All right, folks, welcome back to Antiwar Radio on Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas.
Our first guest today is Wayne Barrett.
He's a senior editor at The Village Voice and has written a bunch of books, two of them about Rudy Giuliani.
One of them, Rudy, an investigative biography of Rudolph Giuliani, and a new one with Dan Collins called Grand Illusion, the untold story of Rudy Giuliani at 9-11, has a new article in The Village Voice called Rudy's Ties to a Terror Chic.
Very interesting stuff.
Welcome to the show, Wayne.
Hey, Scott.
It's good to have you here.
Very interesting article here, Rudy's Ties to a Terror Chic.
And you actually reminded me in this article of a story that I hadn't heard in years.
I'd almost completely forgotten about, but that was in 1996, the FBI hostage rescue team had a date to kidnap Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to arrest him and bring him back to the United States.
And he was allowed to escape.
Can you basically help refresh the audience on what happened?
Yeah, the reason why this directly relates to Rudy's business is that his company, Giuliani Partners, which has a subsidiary called Giuliani Security and Safety, has had a bunch of contracts in the country of Qatar, which is run by the emir.
And he's done business with the emir and he's done business with the interior ministry.
And both of them were implicated in Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's narrow escape in 1996.
I think everybody who knows anything about the 9-11 attack would say, and I'm certain that the 9-11 Commission report reflects this, that had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed been captured in 1996, there might never have been a 9-11 attack since he was the one who conceptualized the use of planes as a weapon.
He was the one who picked the targets.
He was the one that convinced Ben Laden how to do it.
And of course, it was his nephew, Ramzi Yosef, who was the engineer of the 93 bombing of the towers.
And one of the ways in which the FBI and others got on to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was that Ramzi Yosef called him from a federal prison once he was captured, and they figured out he was in Qatar.
Well, he was not only in Qatar, but he was on the payroll of the government.
And he was living on the farm that was then owned by the Islamic Affairs minister, a man named Abdullah Ben Khalid Al Fani, who was a member of the royal family, the Amirs family.
And everybody was involved in this in late 95, early 96.
By everybody, I mean Richard Clarke lays it all out in his book.
Louis Freeh, the head of the FBI, describes it in his book.
They were, you know, the 9-11 Commission does many other people have examined how close they came to catching Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Qatar in 1996.
They didn't know quite how to approach it.
They brought in the Pentagon.
The Pentagon was asked to strategize.
Could we do essentially an attack on the country just to put troops into Qatar just to capture KSM?
And they had rendition thoughts.
What everybody agreed to was that the last thing they wanted to do was inform anybody in the government of Qatar that they knew Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was there because they feared that the government would tip him off.
That's what the understanding was across the spectrum.
That's how dangerous they thought it was.
But in the end, they couldn't come up with a strategy that wasn't dependent on telling the emir.
So they directly told the emir that the FBI was coming in to try to arrest, with the cooperation of the Qatar government, to try to arrest Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
And no sooner did they tell the emir, but Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was given 20 blank passports, put on a plane, left Abdullah al-Fani's farm.
It is certainly the surmise of a great deal of intelligence information that it was Abdullah himself, who is now the interior minister of the government of Qatar, been promoted twice since he managed to pull this off, that Abdullah spirited KSM out of the country in February of 1996.
Now, if you don't mind me dwelling on the point here for a moment, you said this in your opening statement, and you say in the article here as well, that this action by this guy, Abdullah al-Fani, in helping Khalid Sheikh Mohammed escape, basically directly led to the September 11th attack.
And I just wanted to, for what it's worth, chime in from the books I've read about this, Lawrence Wright's book, and Terry McDermott and others.
They basically confirm your statement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ran this whole thing.
Rams Yousef and Abdul-Hakim Murad came up with the plan in the Philippines in 95.
And then after Yousef went to prison, his uncle picked up the mantle from there and carried it on, convinced bin Laden to do it, helped Ramsey bin al-Shib run the cell out of Hamburg, Germany and all that.
So I think it kind of goes without saying that if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been arrested in 1996, the September 11th attack would not have happened.
