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Sat 3 Apr, 2004 09:53 pm
December 2003
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 Dick 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.
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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.
More about Laurie Mylroie
Laurie Mylroie is an internationally recognized expert on Iraq and terrorism.
Dr. Mylroie received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and her B.A. from Cornell. She was an Assistant Professor in Harvard's Political Science Department, before becoming an Associate Professor in the Strategy Department at the U.S. Naval War College. Subsequently, she was a member of the staff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She also served as advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and has worked as a consultant on terrorism to the Departments of Defense and Energy; ABC News, the BBC, and Newsweek; as well as several law offices. She is presently an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and publisher of Iraq News.
She is also the author of Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein.s Unfinished War Against America (American Enterprise Institute Press, 2000). Published in paperback, as The War Against America (HarperCollins, 2001), the book was hailed by Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz: "argues powerfully"; and Richard Perle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense, "splendid and wholly convincing". J. Gilmore Childers, lead prosecutor in the World Trade Center bombing trial, described it as "work the U.S. government should have done".
Her first book, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, (co-authored with Judith Miller) was a number one New York Times bestseller, translated into 13 languages.
Her articles have appeared in The American Spectator, The Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, Jane.s Intelligence Review, The National Interest, The New Republic, and Newsweek, as well as The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post, among others.
Recent articles by Laurie Mylroie
VERY AWKWARD FACTS Wall Street Journal April 2, 2004
WHAT INTELLIGENCE FAILURE IN IRAQ? Front Page Magazine February 5, 2004
MISHANDLING TERRORISM National Review Online January 23, 2004
SADDAM AND 9/11 FrontPageMagazine.com January 8, 2004
"AL QAEDA DUNNIT!" NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE November 24, 2003
EB-BOOK REVIEW: LAURIE MYLROIE'S "BUSH VS. THE BELTWAY"
NATIONAL REVIEW OCTOBER 27, 2003 VOL. LV, NO. 20
NRO INTERROGATORY : BATTLING THE BELTWAY - LAURIE MYLROIE
INTERVIEWED BY K. LOPEZ NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE September 11, 2003
The Baluch Connection Wall Street Journal March 18, 2003
The Circle of Terror National Review Online February 19, 2003
Understated National Review Online February 5, 2003
Another mistaken 'conceptzia' Jerusalem Post December 4, 2002
How Terror Investigations Can Go Awry Wall Street Journal December 26, 2001
The United States and the Iraqi National Congress Middle East
Intelligence Bulletin March 2001
PBS Frontline interview of Laurie Mylroie 10/18/01
PBS Frontline interview of Laurie Mylroie
October 18, 2001
What's going on in Washington right now in the debate over terrorism and the possible Iraq connection?
The Pentagon believes Iraq is behind the terrorism that began on September 11 and wants to include Iraq as a central target in our war on terrorism.
The State Department says that there's no evidence, or insufficient evidence, that Iraq is involved; [that] Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan should be the sole object of our war, because we have to build an international coalition for support for the American war effort in Afghanistan, and if we add another target, i.e. Iraq, to our war, that will break up the coalition that exists in support of the war in Afghanistan. The CIA maintains that the evidence points to bin Laden and there is little evidence pointing to Iraq, and it's not interested in pursuing the evidence pointing to Iraq.
Who are the members of the teams that are fighting each other here?
This is a very bitter and nasty fight. ... One of the things that is going on is that people who accommodated Bill Clinton's desire not to hear of Iraqi involvement in any of the preceding terrorism are continuing on that line, probably with an eye to their past positions they held and maybe probably their careers; they feel their careers may be endangered.
The Defense Policy Group for the Defense Department, this panel of very esteemed Washingtonians, people from power in the past and such, recently came to some decisions. Can you tell us about that?
I was not at the Defense Policy Board meeting. Some people who were, some friends, told me about it. And what I heard was that, in some respects, my work on terrorism played a prominent role. There are people [who are] involved in this debate with the book who are familiar with this book [and] who have endorsed it. I think it makes a compelling case that Iraq was involved in the first attack on the World Trade Center back in 1993, and then it raises questions -- serious questions -- about whether Iraq has not been involved in subsequent terrorism.
