlier in 2000, and that protection was provided at those times.
They refused to provide dates, describe the nature of the threats or confirm - as witnesses and a law enforcement source now contend - that the protection began before she was publicly identified as the married mayor's girlfriend in May 2000.
That would make the threat justification all the more puzzling, because she wasn't a public figure.
"Mayor Giuliani and some of those close to him were provided security that NYPD professionals determined was necessary at any given time," said Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor. "It was not something any of us wanted."
Ed Hartnett, the former deputy chief of the NYPD's intelligence division and now Yonkers police chief, added in an e-mail from the Giuliani campaign that Nathan's protection was at first sporadic and did not include a full-time, round-the-clock detail.
But former neighbors of Nathan's, as well as a law enforcement source, describe a full-scale valet service at Nathan's beck and call well before the affair became public.
"I saw guys coming here to pick her up," said Alexei Moncayo, a manager in the garage adjoining Nathan's building where her NYPD escorts often idled. "Maybe a couple of months later I found out she was dating the mayor."
A law enforcement source familiar with mayoral protection said Nathan got bodyguards as far back as 1999, shortly after the affair began.
"If she had to go shopping, errands, that's where you went," the source said.
Other residents at the building said they often saw Nathan coming and going with two well-dressed drivers, who occasionally toted her packages.
"She was always coming back with shopping bags from the different well-known stores in New York," said Jacqueline Elman, a building resident for 12 years who walked her dog regularly and often spotted Nathan, who became the third Mrs. Giuliani in 2003.
Degenstein said he doesn't remember the exact date that cops started showing up for Nathan, but he's certain the rides started before May 10, 2000. That's the day Giuliani dramatically informed his wife, Donna Hanover, via a news conference, that he wanted a separation.
"It was prior to this whole thing with Donna Hanover," Degenstein recalled.
Degenstein, a self-proclaimed police buff, said it wasn't hard to identify Nathan's city-funded wheels as an unmarked police car.
"The windows were all blacked out, it had several antennas affixed to the trunk and of course had the orange E-ZPass stuck in the front windshield," said Degenstein, referring to the special colored toll devices affixed to city cars.
Degenstein is no critic: He said he voted three times for Giuliani during his runs for mayor and says he'll do so again if the alternative is Democrat Hillary Clinton.
"I'll close one eye, but I'll do it," he said.
The law enforcement source said that Nathan eventually had as many as seven detectives assigned to her, and that like any protected person, they took her wherever she wanted to go.
"Whether it was to take her shopping or business - you can't say 'We are not going there,'" the source said. "[If you did] you'd be walking a foot post in the seven-five [Brooklyn's 75th Precinct] somewhere."
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace