CNN Anthrax Attacks Propaganda Exposed!

[Jenny Lake]

http://universitypress.info/USABiologicalTerror.pdf
In the early 1940s, the US and Britain began working on developing "anthrax bombs" which they intended to drop on German cities. According to Stanford University historian Prof. Barton J. Bernstein: "British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was advised that 1,000 projectiles, each of 500 pounds and containing 106 four-pound anthrax bombs, could destroy life in a 25 mile area...
   Because the Germans surrendered before any of these anthrax bombs could be tested on German civilians, these biological bombs were instead dropped on the villagers of Gruinard, an island off the northwest coast of Scotland.
...the island became uninhabitable for more than 45 years

The author of this article, called "America Betrayed" recounts documented biowarfare testing on Americans and writes:

In the Senate hearings held in 1977, we were in fact warned that the United States government reserved the right to continue attacking its own citizens in order to protect national security. According to Pentagon spokesperson, Lt. Colonel George A. Carruth, "additional tests" would be conducted in the future if the Army felt it necessary to assess our 'vulnerability' to biological attacks...

In 1979, the USSR conducted an anthrax attack on its citizens as well:

http://www.wbur.org/special/specialcove ... e_bio2.asp  
A mysterious outbreak of the disease killed at least 68 people 22 years ago in the Russian industrial center of Sverdlovsk, today known as Yekaterinburg. At the time, neither the victims nor their families suspected they had been hit by a biological weapon.

In 1992, then-Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who in 1979 was Communist Party chief in Sverdlovsk, said in an interview that the outbreak was caused by an accident at a germ warfare laboratory. Until that time, the official explanation had always been infected meat.

...Details of the incident were first described in a 1994 article by Harvard's Matthew Meselson in the journal Science. Meselson and his co-authors found that most of the 77 known patients lived and worked in the southern part of the city, near Military Compound 19, and concluded the outbreak was caused by a spray of anthrax spores originating at the compound.

Meselson was a founding Fellow of the Salk Institute in San Diego, and was called on by the government in 2001 to participate in the anthrax analysis.

http://www.bulldognews.net/anthrax_russ ... break.html  The amazing explanation Russian public health leaders gave for this episode will appall the reader, as it did those of us who heard their story when they visited the United States in 1988. These Russian officials fabricated a story of a foodborne epidemic brought on by faulty inspections by public health veterinarians.

...The American pathologist David Walker proved false the Russian explanation for the anthrax epidemic in Sverdlovsk as soon as he examined the thoracic and mediastinal lymph nodes of the victims.  The findings were consistent with airborne spread of the disease.
     Walker had no doubt that the 64 persons whose tissues he examined were victims of a release of anthrax aerosol that occurred for a few hours on April 2, 1979, near a military production facility in Sverdlovsk.
     The investigation of the epidemic by Matthew Meselson and Jeanne Guillemin, with assistance from Alexis Shelokov and Martin Hugh-Jones followed up on what Meselson suspected -- that the epidemic was unusual and of great relevance to the prevention of biologic warfare.

 

In 2008, during the 'wrongful death' lawsuit filed by Maureen Stevens against the government and Batelle, the govt lawyers took the position that anthrax had never been used as a 'terror' weapon:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/200 ... 5301_x.htm
Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Bucholtz and Batelle lawyer Tami Lyn Azorsky argued there's no way their clients could foresee the material would be used as a terror weapon because it had never happened before....
The lawsuit claims the strain of anthrax that killed Stevens was traced to the Army's Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md....The suit also claims the government and Batelle are negligent because they failed to keep it secured....

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/news/a ... death.html  "One of the real areas of satisfaction, if you can call it that, is that we've maintained all along this was an inside job" said Richard Schuler, Maureen Stevens's attorney.
...[her son-in-law Hogan said] "I'm just very happy that they actually found somebody."
...One court document contends that even if a U.S. employee is found responsible for the anthrax attacks, those acts are "beyond the scope of employment" and the government isn't liable....so it shouldn't have to pay the Stevens family....

[Jenny Lake]

http://archives.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/euro ... x.history/  Russian scientists first grew spores in secret labs in 1926. But anthrax didn't become powerful until the 1950s, when experiments on rats produced stronger strains....
"Perhaps a million people worked in the anthrax program since 1926," says Fyodorov. "Yes, some people went away to other countries ... but (each person) only brings a fragment of the knowledge required to develop a strain."

In 1988, Glasnost caused a Soviet science contingent to visit the US and present data on the Sverdlosk incident:
 

http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/14/world ... wanted=all
The data they presented, according to American officials who attended, went beyond what was put forth in the past. But the officials said the data might not be complete.
The United States assessment of the episode rests on estimates of the number who died, on reports that many vicitms had symptoms suggesting that they had inhaled anthrax spores...
The Soviet scientists said none of the Sverdlovsk victims had pulmonary anthrax, the type that is spread through inhalation of the bacillus anthracis spore. The only pulmonary symptoms, they said, were fluid in the lungs and chest cavities that they attributed to toxic shock from intestinal anthrax...
Anthrax has long been regarded as easily convertible to military use, which would violate a 1972 international convention banning the possession of biological weapons. Both the United States and the Soviet Union have signed the accord.

                           _______________________________________________
 
The scope of 2001 anthrax in Washington buildings:

According to a November 6, 2001 article http://www.usatoday.com/news/sept11/200 ... oundup.htm , the **facilities that tested positive at any time were:

**Postal Service: 13 facilities tested positive

**Pentagon: .."found in two mailboxes" inside a US post office within the building

**Supreme Court: "a trace amount of anthrax was found in the court's basement mailroom"

**CIA: "trace amounts of anthrax were found there on Oct.25...not enough to cause illness"

**Health and Human Services: "Despite earlier positive readings, further testing has found no evidence"...

**Agriculture: "Preliminary tests last week found anthrax at the offices of USDA's Economic Research Service on M Street...but a subsequent round of tests were negative"

and the Congress buildings:

**Longworth House Office Building

**Hart Senate Office Building

An earlier report from Oct.25, announced to lawmakers,  http://avalon.law.yale.edu/sept11/cr_047.asp included "The mailroom in the Dirksen Senate Office Building where a trace of anthrax was discovered last week"...

The Washington Post printed a story the next day, Oct.26, that "a test for anthrax in a mailroom in the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md., came back positive Thursday"... http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ap ... 29_000.htm

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Found this:

http://www.livevideo.com/video/killtown ... r-the.aspx

Dark Winter

Exercise Overview

The Dark Winter exercise portrayed a fictional scenario depicting a covert smallpox attack on U.S. citizens. The scenario is set in three successive National Security Council (NSC) meetings (Segments 1,2 and 3) which take place over a period of 14 days. Former senior government officials played the roles of NSC members responding to the evolving epidemic; representatives from the media were among the observers of these mock NSC meetings and played journalists during the scenario's press conferences (see Players List). The exercise itself was held at Andrews Air Force Base, Washington, D.C., on June 22-23, 2001.

The Dark Winter exercise was the collaborative effort of four organizations. John Hamre of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) initiated and conceived of an exercise wherein senior former officials would respond to a bioterrorist induced national security crisis. Tara O'Toole and Tom Inglesby of the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies and Randy Larsen and Mark DeMier of Analytic Services Inc. (ANSER) were the principal designers, authors and controllers of Dark Winter. Sue Reingold of CSIS managed administrative and logistical arrangements. General Dennis Reimer of the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (MIPT) provided funding for Dark Winter.

   

Additional Information

July 23, 2001 House Hearing on Combating Terrorism: Federal Response to a Biological Weapons Attack

    I was honored to play the part of the President in the exercise Dark Winter.... You often don't know what you don't know until you've been tested. And it's a lucky thing for the United States that, as the emergency broadcast network used to say, 'this is just a test, this is not a real emergency.' But Mr. Chairman, our lack of preparation is a real emergency.

            — The Honorable Sam Nunn in testimony before the House Government Reform Committee,Subcommittee on
            National Security,Veterans Affairs and International Relations, July 23, 2001
             

Shining Light on "Dark Winter"
article published electronically on 02/19/02 in
Confronting Biological Weapons:
a special section in Clinical Infectious Diseases

http://www.upmc-biosecurity.org/website ... arkwinter/  (maybe take anonym.to to get there.)

[Jenny Lake]

Personally, I have no doubt that we were in the midst of an ongoing biological attack with WEST NILE VIRUS when 9-11 happened. The WNV was new to North America in 1999 --and the US strain matches an Israeli strain that was isolated in 1957. The investigator who wrote this up noted the 'beginning' as a case of suspected pigeon poisoning in Central Park http://citizen2009.wordpress.com/west-nile-virus/
The spraying that followed appears to have targeted people, not mosquitos. No mainstream citation has attempted to explain how an outbreak in new York skipped down to Florida or if there is a precedent for this traveling vector with mosquitos. Something near 50,000 Americans by now have been infected with WNV, an infection identical to polio.
Jerome Hauer was managing the spray campaign. In 2004, he was made a director of BioPort/Emergent BioSolutions and also a La Jolla, Ca. (near VA, Salk &Scripps) company with an "anti-radiation" pharmaceutical   http://citizen2009.wordpress.com/2010/0 ... ion-drugs/
 
Anthrax hoaxes in 1999 alone represent one-eigth of ALL the terror threats recorded since year 1900!  http://lxmi.mi.infn.it/~landnet/Biosec/cameron.pdf.
"The Monterrey WMD Terror Database includes 175 entries for 1999, of which 104 occurred in the United States.....Over one quarter of the incidents recorded in the database [687 incidents since 1900] occurred in a single year, 1999. Of the 494 incidents that occurred 1990 to 1999, 35 percent ocurred in 1999. This is largely the result of the second cause: the high number of anthrax hoaxes that were perpetrated in the United States Of the 104 incidents..in 1999, 81involved anthrax threats. This wave of anthrax hoaxes began in October 1998 and continues...
...Apart from hoaxes, there was a single incident involving anthrax: an attempted acquisition. Similarly, there were relatively few incidents of any type that involved other high-end sophisticated agents such as ricin (one threat with possession) and sarin (two hoaxes)."

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

ANSER is also worth a look over. They are an offshoot of the Rand corporation and have done deep analysis of Air Force Weapons systems.  They did a lot of research on the outcomes of Dual National Israeli Jerome Hauer's "Darkwinter". They focused on crowd psychology during outbreaks:

Our History

Analytic Services Inc. is a public-service institute, an independent, not-for-profit corporation chartered in California with the assistance of the RAND Corporation in 1958. The corporation quickly became known as ANSER: today ANSER is one of two operating units under the Analytic Services umbrella.

A Board of Trustees from business, public service, academia, and military affairs governs the company. From the beginning, the Board has played an active role in ensuring that operations are in the public interest and meet consistently high standards of excellence, objectivity, and utility.

The corporation was originally established to support the Air Force, which needed a technically qualified, objective organization close to the Pentagon, able to respond on a day-to-day basis to identified needs for unbiased studies and analyses. Shortly after it was established, Analytic Services Inc. became a Federal Contract Research Center (FCRC), one of nine such organizations including RAND, Aerospace, MITRE, CNA, and Lincoln Laboratory. As such, it served a single client (the Air Force Director of Development Planning, later the Deputy Chief of Staff/Research and Development) and was restricted to only modest growth.

After changing its status in 1976, dropping the FCRC designation, Analytic Services Inc. began work for numerous Air Force organizations, other Department of Defense components, and other federal agencies. On the occasion of the corporation's 25th anniversary in 1983, the Secretary of the Air Force wrote, "ANSER studies and technical approaches have served to illuminate ... issues related to the research, development and acquisition of almost every major Air Force weapon system over the past quarter of a century. ANSER's work has been marked by quality, responsiveness, and objectivity...."

Analytic Services Inc. has always served the national interest by expanding capabilities, enriching staff, and moving in new directions as current and future clients alter the course and content of their missions. It values flexibility, professionalism, and continuous learning as it strives to enlarge its contributions to the Nation.

The corporation now provides analytic and technical support to government agencies throughout the national security, homeland security, and public safety mission areas. Analytic Services Inc. uses a flexible, impartial, multidisciplinary approach to address complex problems, often on a quick-response basis.

More recently, in 2004 The Homeland Security Institute (HSI) was founded as the second operating unit of Analytic Services Inc. HSI is a Studies and Analysis Federally Funded Research and Development Center sponsored by the Department of Homeland Security that delivers independent and objective analyses and advice in core areas important to its sponsor in support of policy development, decision making, and evaluation of new ideas on issues of significance.

Work by the corporation today adheres to the principles that Analytic Services Inc. established in 1958: excellence in everything that it does; uncompromising integrity and ethics; dedication and a service attitude to each client; creative thinking, communication, and flexibility in performance of all work; learning as it conducts its business; and maintaining a base of employees who are continually growing and enhancing their professional standing.

