Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
By Laurie Mylroie The New York Sun October 19, 2004
www.nysun.com/article/3413
The central issue in the presidential race is, arguably, the legitimacy of
the Iraq War. Is this conflict a necessary part of the war on terrorism? The
answer is decidedly yes, although this seems to be a fight the White House
would rather duck, even as documents now trickling out of Baghdad suggest
Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with terrorists, including with Islamic
militants.
One source for this claim is the widely discussed, but scarcely read, report
of the Iraq Survey Group, the coalition intelligence team that went into
Iraq after the war. As Richard Spertzel, an Iraq Survey Group member who
also had served with the United Nations Iraq weapons inspections team,
explained in the Wall Street Journal, "Documentation indicates that Iraq was
training non-Iraqis at Salman Pak in terrorist techniques, including
assassination and suicide bombing. In addition to Iraqis, trainees included
Palestinians, Yemenis, Saudis, Lebanese, Egyptians and Sudanese."
Soon after September 11, 2001, two Iraqi defectors came forward, explaining
that Iraqi intelligence had trained non-Iraqi Arab militants at itsextensive
compound at Salman Pak, an area south of Baghdad. Among the skills taught
there was hijacking airplanes. One defector even drew a sketch of the area,
showing a passenger plane parked in the southwest corner of a large
compound.
When American marines took over Salman Pak in early April 2003, they indeed
found the terrorist training camp, the airplane, and the foreign terrorists.
An American military spokesman affirmed, "The nature of the work being done
by some of those people we captured. ..gives us the impression that there is
terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak." The marines "inferred"
that the airplane "was used to practice hijacking," the Associated Press
reported. Saddam's apologists claim the camp was for counterterrorism
training, but that seems highly improbable.
Iraqi documents, dating from January to May 1993, suggest that Baghdad's
training of terrorists goes back over a decade - at least to the period
following Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That training was
interrupted by the 1991 war, but appears to have resumed not long
afterwards.
These documents, leaked by a Pentagon official to Scott Wheeler of Cybercast
News Service, are posted on its Web site. Bruce Tefft, a retired CIA
counter-terrorism official who worked on Iraq; MEMRI's Nimrod Raphaeli;
Middle East scholar Walid Phares; and this author have all expressed their
confidence in the documents' authenticity. They are on official Iraqi
letterhead and are essentially a 40-page correspondence between Iraqi
intelligence and Saddam's office.
Responding to a request from Saddam, M-14, the division of Iraqi
intelligence responsible for training and conducting special operations,
produced a report dated April 1, 1993. The seven page document lists 100
"Arab fedayeen," whom it had trained in Iraq during the fall of 1990.Their
nationalities include a wide swath of the Arab world: Palestinians, Syrians,
Lebanese, Egyptians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Sudanese, and Eritreans, who are
not usually considered Arab.
One important relationship discussed in the documents is Iraq's support for
the militant domestic opponents of the Egyptian government, a key Arab
member of the 1990-91 coalition against Iraq. Three weeks prior to the
Persian Gulf War, on December 24, 1990, Iraqi intelligence concluded an
agreement on a plan of sabotage against Cairo with a representative of the
Egyptian Islamic Group, whose leader, Shaykh Omar Abdul Rahman, was
subsequently tried and convicted for terrorism in New York. Those operations
ended with the February 28, 1991, cease-fire, according to these papers.
The documents also indicate that Iraqi intelligence, along with Sudan's
Islamic government, allied with Iraq, pressed in early 1993 to resume
operational support for Egypt's militants. Saddam rejected this, ordering
that Iraq's backing for them remain limited to financial support for the
time being.
Nonetheless, the director of Iraqi intelligence informed the palace that the
vice chairman of Sudan's governing National Islamic Front would be sending a
leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad - a group headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who
subsequently became Osama bin Laden's deputy - to Baghdad on a Sudanese
plane carrying meat. The U.N. Security Council actually gave Sudan an
exemption for such flights, creating a strange, unnecessary breach in the
air embargo then imposed on Iraq.
An 11-page document dated January 25, 1993, lists various organizations with
which Iraqi intelligence maintained contacts. It recommends "the use of Arab
Islamic elements which were fighting in Afghanistan and now have no place to
go and who are currently in Somalia, Sudan, and Egypt." Saddam approves the
suggestion, with the order to "concentrate on Somalia."
The document also mentions a group called Hezb-e-Islami, headed by Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar. Noting that Iraqi intelligence established a relationship with
this party in 1989, the document states that Iraq now had a direct
relationship with Hekmatyar. This man was, in turn, an important ally of
Osama bin Ladin. In a terrorism case in Chicago, the U.S. Attorney's Office
affirmed, "Hekmatyar was aligned with Osama bin Ladin in Afghanistan after
al Qaida was formed in 1988, and indeed many of al Qaida's camps were
located in territory controlled by Hekmatyar."
The report of the Iraq Survey Group presents further evidence of Iraq's
involvement in hostile activities. It includes the most comprehensive
account of the Iraqi Intelligence Service ever published in open-source
literature, depicting an organization that consisted of "over twenty
compartmentalized directorates." Section M-14 included the "Tiger Group" -
"primarily composed of suicide bombers. "It also supervised the "Challenge
Project," a highly secretive enterprise involved with explosives, about
which the Iraq Survey Group could learn little. Another section - M-21 - was
formed in 1990 to create explosive devices for Iraqi intelligence. Its
chemistry department developed explosive materials; its electronics
department prepared timers and wiring; and its mechanical department
produced igniters and designed the bombs.
This picture shows the substantial, longstanding involvement of Iraq's
intelligence services in terrorist training and support operations,
including collaboration with Islamic militants. Its activities were
infinitely more sophisticated than anything that was taught to the
mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. This underscores just how
odd it is that our default explanation for terrorism has now become Al
Qaida - which did not have a chemistry department, one of countless points
that distinguishes that organization from the intelligence service of a
major terrorist state.