Well, I mean, the 9-11 Commission calls him the mastermind.
You don't have to go beyond that.
But let me take one step beyond it.
Well, I try not to cite them, because they never seem like a very credible source to me.
But go ahead.
Yeah.
Louis Freeh, who was the head of the FBI, and a lifelong friend of Rudy Giuliani's.
I knew him when he worked with Rudy at the U.S. Attorney's Office.
Louis Freeh made the pizza connection case when he worked for Rudy.
He worked directly with Rudy.
He's an extremely close friend of his.
And Louis Freeh was also a source of information to Giuliani, because he was the head of the FBI the same year that Rudy was mayor.
And Louis Freeh and he would have conversations about terrorist threats.
So at any rate, Louis Freeh is the one who was so upset about the spiriting off, the tipping off of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1996 that he wrote a letter to the foreign minister of the government of Qatar, another al-Thani, not only complaining about it and saying just how shocking it was, but saying specifically, anticipating the events of 9-11, that the fact that you guys let this guy get away means that he will continue his terrorist actions.
So it was a prophetic statement by Rudy's right-hand guy on these terrorism questions.
And of course, how did he continue his terrorist actions?
One of the ways was he was deeply involved with planning and executing the 9-11 attack.
You know, we've heard all this stuff about waterboarding and the Mukasey hearings and all the rest of it.
Well, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded at Guantanamo.
That's where he is today.
And he is the architect of much of this.
I think he's on a par with Ben Laden in terms of the importance that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has with the international terrorist efforts.
Yeah, it would seem like if you were to identify the top three of Al Qaeda, it would be bin Laden, Zawahiri, and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
We got one of the three so far.
So, you know, I just find it to be such an anomaly that Rudy Giuliani, who is the kind of guy who sees no gray, I mean, it's all black and white, especially in the terrorist questions.
It's bad guys and good guys.
And for business reasons, he can do business with just about anybody.
Then he sees the gray.
Qatar is now an ally of the United States in some way, just as is an ally of the terrorist world.
It's an ally of the United States because we took the bases out of Saudi Arabia and we put them in Qatar.
That's where they are now.
Qatar is really, those are the bases from which all the war in Iraq has been pursued through Qatar.
So they're an important ally.
We're willing to ignore this history, even though the history has been very recent.
I also point out that another member of the Al Fani royal family, Abdul Al Fani, actually secreted Khalid Sheikh Mohammed for two weeks after 9-11.
Immediately after 9-11, where did KSM go?
He went back to Qatar and he was with another member of the royal family for a couple of weeks there.
In fact, the emir comes to the United States.
I start the story with this scene.
He comes to the United States on October 2 and meets with Rudy Giuliani and Rudy goes on Larry King with him and treats him as a friend.
He's asked directly by Larry King.
He's a friend, isn't he?
And Rudy says, how terrifically they're getting along.
Well, he just left Qatar where Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been up to a couple of days before he came to the United States.
I don't know, giving Khalid a progress report?
I don't know.
Well now, that's interesting.
I hadn't realized that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had gone to Qatar after September 11.
Is that where he was when he gave the statement to Al Jazeera, basically taking credit?
You know, I don't know if he was there then.
I know it's been reported.
It's not something I initiated.
I mentioned it in the story, pretty deep in the story.
I mentioned it probably too deep.
But I do mention that the New York Times reported that Abdul Al Fani hosted him for two weeks after 9-11, immediately after 9-11.
Wow.
Well, you know, I can see where the conspiracy theorists would take these facts and say, well, see, look, they are all buddies.
Al Qaeda works for Giuliani.
I mean, it's just one degree of separation we're talking about, right?
Well, say that again.
I'm saying I can see how the conspiracy theorists would think that, you know, well, this is all just more proof of the inside job that they believe in.
It's just one degree of separation here.
I don't want to look to that.
I think that's a bunch of nonsense.
Well, I do too.
I'm just saying it's...
Well, why are you asking me about it?
It's nonsense.
Well, forgive me.
I was basically just making the joke that, you know...
Can we go on to something else?
I get this inside job stuff.
I write a 9-11 book.
