Rudy Guiliani's campaign theme is going to exploit September 11 and warn voters that the country will get hit again if a Democrat is elected in 2008. Read about it here. God help us all if this autocratic bullshit artist with no foreign policy experience is elected.

September 11 is the gift that keeps on giving. Republican candidates have exploited that tragedy for six years now, most obviously in staging the Republican National Convention in New York City in 2004 at an unusual time-frame, late August. George W. mentions 9/11 every chance he gets, and the Republicans in 2004 and 2006 campaigned on the backs of the victims of September 11 by warning voters that another attack awaits a Democratic victory.

Is there anything more disgusting than these obvious efforts to scare the shit out of the American voter? We all remember how we felt on 9/11. The Republicans want those bad feelings to linger. Politicizing 9/11 should be made against the law.

With a deft skill for public relations, Rudy turned himself into a folk hero on September 11, saving his political career as it was winding down as Mayor of New York City. After several years of alienating New York residents with his temper and repressive First Amendement and police policies, his dust-covered presence on television in the aftermath of 9/11 somehow made him "America's Mayor." In fact, according to people who have chronicled his career, Rudy was a failure when it came to securing New York City and his reckless post 9/11 actions placed first-responders (police and firefighters) at risk as they were sent into Ground Zero without adequate protection and many are now suffering from serious respiratory problems.

As MSNBC reported last year, "not everyone is touting the former mayor’s leadership credentials. In their new book, “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11,” (HarperCollins) investigative reporters Dan Collins and Wayne Barrett argue that—far from being a heroic soldier in the war on terror—Giuliani failed to take adequate precautions before the attacks and was directly responsible for many of the city’s failures to cope with the crisis."

Below is an interview with Wayne Barrett, one of the few real investigative reporters focusing on New York politics. It wouldn't be a bad idea to read Barrett's book.

NEWSWEEK: Do you think most Americans have an accurate perception of Rudy Giuliani?

Wayne Barrett: After the 9/11 attacks, Giuliani said all the right things—he hit a chord with Americans when the president disappeared. [Giuliani] stood tall that day and empathized and said reassuring things. The powerful visual of him walking the canyons of 9/11, covered in soot, will stick with everyone. The problem is that he did a lot of wrong things [too]—mostly prior to that day, some even on that day, and many after that day, as the respiratory cases related to 9/11 are showing. This book is a story of stark contrasts between this great capacity he showed that day to lead and the way in which those visuals have insinuated him into the American mind and his paltry performance preparing the city for a terrorist attack even though the city had been attacked [in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing] just months before he took office in 1994.

Giuliani managed to convert that persona we all saw on 9/11 and appreciate [it] into a marketing device and turn himself into a legend as someone who understood the threat and really prepared the city. But, as our book shows, he seemed to have had no appreciation of the terror threat prior to 9/11. In fact, he took many steps backward in preparing the city.

In what ways?

The dumbest decision he made was to put the [city’s emergency] command center in the World Trade Center even though his principal security advisers urged him to put it elsewhere. His own emergency-management director, Jerry Hauer, wanted it to go where [current New York City Mayor Michael] Bloomberg has now put it: in Brooklyn ... If he had, he could have managed the crisis much more capably ...

Also there was his decision not to support Jerry Hauer when he tried to do what he was mandated to do—to create matrixes of which agencies were in charge of which responsibilities and develop protocols for anticipated incidents. The police department resisted every single protocol that Jerry suggested. [The police commissioner] refused to sign off on them, and Giuliani didn’t make him. So there were no interagency protocols [on 9/11] for terror attacks or for a high-rise fire.

There’s also a whole chapter about radios. It took until March of 2001 for the fire department to come up with new radios. And the radios failed in the first week and had to be withdrawn. But they could have been reconfigured to an analog mode, which would have made them [operable]. The company was willing to reconfigure them, but the lame-duck administration walked away from them instead and left the fire department with the same radios that had failed in 1993. In fact, there were memos we found all the way back to 1990 that said the radios would cost firefighters’ lives. And yet they were still carrying those radios 11 years later. That is inexcusable policy. Also, they were not interoperable, so the fire department couldn’t communicate with the police department [preventing commanders from warning firefighters inside the towers of the impending collapse on 9/11].

Giuliani took office in January 1994, not long after the [first] World Trade Center bombing. Wasn’t there pressure on him to prevent another attack?

Everyone agrees that the question of terrorism never came up in selection of a police commissioner, which began not long after the attack. A water main broke in the first month of [Giuliani’s] administration, and he was more concerned with how the city responded to that. That’s when he began to form the Office of Emergency Management—because he found out about the water main break on TV and he wanted to be notified about these things right away ... He wanted to position himself as a man to fix those sorts of problems. He was more concerned about how to handle water-main breaks than terror attacks.

Is the city better prepared today?

Sure. There’s no question that the fire department’s radio communication is substantially better. Also, there are enormous ways the police department has changed now. Maybe now they are preventing terror attacks ... There were 16 or 17 detectives assigned to [the FBI's] Joint Terrorism Task Force when Giuliani took office, and when he left office in 2001 there were still 16 or 17 officers assigned. [Police Commissioner] Ray Kelly has increased that five- or sixfold, and he’s increased the amount of personnel assigned to terrorism to over 1,000. Clearly, he has prepared the police as far as having an understanding of the terror threat. And there are command and control protocols now ... In many ways, we are much better off. Though we are still glaringly deficient in some areas.

Like?

No one has done anything about those who are above a fire line in a high-rise building. That’s a failing of the Bloomberg administration—and was in the Giuliani administration—and a failing of our own government. Los Angeles requires helicopter pads on every skyscraper [for rescues]. But that’s the only city I know of that has begun to deal with the question of how to rescue people above a fire.

A recent poll showed Giuliani is the favored 2008 Republican presidential candidate. Would he make a good president?

Every poll shows he is a very serious presidential candidate. Some polls indicate he is the most admired figure in American culture. I think that’s largely a consequence of 9/11. But if the rationale for his candidacy is 9/11 then shouldn’t both the Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, be interested in the true story of his performance leading up to and after the attacks? I think so. Sometimes in America, as strong as spin is, the facts matter. I think these facts should matter.

Giuliani has other strengths politically. He’s widely credited with having greatly reduced crime in New York City. He can run on those credentials. He is a formidable candidate. The power of the 9/11 visual will stay with him now and maybe forever. But the 9/11 Commission acknowledged that it did not ask him tough questions, and Americans have yet to ask him a single tough question about how he handled 9/11. Maybe our book will create a framework for which a more truthful assessment of his role can begin.