The Iraqi documents described here have received little public attention, as
the Bush administration has said virtually nothing about them. Many people
find it incomprehensible that significant information linking Iraq to
terrorism would exist, and the White House would say virtually nothing about
it. Every discussion of that link, particularly between Saddam's so-called
secular regime and Islamic militants, produces an enormous caterwauling from
a variety of parties vested in the notions that the militants acted on their
own and that Saddam was little threat.
Yet never before has a president sent America's soldiers into combat, while
understating the reasons for that conflict. A full explanation of the
reasons for a war is strategically as well as morally essential. It is
critical for maintaining support on the home front. And the soldiers who
risk life and limb are entitled to understand why they are being asked to
make such sacrifices, as are their families.
Moreover, the matter of Baghdad's long-standing co-operation with Islamic
militants is critical to understanding the current battles in Iraq. Who,
exactly, is the enemy? Do the foreign terrorists there operate independently
of the Baathists? Or do the attacks reflect an ongoing relationship, dating
back to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, in which the Baathists worked with and
hid behind Islamic militants? And what is the role of the Syrian Baath? It
is striking that nowhere in these Iraqi documents can one find the least
suggestion that Iraqi intelligence had any qualms about working with the
Islamic militants.
President Bush made a necessary and courageous decision for war with Iraq.
He inherited from the Clinton administration a fatally flawed explanation
for terrorism: the role of states in such attacks had been supplanted by
shadowy networks, above all Al Qaeda. This view was articulated and
maintained for nearly the entirety of Clinton's eight years in office. As so
many people accepted, endorsed, and promulgated it, it has generated
ferocious opposition to the notion that Saddam was involved in terrorism.
Yet unless the White House itself takes a much bolder lead in presenting the
ever-clearer picture of Iraq's ties with terrorists, the arguments regarding
this war will remain hopelessly distorted.
.
|
|
| User: "eric davis" |
|
| Title: Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons' favorite conspiracy theorist. |
08 Jan 2005 01:39:48 PM |
|
|
"TonyZ2001" <tonyz2001@aol.com> wrote in message
news:20050108133052.08281.00003429@mb-m04.aol.com...
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
By Laurie Mylroie The New York Sun October 19, 2004
www.nysun.com/article/3413
The central issue in the presidential race is, arguably, the legitimacy of
the Iraq War. Is this conflict a necessary part of the war on terrorism?
The
answer is decidedly yes, although this seems to be a fight the White House
would rather duck, even as documents now trickling out of Baghdad suggest
Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with terrorists, including with Islamic
militants.
One source for this claim is the widely discussed, but scarcely read,
report
of the Iraq Survey Group, the coalition intelligence team that went into
Iraq after the war. As Richard Spertzel, an Iraq Survey Group member who
also had served with the United Nations Iraq weapons inspections team,
explained in the Wall Street Journal, "Documentation indicates that Iraq
was
training non-Iraqis at Salman Pak in terrorist techniques, including
assassination and suicide bombing. In addition to Iraqis, trainees
included
Palestinians, Yemenis, Saudis, Lebanese, Egyptians and Sudanese."
Soon after September 11, 2001, two Iraqi defectors came forward,
explaining
that Iraqi intelligence had trained non-Iraqi Arab militants at
itsextensive
compound at Salman Pak, an area south of Baghdad. Among the skills taught
there was hijacking airplanes. One defector even drew a sketch of the
area,
showing a passenger plane parked in the southwest corner of a large
compound.
When American marines took over Salman Pak in early April 2003, they
indeed
found the terrorist training camp, the airplane, and the foreign
terrorists.
An American military spokesman affirmed, "The nature of the work being
done
by some of those people we captured. ..gives us the impression that there
is
terrorist training that was conducted at Salman Pak." The marines
"inferred"
that the airplane "was used to practice hijacking," the Associated Press
reported. Saddam's apologists claim the camp was for counterterrorism
training, but that seems highly improbable.
Iraqi documents, dating from January to May 1993, suggest that Baghdad's
training of terrorists goes back over a decade - at least to the period
following Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. That training was
interrupted by the 1991 war, but appears to have resumed not long
afterwards.
These documents, leaked by a Pentagon official to Scott Wheeler of
Cybercast
News Service, are posted on its Web site. Bruce Tefft, a retired CIA
counter-terrorism official who worked on Iraq; MEMRI's Nimrod Raphaeli;
Middle East scholar Walid Phares; and this author have all expressed their
confidence in the documents' authenticity. They are on official Iraqi
letterhead and are essentially a 40-page correspondence between Iraqi
intelligence and Saddam's office.
Responding to a request from Saddam, M-14, the division of Iraqi
intelligence responsible for training and conducting special operations,
produced a report dated April 1, 1993. The seven page document lists 100
"Arab fedayeen," whom it had trained in Iraq during the fall of 1990.Their
nationalities include a wide swath of the Arab world: Palestinians,
Syrians,
Lebanese, Egyptians, Moroccans, Tunisians, Sudanese, and Eritreans, who
are
not usually considered Arab.
One important relationship discussed in the documents is Iraq's support
for
the militant domestic opponents of the Egyptian government, a key Arab
member of the 1990-91 coalition against Iraq. Three weeks prior to the
Persian Gulf War, on December 24, 1990, Iraqi intelligence concluded an
agreement on a plan of sabotage against Cairo with a representative of the
Egyptian Islamic Group, whose leader, Shaykh Omar Abdul Rahman, was
subsequently tried and convicted for terrorism in New York. Those
operations
ended with the February 28, 1991, cease-fire, according to these papers.