I hear from these kooks all the time.
I don't have any patience for it.
Okay, well, I'm sorry.
Neither do I, frankly.
I was just trying to remark on how funny it was that here's Giuliani, the mayor of 9-11, palling around with a guy who's palling around with a guy who carried out the attack.
That's all.
I think it's as ironic as you do.
That's all I meant.
Okay.
All right.
Well, let me ask you this.
If the U.S. government has made allies out of Qatar, despite the involvement of their emir and their head of the interior ministry and so forth, wouldn't Giuliani say, well, that's what makes it okay?
These guys are the good guys in the war on terror now, even if they made mistakes in the past or something along those lines?
Well, I assume that that's what he's saying.
He's not been forced to answer many questions about it.
But, you know, it's a much more complicated picture than he normally likes to present.
As I say, I think the irony here is that, you know, he lives in this good guy, bad guy world.
And then, as I point out in the story, now, look, I can't comprehensively know every American business that is doing any work in Qatar.
But I spent a couple of weeks trying to figure this out.
And the only American company that I could find that was providing security consulting services to the government of Qatar was Giuliani's.
The big oil companies obviously have to deal there.
Many other American entities have to deal there.
None of them are headed by somebody.
None of those companies are headed by somebody.
And, of course, Giuliani's been doing business there since early 2005.
And none of those companies are headed by somebody who's running for president of the United States.
I think you have to apply a different standard to somebody who's running for president.
And I would certainly think that somebody who's running for president, with his perspective on the war on terror, would not want to be associated with a government that has this kind of history.
Right.
And as you point out in your article, if you're Gulf Oil, you have to go where the oil is.
But if you're a security company like this, you can advise any national government on Earth.
Why pick these guys to do your business with?
That's absolutely right.
Now, you also point out, and this goes along with the whole black, white, it's them versus us.
I'm sure you're familiar with Giuliani's statements where he can't even differentiate between Al Qaeda and Iran, even when asked follow up questions about it and so forth.
And you point out in your article here that the emir of Qatar sitting in, I guess, one of these rotating seats on the U.N.
Security Council has been an adversary of America's Iran policy as well.
Oh, they were the only member of the Security Council to vote against the resolution that dealt with the Iranian government and its nuclear development program.
They've been a little prophetic considering what's just come out with the national intelligence estimate, but they were the only government to vote against the American backed resolution that called on the government of Iran to stop its nuclear development program.
The irony is, and I just found this to be remarkable, that Rudy actually went to Doha, the capital of Qatar, for the Asian Games, which was one of the government services.
These are kind of Olympic connected Asian Games, involved about 40 countries or something.
It was held in December of 2006 in Qatar, and Rudy was providing security advice for it.
So he actually went to the Games.
He went there on a Saturday.
I think it was December 2nd.
I lay it out in the story.
And no one noticed that he was there.
It was not reported that he was there.
But as a matter of fact, the president of Iran was there.
The president of Hamas was there.
The president of Syria was there, all in town for the opening of the Asian Games.
Rudy is presumably meeting with the Emir or certainly working on his contract for the Asian Games the same day that the Hamas president reaches an agreement with the Emir to break the American boycott of the Hamas government and to pay all of the teachers' salaries, to pay for health benefits, to put $50 billion into an account in the government and the Hamas-led bank in Palestine.
All of this is going on while Rudy is there working for the same guy.
Incredible.
It really is such an hypocrisy.
You almost need a new word for it.
Let me ask you this, too.
You brought this up in the article, the Khobar Towers attack.
That was in 1996, what, 19 Marines killed?
Correct me if I'm wrong.
The current story on that is that the Saudi Hezbollah group did that.
But then in your article here, you seem to be referring to information that would make it seem like this actually was an Al Qaeda attack back in 1996.
Well, you're absolutely right.
Actually, there were 14 people that were indicted right here in New York for the Khobar Towers attack, and all of them were Hezbollah-associated, Iranian-associated, and Shiites, not Sunnis.
But the Khobar Towers attack, you know, if you read all the materials on it from the 9-11 Commission to many books about it, you'll see that I think the conclusion, the generally accepted conclusion is that this was an unusual combination of Shiite-Sunni involvement in 1996.
