Andy: Her credentials are good. It's hard to believe that
anybody with any real
information could have linked Saddam and 9/11 and done it so
forcefully.
Her information certainly didn't mislead Clinton.
Eric: Her stuff is interesting. Unlikely as it sounds, Gore
Vidal's on board with some of it too. In that book I cited, _Best
American Essays 2002_ there's a piece by Gore Vidal about Timothy
McVeigh and the OC Bombing, where Vidal speculates about the
Iraqi/Middle Eastern involvement in the blast. It's also worth
reading.
Her straining to connect all the dots all the time (and some of
the dots actually were connected, such as the Salman Pak
terrorist training center, which the Marines excavated) made her
what Peter Bergen called "a crackpot."
Yet if anything, that shows how dangerous an inept intelligence
agency is, and how important it is to have an extensive
intelligence network. Unless one has good intelligence, then it's
possible to be persuaded of almost any threat.
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