The 9/11 commission can't get the documents and witnesses it wants, but last week it did get as a witness one Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie is a "terrorism expert" who believes, as James Ridgeway points out in this week's Village Voice, that Saddam Hussein's Iraq was behind the 2001 World Trade Center attack and the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and may well have been behind the 2001 anthrax mailings and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. On the right, Mylroie isn't regarded as a nut -- to the contrary, as Ridgeway points out, "Mylroie's work on Iraq and its connections to the two World Trade Center attacks have been endorsed by Rumsfeldians Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and former CIA director James Woolsey."

Jude at the blog Iddybud provides a few links to Mylroie's writings -- this one will get you up to speed on her 9/11 views -- but I'm sorry Jude doesn't link my favorite Mylroie page, this transcript of an October 29, 2001, CNN online chat in which Mylroie not only links Saddam to the anthrax attacks but warns that "children and all non-essential personnel" might have to be evacuated from America's major cities prior to a war with Iraq (which she desperately craved) because, in her view, Saddam was likely to escalate the bioweapons campaign against the U.S. he had begun with the anthrax mailings.

The anthrax letters stopped, WMDs weren't used in the recent Iraq war, WMDs weren't used in the first Gulf war, no WMDs or evidence of an active WMD program have been found in Iraq in the months since Saddam left the country and we got the run of the place -- and yet Laurie Mylroie is still taken seriously, as an "expert" and as a useful witness for the 9/11 commission. Lovely.

I'm also sorry that neither Ridgeway nor Jude mentions the fact that back in 1990 Laurie Mylroie wrote a quickie book called Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a bestseller, with Judith Miller of The New York Times. I've been trying to dig around to determine whether the "expert" and the journalist/fabulist have maintained ties to this day -- unfortunately, I'm not sure. But they did share book royalties once upon a time.