The company maintains its home office in Arlington, VA. As its work and contract base have evolved, field offices have provided essential support. Analytic Services Inc. has offices in Colorado Springs, CO, and Hampton, VA.

http://www.anser.org/%28X%281%29S%28qs0 ... px?mid=267


------
More on Dark Winter from a Clinical research perspective:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/4483004

[Bela]

This from http://www.rense.com/general47/bushsmitten.htm
Two important reputed pictures of George W. Bush were in the custody of American Media, Inc., headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida. publisher of several supermarket tabloids including National Enquirer. One was an authenticated one of George W. Bush, laying in the satanic ritual coffin while engaging in homosexual acts with his male sex-mate who was later to engage in such over later years and traveled with Bush and reportedly on occasion stayed at Bush's Texas ranch. The other picture was mentioned in Part 13 of this "Overthrow" series.
 
To obstruct the use of these two reputedly authentic pictures, the America Media picture editor, Bob Stevens, was snuffed out by way of anthrax-by-mail. [See pt 13 of this series.]
 
In October, 2001, after the death (murder) of Bob Stevens, the FBI caused the closing and sealing of the entire American Media building in Boca Raton. Some months later, the FBI refused to reportedly permit officials of the publisher to retrieve important pictures inside the building in a database. Some familiar with the situation, contend it was the two mentioned pictures."

[Jenny Lake]

http://www.anthraxattacks.net/2009/07/t ... ry-solved/

...Israel's bio-weapons programs dates back to the earliest formation of the Zionist state. Dr. Avner Cohen documents Israel's program in his paper, "Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control." Cohen begins by describing how Zionists during the 1948 war poisoned the wells and water supplies of Arab villagers. According to Israeli military historian Dr. Uri Milstein, the typhoid epidemic that spread throughout the costal town of Acre in May 1948 was the result of Zionist Jews contaminating the Arabs' water supply. In Gaza the Jews failed in a similar attempt. The Egyptian Army found four Jews disguised as Arabs near the water wells. The four terrorists were caught with a canteen filled with dysentery and typhoid bacteria. All four were tried, convicted, and hanged within a three-month period. Dr. Cohen questions if the two incidents were isolated or part of a larger program of bio-warfare during the 1948 war.

Israel's bio-weapons facilities are located at the Israel Institute of Biological Research (IIBR) in Ness Ziona (also Nes Ziona, Nes Tona) a few miles southeast of Tel Aviv. In 1952 the IIBR consisted of a single building hidden in an orange grove. Today, the IIBR has grown into a massive 14-acre compound with several hundred employees surrounded by high walls and electronic sensors. What goes on behind those high walls is something Israel would prefer to be kept secret.

Dutch journalist Karel Knip has researched the IIBR and came up with some interesting findings. Knip began by going through medical literature he found on the Internet. Specifically, he focused on the papers of 140 scientists affiliated with IIBR over the last five decades. With the help of experts on chemical and biological weapons, Knip developed an overview of the various programs that exist at IIBR. Knip found IIBR research began in the 1950s involving plague, typhus, and rabies. Dr. Avner Cohen discusses Knip's findings in his paper and states, "... a significant number of studies at IIBR focused on anti-livestock agents, following the path of other national BW [bio-weapons] programs at the time." 'Anti-livestock agents' is Cohen's cryptic reference to Israel's anthrax programs.

A motive for Israel in launching the anthrax attacks would be to bring America into war against Iraq and to remove that country as a potential threat to the Jewish state. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United States Senate was thrown into a heated debate as to whether or not this country should go to war. Senator Tom Daschle took the lead in being against American involvement. In order for Israel to achieve her war objective, this time Senator Daschle would have to be removed—or turned toward Israel's position. Either way, Israel would win.

Likewise, Senator Patrick Leahy ran afoul of the Israelis when he introduced his Leahy Amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act. The Leahy Amendment, also called the Leahy Law, prohibits American arms sales to foreign security or military units that systematically violate human rights. The Israeli military routinely tortures Palestinian prisoners, assassinates Arab political figures, and fires American-made rockets and missiles into civilian crowds and apartment buildings. If an American administration ever decided to enforce the Leahy Law, Israel would find herself under an arms embargo. Eliminating or 'turning' her Senatorial adversaries—a gamble she couldn't lose— would be powerful motives for Israel to target Senators Daschle and Leahy for political assassination by anthrax.

For Israel to have initiated the anthrax attacks, prior knowledge of the al-Qaeda plot was essential. The Mossad, Israel's external intelligence service, has made it their mission to track Arab terrorists around the world. Indirect evidence of Mossad's surveillance of the al-Qaeda hijackers prior to September 11 can be found in the Drug Enforcement Agency report, "Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities," and in an investigative report from Fox News.

In March 2001, an alert was issued by the National Counterintelligence Executive, a branch of the CIA, warning federal employees to be aware of "suspicious visitors to federal facilities." There had been reports of Middle Eastern persons showing up at government buildings—many of them DEA offices—claiming to be Israeli art students. At first it was thought the Israeli art students might be Arab terrorists planning an attack. However, it later turned out the art students were indeed Israelis.

The Israelis would appear unannounced at various government offices or at the homes of federal officials. They would falsely identify themselves as art students from the University of Jerusalem or Bazala Academy in Israel and attempt to sell their artwork on canvas. Astute government employees soon discovered the Israelis were more interested in obtaining information than in selling artwork. The students, in the course of their conversations, would ask for business cards and inquire about the officials' work activities and those of their associates. At times, the Israelis were found breaching government entrances through back doors and parking garages. Others appeared at government offices that were hidden or undisclosed to the local community. Some were found with diagrams of government buildings showing entrances and offices of various employees—indicating prior surveillance. Others were found with photographs of government agents. One Israeli had a computer printout with the heading "DEA groups."

 

...During this period, the DEA was investigating the activities of Israeli organized crime. Israeli mobsters, along with the Russian Mafia, control the distribution of the drug Ecstasy in America. It should be noted there is no real difference between these two criminal organizations. It has been known for a long time that the Russian Mafia is made up of Russian Jews from the former Soviet Union. Questions still remain: Why were Israeli spies posing as art students interested in the activities of the DEA? What connection does the Mossad have with the Russian Mafia? The conclusion that best fits the known facts is that Israeli intelligence launched an operation against the DEA to protect their new intelligence asset, the Russian Mafia, from prosecution.

After September 11, the activities of Israeli art students were seen in a new light. The FBI began to investigate the trail left by the Arab hijackers and found many of them had residences in Florida. Interestingly, one third of the art student spies were also based in Florida. It was discovered that some of the Israeli art students had addresses in the same locations as the hijackers. One commentator said that, at times, they were just yards apart....

[Jenny Lake]

http://garfield.library.upenn.edu/histc ... de/82.html
In April and May 1979, an unusual anthrax epidemic occurred in Sverdlovsk, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Soviet officials attributed it to consumption of contaminated meat. U.S. agencies attributed it to inhalation of spores accidentally released at a military microbiology facility in the city. Epidemiological data show that most victims worked or lived in a narrow zone extending from the military facility to the southern city limit. Farther south, livestock died of anthrax along the zone's extended axis. The zone paralleled the northerly wind that prevailed shortly before the outbreak. It is concluded that the escape of an aerosol of anthrax pathogen at the military facility caused the outbreak.

http://www.onehealthinitiative.com/publ ... No%204.pdf
Soviet medical authorities reported that the epidemic was linked to an outbreak of anthrax among livestock in the area, and that the human cases were due to people eating contaminated meat and having skin contact with contaminated animal carcasses. The size of the human epidemic, however, led to international speculation whether it was natural or accidental, and if accidental whether it was due to activities in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972. After repeated attempts to bring in dependent scientific teams to Sverdlovsk, permission was granted for a scientific team to visit, and the investigation took place in 1992 and 1993.

The investigative team, led by the noted American geneticist, molecular biologist and Harvard biochemist, Matthew S. Meselson, PhD, included Jeanne Guillemin, PhD, noted author/sociologist/medical anthropologist, Alexis Shelokov, PhD, a vaccine expert from the Salk Institute with a long career in public health, David Walker, MD, well known University of Texas Medical Branch pathologist, and renowned veterinary medical epidemiologist Martin Hugh-Jones, DVM, MPH, PhD. In her *book, Dr. Guillemin said, "The veterinary perspective is essential. Anthrax is a zoonosis, a disease that can travel from animals to humans. It is almost always associated with grazing animals, especially sheep, cows, goats, and horses that pick it up from contaminated soil, by either eating or inhaling the tough spores that are the dormant form of its deadly bacteria." The legendary human medical epidemiologist, Alexander D. Langmuir, MD was involved in deciphering data for publication.

From the beginning, the team took a "One Health" approach with human medicine and veterinary medicine professionals working side by side to investigate both human and animal cases of anthrax that had occurredSince the KGB had apparently destroyed hospital and public health records of the outbreak, the team had to locate (using government compensation lists) and personally interview survivors as well as family and friends of anthrax cases,search local cemeteries, and comb through hospital autopsy reports and individual case histories. They also searched reports from veterinary laboratories and interviewed owners of sheep and other livestock that had died. Through this painstaking process, they were able to analyze 77 human cases, and establish that most of them lived and worked in the southern part of the city.

...The apparently 4 km long area where cases were clustered was downwind from a military microbiology laboratory that had officially been developing an improved anthrax vaccine at the time of the outbreak. This seemed to provide evidence that an accidental release of anthrax from the military facility had caused the human outbreak...

...The fact that animals died in an area almost 50 km from the nearest human case provided key information about the movement of the airborne anthrax spores...It also indicated that sheep may be more susceptible than humans since they apparently became sick and died at exposure levels an order of magnitude lower than where human cases occurred. In this way, the animal deaths served as "sentinel events" providing warning information to humans about an environmental health hazard, in this case a pathogen that is a prime bioterrorism agent.

Wasn't this just THE BEST TEST ever?...the Soviets were "officially..developing an improved anthrax vaccine at the time". The One Health (One Medicine) folks are still excitied about this event.

The findings of the team's investigation were published in Science (Meselson M, Guillemin J,
Hugh-Jones M, Langmuir A, Popova I, Shelokov A, Yampolskaya O.The Sverdlovsk anthrax
outbreak of 1979.Science. 1994; 266(5188):1202-8 and *Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly
Outbreak by Jeanne Guillemin, University of California Press, 1999.

There were 96 human cases total in the Soviet outbreak.
Three months after the conclusion of the Russian onsite tour, on 11-22-1993, Alexander Langmuir died, leaving only the two Salk Institute Fellows plus a wife as the core team http://www.anthrax.osd.mil/documents/li ... dlovsk.pdf :
husband and wife, Matthew Meselson and Jeanne Guillemin
--Meselson, founding Salk Fellow, at Harvard http://www.polioforever.wordpress.com/salk-institute/
--Guillemin, Dept. of Sociology at Boston College, MIT, Brigham & Women's Hospital, conducted interviews during the Sverdlovsk investigation and later authored "Anthrax: the Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak" published in December 1999 http://www.ucpress.edu/books/pages/8835.php
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeanne_Guillemin
--Martin Hugh-Jones of Louisiana State University http://www.vetmed.lsu.edu/pbs/hugh-jones.html , Director of the WHO division called the Collaborating Center for Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems for Public Health. He retired from LSU in 2005, and down-graded his WHO job to 'Deputy Director'. Hugh-Jones had a lot to say about Hatfill and Ivins, including how "Ivins would never have been on his shortlist of [suspects]" http://www.npr.org/templates/story/stor ... t=1&f=1003 , but he maintained a belief that the anthrax attacks were "domestic and I have no reason to doubt that". Hugh-Jones described Hatfill as a 'jerk' http://smh.com.au/articles/2003/11/07/1 ... 99245.html   According to the military's Sverdlovsk link above, Hugh-Jones did not participate in the 'report' meetings, though he is considered the foremost US expert on anthrax.
--Alexander Langmuir http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Langmuir " Alexander Duncan Langmuir (2 September 1910 – 22 November 1993) was an American epidemiologist. He is renowned for creating the Epidemic Intelligence Service."
--Alexis Shelokov, also a Salk Institute Fellow in San Antonio,Tx, was a spine surgeon and scoliosis specialist http://www.spine-health.com/files/AlexisShelokov.pdf , described as a vaccinologist who speaks fluent Russian, he passed away at age 55. Shelokov had a central role in the controversies about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which were reaching a head in the early 1990s. CFS can be considered "the other AIDS", less fatal but more neurologically debilitating and contagious, still mired in mystery from the malfeasance of CDC/NIH personnel such as Stephen Straus.
--David H. Walker, a spine surgeon, WHO director, and pathology chair >>"last fall during the anthrax poisoning episodes and their aftermath, reporters for major national, international, and local media outlets clamored to interview Drs. Peters and Walker and several of their knowledgeable UTMB colleagues, including Dr. Robert Shope, associate director of the Center for Biodefense and leader of the team responsible for most of the countermeasures to bioterrorism research." http://www.utmb.edu/utmbmagazine/archiv ... e_Wind.pdf
 
excerpt from Guillemin's book:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=117197&page=1
Chapter One: ACCURSED FIRE AND BIOLOGICAL WEAPON
Tuesday, June 2, 1992. After a long transatlantic flight from New York, our research team arrives in the new post-Soviet Russia, a nation that six months before did not exist. We are in the first stage of a trip to investigate the cause of the worst anthrax epidemic recorded in a modern industrial nation....
...After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, however, the political doors have opened for our travel to Sverdlovsk, which has reclaimed its prerevolutionary name, Yekaterinburg. We have allowed ourselves only two weeks to attempt to discover conclusive evidence about the source of the 1979 anthrax deaths.
...The congenial Dr. Alexis Shelokov, who speaks fluent Russian, is a vaccine expert from the Salk Institute with a long career in public health. The more reserved Dr. David Walker is chief of pathology at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. We are hoping that reports in the Russian press will prove true, that autopsy samples have been preserved by two pathologists who worked during the 1979 outbreak.
The fifth member of our team is veterinarian Martin Hugh-Jones from Louisiana State University, a member of the World Health Organization's Anthrax Research and Control Working Group, and an avid world traveler.