That's very important, because the general view is we have been doing all these things to Saddam for a decade since the Gulf War, and he's been unable to strike back at us. Now, if you believe that, you believe Saddam's no problem. But if you believe that he has been attacking us since 1993 with very major ambitions -- because in 1993, the intention was to bring down the Trade Center towers; Saddam has been trying to carry out those murderous plots since 1993 -- then you have an entirely different view of the man's vengefulness and willfulness and the kind of threat he poses to the United States.
Laurie Mylroie is the author of two books on Saddam Hussein. The most recent, Study of Revenge--Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, assembles evidence that Saddam was behind the bomb plot to topple the World Trade Center towers in 1993 and that two Iraqi intelligence agents were masterminds of the plot. She was interviewed on October 18, 2001.
Why would Saddam Hussein get involved in this? Why take the chance of attacking the United States?
One can ask why did Saddam invade Kuwait in 1990. He is a man who takes chances. Moreover, Saddam's view of the utility of violence is entirely different than ours. A Kuwaiti once told me -- he's a professor of political science at Kuwait University -- "There's something very important that you Americans have to understand about the mentality of Saddam and those around him." The Kuwaiti then went on to tell me this little story.
He was a member of a delegation from the Arab Political Science Association -- Arab academics -- who visited Baghdad in the late 1980s during the latter years of the Iran/Iraq war. And they asked Tariq Aziz, the deputy prime minister, "Why is it that Iraq attacks oil tankers carrying oil from Iran, even when those tankers belong to countries that are friendly to Iraq, like France?" And Tariq Aziz replied to them, "Iraq wants more international pressure to end the Iran/Iraq war, and the way to get people to do what you want is to hurt them."
Saddam sees violence as something that can achieve his goals. He sees a utility in violence. In addition, Saddam seeks revenge against the Untied States, to do to us what we have done to Iraq. ...
Give me the overall picture on the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and evidence of connections to Iraq.
... [It] revolves around the issue of the identity of the Trade Center bomber. [Convicted terrorist] Ramzi Yousef came into the United States on an Iraqi passport in the name of Ramzi Yousef, which is why he's known by that name. He left on a Pakistani passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim, who is a real individual. He was a Pakistani born and raised in Kuwait, where his father worked.
And oddly enough, most of that can be deduced from the evidence in the Trade Center trial, particularly the copies of the passport of Abdul Basit Karim that Ramzi Yousef presented to the Pakistani consulate in New York in December 1992 to obtain the passport on which he fled. The Kuwaitis maintained a file on Abdul Basit Karim because he was a resident alien, and that file was tampered with.
... There is considerable evidence that Iraqi intelligence tampered with documents in Kuwait when it occupied that country. Above all, the file of Abdul Basit Karim, on whose passport Ramzi Yousef fled the United States the night of the Trade Center bombing, was tampered with. Information was taken out, information was put in.
So what does that lead you to believe?
That Abdul Basit's file in Kuwait was tampered with leads me to believe that Iraqi intelligence tampered with that file to create a false identity for Ramzi Yousef. Only Iraqi intelligence, reasonably, could have tampered with the Kuwaiti Interior Ministry files.
Has what you just laid out convinced other people?
The evidence did convince other people of this -- many other people, including senior people in national security circles and journalists. Then there was this recent lpptrip to London by James Woolsey, and the British provided information that is contrary to that.
So James Woolsey's trip to London, which we assume ... was to figure out who Yousef really was... Your information is that London intelligence told Woolsey that indeed, it seems that he was this Kuwaiti?
The impression I have is that the British officials said that Ramzi Yousef is really the individual born Abdul Basit Karim in Kuwait.
But you think this is just a ploy, basically, and the real intention was...?
I believe that the British officials who said that are either mistaken -- because it is an Iraqi intelligence operation and it's very complicated, and one can make mistakes in the investigation -- or that they acted out of ill will for some reason, like Britain does not want the U.S. to go to war against Iraq.
There is a big debate going on. If Iraq can be shown to be behind the February 1993 attack on the Trade Center, that makes the case a great deal stronger. Some people do not want that case to be made, because they don't want us to go to war with Iraq.
Why do people in Washington get nervous about the coalition when it comes to targeting Iraq?
The State Department's business is diplomacy. It likes coalitions, by its very nature, and it likes negotiations and it likes agreements. There are some problems that cannot be dealt with in that way. In addition, the State Department accommodated the position of the Clinton administration, which was not to see any problem in Iraq, whether in regards to Saddam's weapons or in regards to terrorism. Clinton just didn't want Iraq to be an issue. And there are people -- many people in the State Department -- who went along with it.
One aspect of that was a viciousness towards the Iraqi National Congress, and getting in the way of trying to provide any meaningful support to the INC, trying to make decision making capabilities far more difficult, and trying to pretend the INC couldn't do anything, when, in fact, it could....
If you were going to go in to see President George Bush and lay down on his desk one piece of evidence that would convince him that indeed, Iraq is tied to terrorism, what would that one piece of evidence be?
I would take the British file on Abdul Basit, because they maintained a Home Office file; the Kuwaiti file on Abdul Basit, which was tampered with; and the American immigration file, INS file, on Ramzi Yousef. And I would use that information to show that the Kuwaiti file was tampered with, that the information in the British file contradicts the information in the Kuwaiti file.
And just so that it's very clear -- what do you think happened? Iraqi intelligence went in to the Kuwaiti files, realizing they had this man, Ramzi Yousef, who they were going to use in the years to come. So therefore they were setting up a circumstance where they would create a mole, basically, whose identity would be certified by Kuwaiti files. What do you assume happened?
When Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, it used some Kuwaiti files to create false identities for key agents. It tampered with those files. It tampered with Abdul Basit Karim's files to create a false identity for Ramzi Yousef.
Questions also exist about Abdul Hakim Murad, who was convicted with Yousef in the plane bombing plot [Ed. Note: a plan to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes in the Philippines] and also claims to be born in Kuwait. Questions also exist about Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, also involved in the plane bombing, a fugitive who also claims to be born in Kuwait. People should check those files to see if they've been tampered with.
On all of this, it's all circumstantial evidence, but a lot of people believe it. Why?
Well, Jim Fox, then head of the New York FBI himself believed that Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing. Why? Because he recognized that the Muslim extremists were not capable of carrying out this plot on their own. There was something major behind it. Two, there were Iraqis all around the fringe of the plot. One of those Iraqis, Abdul Rachman Yasin, came from Baghdad before the bombing, returned to Baghdad afterwards.
The bombing occurred on the second anniversary of the Gulf War ceasefire approximately, and the Gulf War was not a distant memory at the time. People had it very vividly in their minds. The defendants themselves -- Mahmud Abu Halima, an Egyptian -- believed that Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing, and understood perfectly well what had happened.
And had used them?
And had used them. That's right.
What did he say about that?
There was an Egyptian in jail with Mahmud Abu Halima, and that Egyptian told the FBI that Halima said that Ramzi Yousef came to the United States, transformed the conspiracy, and left them behind to be arrested and take the blame. The Egyptian asked Halima, "Are the authorities going to catch Ramzi Yousef?" and Abu Halima said, "No, don't ask. Can't catch a Ramzi Yousef." Abu Halima's brother told the same Egyptian man that Muhammad Salameh ([Note: Salameh is another defendant in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing] had dealt with Iraqi intelligence.
Yasin -- what was his role, and how do we know that?
Abdul Rachman Yasin was indicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the Trade Center. He's still a fugitive. The indictment of Yasin states explicitly that he helped mix chemicals for the bomb.
How was national security, in your view, endangered by the locking up of the evidence in this case, or in general, in looking at terrorist cases as cases that can be dealt with in the court?
By treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue, that has the effect of denying to the national security bureaucracies the information that would allow them to recognize state sponsorship. That is because of the grand jury secrecy laws. That lies at its heart.
Whenever information is obtained by a grand jury investigation, it cannot, by law, the criminal code, be provided to the national security bureaucracy. So that meant, for example, that in the 1993 bombing, the results of the FBI investigation were not provided to the national security bureaucracy. The FBI said to them... For instance, if an individual, say, in the State Department -- which did happen -- asked the FBI about the Trade Center bombing, the FBI said there was no state sponsorship.
When this individual asked, "Well, could we see the evidence to check for ourselves," the FBI said, "No, this is a criminal case. We're handling it." In order to understand who was behind that bomb, one needs the results of the FBI investigation. It's much more important than the intelligence that's produced by the national security bureaucracy.
The only agencies which had both the evidence and the intelligence was the FBI, and in particular, the National Security Division of the FBI. It was formally responsible for examining the question of state sponsorship in the Trade Center bombing. It didn't recognize the structure and hierarchy which supported that plot. It saw only individuals, and therefore came to the conclusion that this was loose networks, or what they called international radical terrorism.
No one could double-check on that work, because no other bureaucracy had the evidence produced by the FBI investigation. And that persists to this day, because there is still an outstanding fugitive. That's what an FBI agent told me earlier this year.
Because Abdul Rachman Yasin is still a fugitive, the entire results of the FBI investigation cannot be provided to the national security bureaucracy. You can get the evidence -- that's what's been made public -- but not the entire results of the investigation.
Did we ever demand from Baghdad the extradition of Yasin?
Under the Clinton administration, although it was known that Yasin was in Baghdad, there was no serious effort to demand his extradition. Perhaps pieces of paper were sent to Baghdad, but there was no serious effort to pursue it. And if the Iraqis did not cooperate, then to use that to show that Iraq is a state that harbors terrorists. ... In fact, I suggested to Martin Indyk, who was NSC adviser in the fall of 1993, that he do exactly that.
I pointed out to him Yasin's presence in Baghdad. I said, "Well, if the Iraqis aren't going to hand him over -- which you don't expect them to -- then let's use that to isolate Baghdad and show it's a terrorist state." Martin thought that was a good idea when I spoke to him, but nothing ever happened. I think he went to those above him; they didn't want the evidence of Iraqi involvement out, and they didn't pursue it.
Why?
The reason that the Clinton administration did not want the evidence of Iraqi involvement coming out in the Trade Center bombing was because, in June of 1993, Clinton had attacked Iraqi intelligence headquarters. It was for the attempt to kill George Bush. But Clinton also believed that that attack on Iraqi intelligence headquarters would take care of the bombing in New York, that it would deter Iraq from all future acts of terrorism. And by not telling the public what was suspected of happening -- that New York FBI really believed Iraq was behind the Trade Center bombing -- Clinton avoided raising the possibility the public might demand that the United States do a lot more than just bomb one building. And Clinton didn't want to do more. Clinton wanted to focus on domestic politics, including health policy.
And even if you read something like George Stephanopoulos's memoirs, for Clinton, the attack on Iraqi intelligence headquarters in 1993 was a nail-biting affair. He was not confident that those missiles would land where they were supposed to. Clinton did not want to get the United States involved in a war with Iraq, in 1993 or since.
A mistake?
The Clinton administration's unwillingness to identify Iraq as the suspected sponsor of the Trade Center bombing was a terrible blunder. Not only did the 1993 attack on Iraqi intelligence headquarters not deter Saddam forever; indeed, Saddam was back already in January of 1995 with that plot in the Philippines.
It didn't deter Saddam forever, and equally important, it generated a false and fraudulent explanation for terrorism called "the loose network theory" -- that terrorism is no longer carried out by states, that the Trade Center bombing was a harbinger of a new terrorism carried out by individuals or loose networks without the support of state.
And once that notion took hold, Saddam could easily play into it by working with Islamic extremists like Osama bin Laden, putting them front and center, leaving a few bin Laden operatives to be arrested. That also played into this fraudulent theory and led directly to the events of September 11. ...
Is your opinion that bin Laden basically was the front man for Saddam Hussein?
Bin Laden and Saddam are working together; they're both in it together. But between Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda, the far more important party is Iraqi intelligence. Bin Laden also worked with Sudanese intelligence. That came out in the trial for the 1998 embassy bombing. Bin Laden works with the Taliban. He's not as important as we think. He does not work independently of a state, of a government. But because we have not seen the links, or perhaps not wanted to see the links between Osama bin Laden and various governments, we ourselves have attributed to him capabilities that he alone does not possess.
