Your conspiracy theory doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the US government wanted to hide Iraq’s supposed involvement in 9-11 and anthrax letters, then why did it repeatedly claim that Iraq was colluding with Al Qaeda between 2001 and the invasion?
If you posit that before 9/11, the US government worked to prevent people from understanding what was happening, then after 9/11, some claims of a connection are safe, and some are not safe. Flight TWA 800 blew up over New York on July 17, 1996, July 17 being the day of the Baathist revolution in Iraq. Partisans of a cover-up hold that the investigation was stage-managed so as to favor the hypothesis of an accident, and then retired when enough people had stopped paying attention. It would be risky to revive the discussion of that incident if there was a cover-up. Whereas the idea that Iraqi intelligence had a man in Kurdistan in 2001, teaching Kurdish Islamists rudimentary chemical-warfare techniques, is a safe thing to talk about. It implies the possibility of Saddam getting together with al Qaeda, without implying that they already did so.
An enormous number of claims and counter-claims were made about the Iraq/AQ connection. Who made the claims, why, and with what degree of sincerity and plausibility also varies greatly. You had western intelligence sources feeding stories to tabloids, you had regional enemies of Saddam fabricating tall tales. So there was always a lot of noise. Then there are the key documents forming the “narrative of the state”, like pre-war statements by the US government to the UN or the Congress, or post-war assessments like the 9/11 Commission report. They offer a history resembling the one you find on Wikipedia.
Then there are a few people offering an alternative history, notably Laurie Mylroie and Jayna Davis. I find that these people have, not just opponents who defend an orthodoxy about al Qaeda (e.g. Peter Bergen), but they have friends from the intelligence agencies who I think act more like handlers.
Thus Mylroie was often advised by James Woolsey, Clinton’s first director of intelligence. Mylroie claims that “Ramzi Yousef” and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, masterminds of the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, respectively, were agents of Iraq, working in the jihadist milieu, and she has some evidence for this. However, she then has a contortion of argument according to which these are the names of innocent Kuwaiti guest-workers whose identities were stolen during the Iraqi occupation and used by agents of Iraqi intelligence. Only the real Mylroie fans ever took that argument seriously, and the fact that KSM’s cousin Zahid Sheikh Mohammed is known to be part of the jihadi milieu pretty much proves that the theory of the “innocent original KSM” makes no sense. However, Mylroie’s theories were first propagated in the early 1990s, before al Qaeda became public knowledge. They seem to me like a half-truth, meant to point the finger for WTC 1993 at Iraq, without revealing too much about the guys who liaised with the mujahideen, because these guys were western assets (against Russia) in the 1980s before they became Iraqi assets in the 1990s.
As for Jayna Davis, her specialty was the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and if she had “handlers”, they were Patrick Lang and Larry Johnson, two intelligence veterans who for a time endorsed her discovery of Iraqi connections around the bombing, but who proposed that Iran was the state sponsor. Again, that would fit the half-truth template, but this time from the liberal side of deep politics, the one that didn’t want a war with Iraq. I’ll just point out that in his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke (who is almost the definition of consensus reality when it comes to the recent history of anti-American terrorism) manages to mention that Timothy McVeigh’s pal Terry Nichols was in the Philippines at the same time that KSM and Ramzi Yousef were working on Operation Bojinka, and even muses in his book about whether Nichols met with Yousef to acquire bombing expertise.
I could go on at great length. And then there’s the anthrax letters, which are either an attempt to link 9/11 to the Iraqi WMD issue, or a message from the true sponsor of 9/11 saying we have weaponized anthrax, this is the next stage of escalation, one that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands if it’s released in the open, and not just mailed in letters. Contrary to your assertion that the US invaded Iraq “as soon as possible”, in fact there was a period of 18 months between 9/11 and the invasion, and only at the very last moment was a concrete deadline provided to Saddam, and only after KSM had been captured and publicly displayed in Pakistan. It is at least consistent with the idea that the US spent those 18 months penetrating and shutting down the command-and-control structure in charge of KSM’s part of AQ, before they dared to invade. (And it’s interesting that KSM was apprehended at the home of a microbiologist in Pakistan.)
even if Aum was full of “North Korean agents” (evidence?)
