"Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not.
Do you not fear Me? says the Lord; Do you not tremble before Me?" - Jeremiah 5:21-22

"In this man's heart (Osama bin Laden) you'll find an insistence,
a strange determination that he will reach one day the tunnels of the White House
and will bomb it with everything that is in it.....with the seriousness of the Bedouin
of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House.
...the revolutionary bin Laden is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting.
That the man....will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs."
(A reference to Sinatra's "New York, New York"?)

- From the Iraqi publication Al-Nasiriya: July 21, 2001
(Also noted in the Wall Street Journal, "Saddam and the Next 9/11", 2/14/03)

"At this stage it is possible to turn to biological attack, where a small can,
not bigger than the size of the hand, can be used to release viruses that affect everything....
The viruses easily spread by air, and people are affected without feeling it."

- Uday Hussein, 9/20/01 (NOTE: The first Anthrax-laced letters were mailed on 9/18/01)
(That means Hussein's son wrote this before any news had come out about the Anthrax mailings in the U.S.)
(Noted in the Wall Street Journal, "Saddam and the Next 9/11", 2/14/03)

Richard Clarke is a paid consultant for ABC News. On the April 8th Nightline program, he was given an opportunity to comment on the day's testimony of National Security Advisor Dr. Condoleezza Rice. That ABC News, and for that matter the entire mainstream media, has given Clarke a global pulpit from which to disseminate misinformation without giving any coverage whatsoever to the opposing views of Dr. Laurie Mylroie, whom Clarke directly maligns in his book, is anti-American and wrong.

It is time to put some heat on the liberal elitists misinforming this nation and undermining the cause for which brave American fighting men and women are putting their lives on the line for, i.e., the war in Iraq.

The direct phone line for ABC's Nightline program is (202) 222-7000. Call them up as I have and let them know that if they are going to have the likes of Richard Clarke on their payroll and featured on their show, then they need to also have on Dr. Laurie Mylroie on behalf of fair and balanced reporting. Be very, very insistent about this.

During the past week, Richard ("Dick") Clarke has been brought to the nation's attention probably more so than any figure thus far regarding the intelligence and government failings that led to 9/11. Mr. Clarke, a key former counterterrorism official in both the Clinton and Bush Administrations, released his new book, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War On Terror", to coincide with his appearance before the 9/11 Commission last week. The book assails the Bush Administration for mishandling the terror threats leading up to 9/11 and the subsequent War On Terror. Most importantly, Clarke believes that the war against Iraq was unjustified, a provocation for more terror and an overall waste of resources in the fight against global terrorism threatening America.

To kick off the book's debut, CBS' 60 Minutes, which is produced by the same company that published "Against All Enemies", carried a segment featuring an interview with Dick Clarke in which the White House was sharply criticized for its failings in the War On Terror. Next, Clarke appeared before the 9/11 Commission where he again publicly chastized the Bush Administration and went so far as to apologize for the government's failure to prevent 9/11. Finally, this week of unprecedented free publicity for Clarke and his book was capped with a rare hour-long discussion with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet The Press.

Yet in contrast, when Dr. Laurie Mylroie testified before the 9/11 Commission and released her newest book, "Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror" in July of last year, there was scarcely a mention of it by the mass media. Dr. Myrloie's work offers the opposite position of Dick Clarke. A former insider of the Clinton Administration, Mylroie holds that the prior Democratic administration dropped the ball in focusing on loose terrorist networks rather than state actors, and Iraq in particularly, in combatting terror against America. She believes that President George Bush and his Administration acted heroically in targetting Iraq in disregard of myopic policy recommendations by entrenched, career-minded government bureaucrats like Dick Clarke. But such a pro-Bush profile has made Laurie Mylroie and her views anathema for mass media coverage. Yet, at least in the interest of balanced reporting, you'd think Mylroie's perspective would now deserve some media attention since Richard Clarke, the man of the hour, clearly fingers her influence on the Bush Administration as the cause of mistaken policy decisions to target Iraq in the War On Terror. Indeed, on the back of the book jacket of Clarke's book, it reads as follows:

From Against All Enemies:

Wolfowitz fidgeted and scowled. . . . "Well, I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man bin Laden."

"We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States," I answered. . . .

Wolfowitz turned to me. "You give bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist."

I could hardly believe it, but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.

Remarkably, Dr. Mylroie's theory regarding Iraqi involvement in the '93 World Trade Center bombing, which Clarke dismisses as "totally discredited" and posits "had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue", was apparently not even understood by this man who is now a focal point of international media attention. In his book, Clarke provides the following commentary:

Ramzi Yousef had many aliases. He was born Abdul Basit in Pakistan and grew up in Kuwait, where his father worked. After his arrest, he became a man of as much mystery and attention as when he was at large. With almost every terrorist incident or similar event, an urban legend develops that challenges the official story. . . .With Ramzi Yousef, the legend was that there were actually two people: one was the man arrested by the FBI in Pakistan and the other was a mastermind of Iraqi intelligence, the Mukhabarat. This legend was part of the theories of Laurie Mylroie.

For those in the U.S. government who knew Iraqi intelligence, the phrase "Iraqi intelligence mastermind" was an oxymoron. The Mukhabarat had a well-deserved reputation as the Keystone Kops of the Middle East. Moreover, Ramzi Yousef, or Abdul Basit, was implicated in the World Trade Center attack by a large number of eyewitnesses, fingerprints, and other evidence. That did not stop author Laurie Mylroie from asserting that the real Ramzi Yousef was not in the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Manhattan, but lounging at the right hand of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad. Mylroie's thesis was that there was an elaborate plot by Saddam to attack the United States and that Yousef (Basit) was his instrument, beginning with the first World Trade Center bombing. Her writing gathered a small cult following, including the recently relieved CIA Director Jim Woolsey and Wolfowitz. (Clarke, pp.94-95)

If Clarke comprehended Dr. Mylroie's theory regarding Ramzi Yousef, as judiciously explained in her book "The War Against America - Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge", he would have realized that she never posited, regarding Yousef, that "there were actually two people: one was the man arrested by the FBI in Pakistan and the other was a mastermind of Iraqi intelligence, the Mukhabarat". Mylroie never asserted "the real Ramzi Yousef was not in the federal Metropolitan Detention Center in Manhattan, but lounging at the right hand of Saddam Hussein in Baghdad". Such a nonsensical assertion is a fabrication by Richard Clarke clearly interested in maligning Mylroie's work without a sound understanding of it.

Dr. Mylroie holds that Ramzi Yousef, in masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, sought to cover his trail by using the false identity of Abdul Basit, a Pakistani who was born and grew up in Kuwait. Abdul Basit and his family apparently disappeared when Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait in 1990 and his files at Kuwait's Interior Ministry were then doctored by Iraqi intelligence during the occupation to create false identities for Saddam's operatives. Dr. Mylroie touched upon this in a 2001 interview with Frontline:

"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."

Laurie Mylroie never asserted that Ramzi Yousef was lounging at the right hand of Saddam Hussein rather than being in federal prison because the Kuwaiti who he sought to steal the identity of was killed in Kuwait during Iraq's occupation.

Dick Clarke continues in his book:

As reported by Jason Vest in the Village Voice (November 27, 2001): "According to intelligence and diplomatic sources, Powell - as well as George Tenet - was infuriated by a private intelligence endeavor arranged by Wolfowitz in September. Apparently obsessed with proving a convoluted theory put forth by American Enterprise Institute adjunct fellow Laurie Mylroie that tied Usama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, Wolfowitz, according to a veteran intelligence officer, dispatched former Director of Central Intelligence and cabalist James Woolsey to the United Kingdom, tasking him with gathering additional 'evidence' to make the case. Woolsey was also asked to make contact with Iraqi exiles and others who might be able to beef up the case that hijacker Mohammed Atta was working with Iraqi intelligence to plan the September 11 attacks, as well as the subsequent anthrax mailings." It turned out there was only one Ramzi Yousef, he was not an Iraqi agent, and he had been in a U.S. jail for years. (Clarke, p.95)

Indeed, former CIA director James Woolsey and author Laurie Mylroie have gone to the Swansea Institute in England to try and determine if the Abdul Basit that studied there in the 1980's was the same person that masterminded the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. What was found is the Kuwaiti named Abdul Basit who studied in the U.K. is not the Ramzi Yousef arrested and imprisoned in the U.S. for masterminding the '93 World Trade Center bombing. That researching this issue "infuriated" entrenched government bureaucrats like George Tenet, CIA chief under Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, is tell-tale. Why should the head of the CIA be upset by an attempt to verify a possible Iraqi connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? Wouldn't such a revelation be of the utmost importance to American intelligence? Apparently for career-minded Washingtonians, who have repeatedly dropped the ball in defending America against international terrorism, such information is of little value, especially since it might reveal their failings. But for U.S. national security such information is vital.

