Laurie Mylroie

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Laurie Mylroie is a U.S. specialist on Iraq. She contends that Iraq under Saddam Hussein sponsored the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and many subsequent terrorist attacks. She is one of the few commentators who believes that Iraq was directly complicit in the September 11th Attacks and subsequent anthrax postal attacks. Her views were very influential among neoconservatives during the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

She has a doctorate in political science from Harvard University and was employed in the school's Government Department. She was an associate professor at the U.S. Naval War College, and advisor on Iraq to Bill Clinton in his 1992 campaign for President.

She is now an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

[edit] Controversy

Mylroie's claims concerning links between Iraq and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were published in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America (2000). "The New York FBI office, however, strongly believed Iraq was behind the 1993 Trade Center attack," she writes. "The Clinton White House did not want to hear that and FBI Headquarters accommodated."[1] Her book is based on an examination of the trial documents related to the 1993 bombing. "Only Laurie Mylroie appears to have gone through it carefully," said former CIA Director James Woolsey. Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi-American who mixed chemicals for the explosive, escaped to Iraq soon afterward. Ramzi Ahmad Yousef, commander of the operation, travelled under an Iraqi passport, although he is not Iraqi. Just a few months before the WTC bombing, Yousef claimed he'd lost his passport and got a new Pakistani passport in the name of Abdul Basit. (Yousef had three passports when he was arrested.) Mylroie examined files related to Basit and his family at the Kuwaiti Interior Ministry and found that various documents are missing, including photos and passport photocopies. She concludes that the files were they were tampered with, presumably during the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait in 1990-91. There is a notation in Basit's file, dating from the occupation period. Mylroie argues that this implies the file was of special interest to the Iraqis. The fingerprint cards in Basit's file match those for Yousef. Mylroie contends that the cards were switched by the Iraqis. She concludes that, "Abdul Basit and his family were in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990; that they probably died then; and that Iraqi intelligence then tampered with their files to create an alternative identity for Ramzi Yousef."[2].

CNN terrorism expert Peter Bergen, however, has noted that Mylroie's argument depends entirely on "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."[3] Bergen claims that "an avalanche of evidence" refutes Mylroie's basic assumption.

After September 11th, former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey was provided a government jet and FBI staff to investigate Mylroie's claim that Basit and Yousef were different people. Newsweek reported: "The idea behind the mission was to check fingerprints on file in Swansea, Wales, where Basit had once gone to school, and compare them to the fingerprints of the Ramzi Yousef in prison. ... Justice Department officials tell 'Newsweek that the results of the Woolsey mission were exactly what the FBI had predicted: that the fingerprints were in fact identical. After the match was made, FBI officials assumed at the time that it had put the Mylroie theory to rest."[4] Mylroie writes that, "Indeed, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, latent fingerprints lifted from material Mr. [Basit] Karim left at Swansea bear 'no resemblance' to Yousef's prints. They are two different people."[5]

Richard Perle, an advisor on national security to various presidents, describes her book in a blurb on the back of it as "splendid and wholly convincing."[6] However, her views with respect to the Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda connection are decidedly in the minority, and she has been criticized by many terrorism experts. CNN reporter Peter Bergen, for example, calls her a "crackpot" who claimed 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." [7] Daniel Benjamin, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, points out that "Mylroie's work has been carefully investigated by the CIA and the FBI.... The most knowledgeable analysts and investigators at the CIA and at the FBI believe that their work conclusively disproves Mylroie's claims.... Nonetheless, she has remained a star in the neoconservative firmament." (Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Next Attack New York: Times Books, 2005, p. 145. [ISBN 0-8050-7941-6]). Dr. Robert S. Leiken of the Nixon Center comments on the lack of evidence in her work: "Laurie has discovered Saddam’s hand in every major attack on US interests since the Persian Gulf War, including U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and even the federal building in Oklahoma City. These allegations have all been definitively refuted by the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and other investigatory bodies...."[8]