 

Yekaterinburg was the site of the Romanov family execution http://en.rian.ru/culture/20070903/76292975.html and apparently a place of revived nationalism. Guillemin notes they had an  agricultural black market.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yekaterinburg
In the 1930s, Yekaterinburg became a large industrial center of Russia. It was the time when the famous Uralmash was built, becoming the biggest heavy machinery factory in Europe.
During World War II, many government technical institutions and whole factories were relocated to Yekaterinburg away from the war-affected areas (mostly Moscow).... During the 1991 coup d'état attempt, Sverdlovsk, a home city of President Boris Yeltsin was selected by him as a reserve capital of Russian Federation in an emergency if Moscow would became dangerous for the Russian government. A reserve cabinet headed by Oleg Lobov was sent to the city, where Yeltsin enjoyed a strong popular support at that time.

...tsk, tsk, except for maybe among those pesky Siberian farmers. A generation earlier, they were subject to experimental polio vaccines from Russian Albert Sabin, who had his Russian Jewishness in common with Jonas Salk.

 The Salk Institute has a veritable 'exchange' program with the Weizmann Institute.

[Jenny Lake]

And in the same time period....real "total" war application of anthrax in Africa in the exact context which Frank Macfarlane Burnet advised to the Australian government in 1947. Burnet headed the Aussie counterpart to what became the Salk Institute, specializing in influenza, polio, and other 'intestinal agents', his personal biowarfare recommendations http://polioforever.wordpress.com/f-macfarlane-burnet/

The diamond market, Oppenheimer and DeBeers, have caused immeasurable strife in the region:

http://www.anthraxvaccine.org/zimbabwe.html Anthrax Epizootic in Zimbabwe, 1978-1980: Due to Deliberate Spread?
Meryl Nass, M.D.*
Abstract
The largest recorded outbreak of anthrax in humans occurred in Zimbabwe during its civil war, in 1979 to 1980. There were a number of unusual features of the epizootic. The disease spread over time from area to area, until six of the eight provinces were affected. Yet anthrax usually appears as a point source outbreak, without significant geographic spread. Only the African-owned cattle in the Tribal Trust Lands were affected; cattle belonging to whites were uninvolved. A critical review of the scientific explanations proposed to account for these events is presented. The possibility that the epizootic could have been a biological warfare event is evaluated. Finally, suggestions are advanced for further investigations into the origin of this epizootic.

 ...Technologically, production of anthrax spores is not a difficult problem. Anthrax weapons were developed and tested by at least the Japanese, British, and United States governments during the Second World War [56-58], and it is suspected that a number of other nations have developed or acquired the technologies since [59]. The spores are stable under a wide range of conditions of temperature, pressure, and moisture. Many means exist for delivering viable anthrax spores [60,61]. Experiments on Gruinard Island (where the British tested anthrax weapons in 1942-1943) included release from exploding bombs and by airplane [62]. Either of these two methods, or other methods, could conceivably have been used in Zimbabwe. Deliberate contamination of animal feeds or fertilizers might have accomplished the same end, although these products were not widely used.

 ...Anthrax weapons produced by the military existed in the United States until about 1970, when President Nixon gave orders for their destruction. One cannot totally exclude the possibility that some biological munitions were transferred from the United States to other countries prior to their destruction. It is also not impossible to imagine that such weapons could have been produced by a nation that was not a complying party to the Biological Weapons Convention (which in any case only entered into force in 1975), or even by a renegade group, and could have found their way to Zimbabwe.

 ...The rationing and limiting of food supplies to the black population was in fact a part of the military strategy for controlling the population and restricting their support to the guerrillas...

...In his memoirs, Flower admits to the deliberate distribution of poisoned clothing, which killed hundreds of black guerrillas [68]. Yet clothing can be worn by anyone. Organophosphate poisoning from tainted clothing affected civilians as well, and poisoning by this means became documented in the Zimbabwe medical literature [69,70]. Dr. Paul Epstein, an American physician practicing in Mozambique for the Ministry of Health, with support from the American Friends Service Committee in 1978, treated large numbers of Zimbabweans, who had arrived from ZANLA training camps, for a bleeding disorder. Initially a viral hemorrhagic fever was suspected. But there were many deaths despite treatment. Eventually a fat biopsy was obtained and sent for toxin analysis; this analysis revealed the presence of warfarin [71]. Thus another unconventional mode of warfare, warfarin poisoning, may have been employed by some within the Rhodesian military...

...Jeremy Brick Hill, a Zimbabwe journalist and veteran of the conflict, claimed that the Rhodesian CIO and Selous Scouts (an arm of the Rhodesian military that employed blacks who successfully masqueraded as guerrillas) used anthrax, cholera, thallium-contaminated foodstuffs, and organophosphate-impregnated clothing in the later years of the war [72,73].

 
Anthrax Vaccine:

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/pubs/pinkbo ... ax-508.pdf ....in 1876, Robert Koch definitively established a microbial origin for anthrax making this the first disease for which this was done. A live attenuated animal vaccine was developed and tested by Louis Pasteur in 1881. An improved animal vaccine containing a suspension of an avirulent, nonencapsulated live strain of B. anthracis was developed in 1939. The role of toxin in the pathogenesis of anthrax was demonstrated in 1954. A human vaccine composed of cell-free culture filtrate was developed in 1954, and in 1970 an improved cell-free vaccine was licensed in the United States.

The  Arms Textile Mill outbreak in New Hampshire in 1957 was an official test in which 4 workers died :

http://www.anthrax.mil/vaccine/protect2.asp  "There was an unexpected outbreak of inhalational anthrax during this study. "

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=29162  Did Army cause anthrax outbreak in mill?...Editor's note: Today, WorldNetDaily presents the first of a two-part report on the federal government's involvement with anthrax. In this story, WND investigates a 1957 outbreak of anthrax in a textile mill that happened to be the site of Army experiments on a vaccine for the disease. Tomorrow's installment examines the federal investigation into the post-9/11 anthrax attacks...
...A central activity at the Arms Textile Mill throughout the 1950s was the processing of goat hair imported from Pakistan, Iraq and Iran. The refined hair was used in the lining of expensive men's suits and overcoats manufactured at the mill. The Arms Mill, in 1957, employed 632 workers spread throughout a complex of large red brick buildings located on the banks of the Merrimack River and near the edge of downtown Manchester, N.H.
...In an amazing coincidence, at the same time as the deadly Arms Mill outbreak the manufacturing plant was the site for tests using an experimental vaccine. Tests on the mill workers – who were considered at risk for anthrax due to handling animal products such as goat and sheep hair – had begun quietly in May 1955 and were sponsored by the Biological Warfare Laboratories of the U.S. Chemical Corps at Fort Detrick.

Not so amazing is the fact that in May of 1955 the Salk polio vaccine was stopped for 5 days and then resumed while the Nevada Test Site was still executing Operation Teapot --New England recorded 400 to 700 percent increases in polio at this time. In 1957, when the anthrax outbreak occurred at the mill, the fallout from the largest and dirtiest test series, Plumbob, concentrated in this place. I'd post the fallout 'cloud track' maps for '57 which I've seen, except I can't find them anymore. The other years are available --just not 1957. The Arms Textile workers who died thought they had a bad case of the flu.

The point in all this, I assume, to test the ability of chemicals and radiation to 'prime' people for infectious agents. No opportunity looks lost historically, to set-up Israel's enemies.

Nearly a half-century beyond the Arms Mill outbreak, no definitive scientific explanation or cause for the epidemic has been discovered. Scientists at UCLA's Department of Epidemiology and other research centers have speculated that"the circumstantial evidence suggested a relationship to a particular batch of goat hair." However, because no samples of that animal hair exist today, no up-to-date testing can be accomplished, and results from tests conducted in 1957 and 1958 remain inconclusive.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Interesting finds there Jenny...  I notice the "J-tagged names" on these two Russian Anthrax Scientists

Looks like  Meselson is doing research in a new lab in Galveston, TX.

Galveston National Laboratory: "The Best Little Bug House in Texas"?
Biot Report #322: January 19, 2006    Printer Printer Friendly

Construction is underway for the six-story, 63,000 square-feet "Galveston National Laboratory" (GNL) at the University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB) at Galveston, according to a well-written and thoughtful January 12, 2006 "New England Journal of Medicine" penned by Robert Steinbrook, M.D., and titled "Research in the Hot Zone". (1) Established in 1891, The UTMB at Galveston consists of a complex of six hospitals, four academic schools, numerous research centers and institutes, and one of the largest medical libraries in the Southwest. (2)

The completed GNL will be a biosafety level 4 facility, which is the highest biosafety rating for laboratories dealing with highly-contagious organisms. The laboratory will be located near the center of the medical school campus, a short distance from the emergency department and the children's hospital. The UTMB at Galveston faces the Texas coast mainland on the north side of the flat and hurricane-prone Galveston barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. The UTMB Magazine writers call the new GNL facility "The Best Little Bug House in Texas." (3)

The new GNL laboratory has many safety features and will be "surrounded by a 200-foot security perimeter from which private vehicles will be excluded," writes Steinbrook who also notes that "n general, the Galveston project [the Galveston National Laboratory] has had the support of the community [of 60,000 people], largely because of the extensive groundwork that had been laid during the planning and construction of the current laboratory". The current laboratory to which Steinbrook refers is the much smaller 2,000 square-foot biosafety level 4 facility named after virologist Robert E. Shope, M.D. who died of idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis in 2004. (4) A virtual tour of a typical biosafety level 4 laboratory is available from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. (See note 5 below for web address.)


Researchers attached to the GNL, which is projected for completion in mid-2008, hope to develop countermeasures to diagnose, prevent, and effectively treat infectious diseases caused by anthrax, bubonic plague, hemorrhagic fevers (e.g., Ebola), typhus, West Nile virus, influenza, and drug-resistant tuberculosis, among others, says a fact sheet prepared by the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at UTMB. (6) An example of the work currently underway in the smaller Robert E. Shope Laboratory, operational since 2004 according to Steinbrook, is combining H5N1 (the avian flu virus strain) with other influenza strains that infect humans. (p. 110)

Biosafety level 4 laboratories are rare. Currently four exist in the United States: Hamilton, Montana; San Antonio, Texas; Atlanta, Georgia; Frederick, Maryland; and Galveston, Texas. A fifth one remains in the planning stages for Boston, Massachusetts whose local community has voiced opposition.

Taxpayers via the National Institutes of Health ($110 million federal money), local sources ($40 million to be covered via state revenue bonds), and private philanthropy ($17 million) are funding construction of the Galveston National Laboratory. The UTMB will own and operate the GNL and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease/National Institutes of Health, whose current head is Anthony Fauci, M.D., will oversee the research projects inside of it. (6)

The principal investigator for the GNL project is Stanley M. Lemon, M.D., a hepatitis virologist trained at Cornell University and employed for years at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill before moving to sunny Galveston in 1997 to become dean of the UTMB School of Medicine. Two years earlier, in 1995, Robert Shope had moved to Galveston from Yale University where he had been employed for his entire adult life. He carried with him to Galveston "one of the most extensive collections of virus cultures in the world", which he and another colleague assembled. The collection of some 5,000 samples is also known as the "World Reference Center for Emerging Viruses and Arboviruses." (7) Like Lemon, Shope was a virologist, but he favored arboviruses (e.g., yellow fever, dengue, Ebola). Shope's father, Richard, was also a virologist who discovered papovavirus, the causative agent of skin and genital warts.