And while the Shiites actually executed the attack, it appears that the explosives, the C-4 explosives that were used in the attack which so surprised everybody in terms of the strength of the explosives, that they were funneled through Qatar, and that bin Laden funneled them through Qatar into Saudi Arabia, and bin Laden personally came to Qatar to facilitate that in early 1996, shortly after KSM left.
There's a very substantial body of evidence to support that as the route that the explosives took, and that this was an unusual alliance of the Shiites and bin Laden in this attack.
This is another example, and by the way, bin Laden stayed at Abdullah bin Khalid al-Thani's farm as well, and the assumption is, of many of the analysts who've looked at this, is that Abdullah and bin Laden participated in supplying the explosives for the Khobar attack, and as I already mentioned, Abdullah was the Islamic minister at the time.
He was promoted in October of 96 to minister of state for interior affairs, which is a cabinet position, and he was promoted to that immediately following the escape of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the Khobar-Qarad attack, all of which occurred earlier in the same year.
Wow.
You know, even without the Giuliani angle, it seems like the Qatar angle on the whole history of Al-Qaeda would be a major topic in and of itself.
Have I missed something?
Well, I don't think you've missed anything, Scott.
I think it's something that, look, in the Iraq war situation and all the rest of it, when Qatar became their three bases there now, it's become such an important national ally that nobody likes to focus on the dark side of Qatar.
I read the country reports that are done by the State Department, and when Colin Powell was the head of the State Department, the country reports were very sharply critical, right up through 2004, which would have been the last country report issued under Colin Powell, they were still saying that Qatar was a base for transnational terrorists and state terrorists, and the reports were extremely critical.
Since Condi Rice has been there, they've gotten very soft, and you hear very little anymore about the role of Qatar in all of this international intrigue, and I think that's a byproduct of the fact that America needs to have an ally there who will let us put these bases there.
Well, you know, I hate to be patronizing, but I think it's quite possible that people in the audience, some of them don't even know where Qatar is.
It's this little sliver, right?
That's a good word for it right there on the Persian Gulf.
Right.
It's very funny.
The population is 900,000, and several hundred thousand of them are not native, they're expats.
I think the total population of the country, take away the expats, is around 600,000.
It's one of the richest per capita countries in the world, and it has, you know, it's not only an oil supplier, much more importantly, it's a liquefied natural gas supplier, especially to the United States, crucial to the United States, and the emirate kind of a matter, Nick, of Middle East politics.
He manages to balance out all of these conflicting things, maintain his relationships with terrorists, and establish a sound relationship with the, now he's wedged, he's in the Persian Gulf, so he's wedged between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and actually liquefied gas fields are jointly owned in some ways with the government of Iran, so he constantly has to maintain a relationship with the Iranian government, but he considers, he openly says, a quote in the story is saying, you know, that if we dial 911 in case of an emergency, meaning an Iranian invasion or whatever, and Iran has made it clear that if we ever went after their nuclear development act, the first place they would take out would be Qatar, but he says, if I have to dial 911, I want to have the police in my own country, so that's what he considers the American military.
They're there to protect him.
He has an army of 11,000.
He has a tiny army, and French-equipped, and he has, he needs to play all of these forces off against each other to protect the great wealth that's in the country.
When you think of the Khobar Towers attack in context with the bases now being moved from Saudi Arabia to Qatar, it makes sense, as Paul Wolfowitz told Vanity Fair shortly after the war, this is actually a good side benefit of the war, is now we can move our bases out of Saudi Arabia, which is what motivated Osama bin Laden to attack us.
That's why I kind of always suspected that the attack on the Khobar Towers was a bin Laden thing rather than Hezbollah attacking the combat forces stationed on the Arabian Peninsula, just like it says in the fatwa.
Robert Pape, the author of Dying to Win, who studied all the suicide terrorists, pointed out that moving the bases, well, to Iraq may be good for something, but moving them to Qatar or Bahrain or elsewhere on the actual Arabian Peninsula is a distinction without a difference to the jihadists.