The documents also indicate that Iraqi intelligence, along with Sudan's
Islamic government, allied with Iraq, pressed in early 1993 to resume
operational support for Egypt's militants. Saddam rejected this, ordering
that Iraq's backing for them remain limited to financial support for the
time being.
Nonetheless, the director of Iraqi intelligence informed the palace that
the
vice chairman of Sudan's governing National Islamic Front would be sending
a
leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad - a group headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri,
who
subsequently became Osama bin Laden's deputy - to Baghdad on a Sudanese
plane carrying meat. The U.N. Security Council actually gave Sudan an
exemption for such flights, creating a strange, unnecessary breach in the
air embargo then imposed on Iraq.
An 11-page document dated January 25, 1993, lists various organizations
with
which Iraqi intelligence maintained contacts. It recommends "the use of
Arab
Islamic elements which were fighting in Afghanistan and now have no place
to
go and who are currently in Somalia, Sudan, and Egypt." Saddam approves
the
suggestion, with the order to "concentrate on Somalia."
The document also mentions a group called Hezb-e-Islami, headed by
Gulbuddin
Hekmatyar. Noting that Iraqi intelligence established a relationship with
this party in 1989, the document states that Iraq now had a direct
relationship with Hekmatyar. This man was, in turn, an important ally of
Osama bin Ladin. In a terrorism case in Chicago, the U.S. Attorney's
Office
affirmed, "Hekmatyar was aligned with Osama bin Ladin in Afghanistan after
al Qaida was formed in 1988, and indeed many of al Qaida's camps were
located in territory controlled by Hekmatyar."
The report of the Iraq Survey Group presents further evidence of Iraq's
involvement in hostile activities. It includes the most comprehensive
account of the Iraqi Intelligence Service ever published in open-source
literature, depicting an organization that consisted of "over twenty
compartmentalized directorates." Section M-14 included the "Tiger Group" -
"primarily composed of suicide bombers. "It also supervised the "Challenge
Project," a highly secretive enterprise involved with explosives, about
which the Iraq Survey Group could learn little. Another section - M-21 -
was
formed in 1990 to create explosive devices for Iraqi intelligence. Its
chemistry department developed explosive materials; its electronics
department prepared timers and wiring; and its mechanical department
produced igniters and designed the bombs.
This picture shows the substantial, longstanding involvement of Iraq's
intelligence services in terrorist training and support operations,
including collaboration with Islamic militants. Its activities were
infinitely more sophisticated than anything that was taught to the
mujahideen fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. This underscores just how
odd it is that our default explanation for terrorism has now become Al
Qaida - which did not have a chemistry department, one of countless points
that distinguishes that organization from the intelligence service of a
major terrorist state.
The Iraqi documents described here have received little public attention,
as
the Bush administration has said virtually nothing about them. Many people
find it incomprehensible that significant information linking Iraq to
terrorism would exist, and the White House would say virtually nothing
about
it. Every discussion of that link, particularly between Saddam's so-called
secular regime and Islamic militants, produces an enormous caterwauling
from
a variety of parties vested in the notions that the militants acted on
their
own and that Saddam was little threat.
Yet never before has a president sent America's soldiers into combat,
while
understating the reasons for that conflict. A full explanation of the
reasons for a war is strategically as well as morally essential. It is
critical for maintaining support on the home front. And the soldiers who
risk life and limb are entitled to understand why they are being asked to
make such sacrifices, as are their families.
Moreover, the matter of Baghdad's long-standing co-operation with Islamic
militants is critical to understanding the current battles in Iraq. Who,
exactly, is the enemy? Do the foreign terrorists there operate
independently
of the Baathists? Or do the attacks reflect an ongoing relationship,
dating
back to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, in which the Baathists worked with and
hid behind Islamic militants? And what is the role of the Syrian Baath? It
is striking that nowhere in these Iraqi documents can one find the least
suggestion that Iraqi intelligence had any qualms about working with the
Islamic militants.
President Bush made a necessary and courageous decision for war with Iraq.
He inherited from the Clinton administration a fatally flawed explanation
for terrorism: the role of states in such attacks had been supplanted by
shadowy networks, above all Al Qaeda. This view was articulated and
maintained for nearly the entirety of Clinton's eight years in office. As
so
many people accepted, endorsed, and promulgated it, it has generated
ferocious opposition to the notion that Saddam was involved in terrorism.
Yet unless the White House itself takes a much bolder lead in presenting
the
ever-clearer picture of Iraq's ties with terrorists, the arguments
regarding
this war will remain hopelessly distorted.
Armchair Provocateur
Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons' favorite conspiracy theorist.
By Peter Bergen
Americans supported the war in Iraq not because Saddam Hussein was an evil
dictator--we had known that for many years--but because President Bush had
made the case that Saddam might hand off weapons of mass destruction to his
terrorist allies to wreak havoc on the United States. As of this writing,
there appears to be no evidence that Saddam had either weapons of mass
destruction or significant ties to terrorist groups like al Qaeda. Yet the
belief that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States amounted to
a theological conviction within the administration, a conviction
successfully sold to the American public. So it's fair to ask: Where did
this faith come from?
In the past year, there has been a flood of stories about the thinking of
neoconservative hawks such as Richard Perle, until March the chairman of the
influential Defense Policy Board and a key architect of the president's
get-tough-on-Iraq policy. Perle has had a long association with the American
Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think tank that was also home to
other out-of-power hawks during the Clinton years such as John Bolton, now
under secretary of state for arms control and international security
affairs. It was at AEI that the idea took shape that overthrowing Saddam
should be a fundamental goal of U.S. foreign policy. Still, none of the
thinker/operatives at AEI, or indeed any of the other neocon hawks such as
Paul Wolfowitz, were in any real way experts on Iraq or had served in the
region. Moreover, the majority of those in and out of government who were
Middle East experts had grave concerns about the wisdom of invading Iraq and
serious doubts about claims that Saddam's regime posed an urgent threat to
American security. What, then, gave neoconservatives like Wolfowitz and
Perle such abiding faith in their own positions?
