Study of Laurie Mylroie

The American humorist Josh Billings was not horsing around too much when he observed that, “As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.” The dogged Laurie Mylroie puts me in mind of Billings’ observation. In her awesome 2000 book Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America, Mylroie argued that Saddam Hussein was the man behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Having meticulously sifted through the evidence introduced at the trial of the first set of World Trade Center bombing defendants, Mylroie deduced that Iraqi state sponsorship likely backed the operation.
In the introduction to the book Mylroie argued that “by treating the World Trade Center bombing and related acts of terrorism strictly as a criminal issue, Washington has left America exposed adn vulnerable to more terrorism from Saddam Hussein, or from any other party that comprehends the winning strategy.” In late 2001 Mylroie’s prophetic book was republished as The War Against America with a foreword by James Woolsey endorsing the book’s conclusions. Woolsey was the director of Central Intelligence at the time of the 1993 bombing and noted that Bill Clinton had never met with him about it.
Today’s New York Sun has a profile of Mylroie that doesn’t quite do justice to her argument but is nevertheless worth reading: “A lone wolf on U.S. intelligence, Iraq marches on.”