WTC One - The Iraqi Connection

The National Interest ^ | Winter 95/96 | Laurie Mylorie

[kabar]

Few Americans are aware of the true scale of the destructive ambition behind that bomb, this despite the fact that two years later, the key figure responsible for building it--a man who had entered the United Stares on an Iraqi passport under the name of Ramzi Yousef--was involved in another stupendous bombing conspiracy.

[kabar]

I don't know why the Bush administration has not done more to connect WTC One to the Iraqis. Mylorie's detailed description of the linkage is very compelling. The Government should be able to verify the facts fairly easily. Why haven't they?

[MHGinTN]

Perhaps the Bush administration is aware that Yousef entering on an Iraqi passport could have been bin Laden's way of trying to implicate Saddam. The sinkEmperor administration worked very hard over their eight years in power to ignore and suppress truth regarding the al Qaeda/bin Laden dangers to this nation. I've read Mylorie's indictment, but no one seems willing to ask 'How stupid is it to enter this nation on a passport from the nation you intend to serve in espionage?' Deniability is the number one thing Saddam has sought to hold in ALL the terrorist actions with which he's been involved. Salman Pak is a far more damning connection of Saddam to terrorist organizations than the 1993 WTC bombing.

[PoisedWoman]

Good piece! The author's strange name is Mylroie , always a challenge to spell and pronounce.

[WOSG]

Salman Pak is a far more damning connection of Saddam to terrorist organizations than the 1993 WTC bombing.

---
Please explain.

BTW, if you follow the trail, Iraqis used Kuwaiti identity as a cover ... just a thought.
"By now it should be clear that the World Trade Center bomber's real name is probably neither Ramzi Yousef nor Abdul BasitAfter all, would someone intending to blow up New York's tallest tower go to such trouble to get a passport under his own name? Yousef was a man of many passports; he had three on his person when he was arrested in Pakistan. Rather, it seems that Ramzi Yousef risked going to the Pakistani consulate with such flimsy documents because he wanted investigators to conclude that he was in fact Abdul Basit, and so would stop trying to determine his real identity. And that is pretty much what happened. ."


"...
What does all this suggest? To me it suggests 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. Clearly, only Iraq could reasonably have: 1) known of, or caused, the death of Abdul Basit and his family; 2) tampered with Kuwait's Interior Ministry files, above all switching the fingerprint cards; and 3) filched the files on Abdul Basit and his family from the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait. "

So this identity was a cover ... cretaed by Iraqi intel.

[Lexington Green]

ping

[WhiskeyPapa]

I don't know why the Bush administration has not done more to connect WTC One to the Iraqis. Mylorie's detailed description of the linkage is very compelling. The Government should be able to verify the facts fairly easily. Why haven't they?

Because it makes Bush Sr. look bad for:

A) stumbling into the Gulf War and setting Saddam off in the first place and,

B) not taking care of business in 1991.

Walt

[MHGinTN]

I don'tdoubt that Iraq helped to 'cleanse' the identity of Yousef (and others). I'm just saying that the Iraq secret terror org wouldn't have left a trail like the passport to be connected but bin Laden would since he wants Saddam out and a fundamentalist Islamicist in, in Iraq.

Salman Pak is a terrorist training camp 85 kliks SE of Baghdad, with a 707 fuselage parked there to train in taking over a modern jetliner. One of the Buffalo cell actually claimed to have been taken there while taking training in Afghanistan. The Iraqis have been helping to train terrorists of Hamas, Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad (or was that Egyptian Jihad?) and have been funding several orgs.

[The Great Satan]

I don't know why the Bush administration has not done more to connect WTC One to the Iraqis.

In fact, if you're paying attention, the administration has gone out of its way to prevent people from making that obvious connection. The author of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ("KSM"), is directly linked to Ramzi Yousef/Abdul Basit: supposedly, he is the brother of Yousef's mother. Despite the fact that Mohammed is a bigger fish than bin Laden we hardly ever hear about KSM. This is even more surprising when you consider that "KSM" lived for several years in the United States, a fact which somehow, amazingly, failed to come out for a whole year after 9/11. Apparently, the CIA also stubbornly refused to reveal anything about what they know about KSM to a congressional inquiry into 9/11 (see CRISIS IN ACCOUNTABILITY, by Notra Trulock).

So, what is going on here? Can you think of other instances pertaining to 9/11 where it is clear that the government knows more than it is letting on? I can. The government clearly knows more about the anthrax than they have been willing to tell us. Indeed, they have even developed a cover story to distract attention from that fact, as you can easily verify by looking at the timeline of the 10/17/01 NSC discussion of the anthrax documented in Bush at War and the emergence of the "domestic terrorism" stall. Another example would be the question of Mohammed Atta's visits to Prague and his reported rendezvous with an Iraqi agent, Ahmed al-Ani. This was first reported as a simple fact a few weeks after 9/11, and has been repeatedly affirmed by the White House and the Czech authorities ever since, despite a slew of mutually contradictory "debunkings" in various left-wing media. Yet, the question of the meeting has never been squarely bought to the fore by the White House. Why?

