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Saturday, April 3, 2004

Laurie Mylroie takes a shot at Richard Clarke by way of defending herself, and by doing so brings a chapter of the Iraq/Terror (and specifically 9/11) connection back into the light. Who is Ramzi Yousef, really? Where does he come from and specifically, where does his voer ID come from? The answers are interesting.

OpinionJournal - Very Awkward Facts - Richard Clarke's denials of Iraq's terror ties don't ring true.

...To reach this conclusion, Mr. Clarke has to ignore a forest of awkward facts. In late 1992, according to court documents, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of the 1984 and 1988 passports of Abdul Basit Karim (those documents have Karim born in Kuwait). Yousef claimed to be Karim, saying he had lost his passport and needed a new one to return home. He received a temporary passport, in the name of Abdul Basit Karim, which he used to flee New York the night of the Trade Center bombing. Karim was, indeed, a real person, a Pakistani reared in Kuwait. After completing high school in Kuwait, Karim studied for three years in Britain. He graduated from the Swansea Institute in June 1989 and returned home, where he got a job in Kuwait's Planning Ministry. He was there a year later, when Iraq invaded.

Kuwait maintained an alien resident file on Karim. That file appears to have been altered to create a false identity or "legend" for the terrorist Yousef. Above all, the file contains a fingerprint card bearing Yousef's prints. But Yousef is not Karim--as Judge Duffy implied--for many reasons, including the fact that Yousef is 6 feet tall, while Karim was significantly shorter, according to his teachers at Swansea. They do not believe their student is the terrorist mastermind. 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...


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But the clincher comes in the following paragraph:

The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim's file had to have been switched. The original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef's. The only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a "legend" for one of its terrorist agents.

Much of this is lifted straight from her book, "The War Against America," originally published in 2000 under the title "Study of Revenge." An interesting read that, taken at face value, eviscerates most of Clarke's arguments.

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