To finish up on Ramzi Yousef ... back in 1996, you suggested to bring former acquaintances to identify him, to figure out what his real identity was. Did that ever happen? And if not, why not?
In 1996, I wrote that those who knew Abdul Basit from his days in Kuwait should be brought to the prison to meet Ramzi Yousef and give us the best possible account we can of whether Ramzi Yousef's, in fact, also Basit. Indeed, I met with Abdul Basit's teachers in Britain. I offered to bring them to New York, because Yousef was about to be on trial -- see if they could look at him in the courtroom and come to a definitive conclusion. Because those people do not believe that their student is Ramzi Yousef, and they've said so since, publicly.
They said to me, "Well, we'd like to do that, but the only circumstances under which we'd be 100 percent sure is if we met with him." Well, he's in the custody of U.S. officials. That was what I wanted to happen; that has not happened to this day. The trip to London, because of what the British said, that is now apparently lost. But I want that to happen. I want teachers who knew Abdul Basit to go to the prison in Colorado and meet Ramzi Yousef, and if the U.S. government can't afford it, I will pay the expenses myself.
The George Bush assassination attempt -- what were the ties? This was one of the situations that people say was proven; it was used as the reason by Clinton for the attack.
Regarding the Iraqi attempt to assassinate George Bush and his entourage in April 1993, the Kuwaitis discovered the bomb before it could go off, and that bomb could be linked to other bombs built by Iraqi intelligence.
So that was, for our government, good enough proof that this indeed was an Iraqi scheme?
Yes. The fact that the bomb in Kuwait could be tied to other bombs built by Iraq was accepted as proof that Iraq was behind this thing. But there was a debate within the Clinton administration about how to respond. There were some people who wanted to hold trials. They did not want the United States to attack Iraq militarily. That's kind of a strange response, but they really wanted it, and that debate had to be settled first before Clinton took action against Saddam Hussein. But as I say, even then, I think Clinton had a lot more in mind.
How is the debate altered by the anthrax attacks?
The anthrax attacks, particularly the attack on Senator Daschle's office, in which high-grade military anthrax was used and infected a considerable number of people, strongly suggests that a state is involved in this. Only states have that kind of material, and of course Iraq is the number one suspect. I believe that it strengthens the hand of those people who argue that the war on terrorism should be taken to Iraq. It's also terribly dangerous. Because what's to prevent those people who have that anthrax from delivering it in a way that's going to be far more deadly?
Suppose those people just go onto a subway system in an American city? Suppose those people go to the subway system in an American city and just release it into the air? When that happens, no one's going to know that it has occurred, so there won't be any testing for anthrax. And presumably, the people who inhale that anthrax, the same sort of anthrax that arrived in Senator Daschle's office, will become sick and die.
You had a conversation with General Wafiq al Samarrai, who helped define the reason why -- after all the pressure of UNSCOM, the U.N. weapons inspection team sent into Iraq -- they would not give up this weaponry. Help us define the Iraqis' view of these weapons.
General Samarrai was head of the Iraqi intelligence. He defected in late 1994 to the Iraqi National Congress, and I spoke with him in the fall of 1995 after Hussein Kamal's defection. Samarrai told me at that point that Iraq was terribly dangerous; Saddam lived for revenge, and that his biological weapons, in particular, were a great danger. He thought those biological weapons were meant for Americans, that they would be part of Saddam's revenge. He told me Saddam is a destroyer.
And what did he mean by that?
I assume that he meant that Saddam, in some way, lives for destruction. I didn't ask him to explain any further. He said, "Saddam is a destroyer." It's open to whatever interpretation people would put on it by destruction.
Are there any other points that are very significant to you?
It is important that people understand that Ramzi Yousef is not an Islamic fundamentalist. That came out following his arrest for the plot in the Philippines. Remember, he was running from authorities and he ran to Islamabad. Many people said he went to Osama bin Laden's guesthouse. No, he went to a commercial guesthouse in Islamabad, not far from the Iraqi Embassy, and that's where he was arrested.
