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.