The
February 23, 2001, Friday
SECTION: BOOKS; Pg. 13B
LENGTH: 786 words
HEADLINE: Q&A with Laurie Mylroie
BYLINE: Elliot Jager
BODY:
Would it be fair to infer that
When
I cautioned Martin Indyk in December 1994, when he was NSC
adviser on the
Even as we spoke, Ramzi Yousef, WTC bombing mastermind, was
plotting to bomb a dozen
And Americans have died for the sly way that the
You argue that the WTC bombing began as a low-level conspiracy among NY-area
Moslem fundamentalists, and that the mission was quickly coopted
by
The Gulf War never really ended. The WTC bombing was the first of the terrorist
attacks Saddam was to conduct against the
What role did bin Ladin and his al-Qaida group play?
After all, some of the WTC bombers had CIA training and were veterans of the
anti-Soviet struggle in
Bin Ladin played no role in the
It is only later, after more bombings, that bin Ladin's name became connected
with the
But that's just sloppy reporting.
Most noteworthy, the indictment of bin Ladin doesn't include the NY bombing
conspiracies. But there seems to be a tendency (in at least
some reporting) to make bin Ladin responsible for everything.
It's not very logical, but maybe simple answers appeal.
But wasn't Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the WTC attack, captured in a
hotel in
Ramzi Yousef was not captured in a hotel in
You get these kind of reports because people somehow
think they "know" something, like Yousef was part of bin Ladin's
network.
And then small points end up distorted to show the "connection," when
there really is none.
What role did Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman play?
The charges against the Egyptian cleric are "seditious conspiracy" -
his inflammatory rhetoric inspired some of those who participated in the WTC
bombing and some who participated in a second bombing conspiracy.
That conspiracy involved picking more bombing targets in
Sudanese intelligence (and behind
Did you uncover any information that might help unravel the story behind the
assassination of Meir Kahane? His killer, El Sayyad Nossair, was also
associated with the WTC bombing gang.
Some information emerged to suggest that El Sayyid Nossair might have had contacts with Abu Nidal.
What parallels do you see between
They are similar in that both were state-sponsored terrorism.
But the big difference is that
The
If the administration had told the
How did you personally become so interested in
I did my Ph.D. on the rivalry among
Then, in 1991, the late Uriel Dann, professor of history at
He was very agitated and I didn't really understand what he was saying.
But I encouraged him to write it up. His article appeared in The New Republic,
entitled "Getting Even."
Dann argued that Saddam lived for revenge and that the consequences could be
quite terrible.
With time, I came to understand that Dann's article
was perhaps the most brilliant and eloquent thing written during that whole
period.
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