Grading PolitiFact: Giuliani and the Bush record on homeland terrorist attacks

Last week was a great week for news.  The aftermath of the underwear bomber attack featured great dollops of controversy, as did the machinations surrounding the health care reform bill snaking its way through Congress.

Controversial news cycles tend to produce work for fact checkers.  By himself, President Obama produced the following potential fact checks:

• "(O)ver the past year, we've taken the fight to al Qaeda and its allies wherever they plot and train, be it in Afghanistan and Pakistan, in Yemen and Somalia, or in other countries around the world."
• "Immediately after the attack, I ordered concrete steps to protect the American people:  new screening and security for all flights, domestic and international; more explosive detection teams at airports; more air marshals on flights; and deepening cooperation with international partners."
• "Guantanamo prison ... has ... become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda.  In fact, that was an explicit rationale for the formation of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."
•  "(T)he Recovery Act included the largest investment in education by the federal government in history while preventing more than 300,000 teachers and school workers from being fired because of state budget shortfalls."
• "(W)e've sought new beginnings with Muslim communities around the world, one in which we engage on the basis of mutual interest and mutual respect, and work together to fulfill the aspirations that all people share -- to get an education, to work with dignity, to live in peace and security."
• "The Recovery Act has been a major force in breaking the trajectory of this recession and stimulating growth and hiring."

During the week I hear claims like this from various government officials and I pause at times to wonder whether the statements will receive attention from PolitiFact, the fact checking folks at the St. Petersburg Times.

Meanwhile, I read that Rudy Giuliani said during an interview that there had been no terrorist attacks under George W. Bush.  I thought "There is the typical PolitiFact fact check."

And here we are.

The issue:

The fact checkers:

Aaron Sharockman:  writer, researcher
Amy Hollyfield:  editor

Analysis:

PolitiFact's objective reporting, here we come!

Republican Rudy Giuliani is painting President Barack Obama as weak on terrorism and longing for the days of former President George W. Bush.

Weak on terrorism if we call needlessly missing out on potentially valuable intelligence weak on terrorism, yeah.

Longing for the days of President Bush if we don't count Giuliani's criticisms of Bush, yeah.

It's great to be able to make an objective claim about what another person is feeling, isn't it?  You're amazing, Aaron Sharockman.

Sharockman:

"What he (Obama) should be doing is following the right things that Bush did -- one of the right things he did was treat this as a war on terror. We had no domestic attacks under Bush. We've had one under Obama," Giuliani said. "Number two, he should correct the things that Bush didn't do right. Sending people to Yemen was wrong, not getting this whole intelligence thing corrected was both Bush's responsibility and Obama's." 

(yellow highlights added)

Cue Archie and Edith Bunker.  Those were the days!  Bush was flippin' perfect.

Sharockman:

Giuliani, the mayor of New York City during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, claims there were no domestic attacks under the Bush administration. That's obviously a preposterous statement that would warrant a Pants on Fire rating. We can't help but remember now-Vice President Joe Biden's line during his presidential campaign, "Rudy Giuliani -- there's only three things he mentions in a sentence. A noun and a verb and 9/11."

Sharockman has a point.  Pretty much everyone knows that New York City experienced a major domestic terror attack that occurred under President Bush's watch.  And few have better reason to recall that fact than Giuliani, who was indeed the mayor of New York City during and after that attack.  So, given that it is hard to conceive that Giuliani's underlying argument jibed with his statement, what do we make of it?  Just move straight to "Pants on Fire"?

Sharockman:

Unfortunately, interviewer George Stephanopoulos never sought clarification on Giuliani's statement. After the interview, Stephanopoulos updated his blog to say Giuliani was wrong to say there were no domestic attacks under Bush, and then later apologized for not pressing him on the misstatement.

Isn't that crazy?  Giuliani's britches are blazing like the Twin Towers and Stephanopoulos has no follow up?

Here's why Stephanopoulous failed to follow up:  He was instinctively giving Giuliani a favorable interpretation.  Unfortunately it was so favorable that he failed to ask Giuliani the appropriate follow up question(s).

Finally, Sharockman gives a nod to charitable interpretation:

But let's treat this as if Giuliani meant to say there were no domestic attacks under Bush post-Sept. 11, 2001, and run that past the Truth-O-Meter.

That isn't the most favorable interpretation possible, but that's OK since Giuliani is receiving charity.  To make the story short, PolitiFact (with an assist from Media Matters!) cited five incidents taking place under Mr. Bush that are reasonably called domestic terrorist attacks.

