a berlin blog
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a berlin blog |
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Tuesday, March 30, 2004 Against All EnemiesI just read an excerpt from Richard Clarke's blockbuster about the Bush White House and Iraq. The book was nicely timed for campaign season, but in fact it's about two years late. Clarke needed to come out during the long, noisy run-up to war. Radio Free Mike readers might remember how we banged on the Laurie Mylroie theory that al-Qaeda fronted for Saddam in the first World Trade Center bombing. We were swayed by it, but not fully convinced; we wanted more liberal friends to admit the theory existed, since Mylroie's book about Saddam (A Study of Revenge, later retitled The War Against America), was obviously the most compact summary of the White House's assumptions. We wanted it read and criticized. The most frustrating part of the debate was that even well-read liberals in San Francisco just dismissed the whole notion of a link between al-Qaeda and Saddam, without even knowing there was a theory behind it. Now, the theory turned out to be wrong. Mylroie may well go down in history as a nutcase. But she was Paul Wolfowitz's nutcase, and Cheney's nutcase; she needed to be aired and whacked like a dirty sheet.Clarke gets right to the point: On the morning of the 12th DOD's focus was already beginning to shift from al Qaeda. CIA was explicit now that al Qaeda was guilty of the attacks, but Paul Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld's deputy, was not persuaded. It was too sophisticated and complicated an operation, he said, for a terrorist group to have pulled off by itself, without a state sponsor -- Iraq must have been helping them. I had a flashback to Wolfowitz saying the very same thing in April when the administration had finally held its first deputy secretary-level meeting on terrorism. When I had urged action on al Qaeda then, Wolfowitz had harked back to the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, saying al Qaeda could not have done that alone and must have had help from Iraq. The focus on al Qaeda was wrong, he had said in April, we must go after Iraqi-sponsored terrorism. He had rejected my assertion and CIA's that there had been no Iraqi-sponsored terrorism against the United States since 1993. Now this line of thinking was coming back. ... straight from Laurie Mylroie. posted by Michael Scott Moore | 3:31 AM | |
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