A Look Back
After the events of September 11, 2001 everyone who had the slightest interest in politics and public affairs became somewhat more interested in issues of foreign policy and national security. In particular, questions about al-Qaeda and international terrorism that had previously been somewhat obscure leaped to the forefront of the public consciousness. In those confusing times, many turned to the country’s stock of prestigious public affairs magazines seeking enlightenment. And of the people who took that course, some proportion — myself included — turned to The New Republic which was, at the time, a well-regarded weekly magazine of the center-left. Its editors decided that what the public needed to read was James Woolsey recycling a version of Laurie Mylroie’s conspiracy theories — an argument that the initial focus on Osama bin Laden was misplaced and that attention should turn instead to Saddam Hussein who, according to Woolsey, was in fact responsible for many terrorist attacks that had been wrongly attributed to al-Qaeda. Woolsey argued that “investigators should revisit the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center” and then they would see the correctness of the Saddam-centric worldview.
As Peter Bergan has pointed out there’s no evidence to support the Woolsey/Mylroie theory of the case:
Moreover, Mylroie’s broader contention that the first Trade Center attack was an Iraqi plot is, to put it mildly, not shared by the intelligence and law-enforcement officials familiar with the subsequent investigation. Vince Cannistraro, who headed the C.I.A.’s Counterterrorist Center in the early 1990s, told me, “My view is that Laurie has an obsession with Iraq and trying to link Saddam to global terrorism. Years of strenuous effort to prove the case have been unavailing.” Ken Pollack, a former C.I.A. analyst, scarcely to be described as “soft” on Saddam–his book The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq made the most authoritative argument for toppling the dictator–dismissed Mylroie’s theories to me: “The NSC [National Security Council] had the intelligence community look very hard at the allegations that the Iraqis were behind the 1993 Trade Center attack. Finding those links would have been very beneficial to the U.S. government at the time, but the intelligence community said that there were no such links.”
Mary Jo White, the no-nonsense U.S. attorney who successfully prosecuted both the Trade Center case and the al Qaeda bombers behind the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa, told me that there was no evidence to support Mylroie’s claims: “We investigated the Trade Center attack thoroughly, and other than the evidence that Ramzi Yousef traveled on a phony Iraqi passport, that was the only connection to Iraq.” Neil Herman, the F.B.I. official who headed the Trade Center probe, explained that following the attacks, one of the lower-level conspirators, Abdul Rahman Yasin, did flee New York to live with a family member in Baghdad: “The one glaring connection that can’t be overlooked is Yasin. We pursued that on every level, traced him to a relative and a location, and we made overtures to get him back.” However, Herman says that Yasin’s presence in Baghdad does not mean Iraq sponsored the attack: “We looked at that rather extensively. There were no ties to the Iraqi government.” In sum, by the mid-’90s, the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the F.B.I., the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York, the C.I.A., the N.S.C., and the State Department had all found no evidence implicating the Iraqi government in the first Trade Center attack.
But at The New Republic there are no editorial standards whatsoever when the aim is supporting a hawkish foreign policy, so the editors decided to publish Woolsey’s article and help mislead TNR’s audience.
24 Responses to “A Look Back”
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September 11th, 2008 at 11:21 am
I was in the World Trade Center complex 15 minutes before the first plane hit (exiting the subway), and a block away when the planes hit. That probably doesn’t give me any more standing to vent my feelings, but it sure as hell gives me more standing that fucking mindless rah rah nationalist scum from Kansas.
I’m not one of the conspiracy theorists – I have no doubt that Al Queda was responsible, in the sense that they carried out the attack – but, in terms of the level of overall moral responsibility for the attack, I’d say
(1) U.S. foriegn policy for the last 60 years
(2) The negligence of the Bush administration in the months prior to the attack, and, a distant, distant third
(3) Al Queda.
Setting that aside, the response of the United States to the attack has been obscene. Whatever moral judgments you want to make about Al Queda – and, as much as I understand their justifiable hatred of the United States, I approve of neither their methods or goals – it seems to me indisputable that, in terms of moral/criminal culpability our reaction has eclipsed the attacks themselves by at least two orders of magnitude.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:37 am
And while I imagine that I’ve already offended you all considerably, let me do some more. Regarding the Kansas comment, let me clarify – yes, I do have contempt for ignorant crackers everywhere, especially in the south. If it’s a cultural war they want, let’s give it to them. I want to make life increasingly uncomfortable for those people – marginalize them culturally, politically, and economically. Make them, in effect, second class citezens.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:37 am
I cannot say it enough, the editors of TNR, Christopher Hitchens, Thomas Friedman, et. al. were, like Bush himself, consumed with fear on 9/11. More than that, they showed themselves as cowards – Bush by running, the ‘experts’ by turning to the first simplistic, pleasing story. Frightened people eschew complexity and non-finality, this was like running into the arms of a comforting bodyguard. Plus, don’t forget the simple revenge factor, which motivated Friedman.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:46 am
I’m inclined to believe Saddam wasn’t involved in the first WTC attack, but our intelligence agencies are so lame that we never know anything for sure.
September 11th, 2008 at 11:49 am
I think it is way off the mark to call The New republic a magazine of the “center-left” as of 9/11/2001. It had long since ceased being anything but a PR arm of AIPAC.
September 11th, 2008 at 12:27 pm
3rd policeman, imagine being consumed by fear after 9/11! Me, I knew AQ would lose interest and never bother us again. After all, they had made their point, which we just needed to absorb. They had to teach us Crusaders a lesson that we can’t impose our values on them. Our own intolerance and aggression was the root cause of 9/11. Kumbaya, my friend!
September 11th, 2008 at 12:38 pm
The only thing Al Qaeda is guilty of is handing out teddy bears to frightened children. Meanwhile, before we invaded Saddam was mere months away from having the technology to blow up the moon!
September 11th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
I do have contempt for ignorant crackers everywhere, especially in the south. If it’s a cultural war they want, let’s give it to them. I want to make life increasingly uncomfortable for those people – marginalize them culturally, politically, and economically. Make them, in effect, second class citezens.
But what if that turns them into terrorists in sixty years?
September 11th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Yeah, they might start bombing abortion clinics or killing gay people and getting away with it.
September 11th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
I’ll say it once and I’ll say it again… the New Republic is a flaming bag of dog shit. But we knew that WAY before 9/11. Stephen Glass anyone?
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