'I feel a great deal of satisfaction that justice has been done,' says Giuliani. Giuliani praises Obama's 'courage'

Rudy Giuliani praised President Obama's "courage" for the risky method he chose to take down Osama bin Laden, adding his death is a "significant step" in the war on terror - but saying the tones of jubilation feel strange to him.

"I feel a great deal of satisfaction that justice has been done, and I admire the courage of the president to make a decision like this because if something had gone wrong everyone would be blaming him," Giuliani told POLITICO Monday morning in his first comments since the capture. "And I admire the courage and professionalism of our military intelligence officials who carried this out and this is a great victory against terror. Nobody can minimize it. He was a symbol more than anything else right now but ... symbols are really important."


Calling it a "significant step," he added: "I feel satisfaction and some emotional relief, but I don't feel great elation. I watch a lot of the celebrating and it makes me feel a little strange, I don't know. Nothing erases the loss of all those lives. ... so I feel satisfaction and I feel the right thing has been done. and I guess it will good thing ultimately but I don't feel like celebrating [as if it's] the end of World War II, because the war is still going on."

Giuliani said he had yet to talk to family members of the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks that occurred while he was mayor; his performance that day vaulted him to global prominence. He also intimated he had had no official contact.

He said on Sunday night he had been reading with his TV tuned to Fox News in the background when Geraldo Rivera cut in to say the president was making an announcement.

"My immediate reaction [was] ... I hope they caught him. Once I found out he was dead I probably thought that's probably better we don't have to go through three or four years of a trial ... and I felt that it shows the determiniation of our military. I'm sure there are people who havent rested a day since that happened."

He also said former President George W. Bush "deserves tremendous credit. This was only accomplished because we have developed a tremendous apparatus in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is the accumulation of years and years of effort.

"I do think it's a sense of relief that he's gone both from the normal human desire for justice, [and] in the long run this will be very helpful to us in defeating Islamic terrorism. ...In the long run this is a much bigger step than people realize."

Giuliani also traveled to Ground Zero on Monday morning, AP photos show.