Ah, to recall the pernicious confluence of incompetence and mendacity that was the Bush administration:
When the Pentagon’s internal think tank decided in 2004 it needed a better understanding of Al Qaeda, it turned to an unlikely source: the terrorism analyst Laurie Mylroie, who was known as the chief purveyor of the discredited idea that Saddam Hussein was behind Sept. 11 and many other attacks carried out by Al Qaeda.
Mylroie was paid roughly $75,000 to produce a 300-page study, “The History of Al Qaida,” for the Defense Department think tank, known as the Office of Net Assessment, a DOD spokesman tells us. The study, which is dated September 2005, was posted on an intelligence blog last month.
It documents the development of Al Qaeda and spends many pages dancing around the theory that has defined Mylroie’s career — that key Qaeda leaders acted at the behest of the Iraqi regime. She also argues that group-think among U.S. analysts has obscured the true nature of the terrorist group.
Those who know Mylroie’s work are shocked that the Pentagon would hire her.
“I think that she has zero credibility on these issues,” says terrorism expert Peter Bergen, who dubbed Mylroie “a crackpot” in a 2003 Washington Monthly profile.
Why the harsh assessment? Well, in addition to her “Saddam was behind 9/11″ hobby horse, she pretty much ascribed everything under the sun to the purported omnipotent dictator who, in actuality, was clinging to power atop a crumbling regime with limited military, economic and inspirational power – not to mention a deep-seated and natural antipathy to al-Qaeda, a sentiment that was returned in full.
Once an assistant professor at Harvard, Mylroie made her name as a Middle East expert in the 1980s. But after the 1993 WTC attack, she became convinced that evidence ignored by virtually everyone else proved Saddam was sponsoring Al Qaeda. She expanded on that theory after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing (which she linked to Iraq) and September 11 (ditto), culminating in the book Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein’s War against America, published by the American Enterprise Institute in October 2001.
Mylroie’s allies in the Bush Administration included Iraq hawks Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, and others. “The elaborate conspiracy theories she had propounded–dismissed as bizarre and implausible by the U.S. law enforcement and intelligence communities–would have enormous influence within the administration,” reported David Corn and Michael Isikoff in their book Hubris.
The only two options that could explain away the affections of Perle and Wolfowitz are that they were either ignorant and incurious enough to actually believe Mylroie’s bizarre theories, or that they found her perspective useful in service of their ulterior motives (initially, paving the way for the disastrous invasion of Iraq, and subsequently seeking to find some plausible justification to paper over the catastrophe). I lean toward the latter. After all, they’re not Doug Feith.
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