Historians will be debating that question for years, but an important part
of the reason has to do with someone you may well have never heard of:
Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie has an impressive array of credentials that certify
her as an expert on the Middle East, national security, and, above all,
Iraq. She has held faculty positions at Harvard and the U.S. Naval War
College and worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as well
as serving as an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign.
During the 1980s, Mylroie was an apologist for Saddam's regime, but reversed
her position upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and, with the zeal of the
academic spurned, became rabidly anti-Saddam. In the run up to the first
Gulf War, Mylroie with New York Times reporter Judith Miller wrote Saddam
Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller translated
into more than a dozen languages.
Until this point, there was nothing controversial about Mylroie's career.
This would change with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the
first act of international terrorism within the United States, which would
launch Mylroie on a quixotic quest to prove that Saddam's regime was the
most important source of terrorism directed against this country. She laid
out her case in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against
America, a book published by AEI in 2000 which makes it clear that Mylroie
and the neocon hawks worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was
behind the '93 Trade Center bombing. Its acknowledgements fulsomely thanked
John Bolton and the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle
glowingly blurbed the book as "splendid and wholly convincing." Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, now Vice President Cheney's chief of staff, is thanked for
his "generous and timely assistance." And it appears that Paul Wolfowitz
himself was instrumental in the genesis of Study of Revenge: His then-wife
is credited with having "fundamentally shaped the book," while of Wolfowitz,
she says: "At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that
is inherently difficult."
None of which was out of the ordinary, except for this: Mylroie became
enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-U.S.
terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert
opinion to the contrary. In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field
theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the
'93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of
the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania
to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11
itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she
were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went
on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a
consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her
eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against
America.
Hussein on the brain
According to Bob Woodward's book Bush at War, immediately after 9/11
Wolfowitz told the cabinet: "There was a 10 to 50 per cent chance Saddam was
involved." A few days later, President Bush told his top aides: "I believe
that Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now." However, the
most comprehensive criminal investigation in history--involving chasing down
500,000 leads and interviewing 175,000 people--has turned up no evidence of
Iraq's involvement, while the occupation of Iraq by a substantial American
army has also uncovered no such link. Moreover, the U.S. State Department's
counterterrorism office, which every year releases an authoritative survey
of global terrorism, stated in its 2000 report: "[Iraq] has not attempted an
anti-western attack since its failed attempt to assassinate former President
Bush in 1993 in Kuwait." In other words, by 9/11, Saddam's regime had not
engaged in anti-American terrorism for almost a decade.
Ideas do not appear out of nowhere, so how is it that key members of the
Bush administration believed that Iraq had been so deeply involved in
terrorism directed at U.S. targets for many years? For that we must turn to
Mylroie's Study of Revenge, which posits that Iraq was behind the first
Trade Center attack, a theory that is risible as hundreds of national
security and law enforcement professionals combed through the evidence of
the '93 bombing, certainly looking, amongst other things, for such a
connection, and found no evidence. But Mylroie claims to have discovered
something that everyone else missed: the mastermind of the plot, a man
generally known by one of his many aliases, "Ramzi Yousef," was an Iraqi
intelligence agent who some time after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990
assumed the identity of a Pakistani named Abdul Basit whose family lived
there. This was a deduction which she reached following an examination of
Basit's passport records and her discovery that Yousef and Basit were four
inches different in height. On this wafer-thin foundation she builds her
case that Yousef must have therefore been an Iraqi agent given access to
Basit's passport following the Iraq occupation. However, U.S. investigators
say that "Yousef" and Basit are in fact one and the same person, and that
the man Mylroie describes as an Iraqi agent is in fact a Pakistani with ties
to al Qaeda.
Mylroie appears never to have absorbed the implications of Occam's Razor,
the basic philosophical and scientific principle generally understood to be:
"Of two competing theories or explanations, all other things being equal,
the simpler one is to be preferred." In this case the simpler--and more
accurate--explanation of Yousef/Basit's identity is that he was part of the
al Qaeda network, not working for Baghdad. Indeed, an avalanche of evidence
demonstrates that Yousef was part of the loosely knit al Qaeda organization,
evidence that Mylroie does not consider as it would undermine all her
suppositions.
When Yousef flew to New York from Pakistan in 1992 before the bombing of the
Trade Center, he was accompanied by Ahmad Ajaj, who was arrested at Kennedy
Airport on immigration charges, and was later found to have an al Qaeda
bomb-making manual in his luggage. Al Qaeda member Jamal al-Fadl told a New
York jury in 2000 that he saw Yousef at the group's Sadda training camp on
the Pakistan-Afghanistan border some time between 1989 and 1991. When Yousef
lived in the Philippines in the early 1990s, his partner in terrorism was
Wali Khan Amin Shah, who had trained in Afghanistan under bin Laden. A
number of Yousef's co-conspirators had ties to a Brooklyn organization known
as the Afghan Refugee Center. This was the American arm of an organization
bin Laden founded in Pakistan during the mid-1980s that would later evolve
into al Qaeda. Yousef's uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, sent him money for
the Trade Center attack, and would later go on to become al Qaeda's military
commander and the chief planner of 9/11. I could go on. The point is that
the 1993 attack was plotted not by Iraqi intelligence, but by men who were
linked to al Qaeda.
