BROADSIDES

October 23, 2002

OKC, WTC and SADDAM: In 1995 while Bill Clinton was busy parlaying tragedy into political capital by equating Republican leaders and conservative talk radio hosts with the likes of homicidal anarchists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, those for whom McVeigh and Nichols planted the bomb may have gotten away. Britain's Evening Standard reports that "senior aides to US Attorney-General John Ashcroft have been given compelling evidence that former Iraqi soldiers were directly involved in the 1995 bombing that killed 185 people." As a result, the "FBI is under pressure from the highest political levels in Washington to investigate suspected links between Iraq" and the OKC bombing.

The Standard's James Langton writes, "The methodically assembled dossier from Jayna Davis, a former investigative TV reporter, could destroy the official version that white supremacists Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols were solely responsible for what, at the time, was the worst act of terrorism on American soil. Instead, there are serious concerns that a group of Arab men with links to Iraqi intelligence, Palestinian extremists and possibly al Qaeda, used McVeigh and Nichols as front men to blow up the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City."

Jayna Davis' extensive investigation into the origins of the OKC bombing was the primary subject of Micah Morrison's Wall Street Journal column on September 5. In addition to detailing Davis' findings, Morrison examines evidence gathered by American Enterpise Institute scholar Dr. Laurie Mylroie to support her published claim that Iraq masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

In addition to implicating Iraq in the first WTC attack, Mylroie's The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks: A Study of Revenge alleges that the Clinton administration, disregarding evidence to the contrary, adamantly refused to consider that the bombing was state-sponsored.

And, as Mylroie wrote in National Review last May, this led to more lethal attacks on the United States:

A decade ago major terrorist strikes on U.S. targets were considered to be state-sponsored. For all practical purposes, that meant Iran, Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Yet that is supposed to have changed with the first attack on the World Trade Center, in February 1993, one month into Bill Clinton's first term in office. The Clinton administration claimed that the bombing represented a new kind of terrorism that did not involve states.

The New York FBI office, however, strongly believed Iraq was behind the 1993 Trade Center attack. The Clinton White House did not want to hear that and FBI Headquarters accommodated the president — echo of the charge made by Coleen Rowley, Minneapolis FBI counsel and agent, of rampant careerism there. And thus was born the notion that major terrorist strikes against the U.S. were carried out by individuals, or "networks," without the support of states. The predictable happened. Terrorism continued. In fact, it grew far worse because the state sponsor of the terrorism was never properly identified and punished.

The investigative work of Jayna Davis and Laurie Mylroie has some high profile supporters, Micah Morrison notes, including former CIA director James Woolsey. Woolsey had this to say to the Journal: "When the full stories of these two incidents are finally told, those who permitted the investigations to stop short will owe big explanations to these two brave women. And the nation will owe them a debt of gratitude.'"

B. Sides @ 8:24 PM