Former New York City mayor and current Donald Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani didn’t manage to shriek all of his policy proposals during his speech at last week’s Republican National Convention. On Wednesday, Giuliani told NJ Advance Media that he thought electronically tagging and monitoring those on the federal government’s terror watch list — which now includes over 1 million people, around 25,000 of whom are American citizens or United States permanent residents — was an “excellent idea.”
“If you’re on the terror watch list, I should know you’re on the terror watch list,” he said. “You’re on there for a reason.” (Of course, that reason is often not a legitimate one.) Giuliani went on to boast of “[putting] undercover agents in mosques for the first time in January 1994,” after the first World Trade Center bombing. “And I kept those police officers in those mosques until I left as mayor.” That practice, which the NYPD expanded after 9/11, infamously led to a rash of apparent civil-rights violations and no credible leads on terrorist plots, but that’s not the sort of information that Giuliani is going to let get in the way of authoritarian fearmongering.
