http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/08/19/miller/index.htmlIt's well established that jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller has close ties to the Pentagon and Bush administration officials who were the architects of the slipshod Iraq war, ties that go on to this day. Arianna Huffington claims that United Nations Ambassador John Bolton, who was undersecretary of state for arms control from 2001 to 2005, recently visited Miller in prison. As Miller sits in a Virginia jail, her visiting hours booked with powerful figures from Washington and elsewhere, Huffington and others are wondering about the nature of Miller's relationships with the people who orchestrated the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.
One person who hasn't received much attention, however, is Laurie Mylroie, an expert on Middle East affairs who works at the American Enterprise Institute, a highly influential right-wing think tank. Miller and Mylroie co-wrote a book in 1990 about Iraq and the Gulf War titled "Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf," a historical overview of Saddam's regime. But while that book was regarded as evenhanded, Mylroie has gone on to become the foremost anti-Saddam conspiracy theorist in the neoconservative movement. In a book published in 2000, "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," Mylroie took a few bits of circumstantial and highly speculative evidence and wove them into an argument that it was Iraq, and not Islamic terrorists, who were behind the first World Trade Center bombings in 1993.
But she didn't stop there. Here's how Peter Bergen described it in a Washington Monthly piece from 2003: "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."
As Bergen noted in his article, Mylroie thanked Bolton and "Scooter" Libby, Dick Cheney's chief of staff, in her acknowledgments for "Study of Revenge," and doffed her cap to former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz for his "crucial support." Richard Perle, a hardcore proponent of Iraqi regime change and Mylroie's colleague at the AEI, called Mylroie's argument "splendid and wholly convincing" in a blurb on the book's back cover.
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