Dr. Mylroie, in Bush vs. The Beltway, spells out the case as follows:

. . . instead of a loose network of radical Muslim terrorists, we now have the picture of a single family located at the center of almost all the major terrorist assaults against American targets over the past decade, starting with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 - an attack undertaken with no evident source of outside funding or training - and culminating in the September 11 strikes. Scarcely mentioned is the existence of intelligence ties between the Baluch and Iraq, though an insider such as General Samarrai has insisted that they are serious and longstanding. The notion that one family lies behind this unprecedented campaign of increasingly spectacular terrorism is difficult to credit. It is without any precedent. No terrorist organization has had a family at its heart, and there has never been a string of major terrorist attacks directed by a wayward family, such as Yousef et al.

- The Kuwait Files -
THE IDENTITIES OF ALL these individuals - Ramzi Yousef; Yousef's uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; Yousef's two brothers, Abd al Munim and Abd al Karim; and Yousef's childhood friend, Abdul Hakim Murad - are all based on documents from Kuwait. (That may be true also for Yousef's cousin, Ali Abdul Aziz.) And these documents all come from files that predate Kuwait's liberation.

But, of course, nothing in Kuwait's files from that time can be assumed to be reliable. Iraq occupied the country from August 2, 1990, until its liberation on February 28, 1991. During that time, Iraqi intelligence had ample opportunity to tamper with Kuwait's files, if it so chose.

It is a standard practice of Soviet-style intelligence agencies to develop a false identity, or "legend," for agents involved in "wet" or illegal operations. The purpose, of course, is to avoid retaliation for an act of aggression by preventing it from being traced back to the sponsor.

There exists an alternative explanation to the theory that these Baluch terrorists represent a single, uniquely violent (and - from a certain perspective - an unusually talented) family: that is, these people are elements of Iraq's Baluch network who were given legends by the Iraqi mukhabarrat (intelligence) during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. The Baluch network was actively used by Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war; it would still have been available two years later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait.

At that time, 95,000 Pakistanis lived in Kuwait. Shortly after the invasion, Iraqi forces seized some two dozen Pakistani nationals and held them hostage. This was, of course, a very violent period, and there has been no real accounting of what happened to third world nationals then. Legends could easily have been developed for Iraqi intelligence agents, using the Kuwaiti Interior Ministry files of individuals who died in that period. Indeed, it would not have been beyond the Iraqis to have killed people for that purpose; or, they could have made up entire files.

- Who Is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed? -
THERE REALLY WAS an individual named Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, born to Pakistani parents in Kuwait on April 24, 1965. He grew up in Kuwait, attended high school there, and graduated in 1983. In January 1984 he traveled to the United States to enroll at Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, a small Baptist school that had begun aggressively recruiting foreign students to boost its enrollment. After one semester at Chowan, Mohammed transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T), a historically black college in Greensboro. He graduated in December 1986, with a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering.

Is the September 11 terrorist mastermind, now in U.S. custody, the same person as the individual described above? Or did the real Khalid Shaikh Mohammed die, and was his identity then assumed by a terrorist agent? At the time of the terrorist's arrest, Mohammed would have been only thirty-seven years old - but the arrest photo, with its grizzled side-burns and heavy jowls, suggests an older man.

That, however, is a subjective judgment. Yet it would be easy enough to investigate the question much more thoroughly and reliably.

Three sets of information exist regarding Mohammed: (1) information from U.S. and Kuwaiti sources from the 1980s, before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. (This would include U.S. immigration records and college documents, as well as information to be obtained from individuals who might remember Mohammed.) (2) Documents from Kuwait. (3) Information since the liberation of Kuwait (including evidence from the terrorist's arrest and interrogation; from the interrogation of other al Qaeda prisoners, and from the investigation into the 1995 plane bombing plot).

The Kuwaiti documents should be scrutinized for internal consistency, and for any irregularities that would suggest the file was doctored.

