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What a difference a decade makes! When it was first reported in May 2004 that Saddam-era chemical weapons shells had injured U.S. troops, the editors of the New York Times dismissed that, “Finding some residual weapons that had escaped a large-scale destruction program would be no great surprise and if the chemicals had degraded, no major threat.” Now, a major New York Times report on the issue has been followed by an editorial warning of “A Deadly Legacy in Iraq”: some 5,000 chemical shells have been discovered over the years in Iraq by U.S. or U.S.-trained Iraqi forces. Many more...

When I served as a Senior Speechwriter in George W. Bush's White House, Karl Rove was the bane of my existence. The rule was that no speech could ever go to the President without its first being reviewed by Mr. Rove, and since Karl was an extremely busy man, he often didn't call in his comments to the Speechwriting Office till eight or nine in the evening. By the time these comments reached me, they often seemed hopelessly cryptic and unintelligible, yet somehow I had to figure out a way to work them into my draft without offending all the...

Third public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States Statement of Laurie Mylroie to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States July 9, 2003 STATE SPONSORSHIP: WHO ARE THE TERRORIST MASTERMINDS? The reasons why we went to war with Iraq--as an integral part of the war on terrorism--are not as well-understood as they might be. Indeed, a major misunderstanding regarding terrorism exists. Prior to the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center, it was assumed that major terrorist attacks against the U.S. were state-sponsored. But that bombing is said to...

May 06, 2008, 4:00 a.m. Writing BlindA response to Andy McCarthy. By Laurie Mylroie In a mixed review of Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness, I criticized the book for slighting the role of states in terrorism. McCarthy’s outsize response — a 3,000-word pejorative/adjective-laden assault in National Review Online — suggests the review hit upon a significant and sensitive point. Extensive name-calling typically obscures a weak argument, or at least attempts to do so, even as this debate involves the national-security issue of the day, including why the United States is engaged in its most serious military campaign in three decades...

Those who support Operation Iraqi Freedom have welcomed the recently released study on Saddam Hussein's dealings with terrorists.Based on captured Iraqi documents held in a Defense Department database, the Institute for Defense Analysis study makes important points. It clearly demonstrates that no ideological barrier prevented Saddam's "secular" regime from working with "Islamic" terrorists and that his regime had dealings with a wide variety of terrorists.*snip*On the basis of the transcript of a meeting Saddam held with other senior Iraqi figures about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the study concludes Iraq was not involved in the attack. Yet other captured...

George Piro, a personable and handsome FBI agent, appeared on 60 Minutes Sunday to tell us Saddam Hussein's secrets. The 36-year-old Lebanese-American was Saddam's interrogator. In addition to whatever the show disclosed about Saddam, it also revealed a lot about how the U.S. media and bureaucracies have handled and stoked the controversies over Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) -- basically, afflicted by chronic Alzheimer's. The events relevant to understanding OIF go back nearly 18 years -- to Iraq's August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Few people worked on Iraq all those years. Still, those doing so now ought to know that history....

1. Could you summarize your background for the readers of the "blog drzz" ? I'm a Middle East expert, with a Ph.D. on the subject from Harvard. I've worked on the subject all my professional life, first in academics and then in Washington. One can find more details on my website, lauriemylroie.com 2. How did you investigate the 1993 WTC case ? Did you meet investigators, talk to the FBI, did you have access to classified informations ? Did you meet officials of the former or present administration who gave you confidence about this matter ? My work is based...

If you have the time these two interviews with Laurie Mylroie on Charlie Rose PBS program are very interesting. When Bill Clinton's name is brought up in the 2002 video Charlie Rose gets very uncomfortable? wonder why. Compare and contrast the statements of Laurie Mylroie before and after 9/11. Charlie Rose: October 10, 1994 57 min - Feb 20, 2007 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1932882822609986830&q=laurie+mylroie&total=4&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=2 Charlie Rose: January 30, 2002 56 min 54 sec - Mar 7, 2007 http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-643948367541268187&q=laurie+mylroie&total=4&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3 Laurie Mylroie earned her doctorate in Government from Harvard University, with a specialization in the Middle East. She also studied Arabic in Egypt, at the...

PBS, NY Times & Scott Riter promoted false history in Iraq Have you seen this CNS news report posted at Laurie Mylroie's website? If you havent yet its time you should http://www.lauriemylroie.com/ CNSNews Report: Saddam Had WMD, Extensive Terror Ties By Scott Wheeler The senior government official and source of the Iraqi intelligence memos, explained that the reason the documents have not been made public before now is that the government has ‘thousands and thousands of documents waiting to be translated Quote from the article “M14 is a reference to Iraqi intelligence directorate of special operations. The Iraqi documents obtained...

Lt. Col. Robert "Buzz" Patterson Mark Eichenlaub interview with LT Buzz Patterson “al-Qaeda #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri’s trip to Baghdad in 1998 (in which he received $300,000, possibly from Saddam Hussein himself), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s medical trip to Baghdad in 2002 and the terrorist training that took place in the Salman Pak camp.” Dr. Mylroie received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and her B.A. from Cornell. She was an Assistant Professor in Harvard's Political Science Department, before becoming an Associate Professor in the Strategy Department at the U.S. Naval War College. Subsequently, she was a member of the...

