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Here, check this out.
An interview with Laurie Mylroie

Author of Study of Revenge:
Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America

* What do you mean by Saddam Hussein’s unfinished war against America?

The Gulf War has never really ended. It has never really ended for the United States, and it has never really ended for Saddam. We maintain sanctions on Iraq that are themselves the product of a war, and we bomb Iraq on a regular basis. And Saddam, for his part, continues the war, mainly through terrorism.

* What terrorist acts do you have in mind?

The World Trade Center bombing for one: this attempt to topple New York’s tallest tower onto its twin may even have been caused by a bomb containing cyanide gas, as Secretary of Defense William Cohen and others have suggested.

* Why do you say Saddam was behind that bomb?

New York law enforcement suspected Iraqi involvement. The World Trade Center bombing occurred on the second anniversary of the Gulf War cease-fire. According to the authorities, many Iraqis were peripherally involved. In fact, the last remaining fugitive charged in the bombing is an Iraqi. He came from Baghdad and fled back to Baghdad.

In addition, the bomb produced a huge effect. Americans may not really realize how big it was because most of the damage was to the basement floors. The bomb left a crater six stories tall. Jim Fox, who headed New York’s FBI bureau then and led the investigation in New York, once told me that—after a hard day’s work searching for evidence—he would often sit and relax at the edge of the crater, stare down into the enormous hole, and ask himself, "Who the hell did this?"

* Can you take it further than just suspicions?

Yes, Study of Revenge does that. It is written as a detective story, and it guides the reader through a very careful analysis of the government’s own evidence, as presented in the terrorism trials that followed the World Trade Center bombing. The analysis of that evidence is really the core of the work, and the book is liberally illustrated with key documents, so the reader can follow the argument and judge for himself.

The key evidence revolves around the identity of the bomb’s mastermind, Ramzi Yousef. He entered the United States as Ramzi Yousef, Iraqi citizen, but left as Abdul Basit Karim, Pakistani national. In fact, both names are aliases.

We know that Abdul Basit Karim is a real person. We know that he was born and raised in Kuwait, studied in Britain, and then returned to Kuwait. He was in Kuwait when Iraq invaded, and he probably died then. As a permanent resident of Kuwait, his records were on file at the Ministry of the Interior in Kuwait City. We also know that his file was tampered with.

* What was done to the file, and why is that significant?

There are things that should be in the file but aren’t. For example, copies of the front pages of Abdul Basit Karim’s passport, with his picture and signature, should be there. But they were removed.

There are also things in the file that shouldn’t be there. For example, a notation that Abdul Basit Karim and his family left Kuwait on August 26, 1990, traveled from Kuwait to Iraq, and crossed into Iran on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where they live now—that information shouldn’t be in a Kuwaiti file. There wasn’t a Kuwaiti government in August 1990. Iraq was occupying the country. Moreover, that’s not the kind of information you give authorities when you travel. You tell them where you came from and where you’re going. You don’t give them your whole itinerary.

But the clincher is that the fingerprint cards in Abdul Basit Karim’s file have Ramzi Yousef’s fingerprints. Yet Yousef is definitely not the same person as Karim. Yousef is tall, and Karim was of medium height. That can only mean that someone took Abdul Basit Karim’s fingerprint card out of the file and substituted a card with Yousef’s prints on it. The only reason for doing that and making other changes was to create a false identity for Yousef. And the only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait.

* What have other people said about this?

I discussed this with Jim Fox, who by then had retired from the FBI. He agreed that Abdul Basit Karim’s file had been tampered with and that that was the "smoking gun." He had passed the information on to the New York FBI, but he cautioned me that he wasn’t sure what they would do with it.

I also discussed this with the Israeli ambassador in Washington and with a senior Saudi official. They both agreed it was the decisive evidence against Iraq. Soviet-style intelligence agencies routinely do just that—develop false identities for agents involved in illegal operations by appropriating the identity of someone who has died.

* What does the U.S. government have to say about this?

I have indeed discussed this with the administration. Initially, I had very good relations with them. In fact, Martin Indyk, who became the National Security Council (NSC) adviser on the Middle East when Clinton became president, brought me out of academia and introduced me to policy-making in Washington. Largely because of Indyk, I was an adviser on Iraq to Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. In fact, I even briefed Clinton on Iraq during the campaign. Clinton seemed tougher on Saddam than Bush, although that changed once he became president.

The New York investigation into the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993 soon began to point to Saddam Hussein. I discussed the matter with Indyk and his aides. I also cautioned them about the possibility that Iraq might carry out biological terrorism, because I had reliable information that Saddam was still producing biological agents. And indeed he was, as was learned after his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan. Indyk was alarmed at what I told him, but nothing was ever done. It seemed that he took the information to those above him, but they dismissed it.

* Why would they do that?

I don’t think that back then—in Clinton’s first term—Clinton and his top national security advisers really understood the kind of threat that Saddam could pose to the United States and its allies. Sandy Berger, when he was about to become head of the NSC, made a telling statement in late 1996, after Clinton’s reelection. Berger likened U.S. policy toward Iraq to a whack-a-mole game at the circus, "They bop up and you whack ’em down, and if they bop up again, you bop ’em back down again."

* Isn’t that dangerous?

Of course it is. Nor do I think the World Trade Center bombing was the end of Saddam’s terrorism. That bomb was attributed to a "loose network" of Muslim extremists. It came to be seen as the harbinger of a new kind of terrorism carried out by loose networks, without the support of states. But I tend to doubt that. I think the strong evidence that Iraq was behind the World Trade Center bombing raises questions about later bombings that were attributed to loose networks, but about which much less information is available.

* What do you expect in the future from Saddam?

I fully expect there will be more terrorist bombings, possibly using more dangerous unconventional biological agents. This would cause terrible casualties.

There’s also the possibility that Saddam might some day launch another war for Kuwait or key oil facilities in the gulf. Saddam got rid of the U.N. weapons inspectors very deliberately—through the series of crises over UNSCOM in 1997 and 1998. And now he is free to develop and improve Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs. Assuredly, the Iraqis are working on developing a nuclear bomb. They are also probably working on developing better delivery systems for their biological and chemical agents.

Iraq poses a very serious problem. But we have been unable to come to terms with that and develop a strategy to deal with it. Yet the more we delay, the stronger Saddam becomes, particularly in terms of his unconventional weapons.