Thursday, September 11, 2003

At National Review Online, Kathryn Jean Lopez interviews Laurie Mylroie -- you know, the "terrorism expert" who thinks Saddam Hussein was behind both WTC attacks, the anthrax killings, and possibly Oklahoma City.

One thing I didn't know about Mylroie until now: While she blames Iraq for everything, she pretty much lets Saudi Arabia -- you know, the home of the vast majority of the 9/11 hijackers -- off the hook.

Iran was not involved in 9/11. If it were, we would have gone to war with Iran. The same with Saudi Arabia. This is not to say that there are not serious problems with those countries. Iran's nuclear program has to be stopped, and the Saudi export of Wahhabism and funding of Islamic militancy should be stopped too.

That said, many people, I realize, believe the Saudis had more to do with the 9/11 attacks than Iraq. Indeed, that is the preferred explanation of the Beltway, including the Democrats, who vehemently oppose the notion that Iraq was involved.


Hmmm...she thinks Iraq is involved in everything and Saudi Arabia is involved in nothing. We're at war in Iraq and we handle the Saudis with kid gloves. Coincidence? Is Laurie Mylroie actually in charge of U.S. foreign policy?

How nuts is Mylroie? Well, she says this:

The post-9/11 investigation into al Qaeda has produced a lot more information than we had before. Most importantly, it is now understood that at the core of the astonishingly lethal terrorism — beginning with the 1993 Trade Center bombing and culminating in the 9/11 strikes — there is a family, or what is supposed to be a family, that includes:

Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing; 2) Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, 9/11 mastermind, said to be Yousef's uncle; 3-4) two older "brothers" of Yousef, also al Qaeda masterminds; 5) a younger "cousin," Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, now known to have sent most of the money to the hijackers; and 6) Yousef's childhood "friend," Abdul Hakam Murad.

This is the claim of the U.S. government.

Yet it is strange. It is without precedent. No terrorist organization has a family at its core. Moreover, all these individuals, with the possible exception of the younger "cousin," are said to be born and raised in Kuwait. Their identities are based on documents in Kuwait, above all interior-ministry files, that pre-date Kuwait's liberation from Iraqi occupation in 1991.

Those documents are not reliable, because Iraq had custody of those files, while it occupied Kuwait. This is self-evident and beyond dispute.

Moreover, at least one file in Kuwait was tampered with to create a false identity for Yousef. A summary of that file was read to me. Quite possibly, other files were also altered. In fact, a colleague retired from the number two position in Israeli military intelligence believes exactly this: Iraq used Kuwait's files to create false identities for intelligence agents.


Got that? In the six months when Iraq controlled Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, the entire brain trust of global terrorism was assigned fake identities. Over the next dozen years, these people pulled off a series of devastating attacks, and some of them were caught and are currently in custody, but no one -- except for Mylroie and one friend of hers -- knows who the captured people really are. And what's her evidence?

A summary of that file was read to me.

A summary of the file was read to her! What is that, quadruple hearsay?

Nuts. Utterly nuts. And the right wing of this country accords her more respect than it does the longest-serving State Department diplomats.

No comments: