The Inventive Logic of the Neocon's only Iraq Expert (Conason)

[VolcanoJen]

This is a short, but excellent, dismantling of the theories of Laurie Mylroie, the shrill and slightly nutty "expert" who insists that Hussein was responsible for almost everything from the Oklahoma City bombing to 9/11.

In the first paragraph below, he's quoting Washington Monthly's Peter Bergen. Bergen's excellent dismantling of Myloroie's theories can be found at the Washington Monthly website in this link:

Armchair Provocateur - Laurie Mylroie: The Neocons' favorite conspiracy theorist

The excerpt below is from the Conason article at Salon:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/12/03/aei/index.html

Excerpt:

As Bergen puts it, "Her theories have bolstered the argument that led us into a costly war in Iraq and swayed key opinion-makers in the Bush administration, who then managed to persuade seven out of 10 Americans that the Iraqi dictator had a role in the attacks on Washington and New York." Her promoters at AEI and in government should be required to read his article, which dismantles her works with clean logic and forensic skill. And although never flippant, he also doesn't neglect his subject's darkly comical characteristics. Having observed Mylroie since 1990 (and having debated her not long ago on public radio), I recognized his description of their tense encounter on Canadian TV last February:

"As soon as the interview started, Mylroie began lecturing in a hectoring tone: 'Listen, we're going to war because President Bush believes Saddam Hussein was involved in 9/11. Al-Qaida is a front for Iraqi intelligence ... bureaucracy made a tremendous blunder that refused to acknowledge these links ... the people responsible for gathering this information, say in the CIA, are also the same people who contributed to the blunder on 9/11 and the deaths of 3,000 Americans, and so whenever this information emerges they move to discredit it.' I tried to make the point that Mylroie's theories defied common sense, as they implied a conspiracy by literally thousands of American officials to suppress the truth of the links between Iraq and 9/11, to little avail.

"At the end of the interview, Mylroie, who exudes a slightly frazzled, batty air, started getting visibly agitated, her finger jabbing at the camera and her voice rising to a yell as she outlined the following apocalyptic scenario: 'Now I'm going to tell you something, OK, and I want all Canada to understand, I want you to understand the consequences of the cynicism of people like Peter . There is a very acute chance as we go to war that Saddam will use biological agents as revenge against Americans, that there will be anthrax in the United States and there will be smallpox in the United States. Are you in Canada prepared for Americans who have smallpox and do not know it crossing the border and bringing that into Canada?"