The UTMB School of Medicine is also the long-time professional home of David H. Walker, M.D., head of pathology and executive director of the Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at The UTMB. Dean Lemon said of Walker, "He has attracted some of the world's top scientists in tropical diseases and has put UTMB on the map as one of the best research centers for emerging infectious diseases in the world." (

David Walker is well known to some people for another reason, which helps to explain his intense interest and participation in realizing a level 4 laboratory at The UTMB. In early 1992, Harvard geneticist Matthew Meselson, Ph.D., a longtime crusader against bioweapons, contacted Walker in Galveston to invite him on a fact-finding mission to Sverdlovsk, Russia. (9) Meselson had been working with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) on the 1979 disastrous Sverdlovsk human anthrax epidemic, as discussed in two books on the topic and recorded in documents stored in the National Security Archives at George Washington University. (10-12). Walker joined Meselson's team, which traveled to Sverdlovsk on June 2, 1992, to examine the remains of the 42 victims autopsied in the wake of the 1979 anthrax epidemic. This trip became possible only because the Soviet Union dissolved and Boris Yeltsin, who hailed from Sverdlovsk, gave his Communist blessing to the trip.

Following the trip, Walker hosted as a visiting scientist at The UTMB in Galveston Russian pathologist Dr. Lev Grinberg who, with lead Russian pathologist Dr. Faina Abramova, performed the 42 anthrax victim autopsies in 1979 and aided the Meselson team in its fact-finding mission in 1992.

Sources:

1. Robert Steinbrook: "Research in the Hot Zone" in The New England Journal of Medicine, vol. 354, No. 2, January 12, 2006, pp. 109-112.
2. "About UTMB" at: http://www.utmbhealthcare.org/AboutUTMB/; accessed January 20, 2006.
3. "The Best Little Bug House in Texas", UTMB, Spring 2005, available at: http://www.utmb.edu/utmbmagazine/archive/05_Spring....
http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/page1/98/08...; accessed January 20, 2006.
4. David H. Walker: "Robert Ellis Shope: 1929-2004. (In Memoriam)(Obituary)" in Emerging Infectious Diseases; 4/1/2004; available at:
http://www.highbeam.com/library/docfree.asp?DOCID=...=.
5. "NIAID Biodefense Research" available at: http://www3.niaid.nih.gov/Biodefense/Public/blt.ht...; accessed January 20, 2006.
6. "Galveston National Laboratory" fact sheet; available at: http://www.som.utmb.edu/som/Research/NBL%20fact%20...'; accessed January 20, 2006.
7. Kevin Moran: "Virus research lab to be sited in Galveston", Houston Chronicle, August 7, 1998, available at: http://www.chron.com/content/chronicle/page1/98/08...; accessed January 20, 2006.
8. Center for Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases at The UTMB: Faculty. Available at: http://www.utmb.edu/CBEID/administration/team.htm; accessed January 20, 2006.
9. Jim Kelly: "Death in the Wind" in UTMB Quarterly, Summer 2002, pp. 3-11. Available online at:
http://www.utmb.edu/utmbmagazine/archive/sum02/UTM...'; accessed January 20, 2006.
10. National Security Archive: "Anthrax at Sverdlovsk"; available at: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB61/; accessed January 20, 2006.
11. Jeanne Guillemin: "Anthrax: The Investigation of a Deadly Outbreak", University of California Press, 1999.
12. Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg, William Broad: "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War" Simon and Schuster, 2001.

Found this article with citations from both the Galveston Lab and the IIBR. They are likely sharing info and researchers which, IMHO, means they can use US taxpayer findings for more than just "preventing" outbreaks:
---

Genetic and Antigenic Diversities of Major Immunoreactive Proteins in Globally Distributed Ehrlichia canis Strains
Xiaofeng Zhang,1 Tian Luo,1 Avi Keysary,5 Gad Baneth,6 Simone Miyashiro,1 Carmela Strenger,5 Trevor Waner,5 and Jere W. McBride1,2,3,4*

Departments of Pathology,1 Microbiology and Immunology,2 Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases,3 Institute for Human Infections and Immunity, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, Texas,4 Israel Institute for Biological Research, Ness Ziona, Israel,5 School of Veterinary Medicine, Hebrew University, Rehovot, Israel6

Received 3 December 2007/ Returned for modification 26 January 2008/ Accepted 3 May 2008

The extent of knowledge regarding the diversity of globally distributed Ehrlichia canis strains has been limited to information gained from a few evolutionarily conserved genes. In this study, E. canis strains from the United States (strain Jake [US]), Brazil (strain São Paulo
), and Israel (strain 611 [IS] and Ranana [IS-R]) were used to examine the antigenic and genetic diversities of four well-characterized major immunoreactive protein genes/proteins. gp36 and gp200 were the most divergent genes, and nucleotide substitutions in the gp36 tandem repeat region of the IS strain, but not the IS-R strain, resulted in two amino acid differences (S->P and P->T) in each nine-amino-acid repeat (epitope-containing region). DNA sequences of gp19 and gp140 were completely conserved in the US and BR strains, but differences were found in the Israeli strains, including two fewer tandem repeats in gp140 and a single amino acid substitution in gp19 from the IS strain. E. canis whole-cell lysates from each isolate were examined by Western immunoblotting using sera from naturally infected dogs from each country, and four major immunoreactive proteins (gp19, gp36, gp140, and gp200) were identified in each strain using protein-specific antisera. The US and BR strains exhibited highly conserved immunoreactive protein profiles, while some differences were identified in the IS strain. Sera from naturally infected Israeli dogs confirmed gene sequencing information, which demonstrated two distinct E. canis strains, defined by the gp36 gene. Conversely, gp19 was strongly reactive and present in all E. canis isolates. gp140 and gp200 were also present in all strains, although gp140 in the IS strain had two fewer tandem repeats and exhibited a smaller mass.

* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Department of Pathology, Center for Biodefense and Emerging Infectious Diseases, University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston, TX 77555-0609. Phone: (409) 747-2498. Fax: (409) 747-2455. E-mail: http://cvi.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/15/7/1080

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Found this too about the Dugway:

UT—Hundreds, perhaps thousands of open-air
germ warfare tests were conducted at Dugway during
the Cold War. The tests introduced non-indigenous
diseases or increased the range of indigenous
diseases in the region, including encephalomyelitis,
Rocky Mountain spotted fever, psittacosis, Q fever,
anthrax, brucellosis, plague, tularemia, and hydatid
disease, all of which are now considered endemic
among the native wildlife. In recent years, Dugway
also produced weapons-grade anthrax of the same
strain used in the attacks in the fall of 2001

http://www.internationalterrorist.com/a ... _24x36.pdf

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Maybe the The Silicon Analysis will finally trace back to Israel's IIBR?  I figure the IIBR scientists probably visited Dugway and Ft. Detrick over the years. This discovery is about 1-week old...

also
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... elson.html

Silicon Analysis of Anthrax Attack Spores: New Answers Leave More Questions Unanswered

By: Jim White Friday March 19, 2010 1:00 pm    


RMR-1029 Flask

We now know conclusively that the spores in the anthrax attacks did not come directly from this flask labeled RMR-1029 by Bruce Ivins, but were cultured most likely using RMR-1029 as the culture inoculum.

Among the many enduring scientific mysteries surrounding the Amerithrax investigation of the anthrax attacks of 2001 is the question of whether an agent such as fumed silica was used to "weapoinze" the spores. Early in the analysis of the attack, statements were issued claiming that the spores were indeed weaponized with silica, but subsequent analysis has proven that not to be the case. New data just released help to pinpoint the reason for the earlier misunderstanding while at the same time emaphasizing that central questions about the conclusion that Bruce Ivins acted alone remain unanswered.

To review, here is a key Washington Post article from October, 2002 that fed into the "weaponized" theory:

    A significant number of scientists and biological warfare experts are expressing skepticism about the FBI's view that a single disgruntled American scientist prepared the spores and mailed the deadly anthrax letters that killed five people last year.

    These sources say that making a weaponized aerosol of such sophistication and virulence would require scientific knowledge, technical competence, access to expensive equipment and safety know-how that are probably beyond the capabilities of a lone individual.

    /snip/

    Several sources agreed that the most likely way to build the coated spores would be to use the fine glass particles, known generically as "fumed silica" or "solid smoke," and mix them with the spores in a spray dryer.

Interestingly, these speculations in the Post were going well beyond the initial disclosures about silicon. Here are snippets of a White House briefing on October 29, 2001. Major General Parker was the head of USAMRIID, the facility where Ivins worked:

    Q: Does that suggest then that there was no additive, there's been nothing in the spores to make them more — or nothing added to the spores to make them more easily aerosolized?

    MAJOR GENERAL PARKER: Complicated question. We do know that we found silica in the samples. Now, we don't know what that motive would be, or why it would be there, or anything. But there is silica in the samples. And that led us to be absolutely sure that there was no aluminum in the sample, because the combination of a silicate, plus aluminum, is sort of the major ingredients of bentonite.

However, the problem is that even though the element silicon was found to be present at higher than expected concentrations in the attack material, the spores were not "coated". Here is a key disclosure of the lack of coating:

    Harvard University molecular biologist Matthew S. Meselson, who has consulted for the FBI on the anthrax probe, dismisses these early statements as misunderstandings or misinterpretations of the scientific studies conducted on the Daschle powder. "I don't know of anybody with spore expertise who actually worked on the stuff who said the spores were coated," he says. The FBI has never publicly claimed the spores were coated with silica and, in fact, told members of Congress at classified briefings that the spores were not coated, he says.
...

    Meselson, who reviewed Beecher's article for the FBI, was asked to assess scanning electron micrographs of the anthrax powder. Early in 2002, he spent half a day at the FBI's Washington field office and looked at "a large heap of electron micrographs" of the powder from the Daschle letter.

    "I saw no evidence of anything except spores, no evidence of silica nanoparticles," Meselson says. "If silica was present, I would have seen it, but nothing could have been purer than what I saw," he insists. Though purified, the preparation "had not been milled," he adds.

I have to note here, that as a Ph.D molecular biologist, the opinion of Mesleson carries tremendous weight for me. Meselson began his career by publishing what later came to be called "The Most Beautiful Experiment in Biology". [To appreciate the elegance of the experiment, see this WikiMedia Commons illustration and watch this brief animation.]

While still under the impression that an agent such as fumed silica was used to weaponize the attack spores, work was carried out at Dugway in attempt to produce similar material. The Chemical and Engineering News article linked above summarizes some of that work and the results. Other parts of the work, including electron micrographs of coated and uncoated spores of a similar bacterial species were published here.

The newest information about the silicon mystery comes in a news article in the March 19 issue of the journal Science. Here, we see conclusive visual evidence that the silicon (in green in the upper frame) in the attack spores is located inside the outer covering of the spores:

silicon in attack spores
Sandia National Laboratories illustration as reproduced in Science

Here is how the article described the analysis carried out at Sandia National Laboratories:

    A more detailed analysis by Joseph Michael and Paul Kotula of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, contradicted that conclusion. Studying individual spores with a transmission electron microscope, they found that the silicon was located within the spore coat, well inside the cell's exosporium (outermost covering). By contrast, when they looked at surrogate spores weaponized with silica, the silicon was clearly outside the exosporium.

    But the Sandia study, presented last September to a National Academies panel reviewing the science behind the investigation, still leaves questions. Out of 124 spores from a letter mailed to Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, Michael found the silicon-and oxygen signature in 97—78% of the sample. The signature was present in 66% of a sample from a letter to former Senator Tom Daschle and in 65% of spores from a letter sent to the New York Post.

    Out of nearly 200 other anthrax samples from different labs, none came close to displaying such a prominent silicon signature. The highest, in a sample from Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, was 29%. The researchers couldn't find silicon in the coat of a single spore out of some 300 taken from RMR-1029, the flask in Ivins's lab identified as the source of the bacteria used in the attacks; they concluded that all the silicon had come from the culture.

These results show conclusively that the silicon content of the attack spores differed from the silicon content of the spores that were in the actual RMR-1029 flask pictured above. The results suggest that the silicon inside the spores used in the attack came from the culture medium in which the spores were grown. Researchers in Japan recently published results with the bacterium Bacillus cereus that provide further support for this interpretation.

These researchers grew B. cereus cultures on growth medium containing high or low concentrations of silicates and found that spores produced after growth on the high silicate medium had a layer of silicon inside the spore that looked like the illustration above for the anthrax spores used in the attacks. They then carried out various experiments on high and low silicon spores to determine how the high silicon spores differed from the low silicon spores. They found no difference in spore dispersion in air (although I have reservations about whether they first achieved the same level of purification away from debris that is reported for the attack material) but did find the high silicon spores were more resistant to disruption in acid, a trait that could have evolutionary advantages. Their final sentence of the publication is the most important here:

    Our findings also strongly indicate that the anthrax spores were harvested from culture on a silicate-containing medium.

