If ever two people matched each other these two guys are it. Louis Freeh, likely the worst F.B.I. director in U.S. history, not to mention the most self aggrandizing, is supporting Rudy, who decided that even after the World Trade Center buildings were hit that the command center should still be inside of them.
Louis Freeh, Democrat Bill Clinton's FBI director, is going over to the other side in a big way today -- endorsing Republican presidential hopeful Rudy Giuliani, the Daily News has learned.
The high-profile endorsement is a boon to the former mayor, whose views on security and terrorism can only benefit from having an international lawman like Freeh in his corner, experts said.
This is just laughable.
Let's remember something that everyone seems to want to conveniently forget: It was Louis Freeh's F.B.I. that was caught with their pants down on 9/11. Freeh's tenure was from September 1, 1993 - June 25, 2001. Get it?
Freeh was in charge when Colleen Rowley was ignored.
Freeh was in charge when he allowed his F.B.I. agents to be sent to New Orleans to investigate a brothel by John Ashcroft, instead of tracking down Islamic terrorists about to attack us.
Freeh was in charge when the terrorists were slipping in and out of the United States under our very noses.
The 9/11 Commission had some stinging criticism of Freeh's FBI, saying that though he had made counterterrorism the top priority in 1998, he never shifted manpower accordingly.
"Well, what they're referring to there is the fact that when Congress appropriates FBI resources, particularly FBI agents, the Congress dictates where those people are assigned," explains Freeh, adding that he couldn't assign his own people to the jobs that he felt were most important.
But he acknowledged he could have shifted more agents to counterterrorism, if he had just asked Congress for permission.
On September 11, six percent of FBI personnel were working on counterterrorism, while twice as many agents were assigned to drug enforcement.
Freeh was the one who was in the middle of it all when red lights were making George Tenet's brain short circuit that fateful summer, and Richard Clarke was trying to get anyone in the Bush White House to have a meeting on terrorism because he knew something was about to blow.
So, in the middle of all this, what did Freeh do? He walked away from the F.B.I. less than 3 months before the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, right in the middle of a summer that had the most serious warnings of an attack ever to come to light since Pearl Harbor. Then decided to write a book about Bill Clinton, blaming everything on him.
Former F.B.I. director Louis Freeh has gotten mostly a pass on 9/11, while Rudy continues to wear a halo. They deserve each other, but not for the reasons everyone is touting and certainly not in the way Rudy's campaign is pimping today.
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