"[1] 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.
[3] 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.
"[8] Her National Interest article appeared in expanded form in Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America (2000).
The Clinton administration, wittingly or unwittingly, has chosen the path of self-delusion: to not investigate the matter seriously....[T]he failure of U.S. officials to address the question of state sponsorship of terrorism will have significant future costs.
CNN reporter Peter Bergen called Mylroie a "crackpot" and criticized her belief 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.
Daniel Benjamin, a former Clinton administration official and senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, points out that "Mylroie's work has been carefully investigated by the CIA and the FBI....
Mylroie's strongest contention, that Ramzi Yousef is not Abdul Basit, does not confirm that Iraq bombed the World Trade Center in 1993.
"[15]While Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, called Mylroie's book Bush vs. the Beltway "the best available account of the reasoning behind the conduct of the war on terror", he also stated "But it is based on a faulty premise, the one implicit in its title: that presidents neither control nor reform their bureaucracies...
"[17] 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.
"[18] 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.
Replying on National Review Online, McCarthy accused Mylroie of misunderstanding "the difference between intrigue and evidence, between history and prosecution."
"[16] At this point, Daniel Pipes wrote a blog entry attacking "Laurie Mylroie's Shoddy, Loopy, Zany Theories.
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.
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.