The published findings of the Amerithrax investigation suggest that detailed genetic analysis (that has not yet been released in full) indicates that the attack spores share a unique subpopulation of four mutant strains along with the primary Ames strain that was only found in Ivins' RMR-1029 flask or cultures that were known to be directly derived from it. These newly released silicon results conclusively show that the attack spores could not have been taken directly from the RMR-1029 flask, but would have to have been cultured on a high silicate growth medium. In this diary, I showed that the amount of spore material that was present in the attack letters would have been very difficult for Ivins to culture on his own in the small shake flasks he had available to him. Instead, it would have been much easier for a researcher with access to a fermenter to produce such a large amount of spores. In this diary, I pointed to a facility at Dugway that has a fermenter of just the right size to produce the material in only one or two batches. Isn't it interesting that the second highest silicon content batch of spores analyzed by Sandia came from Dugway?

http://seminal.firedoglake.com/diary/36075

Note this is laced with some propaganda:

Source:  Baltimore Sun, December 12, 2001.

Anthrax matches Army spores

Bioterror: Organisms made at a military laboratory in Utah are genetically identical to those mailed to members of Congress.

By Scott Shane, Sun Staff

For nearly a decade, U.S. Army scientists at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah have made small quantities of weapons-grade anthrax that is virtually identical to the powdery spores used in the mail attacks that have killed five people, government sources say.

Until the anthrax attacks led to tighter security measures, anthrax grown at Dugway was regularly sent by Federal Express to the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick, in Frederick, where the bacteria were killed using gamma radiation before being returned to Dugway for experiments. The anthrax was shipped in the form of a coarse paste, not in the far more dangerous finely milled form, according to one government official. Most anthrax testing at Dugway, in a barren Utah desert 87 miles southwest of Salt Lake City, is done using the killed spores to reduce the chance of accidental exposure of workers there.

But some experiments require live anthrax, milled to the tiny particle size expected on a battlefield, to test both decontamination techniques and biological agent detection systems, the sources say. Anthrax is also grown at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, where it is used chiefly to test the effectiveness of vaccines in animals. But that medical program uses a wet aerosol fog of anthrax rather than the dry powder used in the attacks and at Dugway, according to interviews and medical journal articles based on the research.

The wet anthrax, while still capable of killing people, is safer for laboratory workers to handle, scientists say. Dugway's production of weapons-grade anthrax, which has never before been publicly revealed, is apparently the first by the U.S. government since President Richard M. Nixon ordered the U.S. offensive biowarfare program closed in 1969. Scientists familiar with the anthrax program at Dugway described it to The Sun on the condition that they not be named.

The offensive program made hundreds of kilograms of anthrax for bombs designed to kill enemy troops over hundreds of square miles.

Dugway's Life Sciences Division makes the deadly spores in far, far smaller quantities, rarely accumulating more than 10 grams at a time, according to one Army official. Scientists estimate that the letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle originally contained about 2 grams of anthrax, about one-sixteenth of an ounce, or the weight of a dime. But its extraordinary concentration - in the range of 1 trillion spores per gram - meant that the letter could have contained 200 million times the average dose necessary to kill a person. Dugway's weapons-grade anthrax has been milled to achieve a similar concentration, according to one person familiar with the program. The concentration exceeds that of weapons anthrax produced by the old U.S. offensive program or the Soviet biowarfare program, according to Dr. Richard O. Spertzel, who worked at Detrick for 18 years and later served as a United Nations bioweapons inspector in Iraq.

Lab security measures

No evidence linking the Dugway anthrax to the attacks has been made public, and there might well be none. Army officials say the anthrax there and at Fort Detrick has long been protected by multiple security measures. The FBI has extensively questioned Dugway employees who have had access to anthrax, according to people familiar with the investigation. Agents also have questioned people at Fort Detrick and other government and university laboratories that have used the Ames strain of anthrax found in the letters. Still, the analysis of the genetic and physical properties of the anthrax mailed to Daschle and Sen. Patrick J. Leahy has caused investigators to take a hard look at Dugway's anthrax program.

First, the genetic fingerprint of the mailed anthrax is indistinguishable from that of the Ames "reference strain," which is the strain used most often at Fort Detrick and Dugway, according to a scientist familiar with the genetic work. Researchers led by Paul Keim at Northern Arizona University have compared the two samples and found them identical at 50 genetic markers - the most sensitive genetic identification method available. That does not mean the mailed anthrax necessarily originated from an Army program, because Ames anthrax has been widely used at government and university laboratories in the United States and overseas.

Shipped without records

While some sources have estimated Ames might have been used in as few as 20 labs, one scientist who has worked with anthrax said the total cannot be known exactly, but is probably closer to 50. "Until the last few years, a graduate student would call up a friend at another lab and say, 'Send me Ames,' and they'd do it," the scientist said. "There wouldn't necessarily be any records kept." Ames is similar to but distinct from the Vollum1B strain of anthrax used in the old U.S. offensive biological weapons program.

The genetic testing proves the mailed anthrax was not left over from the old program, most scientists agree. Even more provocative than the genetics are the physical properties of the mailed anthrax. While some scientists disagree, many bioterrorism experts argue that the quality of the mailed anthrax is such that it could have been produced only in a weapons program or using information from such a program.

Link to Dugway base

If true, that would greatly limit the field, increasing the likelihood of a link to the only site in the United States where weapons-grade anthrax has been made in recent years. Dugway, which is larger than Rhode Island, has been a military testing ground since World War II, when military officials selected it for its remote location in Utah's Great Salt Lake Desert. The Dugway anthrax program was launched in the early 1990s, shortly after the Persian Gulf war reawakened U.S. military commanders to the threat from biological weapons.

Iraq is known to have built a major bioweapons program that included anthrax in its potential arsenal. (Early Iraq-War propaganda three months after 9/11--The CSR)

According to Dugway's Web site, the proving ground's Life Sciences Division has an aerosol technology branch and a biotechnology branch, both of which use a Biosafety Level 3 laboratory designed to contain pathogens. Anthrax and other dangerous germs at Dugway are guarded by video cameras, intrusion alarms, double locks and a buddy system that does not permit workers to handle the agents alone, according to one scientist. But Dugway does not have a gamma radiation machine, which is why its anthrax has been shipped to Detrick for irradiation. Dr. David L. Huxsoll, who headed Detrick's biodefense program in the 1980s, said vaccines and detection systems must be tested against aerosolized anthrax if troops are to be prepared for biological attacks.
"When you're building a program to defend against biological weapons on the battlefield, you have to be prepared for an aerosol exposure," he said.

Not a treaty violation

Milton Leitenberg, an expert on bioweapons at the University of Maryland, said he was not aware of the Dugway anthrax production.
But he said making a few grams of weapons-grade anthrax for testing defensive equipment would not violate the international convention on biological weapons.
The treaty bans the production of bioagents "of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective and other peaceful purposes."
"There's no specific limit in grams or micrograms," Leitenberg said. "But if you got up in the hundreds of grams, people would be very, very skeptical."
The FBI's investigation, called Amerithrax, has focused on the possibility that the anthrax terrorist might be a loner in this country with some scientific training. The Sun reported Sunday that in two months, none of the hundreds of FBI agents on the case had contacted the Army retirees who produced anthrax in the 1950s and 1960s.

Yesterday, one of those anthrax veterans, Orley R. Bourland Jr. of Walkersville, got a call from the White House Office of Homeland Security seeking information.

The FBI had not made contact with several veterans interviewed yesterday.

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/EPI/bioter/anthr ... pores.html

This guy is interesting:

Richard O. Spertzel

 is a veterinarian, microbiologist and expert in the area of biological warfare. He participated in germ warfare research at U.S. Army Medical Unit (USAMU), Fort Detrick, Frederick, Maryland. (USAMU is now known as the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, or USAMRIID)[1]. Spertzel held several positions USAMRIID including Deputy for Research, Deputy Commander, and Chief of the Animal Assessment Division. From 1994 to 1998 Spertzel served as the Senior Biologist for the United Nations Special Commission in Iraq. His strongly misleading Congressional  testimonial about the WMD capabilities of Iraq[2] helped to justify the subsequent US invasion of Iraq. After the invasion, Spertzel was a member of the Iraq Survey Group, which found that Iraq was not producing nor planning to produce WMD at the time of the invasion.

 Education

In 1955, Spertzel earned a Bachelor of Arts in microbiology at the University of Pennsylvania. Sperzel did postgraduate work at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine and in 1962 he was awarded a Master's Degree in radiation biology by the Graduate School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Rochester. His terminal degree was obtained in 1970, a Doctor of Philosophy in microbiology from the University of Notre Dame.
[edit] 2003 Invasion of Iraq

As part of the Congressional hearings prior to authorization of the invasion of Iraq, Spertzel provided testimony to the United States House Committee on Armed Services on September 10, 2002.

Testimony by Spertzel[3]:

    * "From its inception in the 1970s, Iraq's BW program included both military and terrorist applications."
    * "Although Iraq claims that it 'obliterated' the program in 1991 (without the supervision by the UN as was set out in the ceasefire resolution 687, April 1991), and in so doing it destroyed all weapons and bulk agents unilaterally without any further documentation. The evidence indicates rather that Iraq continued to expand its BW capabilities."
    * "Iraq asserts that the program was obliterated in 1991 but this is patently not true."
    * "Documentation recovered by UNSCOM indicated a continued build up of Iraq's BW program capability."
    * "It has had 12 years to advance its viral capability and, as I have cited elsewhere, this almost certainly includes smallpox as an agent."
    * "There is no doubt in my mind that Iraq has a much stronger biological warfare program today than it had in 1990."

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the United States government concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction during the period leading up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq after reviewing the Iraq Survey Group's final report on September 30, 2004. Claimed links of Iraq to terrorist groups like al Qaeda were never verified, and the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States concluded that there was no real evidence of such links. Much of the "intelligence" suggesting WMD in Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion was fabricated by groups like the Iraqi National Congress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_O._Spertzel

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The anthrax material

The letters contained at least two grades of anthrax material; the coarse brown material sent in the media letters and the fine powder sent to the two U.S. Senators. In addition, it has been suggested the anthrax material sent to an old Post Office Box address of the National Enquirer and then forwarded to AMI may have been an intermediate grade similar to the anthrax sent to the Senate.[14] The brown granular anthrax sent to media outlets in New York City caused only skin infections, cutaneous anthrax. The anthrax sent to the Senators caused the more dangerous form of infection known as inhalational anthrax, as did the anthrax sent to AMI in Florida.

Although the anthrax preparations were of different grades, all of the material was derived from the same bacterial strain. Known as the Ames strain, it was first researched at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland. The Ames strain was then distributed to at least fifteen bio-research labs within the U.S. and six locations overseas.

DNA sequencing of the anthrax taken from Robert Stevens (the first victim) was conducted at The Institute for Genomic Research beginning in December 2001. Sequencing was finished within a month and the analysis was published in the journal Science in early 2002.[15]

Radiocarbon dating conducted by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in June 2002 established that the anthrax was cultured no more than two years before the mailings. In October 2006 it was reported that water used to process the anthrax spores came from a source in the northeastern United States.[16] Erroneous press reports in 2003 indicated the FBI failed to reverse engineer the type of anthrax found in the letters.[17][18] According to Chemical & Engineering News, December 4, 2006,[16] there was never any attempt to "reverse engineer" the attack anthrax. Instead, the Dugway Proving Grounds "used the Leahy powder as the culture starter to 'produce several different preparations using different media, and different ways of drying and milling the preparation' that the FBI could use for comparison purposes." They "never analyzed the Leahy powder and did no comparative analyses between the preparations made and the Leahy powder."

