Fingerprint Controversy
After September 11, former Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey was provided a government jet and FBI staff to investigate Mylroie's claim that Basit and Yousef were different people. Newsweek reported:
- The idea behind the mission was to check fingerprints on file in Swansea, Wales, where Basit had once gone to school, and compare them to the fingerprints of the Ramzi Yousef in prison.
- ... Justice Department officials tell Newsweek that the results of the Woolsey mission were exactly what the FBI had predicted: that the fingerprints were in fact identical. After the match was made, FBI officials assumed at the time that it had put the Mylroie theory to rest.
Mylroie, however, pointed to a British report stating the opposite: "Indeed, according to Britain's Guardian newspaper, latent fingerprints lifted from material Mr. Karim left at Swansea bear 'no resemblance' to Yousef's prints. They are two different people."
The Guardian report cited this finding as evidence against Mylroie's theory:
- Mr Woolsey returned empty-handed. "The two sets of fingerprints were entirely different," says a source familiar with the investigation.
But Mylroie noted: "that conclusion actually supports my argument: Yousef’s inked prints (from JFK immigration) did not match the latent prints on Karim’s project. They are two different people."
David Plotz points out that most of Mylroie's critics question not the claim that these were two different people, but rather her assumption that this proves Iraqi culpability in the attacks:
| “ | "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." | ” |
According to the 9/11 Commission, Yousef was not a member of al-Qaida and there was no credible evidence of Iraqi involvement in the 1993 bombing.
Laurie Mylroie's former ally Daniel Pipes, of the Middle East Forum, called her theory "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 had prosecuted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman after the 1993 bombing, "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."
Read more about this topic: Laurie Mylroie
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