Olbermann reports on how Rudy Guiliani's single degree of seperation ties to 9/11 Mastermind - Khallid Sheik Muhammad.
Three weeks after 9/11, when the roar of fighter jets still haunted the city's skyline, the emir of gas-rich Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifah al-Thani, toured Ground Zero. 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 when Larry King asked the mayor: "You are a friend of his, are you not?"
American Mayor, St. Rudy the First, the man who couldn't be bothered to attend meetings of the 9/11 Commission, because he was too busy cashing-in on 9/11, personally invited to Ground Zero a man who harboured one of the masterminds behind the plot?
What's most shocking is that Abdallah al-Thani has been widely accused of helping to spirit KSM out of Qatar in 1996, just as the FBI was closing in on him. Robert Baer, a former CIA supervisor in the region, contends in a 2003 memoir that the emir himself actually sanctioned tipping KSM. The staff of the 9/11 Commission, meanwhile, noted that the FBI and CIA "were reluctant to seek help from the Qatari government" in the arrest of KSM, "fearing that he might be tipped off." When Qatar's emir was finally "asked for his help" in January 1996, Qatari authorities "first reported that KSM was under surveillance," then "asked for an alternative plan that would conceal their aid to Americans," and finally "reported that KSM had disappeared."
Although there's been quite a brujah over Rudy's Shag Fun, aka Sex On the City, I strongly suggest that this story, which smacks at the very least of criminal cluelessness just might be much more dangerous to Rudy's Presidential hopes than his tendency to have the NYPD walk his mistresses Dog.
