So Wayne Barrett and the Village Voice have delivered a bombshell only no one seems to be interested? David Shuster (aka Keith Olbermann) covered it on Countdown last night (10/25) but in today's NYTimes or Washington Post? Nada.
Here's the scoop: Barrett got ahold of accounts of Giuliani's testimony to the 911 Commission, testimony that was to have been kept secret until after the 2008 elections, though no one has explained why. The substance of Giuliani's testimony, however, reveals why he would have wanted it hidden away. It seems that Rudy the Terrorist Slayer is no such thing.
Here are the two leading paragraph's of Barrett's story:
In a recent broadside deriding the Clinton administration's response to Al Qaeda, Rudy Giuliani told an audience at Pat Robertson's Regent University: "Bin Laden declared war on us. We didn't hear it. I thought it was pretty clear at the time, but a lot of people didn't see it, couldn't see it." Other tenets of his standard stump speech include the assertion that he's been "studying terrorism" for more than 30 years, and that "the thing that distinguishes me on terrorism is that I have more experience in dealing with it" than the other presidential candidates.
However, in private testimony before the 9/11 Commission in 2004, Rudy gave a very different version of how much he knew about terrorism when the World Trade Center was attacked. That testimony isn't scheduled to be released publicly until after the 2008 presidential election, but the Voice has obtained a copy of it. And it reveals a New York mayor who was anything but an "expert on terrorism."
Ok, so does this sort of "dirt" matter to those of us fervently working to ensure that a Democrat occupies the White House for the next 8 years? And if it does, how best to make use of it? I'm no expert on electoral politics, so all I can do is ask whether it would be best to try to knock Giuliani out of his top spot in the GOP race now (lots of pundits are betting there will be no revolt of the religious right, when push comes to shove) or better to wait and use it against him in the general election. Perhaps the wisdom of the Kos community can weigh in here.
It might also be useful to discover exactly who decided that 911 testimony would remain secret until after the 08 elections. Was this "rule" general to everyone's testimony or just to some folks'? Whose interests are served by such procedures?
Clearly someone associated with the commission thought such secrecy might be harmful to the republic (and a specific Republican) since he/she leaked it to Barrett. What else is lurking in all that testimony?