You’re judged by the people you pick

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani recently announced the 15 people he’s asked to help him keep his commitment to “ensure American communities are prepared for terrorist attacks and natural disasters.” It’s inconsequential that Giuliani’s advisers are all white men. They can be green for all I care, so long as they have hands-on experience in planning for and responding to natural disasters — much more likely occurrences than terrorist attacks.

The diversity question that does matter concerns geography, not gender or pigmentation. Seven of the homeland security advisory board members are New Yorkers. One is the terrorism preparedness coordinator for Indianapolis. Another is the former director of homeland security for Minnesota. The rest mostly worked in the D.C. area.

But there’s no Floridian emergency coordinator, for example, who could bring hurricane preparedness experience. No Texan, who could bring hurricane and tornado experience. Nary a West Coaster with earthquake or wildfire experience.

Rudy’s list comes up short, regardless of how fervently his campaign staff says otherwise. The few who have hurricane experience shouldn’t crow about it, given that they were among the officials on duty during the botched response to Katrina.

Vulnerability list

Political candidates often are evaluated by the people with whom they surround themselves. It’s understandable that Giuliani seeks counsel from men he knows and trusts. But it doesn’t exactly instill confidence that several of Giuliani’s picks were among the New York officials whom the 9-11 Commission faulted for being ill-prepared prior to that awful day — even though the World Trade Center topped the city Police Department’s vulnerability list after a previous attack against the towers.

Advisers Richard Sheirer and John Odermatt, both former commissioners of the New York City Office of Emergency Management, were criticized by the commission for not manning the OEM command center after the attacks (which is Policing 101), going instead to the World Trade Center.

John Farmer, who led the commission’s unit that assessed the city’s response, told journalists Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins for their book, “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11”: “We (the 9/11 Commission) tried to get a sense of what Sheirer was really doing. We tried to figure it out from the videos. We couldn’t tell. Everybody from OEM was with him, virtually the whole chain of command. Some of them should have been at the command center.”

Among other concerns, the final commission report noted that the OEM headquarters “was located at 7 WTC. Some questioned locating it both so close to a previous terrorist target and on the 23rd floor of a building. There was no backup site,” Barrett and Collins wrote.

Branch Davidian mess

Giuliani named former FBI Director Louis Freeh as his advisory board’s chairman. Recall that in the days prior to Sept. 11, lots of folks were calling for Freeh’s resignation as bureau chief after the way the agency bungled the Branch Davidian mess near Waco and the case of Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee.

Freeh, who spent his early law enforcement and judicial career in New York, got poor marks from the 9/11 Commission for not developing an effective system for sharing information within the bureau and for his refusal to see counterterrorism as a priority.

Advisory board members with baggage not related to Sept. 11 include Rob Bonner, named as Giuliani’s “chief homeland security adviser.” Bonner was commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection when he ran afoul of the Bush administration over his support for civilian “minutemen” assisting Border Patrol agents along the U.S.-Mexico border. President Bush rightly equated those self-proclaimed volunteers with vigilantes.

And board member Howard Safir was New York City police commissioner at the time of the Abner Louima, Amadou Diallo and Patrick Dorismond police brutality cases. Although he was heralded for the reduction in crime that took place during his four-year tenure, Safir was roundly criticized for his tactics and callousness from outside and within the department, including the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association’s unanimous no-confidence vote and famed officer Frank Serpico’s call for an end to Safir’s “reign of terror.”

X Jill “J.R.” Labbe is deputy editorial page editor of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.