The information about Mohammed from the 1980s should be compared with the information about him that has emerged since Kuwait's liberation. The terrorist may prove to be taller (or shorter) than the student. His U.S. interrogators might ask him what he remembers about the American colleges he is supposed to have attended. If he cannot recall anything about them - especially personal information, like the classes he took or some of the teachers he had - that would be a significant indicator that he is not who he purports to be.

There may be individuals who remember Mohammed from his time in America, who would be able to say whether the terrorist is really the student or not. There may also be individuals in Kuwait who would remember him from before Iraq's invasion. (This sort of statement always has to be carefully vetted, possibly by polygraph, particularly in the context of a high-profIle investigation.)

There do appear to be some individuals who have a genuine memory of Mohammed. Professor Gaith Faile heads the science department of Chowan College and recalls Mohammed as "a B-type student" who "wasn't unusually radical. I didn't notice anything different about him." Mohammed al Bulooshi, a fellow Baluch from Kuwait, studied with Mohammed at Chowan. He states, "We lived in one building, had breakfast, lunch and dinner together, us and thirty Arab students. We all became quite close." Al Bulooshi also said that Mohammed "was so quiet, there was no indication that he was involved in [religious extremism]. I would never have thought in a million years that he could be involved in these terrorist things." These and other acquaintances should be allowed to meet with Mohammed, to try to provide an authoritative answer to the question as to whether the terrorist is really the same person as the student or not. (Mylroie, pp.152-155)

Thus, in her latest book, ignored by the mainstream media, Dr. Mylroie spells out in explicit detail how an Iraqi operative may have masterminded 9/11 and how to prove this is the case. But has the U.S. intelligence community, headed by George Tenet and the like, picked up the baton to verify possible Iraqi complicity in 9/11? Nope. Rather, we live in a society where self-serving government bureaucrats like Dick Clarke are paraded across the news as progenitors of the new truth the liberal elite of our society wants America to believe. Yet, all that's being fed to the world is a new set of lies favorable to America's enemies....foreign and domestic.

"I didn't think it possible that Osama sitting up there
in the mountains could do it....those who executed it were much more modern.
They knew the U.S., they knew aviation. I don't think he
has the intelligence or the minute planning. The planner was someone else."

"If Saddam's operatives manipulated simple-minded Islamic zealots to bomb the World Trade Center,
it is only prudent to assume his agents are capable of striking again."

"From inside America, how five planes flew.
Such a mishap never happened in the past!
And nothing similar will happen.
Six thousand infidels died.
Bin Ladin did not do it;
the luck of the president [Saddam] did it."

(Text of poem recited in the presence of President Saddam Hussein by
Shaykh Ali Bin Shallal, head of the al-Sharji tribes, at a meeting with
tribal chieftains from Basra and Maysan Governates on 12/3/01.
Was the 5th plane the crash of AA Flight 587 into Queens, NYC on November 12, 2001?)

"Hear this, O foolish and senseless people, who have eyes, but see not, who have ears, but hear not. Do you not fear me? says the LORD; Do you not tremble before me? I placed the sand as the bound for the sea, a perpetual barrier which it cannot pass; though the waves toss, they cannot prevail, though they roar, they cannot pass over it. But this people has a stubborn and rebellious heart; they have turned aside and gone away. They do not say in their hearts, `Let us fear the LORD our God, who gives the rain in its season, the autumn rain and the spring rain, and keeps for us the weeks appointed for the harvest.' Your iniquities have turned these away, and your sins have kept good from you. For wicked men are found among my people; they lurk like fowlers lying in wait. They set a trap; they catch men. Like a basket full of birds, their houses are full of treachery; therefore they have become great and rich, they have grown fat and sleek. They know no bounds in deeds of wickedness; they judge not with justice the cause of the fatherless, to make it prosper, and they do not defend the rights of the needy. Shall I not punish them for these things? says the LORD, and shall I not avenge myself on a nation such as this?" Jeremiah 5:21-29

BUSH VS. THE BELTWAY:
How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror

By Laurie Mylroie
COAUTHOR OF THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf

A Washington Post Expert's Pick on Terrorism and the Middle East

THE WAR AGAINST AMERICA

Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks:
A Study of Revenge

(Previously Published as Study of Revenge)

By Laurie Mylroie
COAUTHOR OF THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf

With a foreword by former CIA Director R. James Woolsey,
and newly revised introduction and conclusion by the author.