I would have to dig up some old notes, but there were a number of ethnic Koreans playing crucial roles—in the sarin release, in the violent side of the cult, in the assassination of Aum’s “science minister” after the attack—and there’s also a few other connections. There was suspicion on the Japanese right that North Korea was involved. But the very best thing I ever found was a story in a British paper (again, I would have to dig to find it again, but I should be able to do so), on the day before the attack, talking about a North Korean plot to employ BW or CW in Japan. (That’s what I remember, details may be a little off.) I consider that story to be the fruit of western signals intelligence, the collaboration of American and British intelligence, and the use of friendly journalists to act as proxies in communication with rogue states. A related example is that a day or so before the 2006 North Korean nuclear tests, there was a story in the Australian media about North Korean nuclear collaboration with Myanmar. The exact mechanics and motivations remain obscure to me, but I think these “leaks” are meant to be seen by the rogue states (who of course monitor what is being said about them). It’s a form of signaling.
Don’t tell me, North Korea has secretly had the bomb since 1973, right?
The “first Korean nuclear crisis” occurred in 1992-1993. It didn’t really resolve until after Kim Il Sung died in mid-1994. That’s the northeast-Asian geopolitical context to the Aum sarin attack of 1995 - Communism had collapsed in most places outside Korea, North Korea started diverting plutonium from its reactors, the Great Leader who was supposed to reunite Korea died. The regime would have had plans for the achievement of Korean reunification including military methods and guerrilla attacks in South Korea and Japan. So whether they had a working nuke or just the ingredients for it, I don’t know, but the nuclear issue was part of the picture. (It’s even been speculated that Pakistan’s sixth nuke test in 1998 was in fact a North Korean nuke—a way for them to test a device outside their own borders.)
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? Going back to your four “reasons for obfuscation”:
Because the US was unable to retaliate? - oh no, it was already bombing Iraq and enforcing a no-fly zone at that time. The US just wanted to ignore a terrorist attack by its enemy? Or maybe the Clinton administration wanted to maintain the flexibility to wait for the Iraqis to pull off a much worse terrorist attack, then wait to be voted out out of office, then deflect attention from the link to Iraq by blaming Iraq for colluding with the terrorists? Or maybe the US had “lied about previous attacks”—like the Golf of Tonkin incident—so that naturally stopped them being able to reveal the truth about TWA 800.
I am beginning to see the power of your historical analysis.
Yes, a lot of people said different things about the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. So when Cheney said “there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s” and “an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta”, his agenda there was to distance Iraq from 9/11. Because a lot of people had said all kinds of things, so who would pay attention to the claims of a mere Vice-President?
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. How has the mainstream consensus opinion been able to ignore this incredibly compelling historical evidence?
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.
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? Unless maybe you sense that leaving ambiguous phrases in your theory makes it hard to debunk… but no, that’s ridiculous.
And yeah, I have to concede that if your old notes say that some “ethnic Koreans” played key roles in the Aum attack, then—ignoring the bogus mainstream consensus that the main high-ups in the cult were Japanese—that proves that North Korea must have been behind it. Just like how Timothy McVeigh was an “ethnic Irishman”, and therefore the Republic of Ireland was behind the Oklahoma City bombing. Well, the Irish in collusion with Al Qaeda, of course.
It makes total sense that Western intelligence agencies would find out that the North Korean sponsored sarin gas attack was about to happen, but then instead of helping the Japanese authorities, they would get a journalist to publish a vaguely-related article the day before. Everyone knows that’s the best way to get a message to a rogue state. The message is “We know you’re about to carry out a terrorist attack, but we’re not going to do anything about it except subtly hint at it in the papers”.
