Posted 12/12/2003 by Pierre Legrand

This bullshit attack article by Peter Bergen was posted on the COMP.SYS.IBM.PC.GAMES.FLIGHT-SIMS group by some anon knucklehead after being published on that pillar of objectivity The Washington Monthly. Its not surprising I suppose how nasty people will get defending the now discredited notion that terrorists are no longer sponsored by states and that Saddam would NOT have allied himself with Al Queda, but still this is over the top.
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html

hehe....This is great the tinfoil beenie cap crowd goes to war, not against the
Islamofacists who might actually strike back but against the EVIL NEO
CONS....

>Armchair Provocateur
>Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons' favorite conspiracy theorist.
>By Peter Bergen

Its lovely that Peter just assumes that some items are a given.
1. Its impossible that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11
2. Al Queda and Saddam couldnt possibly have any links
3. Anyone who believes differently is a kook.

He believes this in the face of items that dont need to be proven.
1. Saddam did in fact try to kill a former US President, no small thing.
2. Saddam did in fact use a cocktail of WMD's on both Kurds and Iranians.
3. He had an all consuming desire to be the next caliphate.
4. Abdul Yasin the other major player in the WTC93 plot was living comfortably
in Iraq. Iraq was a police State tightly controlled meaning that Yasin was there
under the protection of Saddam.
5. Abu Nidal was under the Protection of Saddam until he refused to train some
of the "arabs"
6. Saddam did in fact have a training base complete with an Airliner that Saddam
claimed was used to train Anti Terror squads. But that defectors claimed was a
training base for the "arab" terrorists who were coincedently trained on how to
take a plane with knives.

>
>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.

Not only did Bush claim this but Clinton claimed this repeatedly. And exactly
why this is such a stretch is beyond understanding. Using terrorists was
actually the most perfect way to accomplish his goals. Plausible
denialbility....the US had for a number of years prior made it a point of faith
that Terrorism was no longer State Sponsored, it was now strictly performed by
maladjusted nut cases who operated outside the fringes of states. This has the
marvelous affect of giving states free rein to actually launch the sorts of
attacks that would dishearten the US Public and allow Presidents intent on not
using the military an out. They could just shrug and say nothing we can do about
it. No one to blame. At which point the US Public would be pleading with the
Government to betray anything to make the attacks stop.

In the WTC93 attack this was precisely the tactic taken by President Clinton
because he had zero desire to launch an attack on Saddam.

Evidence of this is his lack of action after the linking of Saddam to the
attempt to assasinate Former President Bush. Exactly what does a leader of a
country have to do to get a Democrat to declare war?

> 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.

What an odd belief. There is plenty of evidence of the linkage...and even more
evidence of WMD's. Exactly what killed the Kurds and Iranians?

What should be asked is exactly why WOULDNT Saddam and Bin Laden link up?
Religion? Political philosophy? These types never explain how in fact did the
union between the Nazis and Soviets ever come about, the union between the
Soviets and the US in WW2...? When faced with a much stronger enemy and is there
any doubt how strong the US is, it would have been foolish for either of them to
stand on principle and die when standing together they had such stronger
potential. Dont forget that had Saddam been able to give Al Queda a NUKE the US
wouldnt be recovering but would be in the midst of the biggest depression and
dislocation ever seen in world history. It is a close run thing that their
strategy has so far fallen short.....history will remark on the closeness of
this pending disaster that we still havent put completly away. It is my firm
belief that it is still very possible for their strategy to win the war.

>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.

What a sexist remark that is....spurned as in Hell hath no fury as a women
spurned??? Is it ok for Liberals to be sexist?

>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.

In short he is lying and misrepresenting Dr. Mylroie's position to make his
point. She has NOT claimed that Saddam was involved in 9/11, she has stated that
Bin Laden could not have had the resources to complete the attack himself. That
he believes that an attempt to link Saddam to 9/11 are the rantings of a
crackpot says more about his inability to understand the nature of terror than
it does about Dr. Mylroie. It is an outright lie to suggest that she links
Saddam to OKC, in emails to me she has stated that the links are interesting but
so far nothing that looks like a smoking gun.

>Hussein on the brain

More sexist bullshit.

>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.

This guy depends on you not questioning his statements. This is simply not
correct. Defectors have described in detail the training camps for "Arab"
terrorists where they were trained on how to hijack planes, the carcass of the
Jet Liner was overun by Marines and it was indeed a terror training base.

Evan Bayh certainly no Neo Con said of the Al Queda Saddam relationship.
"There's obviously a lot of smoke," says Bayh. "The real question is how much
fire was there. The best case--it certainly looks as if there were many
contacts, some kind of relationship there. I guess the best answer is that this
is a developing story and we'll know more soon."

>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.

Yea well except for trying to assasinate a former President, Uncle Saddam hasnt
been doing much of anything. He just gave up after that fiasco, or maybe he
decided to get better operatives....hmmm.

Here is what President Clinton had to say about the possibility of Saddam using
terrorists for delivery of his weapons of which he has little doubt exist.

"In the next century, the community of nations may see more and more the very
kind of threat Iraq poses now a rogue state with weapons of mass destruction
ready to use them or provide them to terrorists, drug traffickers or organized
criminals who travel the world among us unnoticed."
http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1998/02/17/transcripts/clinton.iraq/

>
>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.

This is a distortion. Jim Fox the head of the New York FBI believed that Iraq
was indeed behind the WTC93 bombing. Also it should be said that because Clinton
chose to make this a law enforcement issue the handling of evidence was
significantly different than it would have been had they been looking for state
involvement. They were looking to prosecute someone for the Bombing, the Iraqis
made sure to leave a nice big trail to those they wanted to take the fall. The
Washington Branch of the FBI was so intent on NOT finding state involvement that
they actually LET GO of the second most important person in the plot. Abdul
Yasin. He sought refuge and gained it in Iraq...where he lived in Baghdad.

> 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.

Are these the same investigators that released the second most important Bomb
Maker? Or are these the same ones who deftly managed to stage a coup inside of
Iraq that was exposed and the Iraqis secret police called the CIA on their own
Super Secret Phones to tell them they had just killed all the operatives
involved.

To say that Dr. Mylroie has a lot more evidence than just the height is just to
admit that this article is purely an attack piece put out by those whose
policies were discredited by the 9/11 attacks. States do sponsor terrorism and
those in the Government who believe otherwise are fighting hard to not be
exposed as fools.


>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.

Absolutely false again, its perfectly within reason for Yousef to have been both
a Iraqis agent and a Al Queda operative....just as our CIA and Spec Ops were
also fighting on the side of the Northern Alliance. The world is a complex place
and spies are the most complex beasts of all. How else does one hide in broad
daylight except to have devious and complicated relationships.

The Soviets trained the Iraqis Secret Service and that Saddam was so powerful is
testament to how well they trained them.

Most of what this author contends revloves around us believing that one cannot
both be a Iraqis Agent and a Al Queda operative....this is absurd as all through
history allies have seconded their best and brightest to help allies with
specific needs. Then he takes the absurd tack in holding up Yousefs claim of not
being an Iraqis agent as some sort of proof. As if Yousef would actually admit
this when the entire point of the Iraqis using Terrorists was to hide their
involvement.

>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."

Exactly how was this strenous effort applied? They were barred from using the
evidence gathered in the WTC93 Investigation.


>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.

How fucking absurd is this...they LET YASIN go then they pleaded with him on the
phone to come back to answer questions once they discovered that he was central
to the plot. Then they claim that they investigated him thoroughly and found no
links....even though he was in Iraq and they had zero assets in Iraq. And the US
Attorney who was so no nonsense was only interested in getting a conviction on
Yousef....finding state sponsorship would NOT have helped that cause and indeed
might have fucked it up.

Ok I have run out of Ducttape to keep my head from exploding with this load of
bullshit this Peter Bergen is selling. He never confronts the issue of exactly
where did the Anthrax come from right after 9/11? Which is central to the issue
of Iraqis involvement in 9/11, its worth noting that the US still cannot produce
this sort of Anthrax that was delivered to Daschles office and that Iraq was
reputed to be one of the world leaders in the aerosol distribution of Anthrax.

Is everything that Dr. Mylroie saying absolutely 100% correct...not a chance.
But intelligence isnt that way, you are trying to read the minds of people
intent on you not reading their next move. Its a foggy business not much fun for
those who have to have everything laid out like Occums Razor.

PAPADOC
My Blog all about politics and the terror war.
www.papadoc.net/PinkFlamingoBar.html