Because he was caught by surprise, he was revealed not to be a fundamentalist. There's nothing religious about him. He went to Manila's bars and enjoyed Manila's nightlife. There are voice files on his computer, and he speaks very abusively to a woman. This is not how those people behave.
Does one have to tie Hussein to bin Laden to give enough reason to go after Hussein?
Well, there is significant evidence tying Hussein to bin Laden. There's evidence tying the plotters in the September 11 attack to Iraq directly. Above all, Mohammed Atta, who piloted the plane that first hit the Trade Center tower -- and that was a key figure in the conspiracy in the U.S. -- met repeatedly with Iraqi officials in Prague.
Very notably, in June 2000, Atta traveled from Germany, where he was based, to Prague and met an Iraqi official there. Atta stayed there only 24 hours. That's the only purpose he had in going to Prague. He then flew to New Jersey on his first trip to the United States. He stayed here for six months, in that period of time taking pilot's training in Florida.
In that period of time, he received a $100,000 wire transfer from the United Arab Emirates. This is a new phase of the conspiracy that begins, and begins after Atta meets an Iraqi intelligence official. That seems significant and worth pursuing.
Lastly, there's a lot of evidence, but it's all circumstantial. Is it enough to turn this country towards what could be a very difficult and damaging war against Iraq, the possibility of the loss of the coalition, and the chance of making a mistake? Is it enough?
An assessment has to be made by the political leadership of this country, whether it is more likely that bin Laden acted on his own or more likely that bin Laden acted in concert with Iraq. That involves questions about could bin Laden himself have carried out the attack on September 11 or was a state required. It means going back and looking at the previous terrorism, including the first attack on the World Trade Center n 1993.
If the assessment concludes -- which I believe it should -- that Iraq was most probably involved, then that means Saddam is a very, very big danger. Don't forget, there's biological weapons now involved. And this anthrax can cause more Americans to die, and many, many more Americans than died on September 11. Is that a threat that we want to sit passively for and wait to happen, or do we want to pre-empt it? Because the odds are very high that Saddam is going to do that at some point.
... I used to teach at the Naval War College, the Navy's senior academy, and one of the things the teachers said and the students learned is you go after the center of gravity, the main force -- and that's Iraq. That information that the president needs does not have to be definitive, because that information may not be available. What it has to do is be convincing. If the president's convinced of it, then we take the war to Iraq and we persuade our coalition partners it has to be done.
How strong is the Pentagon convinced of this?
I think at the Pentagon they are quite convinced of this need to take the war to Iraq.
Is there any point that you think is essential to know?
Saddam Hussein retains a huge biological weapons program. That's the program that he made the greatest effort to conceal from UNSCOM and the U.N. weapons inspectors. Richard Butler, the last UNSCOM chairman, has repeatedly described it as "a black hole." And it's very dangerous, Iraq's biological weapons program. There haven't been any weapons inspectors in Iraq for the past three years.
One of the things that is particularly disturbing about the way that Iraq dealt with that program -- it never turned over any of its stockpile of biological agents to UNSCOM. That's a bit strange, because a biological program is the easiest to reconstitute. Iraq could have given UNSCOM most of its stockpile, kept a few seed germs to regrow at any time, and very quickly reconstituted that stockpile that it had. Why didn't it do that?
One suggestion that has emerged, which is particular relevant in recent days, [is that], as people all know now, anthrax and other biological agents have DNA. If the U.N. weapons inspectors had part of the stockpile from which any given Iraqi biological agent had come, if there were an act of terrorism carried out by Iraq in this country using Iraqi biological agents, it might be possible on the basis of DNA testing to trace the agents used in the biological attack to Iraq's stockpile. But without Iraq's stockpile, of course, that can't be done.
So by retaining Iraq's entire biological stockpile, Saddam also retained the option of carrying out biological terrorism against the United States.
Because we can't prove it?
We can't prove it. We don't have any evidence whatsoever. If we had, or if more particularly, the U.N. weapons inspectors had Iraq's biological agents; if Iraq had turned over those stockpiles, then we might well be able to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq.
The Missler Report: Laurie Mylroie; Iraq and the Middle East
Transcript from Jerusalem Post Radio
"Newsmakers with Mordechai Twersky"
www.jpost.com
Interview with Dr. Laurie Mylroie
Terrorism Expert, Author, and Publisher of Iraq News
October 30, 2001
Note - audio file link file:
http://www.jpostradio.com/Archive/2001/10/30/asx/011030nws.asx
Mordechai Twersky: How concerned are you that the current crisis will spill over into Iraq, and perhaps, by extension, into the State of Israel?
Laurie Mylroie: Sooner or later, the United States is going to have to go to war with Iraq to remove Saddam Hussein. Iraq was behind the September 11th attack and Iraq is also behind the anthrax letters.
MT: Now that's a sweeping statement. How can you say that?
LM: The September 11th attacks had to be sponsored by a state. Only a state has the resources to carrry out the most massive, stupendous terrorist attack in human history. In fact, if this had occurred a decade ago, we in the United States would have recognized that a hostile state was behind what happened. A decade ago, the prevailing assumption was that major attacks against the United States were state-sponsored. That really meant Iran, Iraq, Syria or Libya. But what happened in the intervening years was that the Clinton administration treated terrorism as a law enforcement issue, with an emphasis on arresting individuals and bringing them to justice. That had the effect of obscuring the role of states, specifically Iraq, in the terrorism that hit the United States in the 1990's.
MT: So are you suggesting that it is not as much Bin-Laden who may be responsible for this act of terror, but Iraq?
LM: Iraq and Bin-Laden are working together. Bin-Laden provides the ideology, he provides the foot soldiers, and he provides a smoke screen for Iraq, while Iraq provides the direction and the expertise for these attacks.
MT: In your estimation, is it only a matter of when, not if, allied forces will target Iraq, and if so, what are the chances Saddam Hussein will target Israel, as he did during the Gulf War?
LM: If the United States does not target Iraq in the present war on terrorism, it will have to target Iraq after the next major attack against the United States. And when the U.S. targets Iraq with the aim of overthrowing Saddam, and Saddam realizes that [he is going down], then Saddam is going to do his best to bring his enemies down--and very high among those enemies to be targeted is Israel.
MT: In your estimation, is Israel prepared to deal with the consequences of a biological or chemical attack that could emanate from Iraq?
LM: No, I don't think Israel is prepared for the kind of attack that Saddam may launch against it when he is going down. There has been a tendency, over the last decade--and people I've spoken with as well, and what one reads in the press and hears privately from individuals--to focus on nuclear weapons, specifically Iran, to the exclusion of biological and chemical weapons, and to discount the kind of damage they can do, and to almost pretend as though that kind of damage is acceptable to the Israeli population.
MT: Have you been in consultation with anybody on the Israeli Home Command or military front, whereby you have information that would lead you to this conclusion?
LM: I'll give you an example. Current assumptions about Iraqi use of anthrax seem to be based on the notion that the anthrax that Iraq may use in the future against Israel or any other target can be treated with antibiotics. But it is not difficult for Iraq to develop anthrax which is resistant to all known antibiotics. What will happen then, if Iraq launches scud missiles with anthrax warheads, and the warheads explode according to the way they are supposed to explode and anthrax that is resistant to antibiotics falls on Israeli cities?
MT: As an expert on terrorism and intelligence, how can Israel effectively prepare for such an attack?
LM: The first thing I believe is that Israeli officials have to address a strategic intelligence failure that occurred in the 1990's. It's not less than the strategic intelligence failure that preceded the Yom Kippur War. It is the failure to recognize that Iraq has systematically been working with Islamic militants throughout the 1990's. That includes Islamic militants targeting the United States, as well as Egypt.
I explained this to a friend from the Dayan Center in 1998. He recognized the problem in our discussions; he was rather stunned by it. But he failed to do anything when he went back to Israel. Most, recently, early this year, I was discussing this with a very well-known Israeli journalist. He responded by saying: 'Does anyone in Israel think like this?' And I told him, 'No, I don't think so.' But that journalist then failed, again, to do anything significant that would bring this to the attention of Israeli authorities. Israeli authorities do not recognize Saddam's vengefulness and viciousness, in part because they do not recognize Saddam's role in the terrorism that has occured in the 1990's or how Saddam has been working with the militant Muslims.
