The Giuliani Papers

Giuliani the Despot

Glenn Greenwald explains the great danger of Giuliani as president:

A President Giuliani would inherit an office bestowed with such dark powers as indefinite detention, interrogation methods widely considered to be torture, vast warrantless surveillance authority, and an impenetrable wall of secrecy secured by multiple executive and judicial instruments. Set all of that next to a submissive and impotent Congress and an equally supine media—to say nothing of the prospect of another terrorist attack to exacerbate every one of those factors—and it is hard to imagine a more toxic combination than Rudy Giuliani and the Oval Office.

Our political landscape has now tilted so heavily in favor of unchecked presidential prerogatives that even a lame duck, wildly unpopular, and universally discredited George W. Bush is rarely denied what he wants. With this framework now bolted in place, a newly elected, shrewd, and inherently aggressive Giuliani, whose certainty about his own rightness is matched only by his contempt for those who disagree, could easily run roughshod over any attempts to constrain his actions.

Exactly as one would expect, Giuliani has enthusiastically endorsed virtually every one of the most controversial Bush/Cheney assertions of presidential power. He wants to keep Guantanamo open and mocks concerns over the use of torture, even derisively comparing sleep deprivation to the strain of his own campaign. He not only defends Bush’s warrantless surveillance, but does not recognize the legitimacy of any concerns relating to unchecked government power.

In April, Cato Institute’s president, Ed Crane, asked several candidates if they believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil, and detain them with no review of any kind. National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru reported Giuliani’s response: “The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.”

In aggressively rejecting that such a power could exist, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote, “The very core of liberty secured by our Anglo-Saxon system of separated powers has been freedom from indefinite imprisonment at the will of the Executive.” Yet Giuliani’s instinct was to assume that he would automatically possess that tyrannical power.

Giuliani and Torture

Giuliani says torture is in the eyes of the beholder. Andrew Sulivan remarks:

He tells the truth about what Bush and Cheney believe. Asked in Iowa last night whether he believed that waterboarding was torture, he replied:

"It depends on who does it."

If the Khmer Rouge does it, it's torture. If the United States does it, it's not. This man cannot be allowed to be president of the United States. He believes that the United States is above morals and the president of the United States is above the law. He is a tyrant to the depths of his being.

Giuliani's Little-Known Attempt to Overturn NYC Democracy

On 9/10/01 Giuliani was an unpopular lame duck at the end of his term-limited second term. On 9/11 he was the first to realize that his luck and his future had forever changed for the better.

Buried in yet another essentially hagiographic New York Times tribute to Giuliani is the seldom-mentioned fact that immediately after 9/11 the mayor attempted to use his newly acquired "stature" as a "leader" to force the city to keep him on as mayor after his term expired. Giuliani contacted Mark Green, a Democratic candidate:

Even as the fires burned at ground zero, Democrats and Republicans campaigned in a mayoral election. In late September Mr. Giuliani summoned Mr. Green, who was running in the Democratic primary, to his command post.

Mr. Giuliani, as Mr. Green recalled, was blunt: I want to remain in office three more months. I have a great team, I can lobby Washington. I’m being reasonable, he cautioned; my supporters want me to run for a new term.

Oh yes, he added, I need your answer tonight.

Mr. Green was taken aback. Yom Kippur, the holiest of Jewish holidays, was hours away. His closest advisers, many of whom were Jewish, would not pick up the phone.

“He made it clear he would invest his Churchillian popularity in hitting whomever did not go along with him,” Mr. Green said in an interview.

That many wanted the mayor to stay on is undeniable. But American electoral democracy rarely pauses. Abraham Lincoln held elections in 1864. Franklin D. Roosevelt stood for re-election as World War II raged.

“It was a very dangerous idea,” said Mr. Schwarz, the former corporation counsel. “The knight on the white horse is always indispensable in his own mind.”

Giuliani's presidential campaign claims Rudy's coup attempt “lasted four days, maybe a week.”

In fact, the mayor’s campaign lasted nearly a month. Mr. Giuliani warmed to the task, jabbing at potential rivals as disaster neophytes. Mr. Giuliani tried to persuade the candidates, Mr. Green and Fernando Ferrer of the Democrats and Michael R. Bloomberg, the Republican, to support a term extension.

Mr. Green gave in, to his regret. Mr. Bloomberg acceded; Mr. Ferrer refused.

“In retrospect, I was wrong,” Mr. Green said.

Calls poured into the office of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, from Mr. Giuliani and from rabbis and priests. Mr. Silver was on the phone when a secretary signaled a new caller.

It was Ehud Olmert, the mayor of Jerusalem, calling to lobby for Mr. Giuliani. But Mr. Silver declared the matter dead. And it was.

The phone call from Olmert is interesting in the context of the news this week from Giuliani's trip to London where he called for Israel's entry into NATO and also discussed current US/Iran policy with Olmert. See previous posts here and here.