Giuliani: ‘I Do Remember Sept. 11’

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Rudy Giuliani appeared on CNN this afternoon in an attempt to explain what he meant when he claimed that no domestic terrorist attacks happened under President George W. Bush.

“I usually say, ‘We had no major domestic attacks under President Bush since September 11,'” he told Wolf Blitzer.

“I did omit the words, ‘since September 11,’ and I apologize for that,” he went on. “I do remember September 11. In fact, Wolf, I remember it every single day and usually, frequently during the day.”

Video after the jump.

Earlier, the former mayor of New York caught a lot of heat for saying, “What [President Obama] should be doing is following the right things 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.”

In his explanation just now, Giuliani told Blitzer that be meant the Fort Hood shootings as that one attack that happened under Obama.

“Fort Hood was clearly an Islamic terrorist attack,” he said. “He was clearly under the influence of Islamic terrorism.”

He also said the anthrax attacks of 2001 don’t count, because they never proven to be done in the name of “Islamic terrorism.”

Interestingly, much of what Giuliani talked about, both in the interview with CNN and this morning’s appearance on Good Morning America, was that Obama had used the phrase “war on terror” in Thursday’s speech about terrorism.

“The president himself has finally now come to the conclusion that he can say ‘war on terror,'” Giuliani said.

But, as Blitzer pointed out, Obama didn’t say “war on terror.” He said “war against al-Qaeda.”

Giuliani brushed the point aside, saying only that focusing on al-Qaeda was “too narrow.”

A spokesman for Giuliani explained his comments similarly this afternoon.

Even the White House had something to say about the mayor’s comments. Asked about it today, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said, “I think he mentioned that there weren’t any domestic terror attacks in the previous administration, and sort of interesting that the mayor of New York had forgotten that.”

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