In addition to ignoring Yousef's many connections to al Qaeda, Mylroie is
clearly aware that in 1995, he gave what would be his only interview to the
Arabic newspaper al Hayat since she alludes to it in her book Study of
Revenge. "I have no connection with Iraq," said Yousef to his interviewer,
adding for good measure that "the Iraqi people must not pay for the mistakes
made by Saddam." "Yousef," who traveled under a variety of false identities,
confirmed that his real name was indeed Abdul Basit and that he was a
Pakistani born in Kuwait, and also admitted that he knew and admired Sheikh
Omar Abdel Rahman, one of al Qaeda's spiritual gurus, whom the U.S.
government would later convict of plotting terror attacks in New York.
Yousef went on to say that he wanted to "aid members" of Egypt's Jihad
group, a terrorist organization then led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, who is now
bin Laden's deputy. Yousef's interview has the ring of truth as he freely
volunteered that he knew Sheikh Rahman, the cleric whom the U.S. government
had by then already identified as the inspiration for several terrorist
conspiracies in New York during the early '90s and also explained that he
was part of an Islamic movement which planned to carry out attacks in Saudi
Arabia to avenge the arrests of Sheikh Salman al-Audah and Sheikh Safar
al-Hawali, radical clerics who have profoundly influenced both bin Laden and
al Qaeda. Yousef knew that he was likely facing a lifetime in prison at the
time of this interview, and so had little reason to dissemble. In Study of
Revenge, Mylroie is careful not to mention the substance of what Yousef said
here as it demolishes her theory that he was an Iraqi agent.
Moreover, Mylroie's broader contention that the first Trade Center attack
was an Iraqi plot is, to put it mildly, not shared by the intelligence and
law-enforcement officials familiar with the subsequent investigation. Vince
Cannistraro, who headed the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorist Center in the early
1990s, told me, "My view is that Laurie has an obsession with Iraq and
trying to link Saddam to global terrorism. Years of strenuous effort to
prove the case have been unavailing." Ken Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst,
scarcely to be described as "soft" on Saddam--his book The Threatening
Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq made the most authoritative argument for
toppling the dictator--dismissed Mylroie's theories to me: "The NSC
[National Security Council] had the intelligence community look very hard at
the allegations that the Iraqis were behind the 1993 Trade Center attack.
Finding those links would have been very beneficial to the U.S. government
at the time, but the intelligence community said that there were no such
links."
Mary Jo White, the no-nonsense U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted
both the Trade Center case and the al Qaeda bombers behind the 1998 attacks
on U.S. embassies in Africa, told me that there was no evidence to support
Mylroie's claims: "We investigated the Trade Center attack thoroughly, and
other than the evidence that Ramzi Yousef traveled on a phony Iraqi
passport, that was the only connection to Iraq." Neil Herman, the F.B.I.
official who headed the Trade Center probe, explained that following the
attacks, one of the lower-level conspirators, Abdul Rahman Yasin, did flee
New York to live with a family member in Baghdad: "The one glaring
connection that can't be overlooked is Yasin. We pursued that on every
level, traced him to a relative and a location, and we made overtures to get
him back." However, Herman says that Yasin's presence in Baghdad does not
mean Iraq sponsored the attack: "We looked at that rather extensively. There
were no ties to the Iraqi government." In sum, by the mid-'90s, the Joint
Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney's office in
the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State
Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the
first Trade Center attack.
Perles of wisdom
As Mylroie was fighting against the tide of expert opinion to prove her case
that Saddam was behind the '93 bombing, her neocon colleagues at AEI and
elsewhere were formulating an alternative vision of U.S. foreign policy to
challenge what they saw as the feckless and weak policies of the Clinton
administration. Mylroie's research and expertise on Iraq complemented the
big-think strategizing of the neocons, and a symbiotic relationship
developed between them, as evidenced by the garlands that the neocons
bestowed upon her for her work. Wolfowitz gushingly blurbed Study of
Revenge: "[Her] provocative and disturbing book argues that.Ramzi Yousef,
was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence. If so, what would that tell us
about the extent of Saddam Hussein's ambitions? How would it change our view
of Iraq's continuing efforts to retain weapons of mass destruction and to
acquire new ones? How would it affect our judgments about the collapse of
U.S. policy toward Iraq and the need for a fundamentally new policy?" (How,
indeed.) James Woolsey, another prominent Iraq hawk who headed the C.I.A.
between 1993 and 1995, also weighed in: "Anyone who wishes to continue to
deal with Saddam by ignoring his role in international terrorism.and by
giving only office furniture to the Iraqi resistance now has the staggering
task of trying to refute this superb work." Study of Revenge was reissued
after 9/11 as The War Against America, Woolsey contributing a new foreword
that described Mylroie's work as "brilliant and brave."
It is possible, of course, that the neocons did not find Mylroie's research
to be genuinely persuasive, but rather that her findings simply fit
conveniently into their own desire to overthrow Saddam. Having blurbed her
first book as "wholly convincing," Richard Perle now says that "not
everything she says is convincing" and that Mylroie's thinking was "not very
important" to the development of his own views on Iraq. At the same time,
Perle continues to praise Mylroie's investigative skills, even saying she
should be put in charge of "quality control" at the C.I.A. So there are
reasons to think that people like Perle actually were persuaded by her
research. As the one member of the neocon team with serious credentials on
Iraq, Mylroie offered opinions which would naturally have carried special
weight. That she was a genuine authority, whose "research" confirmed their
worst fears about Saddam, could only have strengthened their convictions.
The evidence that the hawks really believed her theories can be seen in
their statements and actions following September 11. Shortly thereafter,
Woolsey was dispatched to the United Kingdom on an extraordinary trip,
apparently sanctioned by Wolfowitz, to check out a key aspect of Mylroie's
argument about Yousef. During the early '90s, Abdul Basit, the Pakistani
whose identity Yousef had supposedly assumed, attended a Welsh college to
study electrical engineering. Mylroie writes that Basit was quite different
in appearance from Yousef, thus further proving her contention that Yousef
was a substitute, a fact that could be proved by visiting Basit's former
college in Wales. As Woolsey has made no comment on his trip to the United
Kingdom, it's fair to assume that his efforts to replicate these findings
did not meet with success. However, around the second anniversary of 9/11,
Vice President ***** Cheney continued to echo Mylroie's utterances when he
told NBC's Tim Russert that Iraq was "the geographic base of the terrorists
who have had us under assault for many years, but most especially on 9/11,"
a demonstrably false theory that Mylroie has been vigorously touting since
this past summer.
