In a mixed review of Andrew McCarthy’s Willful Blindness, I criticized the book for slighting the role of states in terrorism. McCarthy’s outsize response — a 3,000-word pejorative/adjective-laden assault in National Review Online — suggests the review hit upon a significant and sensitive point. Extensive name-calling typically obscures a weak argument, or at least attempts to do so, even as this debate involves the national-security issue of the day, including why the United States is engaged in its most serious military campaign in three decades and whether the decision to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s regime was correct. Few questions merit more careful consideration.
1) McCarthy’s NRO piece introduces matters not in my review and misrepresents them. In the mid-1990s, I approached the Manhattan district attorney’s office, because I believed the federal government was gravely mishandling terrorism by treating it almost exclusively as a law enforcement issue. McCarthy, an unexpected guest at that meeting and one whose contribution then consisted mostly of shouting at me, errs on the date of my briefing there. It was not 1993 or 1994, but January 13, 1995 (as noted in my book on the subject, Study of Revenge, p. 277). The trial of Sheikh Omar had just begun, with jury selection underway.
I had not expected to brief the federal prosecutors, but at the last moment, the Manhattan DA’s office decided not to take up the issue, but leave terrorism to the federal government (a policy reversed after 9/11.)
My main point was that treating terrorism on the scale of the two very large and ambitious plots that had occurred in New York in 1993 as a law enforcement matter was so grossly inadequate, it would only invite more attacks. Of course, that has now become conventional wisdom, embraced by McCarthy among many others.
The essential points of that briefing were published as
the lead article in
The National Interest (Winter 1995/96) with Vincent Cannistraro (chief of counterrorism operations for the CIA) hailing it as “one of the most brilliant pieces of research and scholarship in the area that I have ever read.” Eric Breindel, in a
New York Post editorial, endorsed the “important article” and its critique of the dangerous inadequacies of Bill Clinton’s law-enforcement approach to terrorism. And
The Washington Monthly highlighted it with a “Journalism Award.”
With support like that, my briefing can scarcely be dismissed as “loopy.” Indeed, if that were so, why would McCarthy sit for nearly two hours, listening to me, particularly with his trial of Sheikh Omar in progress?
2) The suggestion that Iraq was behind the February 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center is supported by New York law enforcement. Indeed, New York FBI, the lead investigative agency, suspected the attack was a false flag operation carried out by Iraq. That was reflected in the contemporary reporting, including in the
New York Times. That is also why, in 1994, when ABC News and
Newsweek did a joint investigation into the WTC bombing, for which I was consultant, we focused on Iraq.
Jim Fox headed New York FBI and the WTC bombing investigation.
As Fox wrote of
Study of Revenge: “This work is the most comprehensive and best researched review of the bombing investigation. . . . I found it to be extremely accurate, and although we are unable to say with certainty the Iraqis were behind the bombing, that is certainly the theory accepted by most of the veteran investigators.”
Gil Childers, the lead prosecutor in the WTC bombing trial (Mohammed Salameh, et al), was considered to be the U.S. official who knew the most about that bombing, and he also attended my briefing. Childers’s response was quite different from McCarthy’s. Childers later spoke at the book launch for
Study of Revenge and described it as “work the U.S. government should have done.”
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