New York Times Sunday Book Review November 14, 2004 Letters The Iraqi Connection
To the Editor: In his review of ''The Connection: How Al Qaeda's Collaboration With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America,'' by Stephen F. Hayes (Sept. 19), Gideon Rose dismisses my work. It is far more substantial than Rose suggests. Fundamental anomalies exist in the official United States explanation for the mega-terrorist plots, starting with the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and culminating in 9/11. Above all, the masterminds of those attacks are said to be a family: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and at least four nephews (including Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing). These individuals are Baluch, a Sunni Muslim people living along the Iranian-Pakistani border. The United States has had virtually nothing to do with them, and they have no evident motive for these assaults -- save that Iraq had extensive ties with the Baluch, using them as spies and saboteurs in its earlier conflict with Iran's Shiite regime. No other major terrorist group has a family at its core. This family was supposedly born and raised in Kuwait. Their identities are based on Kuwaiti documents that predate Kuwait's liberation in 1991. It is at least possible that these identities were falsified, as Iraq had custody of those documents, while it occupied Kuwait. Following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, senior officials in the New York office of the F.B.I. believed Iraq was behind the attack. Reports in The New York Times hinted at an Iraqi connection. Rose (and others) might do well to review that material, before cavalierly dismissing the possibility of Iraq's involvement with this family that twice attacked the Trade Center towers. Laurie Mylroie Washington
