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The destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center and the attack on the Pentagon--all within one hour on September 11, 2001--demonstrate America’s shocking vulnerability to terrorism. But the terrorists’ war against America actually started eight years earlier, when the mysterious terrorist mastermind Ramzi Yousef bombed the World Trade Center in an attempt to fell the buildings. His attacks were viewed as the harbinger of a new terrorism, carried out by an elusive enemy driven by religious fanaticism to unprecedented hatred of the United States. But is that perception accurate?

In Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War against America, Laurie Mylroie argues that this "new terrorism," supposedly the work of "loose networks" of Muslim extremists, is nothing other than old-fashioned, state-sponsored terrorism in a new disguise. The author is the only person to plow through the copious evidence from the first attack on the World Trade Center and to combine that with information from the intelligence community and from personal interviews she has conducted. She gleans from her extensive research that Iraq has been working with and using Islamic extremists such as Osama bin Laden in its own ongoing war against America.

Mylroie chronicles how, time after time, the Clinton administration focused on the extremist freelancers and vowed to bring the perpetrators to justice while it turned a blind eye to the evidence that Iraq was also involved. Her real-life detective story reveals the split between New York and Washington that emerged during the investigation and tells a terrifying tale of an America left exposed and vulnerable following the mishandling of the first attack on the World Trade Center, which was once the most ambitious terrorist attack attempted on U.S. soil.

In a new post-September 11 foreword to Study of Revenge, former CIA director R. James Woolsey writes, "If time proves that Laurie Mylroie is right about what happened in 1993, the truth may help us, belatedly, to find our real enemy and defeat him." [more...]

Laurie Mylroie, publisher of the online newsletter Iraq News is an adjunct fellow at AEI and has taught at Harvard University and the U.S. Naval War College. She is the coauthor, with Judith Miller, of the New York Times number-one bestseller Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf.