The "Nasty Man"

Rudy's Torture Talk: "John McCain, who is understandably appalled by the casual advocacy of torture, noted that Giuliani and the others in the GOP field come by their faux toughness without benefit of military service. This is a fair point, because as both McCain and Colin Powell have noted, all a POW has going for him is the hope of reciprocity. If we don't torture, maybe they won't, either.

This means nothing to Giuliani. He rebutted McCain with one of his signature your-mother-wears-a-mustache responses. McCain, he said, has "never run a city, never run a state, never run a government." Yes, but he has been tortured.

McCain's experience, though, makes no impression on Giuliani. He likened "intensive questioning," the term of art for a wee bit of torture, to what he practiced as New York's U.S. attorney and then mayor: "If I didn't use intensive questioning, there would be a lot of Mafia guys running around New York right now."

Is he serious? Did he waterboard the Gambinos? Did he deprive the Genovese family of sleep? Did he hang the Colombos by their thumbs? Did he bombard the Luccheses with opera from a regional company?

You could dismiss Giuliani's statements as campaign hot air and leave it at that. But to those who know something about his time as mayor, it is reminiscent of Giuliani's scary lack of empathy for victims and a concomitant inability to distinguish critics from enemies. These are the qualities that made him so unpopular in New York's black community (and elsewhere), and prompted Ed Koch to title his book about Giuliani The "Nasty Man."

I doubt Giuliani had Orson Swindle in mind when he trivialized sleep deprivation as a pillowless night on a bumpy campaign flight. But he should have had a somber appreciation for the realities of torture and not, as he did, make it sound like a scene out of a movie. Swindle laughed when he heard Giuliani's comment. "He obviously doesn't understand what he's talking about," Swindle said.

It's a habit."

Rudy can be stopped, but it might be very messy.