Gold9472
11-19-2005, 09:55 AM
In Lawsuit, Team Bush Swore Saddam Was Behind 9/11
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/05/11/17_lawsuit.html
November 17, 2005
by Evelyn Pringle
Much to the dismay of President Bush, Americans can remember all on their own, without any coaching from Democrats, that in the run up to war in Iraq it was top officials from the administration who were making the claim that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden and that he was secretly involved in 9/11.
The fact that the administration's disinformation campaign was entirely successful is evidenced by an October 2004 Harris Poll, taken three weeks before the last presidential election, which reported that 62% of all voters and 84% of those planning to vote for Bush still believed that Saddam had "strong links" to Al Qaeda, and that 41% of all voters and 52% of Bush backers believed that Saddam had "helped plan and support the hijackers" who had attacked the country on 9/11.
As we now know, the basis for these allegations were false. But the saddest part of the situation is that many Americans are just now beginning to realize that Bush knew the stories were false for more than a year when he cited them as justification for taking the country to war.
Documents recently declassified and made public show that the administration was warned by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 that the tale about a trip to Prague by the leader of the 9/11 highjacker, Mohammed Atta, had come from an unreliable drunk, and that the story about Iraq training members of al Qaeda on the use of chemical and biological weapons was deliberately fabricated by an Iraqi defector.
A recent poll conducted by NBC and the Wall Street Journal indicates that Americans recognize the significance of this revelation - 57% of Americans now believe that Bush misled the country about prewar intelligence; a 52% majority of those polled say the war was not worth it; and by a 58% to 38% margin, Americans believe that Bush has not given good enough reasons to keep our troops in Iraq.
The debate over who was most responsible for convincing the nation that there was a link between Saddam and 9/11 will probably continue for years, but an important piece of the puzzle can be found by zeroing in on a woman by the name of Laurie Mylroie.
Mylroie had been pushing for an all-out war against Iraq for a decade. In the run-up to the first Gulf war, Mylroie, along with the recently fired New York Times reporter Judith Miller, wrote a book titled Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf.
The original Iraq war obsession originated at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think-tank that served as a home base for the many neocons who were rendered powerless during the Clinton years such as Richard Perle, who became chairman of the Defense Policy Board under Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, who moved into the number two position at the Pentagon, as well as Newt Gingrich and John Bolton, to name just a few.
In 2000, at a time when Dick Cheney sat on the AEI board, the group's publishing arm put out a book by Mylroie titled, A Study in Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America.
In the author's acknowledgement section of the book, Mylroie thanked a familiar case of characters - including John Bolton and the staff of the AEI - for their assistance. She also wrote thanks to Scooter Libby for his "generous and timely assistance."
Mylroie noted that Paul Wolfowitz was instrumental to her in writing the book and said, "At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She said that Wolfowitz's wife (at the time), had "fundamentally shaped the book." Neo-con Richard Perle described the book as "splendid and wholly convincing."
If Mylroie is to be believed, Saddam was involved in every anti-American terrorist event that took place since the early 1990s, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya - which she says may have been "the work of both bin Laden and Iraq" - to the federal building in Oklahoma City.
She also accuses Saddam of involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center even though the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State Department, all determined that there was no evidence of the Iraq's involvement in the attack back in the mid-1990s.
Mylroie also claimed that TWA flight 800, which crashed into Long Island Sound, was a likely Iraqi plot even after a lengthy investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined that it was an accident.
She maintains that in 2000, Saddam provided the expertise for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, which killed 17 sailors, even though no law enforcement agency has ever made such a claim. She even blames Saddam for the anthrax sent through the mail shortly after 9/11.
Once Bush became president, the neo-cons were brought back into power as either members of the administration or members of the influential Defense Policy Board and war against Iraq became the administration's obsession, with Mylroie and the hawks working hand in hand to promote the theory that Saddam was involved in every terrorist act against the U.S. over the past decade.
After the attacks on 9/11 the race towards Iraq was on, and Mylroie's book was reissued by Harper Collins under the new title The War Against America. The foreword for the second edition was written by former CIA Director James Woolsey, who described her work as "brilliant and brave."
The book's cover displayed an endorsement from Paul Wolfowitz which stated, "Provocative and disturbing ... argues powerfully that the shadowy mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing ... was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence."
In the book's acknowledgment, Mylroie thanks Wolfowitz for being "kind enough to listen to this work presented orally and later to read the manuscript. At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She also praised the assistance of John Bolton.
Now, a nutcase like Mylroie, if left to her own devices, would probably have been harmless. But when the neo-cons made her a consultant to the Pentagon, the position granted grossly misplaced credibility to her hair-brained conspiracy theories.
There is no doubt that she was hired to convince the world that Saddam played a role in 9/11 and although I don't know how much she was paid, its plenty obvious that the Bush team got a lot of bang for the buck.
