The War Against America Laurie Mylroie HarperCollins £9.99, pp352 The torrent of comment that all but flooded the media of the West in the wake of the terrorist atrocities on 11 September was often, perhaps inevitably, marked by inaccuracies and glib assertions, recycled and repeated numerous times. Among the most frequent was the attribution to Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network of previous attacks with which he had no connection, such as the first bombing of the New York World Trade Centre in 1993. As this prescient and penetrating book makes clear, misconceptions of this kind played a crucial part in the vast, collective failure of both intelligence and policy that 11 September represents. To disregard it now may well result in further devastating attacks. Mylroie's conclusion, reached by relentless forensic analysis of a huge array of human and documentary sources, is that the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing did not, as the Clinton administration claimed at the time, signal the emergence of a 'new kind of terrorism' by 'loose networks' of Muslim extremists. Instead, it was the first skirmish in 'a new kind of war' - sponsored, like old-style wars, by a hostile state, Iraq. Planned as the world's worst terrorist attack, in which one of the towers would have collapsed into the other amid a cloud of cyanide, the plot's Iraqi directors simply made use of a little Islamist muscle, stooges who were meant to be caught, in order to conceal its real origin. Of course, that muscle, corralled by New York's blind, radical mullah, Shakyh Omar Abdul Rahman, had nothing to do with bin Laden, who was busy building roads and airports in Sudan at the time. But to those of us who have studied the considerable evidence of Iraqi involvement in the 2001 atrocities, it seems clear that 1993 was essentially a botched prototype for the later operation. On both occasions, Iraqi training, intelligence and logistics were hidden behind an Islamist façade, which was indeed provided last year by al-Qaeda. Mylroie, whose previous work was a bestseller on Saddam and the 1991 Gulf War, argues that the Iraqi dictator has, since seizing power in a bloodstained coup in 1979, used violence as his main policy tool. His expulsion from Kuwait, the imposition of no-fly zones and UN weapons-inspection teams induced in him a fierce desire for revenge. One way he sought it was his attempt to assassinate George HW Bush in 1993. Another was the WTC bombing, in which six people died. Like a detective novelist, Mylroie uses the enormous official record of the FBI's investigations and subsequent trial to tell the story of Iraq's manipulation of the indigenous New York radicals. The FBI's chief agent, the late Jim Fox, was convinced that Iraq had been behind the attack, but was overruled. In the end, two pieces of evidence loom over everything else. Abdul Yasin, who allegedly mixed the bomb chemicals, is an Iraqi and managed to escape. He now lives in Baghdad, working for Saddam's government. The plot's leader, Ramzi Yousef, who was eventually arrested in the Philippines in 1995 as he plotted to blow up 12 US airliners on a single day and was sentenced to life in a US federal prison, was almost certainly a career officer from Iraqi intelligence, who stole the identity of a harmless, dead Kuwaiti, Abdul Basit Karim. This was a standard technique for deep-cover operatives, long propagated by the KGB, who trained Saddam's intelligence service until the Soviet Union ceased to exist. (Karim, who was 5ft 8in tall, was once a student in Wales - where his former teachers are understandably certain he was not the 6ft Yousef.) Mylroie first marshalled much of this evidence in scholarly articles in 1996, yet the response of the US government was determined denial. Clinton did not want to tackle Iraq seriously, and so the WTC bombing had to be down to Shakyh Omar. A similar process is at work in Whitehall and parts of Washington now. We know that Mohamed Atta and his two co-leaders of the 2001 hijackings made repeated, hasty journeys across the world to meet Iraqi intelligence officers in the months before the attacks. We also know Iraq ran a terrorist camp for foreign Islamists, where it taught them how to hijack planes with boxcutters, and that Farouk Hijazi, deputy head of Iraqi intelligence, travelled to Afghanistan to see bin Laden in 1998. Briefing the media, officials simply sweep these facts aside. Outside the group of hawks in the Pentagon, Iraq is apparently not a legitimate target for the 'war on terror'. Mylroie wrote the conclusion to this book many months before last year's attacks. It has equal relevance now: 'Saddam... has succeeded in thoroughly confusing America as to the nature of the terrorist threat it has faced. He is free, it would appear, to carry out more terrorist attacks - possibly even unconventional terrorism, as long as he can make it appear to be the work of a loose network of Muslim extremists. If America's leadership continues to deal with Saddam in that fashion, we must be prepared to see further acts of violence that are more successful, more brutal, and more devastating.' |
Bush rejects Saddam 9/11 link