Posted on 09/14/2001 3:05:58 PM PDT by BplusK
Ex-CIA Chief Woolsey Sees Iraqi Fingerprints
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NewsMax.com Wires
Friday, September 14, 2001
WASHINGTON -- A former CIA chief sees the hand of Iraq behind Tuesday's attacks, and he warned the White House not to shirk the hard realities of possible state sponsorship. "First of all we have to find out who did this thing," R. James Woolsey told United Press International in a phone interview Thursday.
But he said the Bush administration must "undo the mistakes of the Clinton administration and not just look at loose associations of terrorists or a terrorist group" such as that of Osama bin Laden's al Qaida, but also at the serious ramifications of possible state involvement.
Woolsey served as director of central intelligence in the first Clinton administration from Feb. 5, 1993 to Jan. 10, 1995. He and Clinton were not close. In 1996 the hawkish Democrat endorsed GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole.
The Washington power lawyer told UPI that he is not sure that Iraq is involved in the attacks, but added: "What we don't want to do is what the Clinton administration did and put blinders on about state involvement by focusing just on a terrorist group."
To do so, he said, is to risk falling into a trap laid by bin Laden and Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
"Why else would (bin Laden) issue fatwas (Islamic edicts) and put out videotapes and chant poems and have all his subordinates come up on networks where they know they're being listened to and all talk about how they're carrying out terrorist operations?" Woolsey asked.
He suggested that Saddam Hussein could be "sitting there grinning with bin Laden, saying: 'This is good for both of us. I don't get blamed, and you get the credit you want.'"
In criticizing the Clinton administration, Woolsey referred to a series of plots in New York City in the early 1990s, notably the initial bombing of the World Trade Center on Feb. 26, 1993. Two factors were at work, he said.
The first was the facts of the various bomb plots were unclear but that prosecutors had blurred the distinctions for their own purposes. "It was easier for the prosecution to get convictions of all of the people who might have been involved in any of these plots in New York if they folded all the charges together under the Seditious Conspiracy Law and said it was all one conspiracy," Woolsey told UPI.
"If it's all one conspiracy inspired by the blind sheikh," he said, referring to so-call mastermind Omar Abd Al-Rahman - "that is, the World Trade Center, and the effort to blow up the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel and the U.N., etc. - it confuses things for a jury to come in and say, 'And by the way, the Iraqi government was also involved.'"
The second important factor, Woolsey said, was that the Clinton administration "was less than enthusiastic about having confrontations with Saddam" in which American casualties might be incurred. "So I think there is a real chance that Iraqi government sponsorship was overlooked."
Woolsey commended Laurie Mylroie's opinion essay "Bin Laden Isn't Only One to Blame," which appeared in Thursday's editions of the Wall Street Journal, as well as "Getting Serious," the newspaper's accompanying editorial.
He said that his essay "The Iraqi Connection: Blood Baath," which appeared latter Thursday on the New Republic Online, "takes off from some of Laurie's work on the '93 bombing of the World Trade Center, and suggests that the U.S. government now should go back and look hard at the possibility that there was Iraqi government involvement in that.
"And if the Iraqis were involved in '93 and have gotten away with it for eight years, and then launched another attack that has some real similarities both in target and in methodology to previous attacks against the World Trade Center and trying to blow up an airliner in the Pacific, we may have a modus operandi."
Woolsey said that Mylroie endorses the thesis of Jim Fox, who handled the FBI's investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing for the first year and a half. Fox died in 1997.
Fox's theory, Woolsey told UPI, is "Ramzi Yousef is not just a random person we don't know, but is in fact an Iraqi government asset." In 1998 Yousef was sentenced to life plus 240 years for the 1993 bombing.
Woolsey expanded on the Fox-Mylroie theory in his New Republic essay.
According to this view, Ramzi Yousef was not the alias of a Pakistani named Abdul Basit, as it had been believed. Rather, Yousef was an Iraqi agent who had assumed Basit's identity when occupying Iraqi intelligence officers doctored police files in Kuwait, where the real Abdul Basit had lived in 1990.
Woolsey noted that Abdul Basit and his family disappeared during the occupation and have never been seen again.
I just wonder how long undoing the mistakes of the Clinton Administration will take AND IF those mistakes can be undone!!
I'm so PROUD OF OUR PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH........Did you see him in the crowd by the WTC site???He is so genuine and down to earth.......I think he made a hit with those New Yorkers, along with a lot of others who have been mislead by our MEDIA!!
Five years of planning. Secret info about Air Force One. Obviously, this operation was quite massive. Terrorism at this level is only possible because it suits the interests of various rogue states.
I've been quite disturbed at the clear indications of Iraq's involvement, but more disturbed at the recent indications that the U.S. govt. is avoiding a focus on Iraq. As one Bush aide was quoted last night (forgive me for paraphrasing): "This operation was complex and compartmentalized. To prove up Iraq's involvement would take years and we don't have that kind of time."
Clinton chose to focus on some direct perpatrators for the embassies and for the USS Cole. He tried ineffectively to hit Osama Bin Laden and only made him stronger and more brazen. But there are powerful reasons not to attack Iraq, Syria, Iran, Pakistan, Bosnia, Palistine, and North Korea at the same time. Also, the U.S. can count on much faster cooperation from our wavering Middle East contacts by focusing right now on the narrow issue of punishing or capturing Osama Bin Laden and crushing his particularly vicious terrorist organization.
I bet that we will also be sending powerful messages to the list of countries I listed above that they will be Round Two of our Crusade if they want to keep dabbling in state-sponsored terrorism.
If I were president I would inform all of the Arab world and their governments and capitols that a certain portion of our nuclear missiles have been reprogramed on their countries and that if another incident of terrorism happnens against us that their countries will be removed from the map.
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