Controversy over coatings and additives

Early reports suggested the anthrax sent to the Senate had been "weaponized." On October 29, 2001, Major General John Parker at a White House briefing said that silica had been found in the Daschle anthrax sample. Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge in a White House press conference on November 7, 2001, told reporters that tests indicated silica, not bentonite, had been used as a binding agent in making the anthrax.[19] Later, the FBI claimed a "lone individual" could have weaponized anthrax spores for as little as $2,500, using a makeshift basement laboratory.[20]

In late October, 2001, ABC chief investigative correspondent Brian Ross several times linked the anthrax sample to Saddam Hussein; on October 26, "sources tell ABCNEWS the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite. The potent additive is known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons — Iraq.... it is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program...The discovery of bentonite came in an urgent series of tests conducted at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and elsewhere," [21] on October 28, stating that "despite continued White House denials, four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the US Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica" [22] and several times on October 28 and 29.[23]

A number of press reports appeared suggesting the Senate anthrax had coatings and additives.[24][25][26] Newsweek reported the anthrax sent to Senator Leahy had been coated with a chemical compound previously unknown to bioweapons experts.[27] Two experts on the Soviet anthrax program, Kenneth Alibek and Matthew Meselson, were consultants with the Justice Department and were shown electron micrographs of the anthrax from the Daschle letter. They replied to the Washington Post article "FBI's Theory on Anthrax Is Doubted" (October 28, 2002), reporting that they saw no evidence the anthrax spores had been coated and that more careful investigation of the specimens is necessary.[28]

A week after Meselson and Alibek had their letter published in the Washington Post, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), one of the military labs that analyzed the Daschle anthrax, published an official newsletter stating that silica was a key aerosol enabling component of the Daschle anthrax.[29] The AFIP lab deputy director, Florabel Mullick, said "This [silica] was a key component. Silica prevents the anthrax from aggregating, making it easier to aerosolize. Significantly, we noted the absence of aluminum with the silica. This combination had previously been found in anthrax produced by Iraq." Unlike naturally occurring anthrax the coated spores were able to reaerosolize. A study published in JAMA on December 11, 2002 showed simulated office activities conducted in the Daschle suite more than three weeks after the initial incident resulted in up to a 65 fold increase in airborne spores over samples collected at the same locations during a semiquiescent state.[30] The spectrum AFIP based their conclusions on actually showed a peak for the element Silicon, an element sometimes naturally occurring in anthrax[citation needed] and not silica (Silicon dioxide) used to weaponise it. A former top military scientist who saw the AFIP scanning electron micrographs of the powder stated; "If the spores had been coated with silica, they would have looked like doughnuts with large sugar particles on them," instead, "the Daschle spores were clean doughnut holes with no sugars."[31]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks

[Christopher Marlowe]

From the site Jenny gave above: http://www.anthraxattacks.net/2009/07/t ... ry-solved/

Anthrax is a spore-forming germ, Bacillus anthracis, and can be found in livestock such as sheep or cattle. Analysis of the spores from the letters reveled them all to be of the same strain. This particular strain, known as the Ames strain, was first researched at the Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland. This strain of anthrax bacteria originally came from a single cow that had died in Texas in 1981. Ames has the reputation of being deadlier than other anthrax strains. Some have called Ames the "gold standard" of anthrax.

From Fort Detrick, the Ames strain was sent to researchers in at least fifteen laboratories within the United States and six laboratories abroad. It is not known how many other universities and labs may have had access to the strain, but according to one law-enforcement official "more labs than you think" could have obtained the Ames strain.

In the past, microbiologists attending conferences on infectious diseases would take vials of various strains and simply swap them with each other to aid in their research. Martin Hugh-Jones, a scientist at Louisiana State University, stated that during this period deadly pathogens were traded "like playing cards." In the real pre-9-11 scenario, any microbiologist in the world might have obtained the Ames strain.

israel has done this before:

The planning for the anthrax attacks of 2001 goes back to at least 1997. In April of that year, the national headquarters of the Jewish organization B'nai B'rith in Washington, DC received a package that contained a petri dish labeled Anthracis Yersinia, implying the dish contained bacteria that could cause anthrax infections or plague. The dish had been broken and was leaking a red fluid. Tests later determined the petri dish to be relatively harmless, and it did not contain the bacteria Anthracis or Yersinia. However, it did contain Bacillus cereus, which is less dangerous and is sometimes used as an anthrax simulant.

Does this remind anyone of the fake anthrax sent to friend of israel, Judith Miller? On October 12, 2001, Miller opened an anthrax hoax letter addressed to her New York Times office. The REAL ANTHRAX letters were sent to the enemies of israel: Leahy and Daschle:

A two-page typed letter accompanied the petri dish. The letter was largely incoherent and contained comments on Jews, Nazis, and the 'Holocaust.' The letter was signed, "The Counter Holocaust Lobbyists of Hillel." Months prior to the B'nai B'rith hoax, a movement was forming on college campuses calling for a debate to question some assertions concerning the 'Holocaust.' Those responsible for the mailing chose to blame historical revisionists or so-called "Holocaust deniers."

The B'nai B'rith hoax received a great deal of media attention. Television outlets like CNN and other networks broadcast the incident live to a national audience. The nearby area was evacuated, and for a period of time office personnel were quarantined. The case has never been solved, and the cost to the government was two million dollars.

Israel's Mossad most likely was responsible for the mailing. The hoax benefited Israel and the Jews in several ways. First, national publicity was generated in this first major anthrax scare. Second, sympathy was elicited for the Jewish organization that was attacked. Third, the persons supposedly responsible—namely, those who have questions concerning the 'Holocaust'—were demonized.

Israel is perhaps the only country in the world that could have succeeded in the anthrax attack upon America. With the help of Jewish scientists from the former Soviet Union, Israel's bio-weapons research has probably surpassed that of all other nations. The Soviet Union's bio-weapons program had 32,000 scientists and staff working in 40 different research and production facilities. Two thousand of these scientists worked exclusively on the Soviet anthrax program. A significant number of these scientists may have immigrated to Israel and become employed in her bio-weapons programs.

On the day of September 11, 2001 the Mossad was waiting for al-Qaeda to strike. Soon the greatest bio-terror event in history would follow. Different grades of anthrax were prepared at Israel's bio-warfare center at Ness Ziona. Coarse brown granules that would cause only skin infections were prepared for the New York media letters. The deadlier "weapons grade" anthrax was reserved for Senators Daschle and Leahy.

The envelopes were pre-addressed and waiting for the letters and the anthrax material to be placed in them. The letters were written with only the date at the top to be added later. In his analysis, Ed Lake has suggested the "09-11-01" top portion of the letter seems to have been printed at a different time and perhaps by a different hand. This would be a necessary precaution if the terror flights were changed or delayed by a few days.

On the day of September 11, or perhaps shortly thereafter, copies of the original letter were made at a publicly accessible copier in New Jersey. Through analysis of scratches on the glass, the FBI is certain they have found the copier used to produce the letters. The original letter used to make the copies may have been destroyed. The Mossad officer could have taken the copies to Israel the next day. The anthrax letters were likely prepared, taped, and brought back to America days later via Israeli diplomatic pouch into New York City or Washington, DC. This speculative scenario could have all occurred within the week that followed September 11. The first batch of anthrax letters was mailed in Trenton, New Jersey, exactly one week after the devastating airplane attacks.

I don't know if it happened exactly this way, but I do think it might be a mistake to think that the immediate source of the anthrax was a US lab.  If the Ames strain was being given out to "fifteen laboratories within the United States and six laboratories abroad", it would not be unreasonable to assume that israel had that strain.  
Also, israel was not, and is currently not a signatory to the international Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention.

Adding up the evidence:
1) israel is a major anthrax researcher.
2) many former USSR anthrax scientists now reside in israel.
3) israel not a signatory to BTW Convention
4) fake anthrax sent to israel supporter
5) real anthrax sent to israel enemy
6) fake anthrax mailed to israel supporter four years prior to 9/11.
7)  timing with 9/11 attacks; those attacks have also many coincidental ties to israel
ability of israel diplomatic pouches to move substances in and out of the US without any inspection.

Another curious aspect of the FBI investigation is the destruction of the evidence in the middle of the investigation:

On October 3, 2001, doctors determine that Robert Stevens in Florida has been infected with anthrax (see October 3, 2001). A culture of anthrax bacteria is grown from a sample of his spinal fluid and quickly flown by corporate jet to Paul Keim. Keim is a geneticist at Northern Arizona University who had recently developed a means to distinguish between strains of anthrax. He and his team gets the sample on October 4 and work all night. By Friday morning, they tell investigators that it is the Ames strain of anthrax. [Philadelphia Inquirer, 9/1/2008] The media will first report that the anthrax was the Ames strain on October 10. [Associated Press, 10/10/2001] Despite Keim's findings, the FBI will approve the destruction of a vital repository of Ames samples, also on October 10 (see October 10-11, 2001).

October 10-11, 2001: FBI Permits Destruction of Original Batch of Ames Strain Anthrax
Edit event  

The FBI allows the original batch of the Ames strain of anthrax to be destroyed, making tracing the type of anthrax used in the recent anthrax attacks (see October 5-November 21, 2001) more difficult. The Ames strain actually originates from a dead cow in Texas, but Iowa State University in Ames has kept many vials of Ames and other anthrax strains collected over more than seven decades. This entire collection is destroyed. It is unclear who wanted the collection destroyed or why. The FBI learned the anthrax used in the attack letters was the Ames strain on October 5 (see October 5, 2001), but this will not be publicly confirmed until October 25. The FBI denies it approved the destruction and say they only did not oppose it, but university officials say the FBI gave explicit approval. [New York Times, 11/9/2001; South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 12/8/2001] The Ames strain is one of 89 known varieties of anthrax and is commonly used in US military research. The Washington Post will later report that "The [Ames strain identification], as compelling as a human fingerprint, shifted suspicion away from al-Qaeda and suggested another disturbing possibility: that the anthrax attacks were the work of an American bioweapons insider." The identification of the Ames strain focuses much attention on two top US Army bioweapons laboratories in particular that have heavily used Ames: USAMRIID in Maryland and Dugway Proving Ground in Utah (see Late 2001). [Washington Post, 9/14/2003]

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Israelis, Neocons, and the Israeli Dual National Spertzel

Rubin and the Chicken-hawk Intelligence Agency

Rubin issued a statement following the Downing Street dossier flap, taking full credit for the cooked intelligence report. His only complaint was that, while the Blair government apologized to Al-Marashi, they did not issue a similar public statement of regret to him and his journal.

To have done so would have been suicidal, as a quick review of Rubin's pedigree makes clear.

According to three current biographies, Prof. Barry Rubin is the deputy director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies in Israel, and a senior fellow at Hebrew University's Harry Truman Center and Haifa University's Jewish-Arab Center. He is the director of the Global Research in International Affairs Center, research director of the Lauder School of Government Policy and Diplomacy, and a senior fellow at the International Center for Counterterrorist Policy (ICT)—all of which are part of the Interdisciplinary Center, Israel's first private university, in Herzliya.

The Lauder School was named after Ronald Lauder, the former Reagan Ambassador to Austria, former president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, soon-to-be-successor of Edgar Bronfman Sr. as head of the World Jewish Congress, and a notorious financier of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The ICT, which co-sponsored a May 26, 2002 Herzliya center conference on suicide terrorism with the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith, is financed by the Marc Rich Foundation, the tax shelter of fugitive Russian Mafiya don Marc Rich. Avner Azulay, a former Mossad officer and director of the Rich Foundation, is an ICT director. Another publicly listed associate of the ICT is Maj. Gen. Meir Dagan, one of Ariel Sharon's most notorious thugs, and the current head of the Mossad.

Rubin, a transplanted Israeli citizen, still spends a good deal of time in the United States. On Feb. 4, he was one of the speakers at a Willard Hotel luncheon in Washington sponsored by Eleana Benador Associates, a New York City public relations firm that counts among its clients the entire chicken-hawk apparatus. Among the other speakers with Rubin were Benador clients Perle, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Laurie Mylroie, former UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel, and former Iraqi weapons scientist Khidhir Hamza.

Rubin is also the chief Middle East columnist for Conrad Black's Hollinger Corp.-owned Jerusalem Post, and a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the think-tank spawn of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the official Israel lobby in America. His writings frequently appear in Middle East Quarterly, the hyper-shrill propaganda journal of Daniel Pipes. Rubin and Pipes are both funded by the Bradley Foundation, one of the quartet of ultra-right-wing tax-exempt funds, along with the Smith Richardson Foundation, the Olin Foundation, and the Mellon Scaife Foundation.

Typical of Rubin's prolific writings was a Dec. 3, 2002 Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, entitled "Sharon the Centrist?" The article celebrated Sharon's Likud party primary victory over Netanyahu, and assailed both Netanyahu and the Labor Party candidate, Gen. Amram Mitzna, whom Rubin labelled an apologist for the Yasser Arafat whom he termed an unrepentant terrorist.

In his Benador schpiel, Rubin echoed Perle and Doug Feith's "A Clean Break" strategy, arguing that the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would herald the "third Arab revolution" of the postwar period, triggering a spontaneous outbreak of democracy, human rights, and free trade throughout the Arab world. Rubin's simplistic fantasy of a Middle East re-made in the American-Israeli image has prompted some genuine experts to denounce him as the "Bernard Lewis for dummies." Princeton Professor Lewis is the author of the "Arc of Crisis" strategy for permanent instability in the Middle East.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2003/3 ... _hoax.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Note the Patriot Act getting rammed through congress and the Anthrax scare. Looks like the Anthrax scare was leveraged by Israeli-Traitor USA intelligence for getting the Iraq War memorandum and the Patriot Act passed. These Israeli compromised assets were utilized in the US government, Weapons programs and US Military. It seems logical that if getting the Iraq-war started was for Israel's long-term security, they would have had Mossad agents on the ground in the USA with military grade Israeli Anthrax to "scare" through these bills in the US Congress.  I agree with Christopher and Jenny this was a Mossad delivered and an Israeli Bio-Weapons developed program plain and simple -- perhaps the compromised media trying to tie all of this back to Ft. Detrick or Dugway is just a massive diversion like the 19 Arab hijackers some of which were found alive?  

