All of this evidence of Qatar's role as a facilitator of terrorism—reaching even to the emir himself—was reported well before Giuliani Partners began its business there "around 2005." Yet even the New York Times story, filled with quotes from Giuliani's friend Freeh, didn't deter him. Nor did the firm's retention of D'Amuro and Soufan, two ex-FBI counterterrorism experts who certainly knew the terror landscape of Qatar.
Soufan, in fact, was the primary investigator who assembled the case against the terrorists who bombed American embassies in Africa in 1998. And the testimony in that 2001 trial established that the Qatar Charitable Society, a nongovernmental agency that is said to "draw much of its funding from official sources," helped finance the attack. Daniel Pipes, a foreign-policy adviser to the Giuliani campaign, has branded the Qatar Charitable Society "one of bin Laden's de facto banks." Reached at home and asked about his work in Qatar, Soufan declined to comment.
Illustration by Wes Duvall
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Special reporting by Samuel Rubenfeld and additional research by Adrienne Gaffney and Danielle Schiffman
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Even the revelations about Khobar Towers didn't slow Giuliani down, though he's subsequently made the bombing a central feature in his stump-speech litany of the Clinton administration's failings. Giuliani also ignored an official State Department report on terrorism for 2003—released in mid-2004, just before his firm began doing business in Qatar—which said that the country's security services "monitored extremists passively," and that "members of transnational terrorist groups and state sponsors of terror are present in Qatar." The report added that Qatar's government "remains cautious about taking any action that would cause embarrassment or public scrutiny" when nationals from the Gulf countries were involved. (Later reports issued by the new secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, moderated the department's Qatar assessment.) Also in 2004, Michael Knights, an analyst at the Washington Institute who works with the Defense Department, wrote that a "Wahhabi clique" tied to extremists "is still in charge [in Qatar], and seeded the security establishment with personnel of their choosing." But even this strong, specific warning didn't deter Giuliani Partners' interest in Qatar.
Presumably, Giuliani's rationale for doing business there was that Qatar had become an American ally, hosting up to 40,000 troops. The CRS report put the complexity of the relationship well, noting that American concerns about Qatari support for terrorists "have been balanced over time by Qatar's counterterrorism efforts and its broader, long-term commitment to host and support U.S. military forces." In a footnote, the CRS report adds that the emir may finally be downplaying Abdallah al-Thani's influence, even as he reappointed him this year. The U.S. government may have to be satisfied with that suggestion of progress; it does not have limitless military options in the Middle East. (The emir, for his part, once reportedly explained his willingness to host U.S. forces by saying: "The only way we can be sure the Americans will answer our 911 call is if we have the police at our own house.")
Giuliani Partners, however, has a world of choices, quite literally. Some American companies who do business in Qatar, like Shell and ExxonMobil, have to chase the gas and oil wherever they are. But a consulting company with instant name recognition like Giuliani's—and which claims to carefully vet its clients—can be both profitable and selective. Moreover, it's the only American company known to be providing security advice to Qatar; the rest hail from Singapore, Australia, and France. A company headed by a man who has known that he would make this presidential run for years—and with 9/11 as its rationale—could have chosen to make his millions elsewhere. Especially a candidate who divides the world into good guys and bad guys, claims that this war is a "divine" mission, and shuns complexity. For that kind of a candidate, Qatar may become one Giuliani contradiction too many.
