Laurie Mylroie

Mylroie is an adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank often identified with leading neocons.

David Corn wrote that "what Mylroie says matters" because "she has influential admirers," most notably Richard Perle and R. James Woolsey, Jr..

Mylroie was adviser on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign.

Mylroie is the author of Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a book published by the American Enterprise Institute in 2000. It pushes her theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

According to writer Peter Bergen, Mylroie's theory was the basis for "the belief that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States," which "amounted to a theological conviction within the administration, a conviction successfully sold to the American public."

According to Bergen, "Mylroie and the neocon hawks worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the '93 Trade Center bombing. Its acknowledgements fulsomely thanked John R. Bolton and the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as 'splendid and wholly convincing.' I. Lewis Libby, now Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff, is thanked for his 'generous and timely assistance.' Others who merit expressions of gratitude in Myleroie's acknowledgements are Cheney's foreign-policy advisors John Hannah and David Wurmser as well as Francis Brooke, a principal Washington lobbyist for the Iraqi National Congress.

And it appears that Paul Wolfowitz himself was instrumental in the genesis of Study of Revenge: His then-wife is credited with having 'fundamentally shaped the book,' while of Wolfowitz, she says: 'At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult.'"

Bergen comments, "Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-U.S. terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the '93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America." 

Newsweek reports that at the heart of Mylroie's theory is the belief that Pakistani Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of the WTC bombing, and Abdul Basit, a Pakistani man who in 1990 was living in Kuwait, are two different people. The FBI has maintained that they are one and the same. Wolfowitz believed in Mylroie's "switched identities" theory enough that he persuaded the "Justice Department shortly after September 11 to provide a government jet and FBI staff support for a secret mission to England by former CIA director James Woolsey. The idea behind the mission was to check fingerprints on file in Swansea, Wales, where Basit had once gone to school, and compare them to the fingerprints of the Ramzi Yousef in prison. ... Justice Department officials tell NEWSWEEK that the results of the Woolsey mission were exactly what the FBI had predicted: that the fingerprints were in fact identical. After the match was made, FBI officials assumed at the time that it had put the Mylroie theory to rest."

Mylroie believes that there is an internal administration dynamic between handling attacks as individual criminal matters which result in individual prosecutions, and holding investigations which find out what actually happened. A prosecutor's goal is a conviction, plain and simple. She claims that the terrorist attacks during the Clinton administration were handled by agencies which sought individuals to punish, denigrating information which pointed to "false flag" support by larger players.

Also see Bush vs. the Beltway. How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror (2003 book)


 * Advisory Committee, Washington Kurdish Institute

External Resources

 * Neocon Europe, Laurie Mylroie
 * A list of actual articles written by Mylroie.
 * Laurie Mylroie, "Iraqi Complicity in the World Trade Center Bombing and Beyond," Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, June 2001.
 * David Corn, "The Neocons' New Enemy: The CIA: Laurie Mylroie's crazy ideas about 9/11", LA Weekly, August 29 - September 4, 2003.
 * Kurt Nimmo, "Right Wing Think Tanks and Information Warfare", Progressive Trail, undated, accessed March 2004.
 * Peter Bergen, "Armchair Provocateur: Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons' favorite conspiracy theorist," Washington Monthly, December 2003.
 * Jonathan Schanzer, "Saddam's Ambassador to al Qaeda," The Weekly Standard, March 1, 2004, supports Mylroie's claim of links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. For more information about Schanzer, visit his blog: http://schanzer.blogspot.com
 * Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, "The Enemy Within," Newsweek, April 21, 2004.
 * Murray Waas, "Key Intelligence Briefing Kept From Hill Panel," National Journal, November 30, 2005.
 * American Enterprise Institute, "Study of Revenge," 1993 Trade Center bombing had its origins in an FBI undercover operation.