So let’s get this straight: the Iraqis blew up TWA 800, choosing a date that was symbolic to them, and the US covered it up.
Why the cover up?
Let’s review some history.
1990: Iraq invades Kuwait, leading eventually to war with the US. Feb 27, 1991: Iraq withdraws from Kuwait and a ceasefire is negotiated.
End of 1992: a new US president; the military victor in Kuwait was defeated at home. Feb 28, 1993 (anniversary of the withdrawal from Kuwait, more or less): World Trade Centre bombed. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, gets away.
Mid-1993: The US destroys the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad, claiming this is in retaliation for a plot to kill former president Bush.
Jan 1995: Yousef is accidentally captured in the Philippines while working on Operation Bojinka, a plot to blow up a dozen planes in midair. One month later, the CIA had a man in northern Iraq, working with Chalabi’s INC on a plan to overthrow Saddam (but the NSC back in the US aborted the plan at the last moment).
Mid-1996: Yousef is on trial in NYC. July 1996: a plane blows up over NYC, just as in Bojinka, killing everyone on board. August 1996: the Iraqi Army goes north and drives the INC out of Iraqi Kurdistan.
What that says to me is that the Clinton administration thought Iraq was behind the 1993 WTC bombing, and behind Yousef’s terror campaign, but they didn’t want to say this in public. Instead, they tried to deal with the Iraq problem covertly and through other means. As to why Iraq would bomb a plane during the trial of their agent, I’d call it intimidation: don’t bring up the connection, or else we will wage guerrilla war inside your own borders.
I hadn’t realised the incredibly compelling link between McVeigh and Al Qaeda: I mean, his friend had once been in the same country as some members of Al Qaeda.
Quoting Richard Clarke’s book (chapter 5): ”… both Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days … 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. The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years earlier in, of all places, Oklahoma City.” (Cebu is the capital of Mindanao, home of the Abu Sayyaf group, the local al Qaeda affiliate.)
The anthrax letters were definitely a message from “from the true sponsor of 9/11”—which according to you is Iraq, right? So why didn’t you just say Iraq?
I was making an argument independently of what came before. If we just look at what happened in 2001, first you had the biggest terrorist attack ever (9/11) and then just one week later, weaponized anthrax was in the mail. So either these acts were carried out by the same group or by different groups. If it was the same group, then, since that anthrax could have killed thousands of people if dispersed in a public space rather than dispatched through the mail, it is reasonable to think that it was a warning of the next step.
And you’re right, that it took 18 months to organise a large scale invasion with a token international coalition suggests that the US was busy rolling up KSM’s part of Al Qaeda, who had a massive anthrax capability that they chose not to use and that hasn’t come out in any trial since.
KSM—the mastermind of 9/11 - was paraded on TV on March 1, 2003. The first concrete deadline for Saddam was announced by Bush on March 17, when he was given 48 hours to get out of Iraq. I wouldn’t say that they had only just caught KSM. Perhaps they had him for a while before that. But I strongly doubt that the timing of the two events was unrelated.
Also, you don’t need to have a massive anthrax capability in order to make a threat like the one in the letters; you just need to produce enough to put in a letter. Either way, if possible, the recipient would want to get to the bottom of that threat and minimize it, before doing anything which risked bringing on a full-scale anthrax attack.
As for Cheney’s remarks about Iraq and al Qaeda… They still fall short of definitely attributing 9/11 to Iraq. And they certainly didn’t attribute anything like TWA 800 or WTC 1993 to Iraq. Politicians modulate what they say with various possible futures in mind. Cheney was pushing a boundary without overstepping it.
[North Korean stuff]
I’ll get back to you on this part. It’s a long time since I thought about this.
You’re not a very good rationalist.
As I have very few good reasons to talk about this stuff, and plenty of reasons not to, perhaps you’re right. :-)
Let’s review some history.
1990: Iraq invades Kuwait, leading eventually to war with the US. Feb 27, 1991: Iraq withdraws from Kuwait and a ceasefire is negotiated.
End of 1992: a new US president; the military victor in Kuwait was defeated at home. Feb 28, 1993 (anniversary of the withdrawal from Kuwait, more or less): World Trade Centre bombed. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, gets away.
Mid-1993: The US destroys the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad, claiming this is in retaliation for a plot to kill former president Bush.
Jan 1995: Yousef is accidentally captured in the Philippines while working on Operation Bojinka, a plot to blow up a dozen planes in midair. One month later, the CIA had a man in northern Iraq, working with Chalabi’s INC on a plan to overthrow Saddam (but the NSC back in the US aborted the plan at the last moment).
Mid-1996: Yousef is on trial in NYC. July 1996: a plane blows up over NYC, just as in Bojinka, killing everyone on board. August 1996: the Iraqi Army goes north and drives the INC out of Iraqi Kurdistan.
What that says to me is that the Clinton administration thought Iraq was behind the 1993 WTC bombing, and behind Yousef’s terror campaign, but they didn’t want to say this in public. Instead, they tried to deal with the Iraq problem covertly and through other means. As to why Iraq would bomb a plane during the trial of their agent, I’d call it intimidation: don’t bring up the connection, or else we will wage guerrilla war inside your own borders.
Quoting Richard Clarke’s book (chapter 5): ”… both Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days … 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. The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years earlier in, of all places, Oklahoma City.” (Cebu is the capital of Mindanao, home of the Abu Sayyaf group, the local al Qaeda affiliate.)
I was making an argument independently of what came before. If we just look at what happened in 2001, first you had the biggest terrorist attack ever (9/11) and then just one week later, weaponized anthrax was in the mail. So either these acts were carried out by the same group or by different groups. If it was the same group, then, since that anthrax could have killed thousands of people if dispersed in a public space rather than dispatched through the mail, it is reasonable to think that it was a warning of the next step.
KSM—the mastermind of 9/11 - was paraded on TV on March 1, 2003. The first concrete deadline for Saddam was announced by Bush on March 17, when he was given 48 hours to get out of Iraq. I wouldn’t say that they had only just caught KSM. Perhaps they had him for a while before that. But I strongly doubt that the timing of the two events was unrelated.
Also, you don’t need to have a massive anthrax capability in order to make a threat like the one in the letters; you just need to produce enough to put in a letter. Either way, if possible, the recipient would want to get to the bottom of that threat and minimize it, before doing anything which risked bringing on a full-scale anthrax attack.
As for Cheney’s remarks about Iraq and al Qaeda… They still fall short of definitely attributing 9/11 to Iraq. And they certainly didn’t attribute anything like TWA 800 or WTC 1993 to Iraq. Politicians modulate what they say with various possible futures in mind. Cheney was pushing a boundary without overstepping it.
I’ll get back to you on this part. It’s a long time since I thought about this.
As I have very few good reasons to talk about this stuff, and plenty of reasons not to, perhaps you’re right. :-)