Preventing future terror attacks

Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani on the NYPD stopping surveillance of Muslims in Mosques

This is a RUSH transcript from "The O'Reilly Factor," January 7, 2015. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
Watch "The O'Reilly Factor" weeknights at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. ET!

O'REILLY: Continuing now with our lead story: Muslim jihadists murdering 12 people in Paris France today. The question now becomes can these terror attacks ever be prevented?

Here in New York City after 9/11 the police department was very aggressive in watching radical Muslims. There are a few mosques in the city that are hotbeds of radical activity and the cops infiltrated those places under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg. But under the new liberal Mayor de Blasio that surveillance has stopped.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Where do you stand with the NYPD surveillance of Muslims? Would you stop that outright?

DE BLASIO: The efforts at surveillance have to be based on specific leads, specific information and obviously need to go through a careful vetting process.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

O'REILLY: Joining us now to analyze from Washington is former Mayor Rudy Giuliani. So who exactly stopped the surveillance on the radical mosques?

RUDY GIULIANI, FORMER MAYOR OF NEW YORK CITY: I guess he did. I started it probably in 1994 and the reason was in 1993 the World Trade Center was attacked and the whole attack was planned in a mosque in Union City, New Jersey. A year later the head of that mosque was sentenced to prison by Judge Michael Mukasey for a hundred years and the head of the mosque declared a fatwa on Judge Mukasey who had to be under protection for 10 years because they tried to kill him.

O'REILLY: That was the blind sheikh -- right -- that we are talking about?

GIULIANI: Yes. All of it was being organized within two or three mosques particularly in Union City, New Jersey. So when I was the mayor I had previously been the U.S. Attorney so I was quite aware of this. I would have my police do surveillance. And when I -- when they would argue against it, I would say I can't imagine that any priest or rabbi would complain if I had a few police officers sitting in that congregation. What are you worried about?

O'REILLY: Yes. I mean I never got it either because that's what it was. It was a surveillance, infiltrating into the mosque by Semitic looking men who were police officers just to figure it out.

I don't know if anybody knows this but there are very radical mosques here in New York City right now. There is one in Brooklyn. There's one in Brooklyn, these guys are, you know, calling openly for violence against Westerners and America and there is one in Queens. And the de Blasio administration is saying look, we are not going to monitor who's doing what and who's saying what.

GIULIANI: You don't need probable cause to put a police officer in a church, a mosque, a temple. You know, we had a shooting in Saint Patrick's when I was the mayor. I had police in Saint Patrick's. Cardinal O'Connor thanked me for having the police in Saint Patrick's. There is no special privacy -- churches generally want people to come in and worship with them.

O'REILLY: Not the Islamic crew -- they don't. CAIR has objected to it -- it's racial profiling. You know -- you've heard. But under Mayor de Blasio -- there was an actual name for this under Bloomberg. It's called the demographics unit the brainchild of a CIA officer named Lawrence Sanchez. And he got together with Mayor Bloomberg and they designed this program where NYPD would go into, if they heard that there was an imam or a guest speaker calling for violence, they would go in and they would watch and see what happened.

But de Blasio has knocked that out and says, look, we are not going it to surveil unless we have evidence of a crime. That's basically what he is saying.

GIULIANI: I mean that's really knocking logic out. The way you prevent crime is by using logical deductions about who may commit the crimes, where is there more crime activity? You put more police officers where there is more crime activity. If, in fact, there are mosques in which there are discussions about or even encouragements to become like these lone wolf terrorists like we are seeing so much of, you would tend to want to put more police there.

O'REILLY: Yes, sure. You would want to infiltrate and get some undercover in there and look, the Parisian authorities say, the French authorities say that they have dismantled a number of plots. I'm sure under your administration and Bloomberg's administration you dismantled a lot of plots before they even got there. The Times Square guy who's going to blow up.

GIULIANI: Absolutely right. We dismantled a plot -- Commissioner (inaudible) and I back in the late 90s with two Muslims who were going to blow up a subway station and we caught them two hours before they were going to do that. The reality is it it's irresponsible not to do it.

O'REILLY: But the political correctness that the de Blasio administration has brought to the city in the last year obviously has played into these protests and the image that the mayor sympathizes with the protest and sees the cop as the oppressive force and you and I have gotten into that. But now it's extending into the terrorist thing we're not going to look any radical mosques even know we know it's radical. I mean I know it's radical. Everybody knows it's radical. We are not going to do that unless you have evidence that somebody in that mosque has actually committed a crime. I just think it puts us all in danger.

I'll give you the last word.

GIULIANI: Well, there's no question it puts us all in danger. It would be as if -- you know, we avoided the Italian social clubs when we were investigating the Mafia because no one particular person in that social club had yet been convicted of a crime. But we knew from general information that there was discussion there about --

O'REILLY: Yes. You guys pug bugged those places where Gotti had lunch. You bugged those -- but do you mean to tell me you were racially profiling Italians when you were investigating the Mafia, Mr. Mayor?

GIULIANI: I must have been. You know what it is? It's not racially profiling. It's logical deduction. It's logical reasoning. It's what we were taught to do in school if you ever took a course on philosophy or on analysis.

O'REILLY: Yes, they don't have that any more. That's fine.

All right, Mr. Mayor, we appreciate your time this evening.

GIULIANI: Ok. Thanks, Bill.

Content and Programming Copyright 2015 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2015 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.