Anthrax Coverup: A Government Insider Speaks Out

By Steve Watson

Is it possible that the anthrax attacks were launched from within our own government? A former Bush 1 advisor thinks it is.

Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.

"After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration tried to ram the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress," Boyle said in a radio interview with Austin-based talk-show host Alex Jones. "That would have set up a police state.

"Senators Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)
were holding it up because they realized what this would lead to. The
first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas
corpus [which protects citizens from unlawful imprisonment and
guarantees due process of law]. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere,
come these anthrax attacks."

"At the time I myself did not know precisely what was going on, either
with respect to September 11 or the anthrax attacks, but then the New
York Times revealed the technology behind the letter to Senator
Daschle. [The anthrax used was] a trillion spores per gram, [refined
with] special electro-static treatment. This is superweapons-grade
anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly
proclaimed programs, had never developed before. So it was obvious to
me that this was from a U.S. government lab. There is nowhere else you
could have gotten that."

Boyle's assessment was based on his years of expertise regarding
America's bioweapons programs. He was responsible for drafting the
Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed
unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President
George H.W. Bush.

After realizing that the anthrax attacks looked like a domestic job,
Boyle called a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism
and counterterrorism, Marion "Spike" Bowman. Boyle and Bowman had met
at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School.
Boyle told Bowman that the only people who would have the capability to
carry out the attacks were individuals working on U.S. government
anthrax programs with access to a high-level biosafety lab. Boyle gave
Bowman a full list of names of scientists, contractors and labs
conducting anthrax work for the U.S. government and military.

Bowman then informed Boyle that the FBI was working with Fort Detrick
on the matter. Boyle expressed his view that Fort Detrick could be the
main problem. As widely reported in 2002 publications, notably the New
Scientist, the anthrax strain used in the attacks was officially
assessed as "military grade."

"Soon after I informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorized
the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," the professor
said. The Ames strain turned out to be the same strain as the spores
used in the attacks.

The alleged destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames,
Iowa, from which the Fort Detrick lab got its pathogens, was blatant
destruction of evidence. It meant that there was no way of finding out
which strain was sent to whom to develop the larger breed of anthrax
used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led
directly back to a secret government biowarfare program.

"Clearly, for the FBI to have authorized this was obstruction of
justice, a federal crime," said Boyle. "That collection should have
been preserved and protected as evidence. That's the DNA, the
fingerprints right there. It later came out, of course, that this was
Ames strain anthrax that was behind the Daschle and Leahy letters."

At that point, recounted Boyle, it became very clear to him that there
was a coverup underway. He later discovered, while reading David Ray
Griffin's book on the 9/11 attacks, The New Pearl Harbor, that Bowman
was the same FBI agent who allegedly sabotaged the FISA warrant for
access to [convicted co-conspirator] Zacharias Moussaoui's computer
prior to 9/11. Moussaoui's computer contained information that could
have helped prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.

In 2003, Bowman was promoted and given the Presidential Rank Award by
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a
letter to Mueller, chastising the organization for granting such an
honor to an agent who had so obviously compromised America's security.

During the anthrax scare, the House of Representatives was officially
shut down for the first time in the history of the republic. Once
opposition from Leahy and Daschle evaporated in the wake of the
attempts on their lives, the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through.
Testimony by Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that most
members of Congress were compelled to vote for the bill without even
reading it.

"They were going to move to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is
all that really separates us from a police state," Boyle said. "And
that is what they have done now with respect to enemy combatants [in
the Military Commissions Act of 2006]." Boyle added that lawmakers are
now arguing that Amendment XIV, which guarantees due process of law to
all Americans, does not mean what it has been taken to mean and that,
under the Military Commissions Act, any U.S. citizen can be stripped of
citizenship and be labeled an enemy combatant.

Continued Boyle: "In other words, they have taken the position that at
some point in time, if they want to, they can unilaterally round up
United States native-born citizens, as they did for Japanese-Americans
in World War II, and stick us into concentration camps." Boyle asserted
that top officials, such as White House legal advisor John Yoo and
former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith (now a professor at
Harvard Law School), are pushing for the legalization of torture as
well.

"The Nazis did the exact same thing," said Boyle. "They had their
lawyers infiltrating law schools. Carl Schmidt was the worst, and he
was the mentor to Leo Strauss, the [ideological] founder of the
neoconservatives. So the same phenomenon that started in Nazi Germany
is happening here, and I exaggerate not. We could all be tortured; we
could all be treated this way."

Boyle stressed that it is vital to keep up the pressure on Senator
Leahy, who now chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, giving him
subpoena power. Since Leahy was himself a target, he may have
sufficient motivation to get to the bottom of the attacks. The FBI and
the Justice Department have so far refused full disclosure to Congress.

In addition to his credentials as a government advisor, Boyle also
holds a doctorate of law magna cum laude and a Ph.D. in political
science, both from Harvard University. He teaches international law at
the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Boyle also served on
the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-92) and
represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court.

Boyle alleged that due to his activities as a lawyer, he was
interrogated by an agent from the CIA/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in
the summer of 2004. The agent tried to recruit him as an informant to
provide the FBI with information on his Arab and Muslim clients. When
he refused, according to Boyle, the FBI placed him on the government's
terrorism watch lists.

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/24273

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Benador Associates (builders of the Iraq-war)

Benador Associates was a public relations firm and speaker's bureau founded around 2002 that promoted expert writers and speakers focusing primarily on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.

Benador Associates described its areas of specialization as "media applied to politics, conflict resolution, the dialogue of civilisations, foreign policy, national security, anti-terrorism, defense of human rights and freedom of religion, among others."

The CEO and founder of the firm, Eleana Benador, is a Peruvian-born linguist-turned-publicist. Her clients include Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board; former CIA director James Woolsey; New York Daily News columnist A. M. Rosenthal; American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Michael Ledeen; National Review contributing editor Frank Gaffney Jr.; former Washington Times editor in chief Arnaud de Borchgrave; former Secretary of State Alexander Haig Jr.; and Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, a Brandeis professor who advocated the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In December 2007, Eliana Benador announced that she was forming Benador Public Relations and would no longer be involved with Benador Associates.[1] Benador Associates now appears to be defunct.


Speakers Listed alphabetically

Max Boot, Ismail Cem, Arnaud de Borchgrave, Khalid Durán, John Eibner, Hillel Fradkin, Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., Michel Gurfinkiel (fr), Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Khidhir Hamza, Fereydoun Hoveyda, Mansoor Ijaz, Charles Jacobs, Shaykh Kabbani, Stanley H. Kaplan, Martin Kramer, Charles Krauthammer, George Jonas, Michael Ledeen, Kanan Makiya, Paul Marshall, Laurie Mylroie, John O'Sullivan, Richard Perle, Walid Phares, Richard Pipes, Dennis Prager, David Pryce-Jones, Tom Rose, A. M. Rosenthal, Barry Rubin, Tashbih Sayyed, Richard O. Spertzel, Amir Taheri, Ruth Wedgwood, R. James Woolsey, Jr., Meyrav Wurmser

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benador_Associates

------------

About Benador

According to Benador's web site,[1] Benador Associates is a "Public Relations, Media and International Speakers Bureau." Benador was founded by Eleana Benador. Offices are "located in New York City as well as in Paris and London. However, the activities of the firm are expanding throughout the American continent, as well as in Europe and the Middle East."

Jim Lobe describes Benador as follows:

    "When historians look back on the United States war in Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a small group of mainly neo-conservative analysts and activists outside the administration were able to shape the US media debate in ways that made the drive to war so much easier than it might have been... But historians would be negligent if they ignored the day-to-day work of one person who, as much as anyone outside the administration, made their media ubiquity possible. Meet Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born publicist for Perle, Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney and a dozen other prominent neo-conservatives whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months."
    — Jim Lobe, The Andean Condor among the Hawks, Asia Times, August 15, 2003.

Speakers

Benador's Speakers are "a highly qualified cadre of inspiring, knowledgeable speakers who are available to address your group or broadcast audience...Each of our experts is nationally and internationally recognized on issues of the Middle East and national security, among others."

Current

(Listed as Expert - April 28, 2006)
Ali Al-Ahmed [2]    Raphael Israeli [3]    Salameh Nematt [4]
Ali Ahmed Al-Baghli [5]    Charles Jacobs [6]    Richard Perle [7]
Nir Boms [8]    George Jonas [9]    Walid Phares [10]
Arnaud de Borchgrave [11]    Stanley H. Kaplan [12]    Richard Pipes [13]
Ismail Cem [14]    Efraim Karsh [15]    Dennis Prager [16]
Leon Charney [17]    Charles Krauthammer [18]    David Pryce-Jones [19]
Saad Eddin Ibrahim [20]    Herbert I. London [21]    Tom Rose [22]
Rachel Ehrenfeld [23]    Lord Lamont of Lerwick [24]    A.M. Rosenthal [25]
John Eibner [26]    Michael A. Ledeen [27]    Jano Rosebiani [28]
Hillel Fradkin [29]    Kanan Makiya [30]    Tashbih Sayyed [31]
David Gelernter [32]    Paul Marshall [33]    Natan Sharansky [34]
Dr. Stephen Gullo [35]    Andrew C. McCarthy [36]    Richard O. Spertzel [37]
Michel Gurfinkiel [38]    Hassan Mneimneh [39]    Amir Taheri
Alexander M. Haig, Jr. [40]    Laurie Mylroie [41]    Paul Vallely [42]
Victor Davis Hanson [43]    Ayman Nour [44]    Ruth Wedgwood [45]
Fereydoun Hoveyda [46]    John O'Sullivan [47]    James Woolsey [48]
Mansoor Ijaz [49]    Yossi Olmert [50]    Meyrav Wurmser [51]

Former Speakers

    * Max Boot
    * Khalid Durán
    * Frank Gaffney Jr.
    * Khidhir Hamza
    * Saad Eddin Ibrahim
    * Martin Kramer
    * Shaykh Kabbani
    * Judith Miller
    * Salameh Nematt
    * Barry Rubin
    * Michael Rubin

Planting fake evidence against Iran

In May 2006, Canada's National Post ran a sensational story by Benador associate and Iranian exile Amir Taheri. The piece claimed that Iran's government had passed a law requiring Jewish residents to wear a yellow insignia -- reminiscent of the policies of Germany's Nazi regime. The story was quickly debunked and the National Post apologized. Eleana Benador admitted that her PR firm had planted the piece. [52]

Reporting on the controversy, Larry Cohler-Esses wrote in The Nation: [53]

    [Eleana] Benador, who said her client [Amir Taheri] was "traveling in the Middle East," was impatient with dissections of his work. Terming accuracy with regard to Iran "a luxury," she said, "My major concern is the large picture. Is Taheri writing one or two details that are not accurate? This is a guy who is putting his life at stake." She noted that "the Iranian government has killed its opponents." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "says he wants to destroy Israel. He says the Holocaust never happened.... As much as being accurate is important, in the end it's important to side with what's right. What's wrong is siding with the terrorists."

    Taheri might seem to be one of Benador's biggest liabilities. In fact, he is right now the agency's proudest coup. On May 30--just days after the National Post's apology for running his false story on Iranian Jews--Taheri was one of a group of "Iraq experts" brought to the White House to consult with George W. Bush on the disastrous situation there.

What others say

    So there are these peculiar archipelagoes of opaqueness in the world of news, where journalists are at the mercy of single sources that appear solid. It is very dangerous for the US cable news channels to depend so heavily for analysis of things like Iraq and the war on terror, on retired military officers and on well-connected cyphers like Walid Phares. (Hint to cable news personnel departments: if an academic has a spotty publication record and is at some small place or doesn't have a proper university post, but you get a call pushing him from some rightwing think tank in Washington or from the Benador Agency, be suspicious).
    Juan Cole, Psy-Ops and News, Informed Comment, Dec. 3, 2004.

Contact details

Phone: (917) 626-1266
Email: info AT benadorassociates.com
To contact Eleana Benador: eb AT benadorassociates.com
Website: http://www.benadorassociates.com/

External links

    * Some information about Benador Associates is available (in French) here
    * Laura Miller, "War is Sell," PR Watch, 4th Quarter 2002.
    * Jim Lobe, "The Andean condor among the hawks," Asia Times, August 15, 2003.
    * Brian Whitaker, "Conflict and catchphrases", The Guardian, February 24, 2003.
    * "Benador Reps Sharansky", O'Dwyers PR Daily, June 6, 2005.
    * Larry Cohler-Esses, "Bunkum From Benador," The Nation, June 14, 2006.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?ti ... Associates

[Jenny Lake]

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.js ... endly=true
On October 3, 2001, doctors determine that Robert Stevens in Florida has been infected with anthrax (see October 3, 2001). A culture of anthrax bacteria is grown from a sample of his spinal fluid and quickly flown by corporate jet to Paul Keim...