In February 2003, Mylroie was featured in an interview on Canadian television where she discussed why Bush was going to war against Iraq. At the same time she emphasized the certainty of a Saddam-9/11 link. Shortly after the interview got underway, she stated:
Listen, we're going to war because President Bush believes Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Al Qaeda is a front for Iraqi intelligence … [the U.S.] bureaucracy made a tremendous blunder that refused to acknowledge these links … the people responsible for gathering this information, say in the C.I.A., are also the same people who contributed to the blunder on 9/11 and the deaths of 3,000 Americans, and so whenever this information emerges they move to discredit it.
Mylroie certainly doesn't make it sound like the CIA was claiming that there was a link between Saddam and bin Laden a month before the war began. Yet that is what the Bush team is saying today.
On March 12, 2003, Mylroie wrote an article in the New York Sun titled, "Blind to Saddam's 9-11 Role," in which she wrote:
Iraq, along with Al Qaeda, was most probably involved in the September 11 attacks, and President Bush understands that. Already on September 17, six days later, Mr. Bush affirmed, "I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now," as Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" discloses. ... Indeed, at Thursday's press conference, Mr. Bush said that Iraq has financed and trained Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups ... That is why Mr. Bush is willing to take the risk entailed in war against Iraq.
At one point, Mylroie attempted to convince the 9/11 Commission that "there is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds [of both the 1993 and 2001 Trade Center attacks] are Iraqi intelligence agents."
However, her testimony was apparently not persuasive because the Commission's final report states that the "Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike."
One of Mylroie's more recent ventures included writing a book titled, Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department tried to Stop the War on Terror. This title is somewhat baffling in light of the speeches in recent days by Bush himself stating that everyone was in agreement with his assessment of the need to go to war and that it was the evidence produced by the intelligence agencies and not his White House that led to the war against Iraq.
The fact is that in the run up to war, Mylroie wore a wide variety of hats. But one of her most important jobs by far came when she testified as an expert witness in a lawsuit against a group of defendants that included the Taliban, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, bin Laden, Saddam and the Republic of Iraq.
The suit was filed by two families on behalf of the estates of 9/11 victims, George Eric Smith, a senior business analyst for Sun Gard Asset Management, and Timothy Soulas, a senior managing director and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald Securities.
End Part I
http://www.democraticunderground.com/articles/05/11/17_lawsuit.html
November 17, 2005
by Evelyn Pringle
Much to the dismay of President Bush, Americans can remember all on their own, without any coaching from Democrats, that in the run up to war in Iraq it was top officials from the administration who were making the claim that Saddam was in cahoots with bin Laden and that he was secretly involved in 9/11.
The fact that the administration's disinformation campaign was entirely successful is evidenced by an October 2004 Harris Poll, taken three weeks before the last presidential election, which reported that 62% of all voters and 84% of those planning to vote for Bush still believed that Saddam had "strong links" to Al Qaeda, and that 41% of all voters and 52% of Bush backers believed that Saddam had "helped plan and support the hijackers" who had attacked the country on 9/11.
As we now know, the basis for these allegations were false. But the saddest part of the situation is that many Americans are just now beginning to realize that Bush knew the stories were false for more than a year when he cited them as justification for taking the country to war.
Documents recently declassified and made public show that the administration was warned by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 that the tale about a trip to Prague by the leader of the 9/11 highjacker, Mohammed Atta, had come from an unreliable drunk, and that the story about Iraq training members of al Qaeda on the use of chemical and biological weapons was deliberately fabricated by an Iraqi defector.
A recent poll conducted by NBC and the Wall Street Journal indicates that Americans recognize the significance of this revelation - 57% of Americans now believe that Bush misled the country about prewar intelligence; a 52% majority of those polled say the war was not worth it; and by a 58% to 38% margin, Americans believe that Bush has not given good enough reasons to keep our troops in Iraq.
The debate over who was most responsible for convincing the nation that there was a link between Saddam and 9/11 will probably continue for years, but an important piece of the puzzle can be found by zeroing in on a woman by the name of Laurie Mylroie.
Mylroie had been pushing for an all-out war against Iraq for a decade. In the run-up to the first Gulf war, Mylroie, along with the recently fired New York Times reporter Judith Miller, wrote a book titled Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf.
The original Iraq war obsession originated at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a conservative think-tank that served as a home base for the many neocons who were rendered powerless during the Clinton years such as Richard Perle, who became chairman of the Defense Policy Board under Bush, Paul Wolfowitz, who moved into the number two position at the Pentagon, as well as Newt Gingrich and John Bolton, to name just a few.
In 2000, at a time when Dick Cheney sat on the AEI board, the group's publishing arm put out a book by Mylroie titled, A Study in Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America.
In the author's acknowledgement section of the book, Mylroie thanked a familiar case of characters - including John Bolton and the staff of the AEI - for their assistance. She also wrote thanks to Scooter Libby for his "generous and timely assistance."
