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Ex Giuliani Aide: Not Good on Terror

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The former top antiterrorism aide to Rudolph Giuliani has told the U.K.’s Sunday Telegraph that the presidential hopeful is "a control freak who micro-manages decision, he has a confrontational character trait and picks fights just to score points. He is the last thing this country needs as president right now."

Jerome Hauer, New York's emergency management director from 1996 to 2000, insists that pre-9/11, Giuliani was instrumental in locating the city's crisis control room in the World Trade Centre complex -- even though it was a known terrorist target after the 1993 truck bomb attack there.

Hauer, who now runs a consultancy firm, insists that the former mayor nixed his proposal to locate the emergency command center in Brooklyn -- as he wanted it to be within walking distance of his City Hall offices in Manhattan.

Hauer, who has been at odds with his former boss since Giuliani pinned the choice of the venue for the crisis control room on his head, also charged in the Telegraph interview that Giuliani failed to calm turf battles between the city's police and fire departments, and appointed inexperienced cronies to key positions.

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  As to the former charge, Hauer was derisive of Giuliani's assertion that Judith Nathan -- a former nurse who was then Giuliani's girlfriend and is now his third wife -- had co-coordinated the Family Assistance Center relief operation after September 11.

"Rudy told me to find a role for Judy,” Hauer said. "She came along to some meetings and her heart was in the right place, but it's baloney to suggest she ran the centre. And now he says he would take her advice on chemical and biological terrorism? Give me a break."

Hauer is a registered Democrat voter who was chosen by the Bush Administration in 2002 to co-ordinate America's public health preparation for future emergencies, including attacks with weapons of mass destruction.

Giuliani's advisers counter the charges as being the inaccurate recollections of a bitter man who puts politics over principle, maintaining that the command center was sited at the World Trade Centre on Hauer's recommendation.

© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.

© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.

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