In July, Mylroie published a new book Bush vs. the Beltway, which reprised
many of the themes of Study of Revenge. The subtitle of her new tome tells
you where the book is headed: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to
Stop the War on Terror. The book charges that the U.S. government actually
suppressed information about Iraq's role in anti-American terrorism,
including in the investigation of 9/11. Luckily, Bush vs. the Beltway, which
reads in part like Bush 2004 campaign literature, does have at least one
heroic figure: "There is an actual hero, in the person of the president who
could not be rolled, spun or otherwise diverted from his most solemn
obligation."
Bush vs. the Beltway, the subject of additional hosannas from both Woolsey
and Perle, claims that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the now-captured mastermind of
9/11, is an Iraqi intelligence agent, like Ramzi Yousef, who adopted the
identity of a Pakistani living in Kuwait. Funnily enough, the U.S.
government doesn't seem to have explored this intriguing theory. Why not?
According to Mylroie, a plot is afoot to prevent Mohammed's unmasking.
Shortly after Bush vs. the Beltway was published, she appeared as an expert
witness before the blue-ribbon commission investigating 9/11, testifying
that "there is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds [of both
the '93 and 9/11 Trade Center attacks] are Iraqi intelligence agents."
Mylroie explained that this had not been discovered by the U.S. government
because "a senior administration official told me in specific that the
question of the identities of the terrorist masterminds could not be pursued
because of bureaucratic obstructionism." So we are expected to believe that
the senior Bush administration officials whom Mylroie knows so well could
not find anyone in intelligence or law enforcement to investigate the
supposed Iraqi intelligence background of the mastermind of 9/11, at the
same time that 150,000 American soldiers had been sent to fight a war in
Iraq under the rubric of the war on terrorism. Please.
Further undermining Mylroie's theory about Khalid Sheik Mohammed is the fact
that since his apprehension in Pakistan, KSM, as he's known to law
enforcement, has specifically denied any connection to Iraq, at the same
time that he has offered up actionable intelligence about terror plots in
the United States. A senior U.S. counter-terrorism official told me that
KSM, like several other high-ranking al Qaeda operatives, has disgorged much
useful information following the use of coercive methods that include making
him "uncomfortable and withholding water and sleep." As a result of KSM's
interrogations, Iyman Faris, a trucker living in Ohio, was arrested for
plotting to cut through the cable supporting the Brooklyn Bridge and was
sentenced in October to 20 years in prison.
Zeitgeist heist
Mylroie declined to be interviewed for this article "with regret," so the
only chance I have had to talk with her came this past February, when we
both appeared on Canadian television to discuss the impending war in Iraq
and Saddam's putative connections to terrorism. As soon as the interview
started, Mylroie began lecturing in a hectoring tone: "Listen, we're going
to war because President Bush believes Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11.
Al Qaeda is a front for Iraqi intelligence.[the U.S.] bureaucracy made a
tremendous blunder that refused to acknowledge these links . the people
responsible for gathering this information, say in the C.I.A., are also the
same people who contributed to the blunder on 9/11 and the deaths of 3,000
Americans, and so whenever this information emerges they move to discredit
it." I tried to make the point that Mylroie's theories defied common sense,
as they implied a conspiracy by literally thousands of American officials to
suppress the truth of the links between Iraq and 9/11, to little avail.
At the end of the interview, Mylroie, who exudes a slightly frazzled, batty
air, started getting visibly agitated, her finger jabbing at the camera and
her voice rising to a yell as she outlined the following apocalyptic
scenario: "Now I'm going to tell you something, OK, and I want all Canada to
understand, I want you to understand the consequences of the cynicism of
people like Peter. There is a very acute chance as we go to war that Saddam
will use biological agents as revenge against Americans, that there will be
anthrax in the United States and there will be smallpox in the United
States. Are you in Canada prepared for Americans who have smallpox and do
not know it crossing the border and bringing that into Canada?"
This kind of hysterical hyperbole is emblematic of Mylroie's method, which
is to never let the facts get in the way of her monomaniacal certainties. In
the case of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, she has said that Terry Nichols,
one of the plotters, was in league with Ramzi Yousef. Richard Matsch, the
veteran federal judge who presided over the Oklahoma City bombing case,
ruled any version of this theory to be inadmissible at trial. Mylroie
implicates Iraq in the 1996 bombing of a U.S. military facility in Saudi
Arabia which killed 19 U.S. servicemen. In 2001, a grand jury returned
indictments in that case against members of Saudi Hezbollah, a group with
ties not to Iraq, but Iran. Mylroie suggests that the attacks on two U.S.
embassies in Africa in 1998 might have been "the work of both bin Laden and
Iraq." An overseas investigation unprecedented in scope did not uncover any
such connection. Mylroie has written that the crash of TWA flight 800 into
Long Island Sound in 1996 likely was an Iraqi plot. A two-year investigation
by the National Tran-sportation Safety Board ruled it was an accident.
According to Mylroie, Iraq supplied the bomb-making expertise for the attack
which killed 17 U.S. sailors on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. No American
law enforcement official has made that claim. Mylroie blames Iraq for the
post-9/11 anthrax attacks around the United States. Marilyn Thompson, The
Washington Post's investigations editor, who has written an authoritative
book on those attacks, says, "The F.B.I. has essentially dismissed this
theory and says there is no evidence to support it." A U.S.
counter-terrorism official remarked: "Mylroie probably thinks the Washington
sniper was an Iraqi."
