Why Was a Conspiracy Theorist Writing Stuff for the Pentagon?

While Weigel covers the crazy at the RNC chairman race, Justin Elliott at TPMmuckraker has some lunacy updates from the not-too-distant past. According to documents that turned up from a Freedom of Information Act request that TPMmuckraker filed, as recently as fall 2007, one of the premier fever-swamp conspiracy theorists, Laurie Mylroie of the American Enterprise Institute — who has long argued that Saddam Hussein was basically behind every significant act of terrorism against the United States since the early 1990s — was writing reports for the Pentagon:

Mylroie is the author of two studies — “Saddam’s Strategic Concepts: Dealing With UNSCOM,” dated Feb. 1, 2007, and “Saddam’s Foreign Intelligence Service,” dated Sept. 24, 2007 — on a list of reports from the Pentagon’s Office Of Net Assessment [ONA], obtained by TPMmuckraker through the Freedom Of Information Act.

Read Justin’s post for the case against Mylroie; anything I’d write would be redundant. But the Office of Net Assessment has long been run by a Yoda-like figure named Andy Marshall, who’s known for drastically unconventional thinking. Apparently, it’s a thin line between thinking outside the box and detonating the box to reconstruct box-like fragments into shapes that boxmakers have long proved were thoroughly unsupportable, while ranting that the boxmakers are the enemies of U.S. national security.