MT: Are there any threats in addition to anthrax that Western Civilization, for that matter, needs to be concerned about?
LM: Iraq's VX advanced chemical agent is very dangerous. It is lethal to the touch and it does not dissipate. There need to be special procedures for dealing with VX. If it is used against Israeli cities, it requires special evacuation procedures and has to be treated entirely differently from other Iraqi known chemical agents. And again, to my knowledge, Israeli authorites have not prepared the Israeli population at all for that kind of attack and what to do about it.
MT: Tell our listeners exactly what VX is and how do we know how much VX Saddam Hussein has.
LM: In 1995, when Saddam's son-in-law Hussein Kamil, defected, Iraq acknowledged having the precursors to make four tons of VX. VX is an advanced chemical agent. It is lethal when someone even touches a surface that has been hit by VX. It is sticky and viscous. It does not dissipate. Following a VX attack, it will be necessary to evacuate people from that part of a city that has been hit by VX. They have to be careful not to touch any surfaces that might have been hit by the chemical agent and not to step in any puddles that might be left behind. They either have to walk out, or one would have to bring transportation from areas which have not been affected by the VX and pick them up and take them to another part of the city that has not been hit. All that requires knowledge and organization communicated to the population ahead of time.
MT: How is the US, for that matter, handling this possible threat?
LM: The United States does not face a VX threat. What it faces is biological terrorism, because Iraqi missiles can't hit the United States. Regarding biological terrorism, very unfortunately, the US officials are in a state of denial. We have had finely-milled, military-grade anthrax in the United States in the form of a letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and somehow, the White House cannot bring itself to say that that anthrax was produced by a state-- which is the only possibility. And therefore, we cannot warn or deter the state which almost certainly produced it, which is Iraq.
MT: Thank you for being with us today, Dr. Mylroie.
LM: My pleasure, Mordechai. Thank you very much.
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Other online interviews with Dr. Mylroie:
PBS Frontline Interview: Gunning For Saddam
NewsMax Interview - Mylroie: Evidence Shows Saddam Is Behind Anthrax Attacks (11/8/2001)
Jerusalem Post Interview with Mordechai Twersky (11/02/2001)
CNN.com - Laurie Mylroie: Is Iraq involved with US terror (10/29/01)
Washington Post Interview - America Attacked: Iraq & Terrorism (9/24/01)
AEI Press: An interview with Laurie Mylroie
Familiar Rogue: The order for the World Trade Center attack came from Iraq (9/17/01)
Disinfopedia re Laurie Mylroie
Laurie Mylroie
Disinfopedia
Mylroie is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank often identified with leading neocons.
David Corn wrote that "what Mylroie says matters" because "she has influential admirers," most notably Richard Perle and R. James Woolsey, Jr..
Mylroie is the author of Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a book published by the American Enterprise Institute in 2000. It pushes her theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. According to writer Peter Bergen, Mylroie's theory was the basis for "the belief that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States," which "amounted to a theological conviction within the administration, a conviction successfully sold to the American public." According to Bergen, "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 R. Bolton and the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as 'splendid and wholly convincing.' I. Lewis Libby, now Vice President Dick 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.':
Bergen comments, "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." [1]
External Resources
Laurie Mylroie, "Iraqi Complicity in the World Trade Center Bombing and Beyond," Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, June 2001.
David Corn, "The Neocons' New Enemy: The CIA: Laurie Mylroie's crazy ideas about 9/11", LA Weekly, August 29 - September 4, 2003.
Kurt Nimmo, "Right Wing Think Tanks and Information Warfare", Progressive Trail, undated, accessed March 2004.
Peter Bergen, "Armchair Provocateur: Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons' favorite conspiracy theorist," Washington Monthly, December 2003.
Jonathan Schanzer, "Saddam's Ambassador to al Qaeda," The Weekly Standard, March 1, 2004, supports Mylroie's claim of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. For more information about Schanzer, visit his blog:
http://schanzer.blogspot.com
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