Readers of this blog know of my high regard for Laurie Mylroie, an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign, and author of “The War Against America” (HarperCollins, 2001). Her views are noted in two of my previous posts on the Richard Clarke affair, here and here.
In this Opinion Journal op-ed, Ms. Mylroie takes Mr. Clarke to the woodshed for his refusal to acknowledge clear signs of Iraqi support and involvement in terrorism against the United States:

Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him. When he cannot win the argument, he cheats. And that is what he has done again in the pages of his book. In order to explain why he opposed the war with Iraq, Mr. Clarke mischaracterizes the arguments of those of us who favored it. The key mischaracterization turns on an important intelligence debate about the identity of the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This mastermind goes by the name of “Ramzi Yousef.” But who was “Ramzi Yousef”?

As she does persuasively in her book, Ms. Mylroie sets forth a strong factual basis for the position that Ms. Yousef uses a false identify and that, whoever he really is, he has close connections with Iraq’s security services under Saddam Hussein. She then concludes by bringing home why these issues are important:

The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim’s file had to have been switched. The original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef’s. The only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a “legend” for one of its terrorist agents.
The debate over Yousef’s identity has enormous implications for the 9/11 strikes. U.S. authorities now understand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed masterminded those attacks. But Mohammed’s identity, too, is based on Kuwaiti documents that predate Kuwait’s liberation from Iraq. According to these documents, Mohammed is Ramzi Yousef’s “uncle,” and two other al Qaeda masterminds are Yousef’s “brothers.”
A former deputy chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, Amos Gilboa, has observed that “it’s obvious” that these identities are fabricated. A family is not at the core of the most ambitious, most lethal series of terrorist assaults in U.S. history. These are Iraqi agents, given “legends,” on the basis of Kuwait’s files, while Iraq occupied the country.
When Mr. Clarke reported, six days after the 9/11 strikes, that no evidence existed linking them to Iraq, or Iraq to al Qaeda, he was reiterating the position he and others had taken throughout the Clinton years. They systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These officials were charged with defending us “against all enemies.” Their own prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation vulnerable.

Paul Sperry of the Frontpage Magazine reports that a former FBI linguist has made potentially explosive allegations to the 9/11 Commission regarding the subversive actions of a key FBI Middle Eastern agent. Read the entire article, but here is tidbit:

When linguist Sibel Dinez Edmonds showed up for her first day of work at the FBI, a week after the 9-11 attacks, she expected to find a somber atmosphere. Instead, she was offered cookies filled with dates from party bowls set out in the room where other Middle Eastern linguists with top-secret security clearance translate terror-related communications.
She knew the dessert is customarily served in the Middle East at weddings, births and other celebrations, and asked what the happy occasion was. To her shock, she was told the Arab linguists were celebrating the terrorist attacks on America, as if they were some joyous event. Right in front of her supervisor, one translator cheered:
“It’s about time they got a taste of what they’ve been giving the Middle East.”
She found out later that it was her supervisor’s wife who helped organize the office party there at the bureau’s Washington field office, just four blocks from the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

The credibility of these allegations coming from a former (and presumably disgruntled) employee is still untested. However, given the U.S. intelligence failures documented in Gerald Posner‘s “Why America Slept,” Laurie Mylroie‘s “The War Against America” and “Bush vs. the Beltway,” and Robert Baer‘s “See No Evil,” these allegations need to be investigated carefully.
Meanwhile, in Policy Review, Richard L. Russell, professor of national security affairs at the National Defense University?s Near East-South Asia Center for Strategic Studies, provides an insightful analysis of the intrinsic problems in the U.S. intelligence apparatus and proposals for remedying them.

The following link will take you to the transcript of CIA Director George Tenet‘s address on U.S. prewar intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.