And yes, an enrichment programme frozen in 1994 and a “speculated” Korean nuke test in Pakistan in 1998 would definitely have been enough to deter the Japanese from complaining about a sarin gas attack in 1995.
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. :-)
If you posit that before 9/11, the US government worked to prevent people from understanding what was happening, then after 9/11, some claims of a connection are safe, and some are not safe. Flight TWA 800 blew up over New York on July 17, 1996, July 17 being the day of the Baathist revolution in Iraq. Partisans of a cover-up hold that the investigation was stage-managed so as to favor the hypothesis of an accident, and then retired when enough people had stopped paying attention. It would be risky to revive the discussion of that incident if there was a cover-up. Whereas the idea that Iraqi intelligence had a man in Kurdistan in 2001, teaching Kurdish Islamists rudimentary chemical-warfare techniques, is a safe thing to talk about. It implies the possibility of Saddam getting together with al Qaeda, without implying that they already did so.
An enormous number of claims and counter-claims were made about the Iraq/AQ connection. Who made the claims, why, and with what degree of sincerity and plausibility also varies greatly. You had western intelligence sources feeding stories to tabloids, you had regional enemies of Saddam fabricating tall tales. So there was always a lot of noise. Then there are the key documents forming the “narrative of the state”, like pre-war statements by the US government to the UN or the Congress, or post-war assessments like the 9/11 Commission report. They offer a history resembling the one you find on Wikipedia.
Then there are a few people offering an alternative history, notably Laurie Mylroie and Jayna Davis. I find that these people have, not just opponents who defend an orthodoxy about al Qaeda (e.g. Peter Bergen), but they have friends from the intelligence agencies who I think act more like handlers.
Thus Mylroie was often advised by James Woolsey, Clinton’s first director of intelligence. Mylroie claims that “Ramzi Yousef” and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, masterminds of the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, respectively, were agents of Iraq, working in the jihadist milieu, and she has some evidence for this. However, she then has a contortion of argument according to which these are the names of innocent Kuwaiti guest-workers whose identities were stolen during the Iraqi occupation and used by agents of Iraqi intelligence. Only the real Mylroie fans ever took that argument seriously, and the fact that KSM’s cousin Zahid Sheikh Mohammed is known to be part of the jihadi milieu pretty much proves that the theory of the “innocent original KSM” makes no sense. However, Mylroie’s theories were first propagated in the early 1990s, before al Qaeda became public knowledge. They seem to me like a half-truth, meant to point the finger for WTC 1993 at Iraq, without revealing too much about the guys who liaised with the mujahideen, because these guys were western assets (against Russia) in the 1980s before they became Iraqi assets in the 1990s.
As for Jayna Davis, her specialty was the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and if she had “handlers”, they were Patrick Lang and Larry Johnson, two intelligence veterans who for a time endorsed her discovery of Iraqi connections around the bombing, but who proposed that Iran was the state sponsor. Again, that would fit the half-truth template, but this time from the liberal side of deep politics, the one that didn’t want a war with Iraq. I’ll just point out that in his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke (who is almost the definition of consensus reality when it comes to the recent history of anti-American terrorism) manages to mention that Timothy McVeigh’s pal Terry Nichols was in the Philippines at the same time that KSM and Ramzi Yousef were working on Operation Bojinka, and even muses in his book about whether Nichols met with Yousef to acquire bombing expertise.
I could go on at great length. And then there’s the anthrax letters, which are either an attempt to link 9/11 to the Iraqi WMD issue, or a message from the true sponsor of 9/11 saying we have weaponized anthrax, this is the next stage of escalation, one that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands if it’s released in the open, and not just mailed in letters. Contrary to your assertion that the US invaded Iraq “as soon as possible”, in fact there was a period of 18 months between 9/11 and the invasion, and only at the very last moment was a concrete deadline provided to Saddam, and only after KSM had been captured and publicly displayed in Pakistan. It is at least consistent with the idea that the US spent those 18 months penetrating and shutting down the command-and-control structure in charge of KSM’s part of AQ, before they dared to invade. (And it’s interesting that KSM was apprehended at the home of a microbiologist in Pakistan.)
