Laurie Mylroie

Dr. Robert S. Leiken, a former Clinton administration official, complained: "Laurie has discovered Saddam’s hand in every major attack on US interests since the Persian Gulf War, including U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and even the federal building in Oklahoma City. These allegations have all been definitively refuted by the FBI, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) and other investigatory bodies...."

Isikoff and Corn argue that Mylroie "was looking to change the region through back-channel, private diplomacy – and she aspired to be a behind-the-scenes peacemaker who would broker a deal between Saddam and Israel." To this end, she met with Iraqi officials including Tariq Aziz. After Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, however, the would-be diplomat "turned against the dictator she had once wanted Washington to help, with the passion of one who felt personally betrayed."

In 2008, Laurie Mylroie, writing in the New York Sun, reviewed Willful Blindness by Andrew C. McCarthy, who had prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in 1995. Mylroie explained that Rahman had not ordered the bombing of the World Trade Center—nor was he charged with doing so. She also explained that other elements of the plot had been organized by Sudan, as the trial transcript made clear. She complained that McCarthy understated "the degree to which the extremists were penetrated by the intelligence agencies of several states." She argued that this was the basic flaw of the Clinton era handling of terrorism: it focused on the arrest and trial of perps and ignored state sponsorship.

Mylroie's writings are considered to have been influential among neoconservatives during the buildup to the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Several of them praised Study of Revenge, including ex-CIA Director James Woolsey, who called it "brilliant and brave" in his blurb for the dust jacket of the book.

Her National Interest article appeared in expanded form in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America (2000). Mylroie later claimed that "the Clinton White House did not want to hear that Iraq was behind the bombing."

"The sharpest critique of Mylroie is that she discounts evidence that Yousef worked not for Iraq but for Osama Bin Laden... Bin Laden biographer Yossef Bodansky, Time magazine, and other media outlets concur that Ramzi Yousef worked for a Bin Laden-funded operation in the Philippines. So does American intelligence, apparently... Mylroie offers no real evidence linking Hussein to the 1998 bombings. Mylroie's strongest contention, that Ramzi Yousef is not Abdul Basit, does not confirm that Iraq bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. It just confirms that Ramzi Yousef is more mysterious than we suspect. It could still be that al-Qaida, not Hussein, provided Yousef with training, fake papers, and resources."

Daniel Pipes derided her view, saying that it was "a tour de force, but it's a tour de force of alchemy. It has a fundamentally wrong premise." According to Andrew C. McCarthy, who prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman in 1995, "Mylroie's theory was loopy... Leaving aside various other implausibilities in her surmise, the government had several sources who knew Basit as Basit both before and after the time he spent in Kuwait."

She met with Bill Clinton on Iraq during Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, but she became a strong critic of Clinton for what she came to charge was his mishandling of the terrorism that began on his watch, starting with the February 26, 1993, bombing of New York's World Trade Center.

Replying on National Review Online, McCarthy accused Mylroie of misunderstanding "the difference between intrigue and evidence, between history and prosecution." Calling Rahman "the central figure in the overarching conspiracy," he wrote: "At trial, we proved that Sheikh Abdel Rahman had close ties to Hassan Al-Turabi, leader in the early 1990s of Sudan's de facto government, the National Islamic Front." At this point, Daniel Pipes wrote a blog entry attacking "Laurie Mylroie's Shoddy, Loopy, Zany Theories." Stephen F. Hayes of The Weekly Standard added: "no one I know took her arguments very seriously."

In October 1990, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak mentioned Mylroie's trips to Baghdad and Israel, which she later denied. Isikoff and Corn, however, interviewed five of her former associates (including Judith Miller) who all "confirmed that she had been a secret go-between for Baghdad and Jerusalem."

Early in her career, Mylroie advocated support for Iraq in the context of its war and rivalry with Iran. In 1988, just before the cease-fire to the Iran-Iraq war, she published an article in the journal Orbis, advocating "The Baghdad Alternative," which involved bolstering U.S. ties to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Ken Silverstein gives this summary:

Laurie Mylroie (born July 22, 1953) is an American author and analyst who has written extensively on Iraq and the War on Terror. The National Interest first published this work in an article entitled, "The World Trade Center Bombing: Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why it Matters." In her book Study of Revenge (2000), Mylroie laid out her argument that the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein had sponsored the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and subsequent terrorist attacks. She claimed those attacks were part of an ongoing war that Saddam waged against America following the cease-fire to the 1991 Gulf War. Less than a year after her book was published, the September 11 attacks occurred. Mylroie subsequently adopted the view that Saddam had been responsible for the attacks, defending it on many occasions, including before the 9/11 Commission.