National Review
Online
April 05, 2004,
8:47 a.m.Dont Look at
MeDick Clarkes reversed
reality.By Laurie Mylroie
In 1992, when Richard Clarke assumed the
counterterrorism portfolio in the White House, terrorism was not a serious
problem. Libya's downing of Pan Am 103 four years before had been the last
major attack on a U.S. target. Yet when Clarke left his post in October
2001, terrorism had become the single-greatest threat to America.
Clarke would have us believe this happened because of events beyond
anyone's ability to control. He argues, moreover, that the Bush
administration has adopted a fatally wrong approach to the war on terror
by including states, particularly Iraq, in its response to the 9/11
attacks.
Clarke's tenure as America's top counterterrorism
official is essentially contemporaneous with the Clinton administration.
Bill Clinton took what had been considered a national-security issue, in
which the U.S. focused on punishing and deterring terrorist states, and
turned it into a law-enforcement issue, focused on arresting and
convicting individual perpetrators. That was certainly an easier response,
but it was completely ineffectual. In fact, it had created a very serious
vulnerability long before September 11, 2001. Clarke's book, Against
All Enemies is, essentially, an attempt to blame the Bush
administration for 9/11, while exonerating Clinton (and therefore Clarke).
The reality is quite the reverse.
CLARKE VS. MEAn audacious series of terrorist attacks began in
the 1990's, starting with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center one
month into Clinton's first term in office. New York FBI was the lead
investigative agency, and senior officials there, including director Jim
Fox, believed Iraq was involved. As Fox wrote, "Although we are unable to
say with certainty the Iraqis were behind the bombing, that is
certainly the theory accepted by most of the veteran investigators"
(italics added).
Clarke vehemently rejects this view, calling it "the totally
discredited Laurie Mylroie theory." While this theory is indeed the
central thesis of my book, Study
of Revenge, one wonders why Clarke would not attribute it to Fox
and the other FBI agents who did the hard work to uncover the evidence of
Iraq's role. Gil Childers, lead prosecutor in the first World Trade Center
bombing trial, was considered by other U.S. officials the expert on that
attack. Childers described Study of Revenge as "work the U.S.
government should have done."
Clarke's office was obliged to review the book in the spring of 2001.
He dismissed it then, as he does now. He systematically
ignores or distorts the information suggesting an Iraqi link to the 1993
bombing, including the critical question of the identity of its
mastermind, Ramzi Yousef; as well as the identity of Yousef's "uncle,"
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks; along with the
identities of other key terrorists in that remarkable "family."
Clarke maliciously misrepresents my argument on these points. After
stating the obvious that Yousef is indeed the terrorist the government
says he is, Clarke writes: "That did not stop author Laurie Mylroie from
asserting that the real Ramzi Yousef was not in the federal Metropolitan
Detention Center in Manhattan, but lounging at the right hand of Saddam
Hussein in Baghdad."
Yet that is not my position: "Ramzi Yousef was arrested and
returned to the United States on February 7, 1995" (Study of
Revenge, p. 212). This very serious dispute relates instead to
Yousef's real identity. Former CIA Director James Woolsey has observed,
"For Clarke to say something like that is like the 13th chime of the
clock. Not only is it bizarre in and of itself, it calls into
question...everything from the same source."
But while Clarke totally rejects the possibility that Iraq was behind
the first attack on the Trade Center, he nevertheless entertains the
possibility of a foreign dimension to the Oklahoma City bombing: "Ramzi
Yousef and [Terry] Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same
days Could the al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the
angry American?... We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his
Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that
Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United
States."
Clarke might have added that Nichols met his (underage) wife,