I would have to dig up some old notes, but there were a number of ethnic Koreans playing crucial roles—in the sarin release, in the violent side of the cult, in the assassination of Aum’s “science minister” after the attack—and there’s also a few other connections. There was suspicion on the Japanese right that North Korea was involved. But the very best thing I ever found was a story in a British paper (again, I would have to dig to find it again, but I should be able to do so), on the day before the attack, talking about a North Korean plot to employ BW or CW in Japan. (That’s what I remember, details may be a little off.) I consider that story to be the fruit of western signals intelligence, the collaboration of American and British intelligence, and the use of friendly journalists to act as proxies in communication with rogue states. A related example is that a day or so before the 2006 North Korean nuclear tests, there was a story in the Australian media about North Korean nuclear collaboration with Myanmar. The exact mechanics and motivations remain obscure to me, but I think these “leaks” are meant to be seen by the rogue states (who of course monitor what is being said about them). It’s a form of signaling.
The “first Korean nuclear crisis” occurred in 1992-1993. It didn’t really resolve until after Kim Il Sung died in mid-1994. That’s the northeast-Asian geopolitical context to the Aum sarin attack of 1995 - Communism had collapsed in most places outside Korea, North Korea started diverting plutonium from its reactors, the Great Leader who was supposed to reunite Korea died. The regime would have had plans for the achievement of Korean reunification including military methods and guerrilla attacks in South Korea and Japan. So whether they had a working nuke or just the ingredients for it, I don’t know, but the nuclear issue was part of the picture. (It’s even been speculated that Pakistan’s sixth nuke test in 1998 was in fact a North Korean nuke—a way for them to test a device outside their own borders.)
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? Going back to your four “reasons for obfuscation”:
Because the US was unable to retaliate? - oh no, it was already bombing Iraq and enforcing a no-fly zone at that time. The US just wanted to ignore a terrorist attack by its enemy? Or maybe the Clinton administration wanted to maintain the flexibility to wait for the Iraqis to pull off a much worse terrorist attack, then wait to be voted out out of office, then deflect attention from the link to Iraq by blaming Iraq for colluding with the terrorists? Or maybe the US had “lied about previous attacks”—like the Golf of Tonkin incident—so that naturally stopped them being able to reveal the truth about TWA 800.
I am beginning to see the power of your historical analysis.
Yes, a lot of people said different things about the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. So when Cheney said “there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s” and “an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta”, his agenda there was to distance Iraq from 9/11. Because a lot of people had said all kinds of things, so who would pay attention to the claims of a mere Vice-President?
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. How has the mainstream consensus opinion been able to ignore this incredibly compelling historical evidence?
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.
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? Unless maybe you sense that leaving ambiguous phrases in your theory makes it hard to debunk… but no, that’s ridiculous.
And yeah, I have to concede that if your old notes say that some “ethnic Koreans” played key roles in the Aum attack, then—ignoring the bogus mainstream consensus that the main high-ups in the cult were Japanese—that proves that North Korea must have been behind it. Just like how Timothy McVeigh was an “ethnic Irishman”, and therefore the Republic of Ireland was behind the Oklahoma City bombing. Well, the Irish in collusion with Al Qaeda, of course.
It makes total sense that Western intelligence agencies would find out that the North Korean sponsored sarin gas attack was about to happen, but then instead of helping the Japanese authorities, they would get a journalist to publish a vaguely-related article the day before. Everyone knows that’s the best way to get a message to a rogue state. The message is “We know you’re about to carry out a terrorist attack, but we’re not going to do anything about it except subtly hint at it in the papers”.
And yes, an enrichment programme frozen in 1994 and a “speculated” Korean nuke test in Pakistan in 1998 would definitely have been enough to deter the Japanese from complaining about a sarin gas attack in 1995.
You’re not a very good rationalist.
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. :-)