There is no Saudi Arabia to them.
It's Arabia, the land of the two holy places and so forth.
I guess one thing that comes to mind is Giuliani clearly has a financial interest we see now in not accepting the fact that they're motivated to attack us by the presence of our forces on the Arabian Peninsula.
No wonder he insists they hate us for our freedom.
Well, I don't think anybody doubts that money is the guiding force in Giuliani's corporate life.
And so I think all of these complex issues didn't matter to him.
I mean, they just opened a bracelet with Giuliani in office in Dubai.
Oh, just opened?
Yeah, his law firm, they just opened an office in Dubai.
And so their association with 9-11 is also extraordinarily dramatic.
Two of the hijackers came from the United States, from UAE.
Yeah, a lot of money went through there, too, right?
Yeah, a lot of money went through there.
A lot of the financing went through there.
So they just opened an office there.
So, I mean, look, Rudy is going to file all the money and there's a great deal of money in places like UAE and Qatar, and he's certainly willing to do it there.
Yeah.
And that's interesting.
His financial interest is in maintaining this black and white fiction, which is the very same thing that makes him such a hypocrite for doing business with these people.
It does.
Yeah.
And now, tell me about Michael McCasey.
He was part of Giuliani's law firm, right?
Well, they worked together, you know, in the same law firm, Patterson Belknap, in the period from 1976 through 1980.
Okay, but that's not a Giuliani partner.
Pardon me?
But not a Giuliani partner.
No, no.
McCasey has not worked at Giuliani Partners.
Oh, okay.
His son, Mark McCasey, represents Giuliani Partners and works at Bracewell with Giuliani, the law firm.
But Mike McCasey, the new attorney general, has never worked at Giuliani Partners.
No, his son is at Bracewell with Giuliani and has represented Giuliani Partners.
And one other thing you mentioned in your article, and again, I'm sorry, it's Wayne Barrett from The Village Voice, Rudy's ties to a terror chic.
And you also mentioned here he's got a contract with this company building a DPRK-financed casino in Hong Kong?
Yeah, that's not my story, and I can't regurgitate the details of it.
I simply cited it in a single sentence because I thought it added to the picture of Rudy's far-reaching corporate connections, and that is that the Chicago Tribune wrote a story, shortly before mine came out, about Giuliani Partners' business with a Singapore casino in which the partners that own the Singapore casino included people involved with organized crime, international organized crime, and with the government of Korea, North Korea.
I don't want to sit here and recite the details of somebody else's story.
Yeah, I understand.
But yeah, it's worth bringing up in your article and on the show, I think, as well.
Were you the guy that wrote just a couple of weeks back about the real purpose behind the stationing of the emergency command center at Building 7 was so that Rudy could get there walking distance from the mayor's office, he could take his girlfriend there on the weekends?
That's in the book that you mentioned at the start, Grand Illusion.
I wrote extensively about the decision to cite the command center at 7 World Trade in the book.
I did mention in an article more recently that he brought his girlfriend there, Christine Latigano and ultimately Judy Nathan.
I don't think that's in the book, but the broader question of the location decision was something I wrote a whole chapter about in Grand Illusion.
And I think I'm going to have to get my hands on that book and maybe do a whole interview with you just about that.
But I guess if you could just sort of fill us in, I guess vaguely you don't have to give us the whole book treatment or anything, but if you can just kind of vaguely fill us in on the overview of the dispute between the firefighters and Rudy Giuliani.
Maybe they're blaming him for some of the deaths that day?
Well, there's a multiplicity of issues.
I'm sorry for asking such a broad question.
Am I going to go on all day here?
I'm sorry?
I thought this was supposed to be a 15-minute interview.
I've ignored three or four phone calls.
Told was that it was a 15-minute interview.
I keep ignoring other phone calls.
I've got other business to do.
When I talked to your assistant, I thought we arranged for half an hour or 45 minutes, and she never said otherwise.
So I'll let you go.
Thanks a lot for your time.
Okay.
Bye-bye.
All right, everybody.
Wayne Barrett from The Village Voice.
