Sleeping With The Enemy

Rudy's Sheikdown

Wayne Barrett, writing for the Village Voice, painstakingly researches Rudy's business contracts. Among his clients: Qatar's emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani.

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...

...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.

The hero of 9/11... what else do we need to find out about Rudy before his presidential campaign crumbles? It's a sure bet that if the shoe were on the other foot and a Democrat was found to have business ties to terrorists, he would be skewered by the Right-Wing Spin Machine.