Saddam has far greater cause than any other party to attack the United States. Nevertheless, in each of the cases discussed in this book, the evidence points toward Iraq as the force behind the attacks. The question of who was behind Ramzi Yousef was never properly investigated, partly because of a peculiar division that exists in America between the Justice Department and the national security bureaucracies. Above all, the national security bureaucracies are not supposed to interfere with the work of the Justice Department, because that could be considered obstruction of justice. Terrorism, when committed by individuals, is a crime.
Terrorism supported by states is also war.
The primary business of the Justice Department is to conduct trials to prosecute and convict individuals. In effect, the Justice Department places a higher priority on the prosecution and conviction of individuals with all the rights to a fair trial guaranteed by the American legal system above our country s national security interest in determining who might have been behind the terrorists. Indeed, the question of state sponsorship may be relegated to such a distant second place that it is never addressed at all. This fundamental problem became evident to me during an unusual meeting I had in January 1995 with the federal prosecutors pursuing the New York bombing conspirators. The New York district attorney s office arranged the meeting, and it included Andrew McCarthy, the lead prosecutor in the conspiracy trial of Shaykh Omar et al., and Gil Childers, lead prosecutor in the first World Trade Center bombing trial.