In her book Bush vs. the Beltway, Mylroie approvingly quotes the maxim "we
should not love our opinions like our children." It's long overdue that she
heed this excellent piece of advice. Saddam is guilty of many crimes, not
least the genocidal policies he unleashed on the Marsh Arabs and the Iraqi
Kurds, but there is no evidence linking him to any act of anti-American
terrorism for the past decade, while there is a mountain of evidence that
implicates al Qaeda.
Unfortunately, Mylroie's researches have proven to be more than merely
academic, as her theories have bolstered the argument that led us into a
costly war in Iraq and swayed key opinion-makers in the Bush administration,
who then managed to persuade seven out of 10 Americans that the Iraqi
dictator had a role in the attacks on Washington and New York. So, her
specious theories of Iraq's involvement in anti-American terrorism have now
become part of the American zeitgeist. Meanwhile, in a recent, telling quote
to Newsweek, Mylroie observed: "I take satisfaction that we went to war with
Iraq and got rid of Saddam Hussein. The rest is details." Now she tells us.
Peter Bergen, a fellow of the New America Foundation, is the author of Holy
War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden and an adjunct
professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins
University.
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| User: "TaDa Pope" |
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| Title: Re: Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons' favorite conspiracy theorist. |
09 Jan 2005 06:44:20 PM |
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Slick Willie, Big Daddy and Dubya
ARE the conspiracy.
Tangents are infinite in all of nature in
all universes constantly and at random.
* D OUOSVAVV M *
*PUBLIUS ENIGMA*
Oh Joy!
The Psychedelic Pope
Patron Saint of the Internet
http://www.apple2.org.za/gswv/me/
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| User: "R. Foreman" |
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| Title: Re: Saddam's Terrorist Ties |
08 Jan 2005 03:25:02 PM |
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(TonyZ2001) Spat the Words
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
By Laurie Mylroie The New York Sun October 19, 2004
www.nysun.com/article/3413
The central issue in the presidential race is, arguably, the legitimacy
of the Iraq War.
Actually, the central issue for me was, is George Bush just a
moron, or is he a complete blathering idiot?
Is this conflict a necessary part of the war on
terrorism? The answer is decidedly yes, although this seems to be a
fight the White House would rather duck, even as documents now trickling
out of Baghdad suggest Saddam Hussein had extensive ties with
terrorists, including with Islamic militants.
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| User: "TaDa Pope" |
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| Title: Re: Saddam's Terrorist Ties |
08 Jan 2005 12:58:45 PM |
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That post provoked me to such a degree that I had to do a couple of whifs of my
Albutrol inhaler.
Tangents are infinite in all of nature in
all universes constantly and at random.
* D OUOSVAVV M *
*PUBLIUS ENIGMA*
Oh Joy!
The Psychedelic Pope
Patron Saint of the Internet
http://www.apple2.org.za/gswv/me/
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| User: "WH" |
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| Title: Re: Saddam's Terrorist Ties |
08 Jan 2005 01:30:22 PM |
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TonyZ2001 wrote:
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
By Laurie Mylroie The New York Sun October 19, 2004
www.nysun.com/article/3413
OOps...as soon as one sees the name Laurie Mylroie at the beginninig of
an article it's a sign that the "article" is rubbish and not worth the
effort of reading.
WH
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| User: "Grantland" |
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| Title: Re: Saddam's Terrorist Ties |
08 Jan 2005 06:57:07 PM |
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"WH" <bollogs@hotmail.com> wrote:
TonyZ2001 wrote:
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
By Laurie Mylroie The New York Sun October 19, 2004
www.nysun.com/article/3413
OOps...as soon as one sees the name Laurie Mylroie at the beginninig of
an article it's a sign that the "article" is rubbish and not worth the
effort of reading.
WH
Amazin'! That's exactly what happened with me! Mind you, I only
half- scan most of tone's rubbish - sooo... \blabber
Grantland
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| User: "WH" |
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| Title: Re: Saddam's Terrorist Ties |
08 Jan 2005 05:52:46 PM |
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WH wrote:
TonyZ2001 wrote:
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
Saddam's Terrorist Ties
By Laurie Mylroie The New York Sun October 19, 2004
www.nysun.com/article/3413
OOps...as soon as one sees the name Laurie Mylroie at the beginninig
of
an article it's a sign that the "article" is rubbish and not worth
the
effort of reading.
WH
The Neocons' New Enemy: The CIA
Laurie Mylroie's crazy ideas about 9/11
by David Corn
The CIA is a rogue institution. It undermines national security. It was
dishonest about the threat from Iraq. It hid the truth from the
American public. It has plotted against other parts of the government.
It has betrayed the country.
That's not the latest lefty screed against the spooks. This critique
is the central point of a new book written by a darling of the
neoconservative claque running much of President Bush's foreign
policy. In Bush vs. the Beltway, Laurie Mylroie, an adjunct fellow at
the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute (neocon HQ), offers
a j'accuse-like indictment summed up by this slim volume's
subtitle: "How the CIA and the State Department Tried To Stop the War
on Terror." Mylroie charges that a conspiracy of head-in-the-sand
intelligence analysts and don't-rock-the-boat foreign service
apparatchiks covered up, ignored and dismissed evidence that Saddam
Hussein orchestrated the 9/11 attacks and that al Qaeda has been a
front for Iraqi intelligence. Moreover, she claims that midlevel CIA
bureaucrats - no names, of course - were able to thwart Bush, Vice
President ***** Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and others from presenting the best
possible case for war against Iraq.
Mylroie's theories might not deserve much attention except for the
fact she has influential admirers. Richard Perle, a member of the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, R. James Woolsey, a former CIA
director, and Christopher Hitchens, the leftist writer turned Wolfowitz
fan, have endorsed her book. Her past work has been hailed by former
U=2EN. Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick (the godmother of the neocons) and
Wolfowitz. Several years ago, Mylroie co-wrote a book on Saddam Hussein
with New York Times reporter Judith Miller. Mylroie is a terrorism
consultant for the Pentagon. She recently testified before the
independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks.
So, what Mylroie says matters - at least to some important folks. And
her work reflects the suspicions (and biases) held by the neocons and
hawks who derided and disregarded intelligence assessments that did not
support their prewar assertions about Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction, Baghdad's supposed alliance with al Qaeda, and the
threat posed by Hussein. Her embrace by the neocons illustrates that
some of this bunch are happy to engage in the most liberal (and
apprehensive) interpretations of reality when it suits their interests.
Mylroie argues that "substantial evidence did exist to tie Iraq to al
Qaeda and to suggest that Iraq was involved in the September 11
attacks." Substantial evidence - that's a big claim for a big
charge. But boiled down, her case rests on the unproven assertion that
key 9/11 plotters were not Islamic fundamentalists but Iraqi
intelligence operatives. She starts with Ramzi Yousef, the convicted
mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. She raises
intriguing questions about an alias he used and speculates that Kuwaiti
files supporting this alias were manipulated by Iraqi intelligence.
And, to her, that means Hussein was behind the first attack on the
World Trade Center. She then turns to Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the
supposed author of the 9/11 attacks. He is Yousef's uncle and, like
his nephew, a Pakistani. Without evidence, she surmises that his
identity might be a concoction, too. Noting that Yousef's two older
brothers and a cousin also are involved with al Qaeda, she asks, what
are the odds that one Pakistani family would be at the center of a
terrorism crusade? It is more probable, she argues, that Iraqi
intelligence set up fake identities for its own operatives so they
seemed to be Islamic fundamentalists.
Appearing before the 9/11 commission, Mylroie was asked if any
information indicated Khalid Sheik Mohammed was indeed an Iraqi
operative. She replied that a friend of hers - a retired Israeli
intelligence official she would not name - had told her, "It's
obvious that these [identities] are legends." As Judith Yaphe, a
professor at the National Defense University who for 20 years was a CIA
analyst, snapped, "That is not evidence."
Even if Mylroie offers more theory than proof, wouldn't the CIA be
keen on demonstrating that Hussein was responsible for 9/11? Au
contraire, she says. CIA officials, she maintains, have been
"systematically denying any evidence of an Iraqi connection with
terrorist activity." During her testimony before the 9/11 commission,
Mylroie recalled, "A senior administration official told me in
specific that the question of the identities of the terrorist
masterminds [particularly that of Khalid Sheik Mohammed] could not be
pursued because of bureaucratic obstructionism." Who said that to
her? Mylroie wouldn't say. Obviously, the Bush administration would
love to connect Hussein to 9/11. So, I asked Mylroie, how could
midlevel CIA bureaucrats foil the White House and the Pentagon? "I
don't really know all the details of it," she answered.
Why would the CIA be undermining the war on terrorism? Mylroie's
answer is simple. In the 1990s, the CIA and the State Department
concluded that modern-day terrorism was mostly a "stateless"
endeavor conducted by evildoers unattached to any particular government
and not sponsored by regimes. So to protect themselves,
national-security bureaucrats have smothered evidence that Hussein was
responsible for 9/11 ("evidence" being a loosely defined term).
According to Mylroie, they rigged intelligence reports and spoke to
reporters off the record to cast doubt on supposed Baghdad-bin Laden
links. The bottom line: The world was kept in the dark because
career-first intelligence officials gave anonymous quotes to a few
reporters.
Mylroie offers some sound points about the self-protective nature of
bureaucracies in Washington and the inability of agencies to rethink
prevailing assumptions. But her investigative techniques do not inspire
confidence. She notes that Hussein's gleeful responses to the 9/11
attacks ("Americans should feel the pain they have inflicted on other
peoples") reinforced "the impression . . . that Iraq was linked to
the attacks." But these comments could as easily have been seen as
Hussein exploiting the tragedy. Mylroie stands by the disputed charge
that Mohammed Atta, the supposed ringleader of the 9/11 hijackers, met
an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001. She neglects to
mention that the FBI investigated and found no corroborating
information and that in October 2002 The New York Times reported that
Czech President V=E1clav Havel informed the White House there was no
evidence to confirm the meeting. By the way, this Iraqi intelligence
officer was captured by U.S. forces in early July. So far, there's
been no word that he has acknowledged meeting with Atta.
Mylroie is still fighting the last battle - in which Pentagon neocons
and their allies wrestled with other government officials who
questioned their Hussein-is-a-threat rhetoric - even though her side
was victorious in that face-off. During the prewar debate, Bush and his
aides relied on belief more than facts to argue that Hussein was an
imminent danger. That has become increasingly clear in the postwar
period, which has yet to yield evidence to back up their most dramatic
charges. Now Mylroie enters the fray, providing even less proof for a
harsher case against Iraq and, more importantly, seeking to discredit
those government forces that occasionally questioned the factual basis
for the invasion. She literally pronounces the CIA the enemy within.
It is no secret that before the war Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and
other Bush officials were suspicious of CIA analysts who were unable to
confirm what these war advocates assumed to be true - that Hussein
was in cahoots with al Qaeda, that he possessed WMDs, that he was a
9/11 co-conspirator. These hawks did not want to be inconvenienced by
facts (or the lack thereof). For this choir, Mylroie's book is a
hymnal. She offers them full justification for adhering to their own
assumptions and disregarding the analysis of others. For the rest of
us, she unintentionally supplies insight into a paranoid corner of the
neocon world where truth is based on presumptions rather than facts.
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