Yus,
thanks for the post. I must assert that i am not convinced that saddam
Hussein was behind this attack. I have been telling people at my job that
the United States will try to blame Iraq in one way or another.The attacks
were committed by mindless criminals.
I only hope that the United States would take this opportunity to settle
their score with Iraq. Listening to Jesse Helmes gave me the impression that
they will attack Iraq.
Pasamba


>From: Yusupha C Jow <[log in to unmask]>
>Reply-To: The Gambia and related-issues mailing list
><[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: THE IRAQ CONNECTION.
>Date: Tue, 25 Sep 2001 17:20:45 EDT
>
>THE IRAQ CONNECTION.
>Blood Baath
>by R. James Woolsey
>
>Post date 09.13.01 | Issue date 09.24.01
>In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's attacks, attention has focused on
>terrorist chieftain Osama bin Laden. And he may well be responsible. But
>intelligence and law enforcement officials investigating the case would do
>well to at least consider another possibility: that the attacks--whether
>perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates or by others--were sponsored,
>supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein. To this end,
>investigators should revisit the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. A
>few years ago, the facts in that case seemed straightforward: The
>mastermind
>behind the bombing, who went by the alias Ramzi Yousef, was in fact a
>27-year-old Pakistani named Abdul Basit. But late last year, AEI Press
>published Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against
>America,
>a careful book about the bombing by AEI scholar Laurie Mylroie. The book's
>startling thesis is that the original theory of the attack, advanced by
>James
>Fox (the FBI's chief investigator into the 1993 bombing until his
>replacement
>in 1994) was correct: that Yousef was not Abdul Basit but rather an Iraqi
>agent who had assumed the latter's identity when police files in Kuwait
>(where the real Abdul Basit lived in 1990) were doctored by Iraqi
>intelligence during the occupation of Kuwait. If Mylroie and Fox (who died
>in
>1997) are right, then it was Iraq that went after the World Trade Center
>last
>time. Which makes it much more plausible that Iraq has done so again.
>According to the theory of the 1993 bombing embraced by federal prosecutors
>and the Clinton administration, Yousef/Abdul Basit was just another Middle
>Eastern student who became radicalized in his early twenties. But it is
>worth
>noting that the only two publicly reported items suggesting that Yousef and
>Abdul Basit are the same man could very easily have been products of Iraqi
>tampering with Kuwaiti police files: a few photocopied pages from earlier
>Abdul Basit passports that had clearly been tampered with, provided by
>Yousef
>in New York in 1992 to get a Pakistani passport in Abdul Basit's name, and
>fingerprints matching Yousef's found in Abdul Basit's police file in
>Kuwait.
>It is also worth noting that Abdul Basit and his family, who lived in
>Kuwait,
>disappeared during the Iraqi occupation, and the family has never
>reappeared.
>Was this a random tragedy of war or part of an effort to set up a false
>identity for Yousef? Moreover, the Fox/Mylroie theory--that Yousef, via
>Iraqi
>intelligence, stole Abdul Basit's identity--would explain a number of
>troubling differences between Abdul Basit in the summer of 1989 (when he
>left
>the United Kingdom after three years of study) and Yousef in September 1992
>(when he arrived in New York). If the two are indeed the same man, then,
>over
>the course of three years, he would have: (a) grown four inches (from five
>foot eight inches to six feet) in his twenties; (b) put on between 35 and
>40
>pounds; (c) developed a deformed eye; (d) developed smaller ears and a
>smaller mouth; (e) gone from being an innovative computer programmer to
>being
>computer-challenged; (f) aged substantially more than three years in
>appearance; and (g) changed from being a quiet, smiling young man
>respectful
>to women to a rather different one (a sound file in Yousef's computer, for
>example, includes his voice saying "Fuck, fuck, fuck" and "Shut up, you
>bitch"). What incentive would the U.S. government have had to overlook
>these
>changes, stipulate that Abdul Basit and Yousef were the same person, and
>turn
>away from any suggestion that Saddam was behind the first WTC attack? One
>can
>only speculate. But by arguing that the 1993 WTC bombing and a separate,
>FBI-thwarted plot to bomb New York tunnels and buildings were connected as
>parts of a common conspiracy, prosecutors made convicting the participants,
>under the very broad seditious conspiracy law, far simpler. As for the
>Clinton administration itself, there would be less need to confront Saddam,
>and perhaps less need to make hard choices, if it didn't finger him as
>being
>behind the WTC bombing. And indeed, ever since Fox's ouster, federal
>prosecutors and the White House have hewed to the line that most terrorist
>attacks on the United States are either the products of "loose networks" of
>folks who just somehow come together or are masterminded by the mysterious
>and unaccountable bin Laden. Explicit state sponsorship, especially by
>Iraq,
>has not been on the agenda. The Clinton administration, meanwhile, treated
>Saddam--in former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger's famous
>metaphor--like the mole in an international version of the "Whack-a-Mole"
>carnival game: If you bopped him on the head, he'd stay in his hole for a
>while. But what has he been doing while he's down there? If Fox and Mylroie
>are right, quite possibly planning, financing, and backing terrorist
>operations against the United States. As of yet, there is no evidence of
>explicit state sponsorship of the September 11 attacks. But absence of
>evidence is not evidence of absence. Does it not seem curious that bin
>Laden
>issues fatwas, pushes videotapes, quotes poems, and orders his followers to
>talk loudly and often about his role in attacks on us? Does someone want
>our
>focus to be solely on bin Laden's hard-to-reach self, and not on a senior
>partner? If we hope to answer that question, the 1993 WTC bombing is a good
>place to start looking. No one other than the prosecutors, the Clinton
>Justice Department, and the FBI had access to the materials surrounding
>that
>case until they were presented in court, because they were virtually all
>obtained by a federal grand jury and hence kept not only from the public
>but
>from the rest of the government under the extreme secrecy requirements of
>Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure. Now a new
>administration, a new attorney general, and a new FBI director should
>investigate the materials that Abdul Basit handled while in the United
>Kingdom in 1988 and 1989, which were taken into custody by Scotland Yard.
>If
>those materials have Yousef's fingerprints on them, then the Fox/Mylroie
>theory is likely wrong. But if they don't, then Yousef was probably a
>creature of Iraqi intelligence. Which means that Saddam still considered
>himself at war with the United States in 1993. And, tragically, he may
>still
>today. R. JAMES WOOLSEY is a partner at Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C.
>He
>served as director of central intelligence from February 1993 to January
>1995.
>
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