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Dissident U.S. intelligence officers angry at former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld helped a European probe uncover details of secret CIA prisons in Europe, the top investigator said on Tuesday. Swiss Senator Dick Marty, author of a Council of Europe report on the jails, said senior CIA officials disapproved of Rumsfeld's methods in hunting down terrorist suspects, and had agreed to talk to him on condition of anonymity."There were huge conflicts between the CIA and Rumsfeld. Many leading figures in the CIA did not accept these methods at all," Marty told European Parliament committees, defending his work against...

From : Laurie Mylroie Sent : Sat, 07 26 2007 18:54:48 To : drzz Subject : Re: Thank you for your fight for truth Thank you very much for your extremely kind note. You can be sure that Iraq was behind 9/11--and the anthrax letters that followed. The FBI has yet to explains, six years later, who was responsible for the anthrax letters! Thanks for sending the videos. Unfortunately, I'm traveling now and don't have a very fast internet connection, but thanks again for your note. Laurie Mylroie

Al Qaeda's Hidden Roots By Laurie Mylroie The American Spectator | September 25, 2006 Cyrus Nowrasteh, scriptwriter for ABC's docudrama The Path to 9/11, defends the film's controversial, invented scenes, noting that the first attack on the World Trade Center occurred one month after Bill Clinton took office, and eight years passed in which Clinton did little to thwart the growing menace. Nowrasteh makes a crucial point, but it is not necessary to resort to fiction. Our understanding of the terrorist attacks -- going back to the 1993 Trade Center bombing -- has become loaded with errors obscuring Clinton's fecklessness....

Abu Abbas, head of the Palestine Liberation Front, was captured in Iraq shortly after the fall of Baghdad and died of natural causes in U.S. custody the following year. Notorious for the 1985 hijacking of the Achille Lauro, Abbas's most deadly terrorist attack actually occurred in 1974, when a PLF assault in northern Israel killed 36 people. Abbas was also behind a foiled attack on a Tel Aviv beach in May 1990, when the U.S. was first trying to establish a dialogue with the PLO. Abbas's assault interfered with those efforts, and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait two months later halted...

Who messed up Iraq? Donald Rumsfeld is the usual nominee. For conservative hawks, attacks on the U.S. Defence Secretary provide a way to attack the war without attacking the larger administration. And for liberal opponents of the war, attacks on Rumsfeld provide a way to attack the war without attacking the military that planned and executed that war. Now comes an important new book, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq, by New York Times correspondent Michael Gordon and retired Marine Corps Lieutenant General Bernard Trainor. Their story bears hard on Rumsfeld. But it daringly...

Among the Iraqi documents released to the public, at least five deal with the construction of improvised explosive devices (IEDs). One such document (CMPC-2003-005914) is a ten-page worksheet.* The first two pages are entitled, "Annual Plan for the Mechanical Workshop, Sheen-27 -- 1999"; the last eight are entitled "First Season Report of the Sheen-27 Work Plan for 1999." The report of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group explains that "Sheen-27" was a section of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) responsible for producing explosives. It had a Chemistry Department, which "developed the explosive materials for the device," an Electronics Department, "which prepared...

Who is Mary McCarthy? Well, as of this morning (Saturday) most of the big media don't care. They're fixated with the weather and gas prices — and anything else that will divert the public's attention from the stunning revelation that a Sandy Berger crony has apparently been leaking top-secret information from her high post at the CIA. The media will continue to downplay this story as they cover-up their own role in exposing our nation's secrets, including the supposed existence of CIA prisons in Europe. She'll be called a "whistleblower" and praised as some kind of patriot (a patriot, in...

After substantial prodding -- including from this paper -- the U.S. government has finally begun to release its captured Iraqi documents and is posting them at the Web site of the Army's Foreign Military Studies Office. This material will take considerable time to absorb and analyze, but it may yet contribute significantly to our understanding of the nature of the threat Saddam Hussein posed. Most dramatically, an Iraqi intelligence report, apparently written in early 1997, describes Iraqi efforts to establish ties with various elements in the Saudi opposition, including Osama bin Ladin. Until 1996, the Saudi renegade was based in...

Saddam's WMD's: The Syrian Connection By Laurie Mylroie FrontPageMagazine.com | February 8, 2006 The New York Sun is doing yeoman’s work in explaining why the latest group-think—that Saddam Hussein had no proscribed WMD—may be very wrong. Ha’aretz has lent its support, reporting that Israeli officials believe “[m]aterial was transferred to Syria in the dark of the night, on the very eve of the war,” and “[t]he Americans are the ones who are making the mistake now." That is also the view of retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, who headed the National Imagery and Mapping Agency. The little...

<p>Ahmad Chalabi, Iraq's deputy prime minister and head of the Iraqi National Congress, arrives today on a visit to Washington and New York, his first trip to the United States in nearly two years. The official American invitation reflects a recognition that Chalabi is among Iraq's most effective political figures and a repudiation of an earlier, perverse U.S. effort to "marginalize," if not destroy, him.</p>