Mylroie noted that Paul Wolfowitz was instrumental to her in writing the book and said, "At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She said that Wolfowitz's wife (at the time), had "fundamentally shaped the book." Neo-con Richard Perle described the book as "splendid and wholly convincing."
If Mylroie is to be believed, Saddam was involved in every anti-American terrorist event that took place since the early 1990s, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya - which she says may have been "the work of both bin Laden and Iraq" - to the federal building in Oklahoma City.
She also accuses Saddam of involvement in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center even though the FBI, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the U.S. Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York, the CIA, the National Security Council, and the State Department, all determined that there was no evidence of the Iraq's involvement in the attack back in the mid-1990s.
Mylroie also claimed that TWA flight 800, which crashed into Long Island Sound, was a likely Iraqi plot even after a lengthy investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board determined that it was an accident.
She maintains that in 2000, Saddam provided the expertise for the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, which killed 17 sailors, even though no law enforcement agency has ever made such a claim. She even blames Saddam for the anthrax sent through the mail shortly after 9/11.
Once Bush became president, the neo-cons were brought back into power as either members of the administration or members of the influential Defense Policy Board and war against Iraq became the administration's obsession, with Mylroie and the hawks working hand in hand to promote the theory that Saddam was involved in every terrorist act against the U.S. over the past decade.
After the attacks on 9/11 the race towards Iraq was on, and Mylroie's book was reissued by Harper Collins under the new title The War Against America. The foreword for the second edition was written by former CIA Director James Woolsey, who described her work as "brilliant and brave."
The book's cover displayed an endorsement from Paul Wolfowitz which stated, "Provocative and disturbing ... argues powerfully that the shadowy mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing ... was in fact an agent of Iraqi intelligence."
In the book's acknowledgment, Mylroie thanks Wolfowitz for being "kind enough to listen to this work presented orally and later to read the manuscript. At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult." She also praised the assistance of John Bolton.
Now, a nutcase like Mylroie, if left to her own devices, would probably have been harmless. But when the neo-cons made her a consultant to the Pentagon, the position granted grossly misplaced credibility to her hair-brained conspiracy theories.
There is no doubt that she was hired to convince the world that Saddam played a role in 9/11 and although I don't know how much she was paid, its plenty obvious that the Bush team got a lot of bang for the buck.
In February 2003, Mylroie was featured in an interview on Canadian television where she discussed why Bush was going to war against Iraq. At the same time she emphasized the certainty of a Saddam-9/11 link. Shortly after the interview got underway, she stated:
Listen, we're going to war because President Bush believes Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Al Qaeda is a front for Iraqi intelligence … [the U.S.] bureaucracy made a tremendous blunder that refused to acknowledge these links … the people responsible for gathering this information, say in the C.I.A., are also the same people who contributed to the blunder on 9/11 and the deaths of 3,000 Americans, and so whenever this information emerges they move to discredit it.
Mylroie certainly doesn't make it sound like the CIA was claiming that there was a link between Saddam and bin Laden a month before the war began. Yet that is what the Bush team is saying today.
On March 12, 2003, Mylroie wrote an article in the New York Sun titled, "Blind to Saddam's 9-11 Role," in which she wrote:
Iraq, along with Al Qaeda, was most probably involved in the September 11 attacks, and President Bush understands that. Already on September 17, six days later, Mr. Bush affirmed, "I believe Iraq was involved, but I'm not going to strike them now," as Bob Woodward's "Bush at War" discloses. ... Indeed, at Thursday's press conference, Mr. Bush said that Iraq has financed and trained Al Qaeda and similar terrorist groups ... That is why Mr. Bush is willing to take the risk entailed in war against Iraq.
At one point, Mylroie attempted to convince the 9/11 Commission that "there is substantial reason to believe that these masterminds [of both the 1993 and 2001 Trade Center attacks] are Iraqi intelligence agents."
However, her testimony was apparently not persuasive because the Commission's final report states that the "Intelligence Community has no credible information that Baghdad had foreknowledge of the 11 September attacks or any other al-Qaida strike."
One of Mylroie's more recent ventures included writing a book titled, Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department tried to Stop the War on Terror. This title is somewhat baffling in light of the speeches in recent days by Bush himself stating that everyone was in agreement with his assessment of the need to go to war and that it was the evidence produced by the intelligence agencies and not his White House that led to the war against Iraq.
The fact is that in the run up to war, Mylroie wore a wide variety of hats. But one of her most important jobs by far came when she testified as an expert witness in a lawsuit against a group of defendants that included the Taliban, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, al-Qaeda, bin Laden, Saddam and the Republic of Iraq.
The suit was filed by two families on behalf of the estates of 9/11 victims, George Eric Smith, a senior business analyst for Sun Gard Asset Management, and Timothy Soulas, a senior managing director and partner at Cantor Fitzgerald Securities.
End Part I