Sharockman:

Here's how Giuliani tried to clarify the issue during an interview later that day with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. "This is so silly," Giuliani said. "What I usually say when I say that, I usually say we had no major domestic attacks under President Bush since Sept. 11. I did omit the words 'since Sept. 11.' I apologize for that." Giuliani went on to say it's not clear if the anthrax attacks were perpetuated by Islamic fundamentalists.
(yellow highlights added)

So Giuliani says he misspoke.  Given the obviousness of the facts he would have ignored with his reply to Stephanopoulos, Giuliani's statement seems plausible on its face.  At least to me.

But not to Sharockman:

Giuliani ran a presidential campaign based on the leadership he showed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. We would expect him to at least acknowledge that those attacks occurred while George W. Bush was president. But even considering that he was talking post-9/11, Giuliani is just plain wrong to suggest no terrorist attacks happened under Bush's watch. The clarifications added by a Giuliani spokesman are thredded (sic) so thin, it sounds like damage control more than anything. We say Pants on Fire!

Giuliani did acknowledge that the attack on the WTC occurred under Bush ("I usually say we had no major domestic attacks under President Bush since Sept. 11"), after he had admitted misspeaking.  In admitting that error, Giuliani added an additional clarification that Sharockman ignores.  That is, he was referring to "major" domestic attacks.

The PolitiFact rating rests entirely on Sharockman's judgment that the explanations sound like "damage control more than anything."

Is it a fair judgment?

Let's back up and look at Sharockman's analysis (oops!  I meant objective reporting):

A spokesman for Giuliani attempted to clarify the former mayor's remark several hours after the GMA interview, saying the statement "didn't come across as it was intended" and that Giuliani was "clearly talking post-9/11 with regards to Islamic terrorist attacks on our soil," according to ABC News.

It wasn't clear to us, or most of the world. But okay.

"(M)ost of the world"?  Did Sharockman do a survey?

As noted above, Giuliani was mayor of New York City when the WTC was attacked.  It is extraordinarily likely that he realized that Bush was president during that time.  The most reasonable explanation is that Giuliani misspoke and intended the 9-11 attack as an exclusion.  If Sharockman is correct that "most of the world" didn't pick up on that, then it says something bad about most of the rest of the world--at least those who understand English.  But I'll take Sharockman's word that his newsroom didn't see it that way.

Sharockman:

Taking the literal definition of "on our soil," that would exclude the failed December 2001 shoe bombing incident since it happened in the air. But not the others. If you add the second layer of "Islamic terrorist attacks," the sniper and anthrax attacks could come off the list as well, because it is unclear if extremist Muslim ideology motivated either attack. Hadayet, the shooter in the Los Angeles ticket counter shooting, was killed during the attack by security personnel. So we don't know his motivation. Taheri-azar's own words make his motivation pretty clear.

There was no need for Sharockman to take "on our soil" literally.  It was understood that Giuliani was talking about domestic attacks, and that is how "on our soil" is normally understood.  A successful underwear bomb attack on the Christmas Day flight would have counted as a "major" attack.  But a failed detonation of an underwear bomb would not count any more than a foiled attempt to detonate shoes.

Sharockman:

We're not sure if Giuliani's claim that Obama has had only one domestic attack in his first year as president is right, either. Besides the Christmas Day bombing attempt, several U.S. lawmakers have already labeled the November Fort Hood shooting as an act of terrorism.

The Giuliani spokesman, whom ABC News did not identify, said the "one" attack that Giuliani says took place during the Obama administration was a reference to the alleged Fort Hood shooter, Maj. Nidal Hasan. (Again, excluding the Christmas Day bombing plot by using the "on our soil" addendum.)

The "Giuliani spokesman" in this case was apparently Giuliani himself, again from his appearance with Wolf Blitzer:

BLITZER: ...which attack are you referring to?

GIULIANI: I would consider the one -- well, I mean the -- the -- the attack on Christmas Day was an attempted attack. I was talking about Fort Hood. Fort Hood was clearly an Islamic terrorist attack. The man who was shooting off the guns and killing those people was yelling out ara -- Islamic phrases when he was doing it -- Allah Akbar and things like that. He was clearly under the influence of Islamic terrorism.

Giuliani's explanation ought to make it extremely obvious that Sharockman's introduction of a literal interpretation of "on our soil" was his own gratuitous invention.  As an attempt to reasonably understand what Giuliani was saying, it failed miserably and not least of all because Giuliani provided a clear explanation himself where Sharockman ought to have noticed.

Sharockman's failure to note Giuliani's full explanation is nearly as perplexing as Giuliani's failure to make explicit note of the 9-11 attacks during his GMA comments. And contrary to Sharockman's opinion, Giuliani's explanation is quite defensible.  The Fort Hood attack was inarguably the most significant domestic attack since the 9-11 attacks in terms of casualties.

Giuliani had good support for his opinion once he clarified his remarks--and PolitiFact has flubbed yet another fact check.

The grades:

Aaron Sharockman: F
Amy Hollyfield: F