What is the link here? The link is that, if the truth about KSM, or the anthrax, or Atta and al-Ani, were clear to the public, then the "big picture" would quickly fall into place. The "big picture" is that 9/11 was an act of war against the United States by Iraq, and Saddam's back-end security -- his threat to anthrax the US population -- is terrifyingly credible, which is why the US is still in no position to name names and retaliate. KSM, al-Ani and the anthrax are each, independently, keys that unlock the whole puzzle, and, for the time being, that is something that cannot be allowed to happen. Expect three fingers to remain firmly plugged in those three dikes for the foreseeable future.

[kabar]

Perhaps the Bush administration is aware that Yousef entering on an Iraqi passport could have been bin Laden's way of trying to implicate Saddam.

I don't buy your facile explanation that Iraqi intelligence would be "stupid" to have one of its agents enter the US on an Iraqi passport. Maybe that is exactly what they thought we would deduce, so why not do the unexpected. I found it interesting that the first place Yousef went when he arrived in the US was to go to the apartment of an Iraqi, Musab Yasin. You also must remember that we were offering many Iraqis asylum in the US after the Gulf War. Many of them were on the Saudi/Iraqi border awaiting processing by US officials. Moreover, Ramzi Yousef, or whatever his real name is, was described as a man of many passports."

I found Mylorie's description of how Yousef assumed Basit' s identity to be the most interesting and compelling. Given all of the hoops that they had to go through including back in Kuwait, this had to be the work of a nation state and not a terrorist group like Al-Qaeda. The resources and coordination to pull it off would have to belong to Iraq--if indeed, this is what happened.

[buffyt]

I just read the entire article! amazing stuff....

[wtc911]

On a personal note....I was working a few blocks downtown from the Trade Center and was on my way to a 12:15 lunch appointment at the Hotel in the WTC when the bomb went off. I was just across the street and was rocked by it but not hurt. My companion and I, both native NYers in out forties, both immediately thought that road salt had leaked into one of the PATH transformers. I remember the scene vividly. Up to that point we had no reason to suspect anything else could have caused the explosion....of course all that changed for us that day....as it did for the rest of us eight years later.

[kabar]

What is most amazing about the article is that it was written more than seven years ago. Fantastic insight and analysis, which went ignored unfortunately.

[bonfire]

Wondered where you have been. What do you think is going on with Rumsfield privately speaking to the House today? Think it fits in with Pres. Bush's speech tonight?

[js1138]

I don't know why the Bush administration has not done more to connect WTC One to the Iraqis.

What makes you think that isn't the reason behind the war? There could be all kinds of reasons not to display the evidence right now.

[kabar]

I hope you are right. Clinton had the same info and did nothing except fire some missiles for four days. Still, Bush should be sharing that evidence with key members of Congress. Given the lukewam comments from people like Bob Graham of Florida, former chairman and now ranking member of the Senate intelligence committee, it appears that they have not received such evidence.

[js1138]

And what if they have?

[RaceBannon]

Must read. Click on the link at the top

[yonif]

bflr

[oceanview]

TGS, I've read many of your posts on this topic, and they are indeed well thought out. But something always seems to be "missing" to me regarding this. I just do not see how the approach Bush has taken regarding Iraq is consistent with the concepts in your hypothesis: namely that Iraq was responsible for the 9/11, the anthrax attacks, and has anthrax pre-positioned in the US waiting to be released. The idea that this entire military buildup is a bluff, just seems to be the absolute worst possible political and military strategy they could have come up with to deal with this situation. What could the possible outcomes be? Absent some "lucky break" like a coup, everything is suddenly called off and the troops recalled? The UN, France and Germany, and the "peace movement" would be dramatically empowered. Bush would be dead politically, and would essentially have resigned himself to the fact that he was leaving this problem to president Kerry or Lieberman to handle. Could it possibly be that the national security apparatus has not made Bush aware of these facts, and he is launching this war "in the dark", only to face a major domestic anthrax attack? Once again, he would be dead politically if this were to occur, being seen as having launched the war while unprepared to protect the homeland.

It seems to me that it would have been easy to go with an alternate strategy on Iraq. He could have essentially conducted an intense "covert war" against Iraq, rather then staking his entire presidency on this pursuit of a bluffed "hot war". The risk there would have been that the same AQ proxies would have launched a wider anthrax attack on the US because of the covert war, but at that point, Bush would have to be prepared to come clean on everything, finger Iraq for that attack, and use any means necessary to fight back. In the aftermath of a wide scale anthrax attack on the US, he would have had overwhelming support.

[Critter]

What if we suppose that this framing the war in the context of Iraq's noncompliance with UN resolutions is just a delaying tactic by Bush, in order to buy time to try and root out the domestic threat?

I keep wondering why, in light of 9/11, and that fact that we are waging war against terrorism, Bush is using 12 year old excuses for a war with Iraq. The easiest way to win support for this war would be to tie Saddam to 9/11, and claim that Saddam supported and still supports terrorism.

Any other reason for war against Iraq invites resistence.