I'm guessing that 'corporate jets' are not standard hospital assets even in South Florida. Since Pritzker was in the Israeli-made corporate jet business, could it have belonged to AMI owners?

[Jenny Lake]

Paul Keim

http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/Bioter/anthr ... ctive.html
Keim, 46, got into anthrax almost by accident. After finishing his PhD in 1981 at the University of Kansas, he went looking for a job -- and first interviewed for a temporary position at the University of Utah. Raised in Kansas, he took one look from the plane at the Wasatch Mountains and knew he wanted to live there.
He spent years at Utah working for a renowned biologist, Gordon Lark, who had a taste for scientific variety that helped shape Keim's own....
Keim's work at Northern Arizona started small. There was no anthrax back then, just Keim, a technician and some money from a seed company to study soybeans.

But Keim needed a summer job to supplement his teaching salary. He got one with help from a former colleague who was working at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Starting in 1991, Keim would jump in his car each summer and drive 450 miles east to Los Alamos to study innocuous bacteria that degrade organic pollutants.
Meanwhile, his friend Paul Jackson was studying something more exciting..."He was very secretive about it. It was tantalizing," Keim recalls -- and that's how it remained until Keim got a security clearance in 1994. He then learned that Jackson was doing research on organisms that hostile governments might use for biological weapons.

Keim and Jackson began working together, developing ways to distinguish strains of microbes from one another using DNA typing...The team got to work, scouring the DNA of anthrax for places where strains differed even slightly from one another. Keim would send samples of anthrax DNA back to his lab in Flagstaff. Technician Jim Schupp would run experiments on that DNA and send the results, in the form of X-ray films, back to Keim at Los Alamos.

In 1995, there was only one known site of variability in the anthrax genome. Using that, all known strains of anthrax could be divided into only three types.
By 1996, Keim, Jackson and their colleagues had found 31 sites that would occasionally differ among strains. But the real breakthrough came in 1999...

...and so did the hoaxes...

 

On Sept.9, 1999, the "experts", Terry C. Dixon, B.S., Matthew Meselson, Ph.D., Jeanne Guillemin, Ph.D., and Philip C. Hanna, Ph.D. wrote:

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/341/11/815   Human anthrax is not common, and only one of us has seen a case...

Inglesby et al. have provided a description of the policies and strategies for dealing with anthrax as a biologic weapon.4 The goal of this article is to familiarize physicians with the current understanding of the pathogenesis, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of anthrax...

[Cutaneous]...The primary skin lesion is usually a nondescript, painless, pruritic papule that appears three to five days after the introduction of endospores. In 24 to 36 hours, the lesion forms a vesicle that undergoes central necrosis and drying, leaving a characteristic black eschar surrounded by edema and a number of purplish vesicles...These lesions are painless... Although cutaneous anthrax can be self-limiting, antibiotic treatment is recommended.  

...so why did the 'hijackers' complain of burning and itching?

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Paul Keim

On Sept.9, 1999, the "experts", Terry C. Dixon, B.S., Matthew Meselson, Ph.D., Jeanne Guillemin, Ph.D., and Philip C. Hanna, Ph.D. wrote:
........

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/341/11/815   Human anthrax is not common, and only one of us has seen a case...

Inglesby et al. have provided a description of the policies and strategies for dealing with anthrax as a biologic weapon.4 The goal of this article is to familiarize physicians with the current understanding of the pathogenesis, diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of anthrax...

[Cutaneous]...The primary skin lesion is usually a nondescript, painless, pruritic papule that appears three to five days after the introduction of endospores. In 24 to 36 hours, the lesion forms a vesicle that undergoes central necrosis and drying, leaving a characteristic black eschar surrounded by edema and a number of purplish vesicles...These lesions are painless... Although cutaneous anthrax can be self-limiting, antibiotic treatment is recommended.  

...so why did the 'hijackers' complain of burning and itching?

Maybe they were Israelis trying to dispose of "Arab" bodies and got a film of acid or lye on their hands ...?

[Jenny Lake]

Los Alamos must've had the best anthrax collection...

http://www.washingtonspectator.org/arti ... shes_2.cfm ..When Securacom went public on September 11, 1997, its prospectus for the Initial Public Offering prominently featured photographs of its clients the World Trade Center and Dulles airport, with a client list that included United Airlines and Los Alamos National Laboratories...

[Jenny Lake]

Remember this?

Monday, Feb. 1, 1999
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/na ... 020199.htm "Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government." So begins a statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command.
At least the voice sounds amazingly like him.
But it is not Steiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.
By taking just a 10-minute digital recording of Steiner's voice, scientist George Papcun is able, in near real time, to clone speech patterns and develop an accurate facsimile. Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a copy of the tape.
Steiner was hardly the first or last victim to be spoofed by Papcun's team members...

Marvin Bush was still a director (from 1993-2000) of Securacom

and this:

http://www.wisconsinproject.org/aboutus ... ref99.html

April 28, 1999, CNN, "The World Today," live interview on possible Chinese theft of nuclear weapon design information from the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

http://www.answers.com/topic/wen-ho-lee "In 1999, Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee was fired from his job; in 1999 he was arrested and held without trial for 278 days while his handling of sensitive nuclear information was investigated. [FBI Director, Louis J.]Freeh accused him of downloading a "portable, personal trove" of U.S. nuclear secrets. Lee pled guilty to one of the fifty-nine counts brought against him, after which he was freed from jail."

[Jenny Lake]

Los Alamos, posted November 1, 2001

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ap ... 44_000.htm
The lab maintains the world's largest bank of genetic information on Bacillus anthracis, the organism that causes anthrax. More than 1,200 strains are on file, with 100 more newly identified strains from nature and scientific programs added every year from around the world...
In 1994 Los Alamos helped provide some answers to one of the world's most perplexing biological warfare puzzles: Why did 68 people living near a weapons plant in the former Soviet Union die suddenly in 1979?
...Los Alamos researchers and others examined tissue from the victims. Tests confirmed that all were infected by an unnatural mixture of anthrax strains, indicating they probably inhaled spores released from the weapons plant.
Today, Los Alamos is largely mum on its current anthrax mission. Officials will only discuss in general terms the esoteric DNA analysis going on...The lab has highly advanced equipment, some of it able to run 100 times faster and 200,000 times more sensitive than conventional DNA testing.
...On the commercial side, the lab traced an anthrax outbreak in Australia to 145-year-old anthrax spores from buried cattle that had been imported from India.
...Until now, Los Alamos has not used actual bacteria in its studies.  

hmmm. Are they claiming examination of 'virtual' tissue?..even 145 year-old, but still viable, spores?

 
Los Alamos had another earlier high profile spying case in 1998:

http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2000_hr/cook.html ... Dr. Peter Lee confessed in a plea bargain to having knowingly passed a document classified Secret Restricted Data to China Academy of Engineering Physics (CAEP) associates during one of his trips to Peoples Republic of China (PRC).

and in 1999,  Israel Aircraft Industries hosted China's second highest official, about the time Wen Ho Lee was getting arrested:

Dec. 1999, Chinese official visits IAI:

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/02/world ... gewanted=1 A top Chinese official concluded a five-day visit to Israel on Tuesday with an unannounced stop at a state company that is outfitting Chinese aircraft with sophisticated surveillance radar.
The project has been criticized by some Pentagon officials and Congressional leaders.
Israeli press reports said the official, Li Peng, personally inspected the Chinese-owned, Russian-made aircraft at Israel Aircraft Industries' headquarters outside Tel Aviv. The military contractor, owned by the Israeli government, is receiving a reported $230 million to equip the plane with its airborne radar system.
Mr. Li, a former prime minister, is the head of China's Parliament and the second-highest official in its Communist Party.
Company officials declined to comment publicly on Mr. Li's visit but confirmed that it had taken place. ''There was nothing unusual about it,'' said one executive. ''Li Peng's visit to Israel was not a secret, and all the previous Chinese government delegations have visited I.A.I. as well.''
But the tour of the military aircraft plant was omitted from the Israeli Foreign Ministry's detailed official itinerary for Mr. Li, whose extended visit here included publicized stops at three other Israeli companies.
And it took place against a backdrop of continuing friction between the United States and Israel over the sale to China of advanced Israeli military technology -- technology that American critics contend has been developed with American financial and technological aid.
...The Israelis said further that despite United States concerns, they were offering to equip three more aircraft for China, in what would be one of Israel's largest foreign military contracts to date. The Israeli radar was developed by Elat, a subsidiary of Israeli Aircraft Industries.
...Mr. Li spent five nights and four days in Israel, alternating trips to a kibbutz and the Holocaust memorial with receptions at Parliament and Prime Minister Ehud Barak's office and visits to local technology industry leaders.  

maybe this too circuitous, but the timing is interesting.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Epstein is likely an Intel asset and could likely be Israeli Intel as well.  Here he points to  a Saudi...

FBI Overlooks Foreign Sources of Anthrax

WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 24, 2001
Commentary

by Edward Jay Epstein
   

The government seems hell-bent in its effort to limit the suspects in the anthrax mystery to a domestic loner. First, the FBI's behavioral analysis came up with the profile of a lone wolf based on its "exacting handwriting and linguistic analysis" of one letter that contained 18 words and another that contained 27 words. It suggested that the writer of these two letters was a single disgruntled American, not connected to the jihadist terrorists of Sept. 11 (even though the letter used the plural pronoun "we" and began with an underlined "9-11").

The problem is that this approach could not apply to the attacks for which no letter was found, such as the one in Florida. More important, the "lone wolf" theory failed to explain how a single person could acquire a virulent strain of Ames bacteria and weaponize it into an aerosol by milling the spore to one to five microns in diameter and producing billions of spores.

Initially, the FBI theorized that this strain was widely available, since it had been circulated to thousands of researchers, but this confused the nonvirulent Ames strain (which lacked an outer protective shells and toxic proteins) with the virulent one contained in the letters. As it turned out, only a small number of repositories -- fewer than 20 -- ever had access to the virulent strain. The search might have been narrowed down to a single repository if the FBI had not allowed an Agriculture Department facility at Iowa State to destroy through incineration the specimens that constituted the "family tree" of the Ames strain (which had originally been found in 1932 in Ames, Iowa).

Next, an analysis at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff found that the DNA of the anthrax used in the attacks was indistinguishable from an Ames strain sample provided by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease at Fort Detrick, Md. At this point, the White House spokesman Ari Fleischer commented that the "evidence is increasingly looking like" the anthrax-laced letters came from a domestic source.

This assumption is premature. The virulent strain of the Ames virus is also found abroad.

David Franz, who headed the biological-research program at Fort Detrick between 1987 and 1998, said that when the Army wanted to conduct defensive experiment on the Ames strain, it had to obtain the "information" from a British military lab that did experiments with Ames anthrax in the powdered form. Evidently, the virulent Ames strain had been sent from the U.S. to Britain, and, after the U.S. destroyed its stockpiles in the 1970s, samples had to be obtained from the British facility at Porton Downs, specifically from the Center for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR). Martin Hugh-Jones, a scientist at Lousiana State University who received a sample from CAMR in the 1990s, recalls that it was marked "October, 1932." So the matching sample traces not only to the U.S. but to Britain.

The security of the British anthrax bacteria is complicated by its privatization. In 1993, at the time it was supplying the virulent Ames strain sample, CAMR was partly privatized by the British government through a marketing agreement with Porton Products Ltd. in which Porton sold all its anthrax vaccine. Porton Products was owned by Speywood Holdings Ltd., which, in turn, was owned by I&F Holdings NV, a Netherlands Antilles corporate shell owned by Fuad El-Hibri, a Lebanese Arab with joint German-U.S. citizenship; his father, Ibrihim El-Hibri; and possibly other undisclosed investors.

Prior to his taking over this biotech company, Fuad El-Hibri had worked in the mergers-and-acquisitions department of Citibank in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, where he specialized in arranging investments for large Saudi investors. Saudi Arabia then was interested in obtaining an anthrax vaccine to counter Saddam Hussein's biological warfare capabilities. But the U.S. would not provide it.

So when Mr. El-Hibri took over the British biotech lab, he reorganized its bio-terrorism defense business, and arranged deliveries of biotech defense products to Saudi Arabia. Mr. El-Hibri was unavailable for comment, but the ownership is a matter of record and he has not made a secret of his involvement in bio-warfare research. Indeed, he testified before Congress in 1999: "I participated in the marketing and distribution of substantial quantities of two bio-defense vaccines -- botulinum Type A and anthrax."

Even more intriguing, Mr. El-Hibri's interest in anthrax vaccines did not stop with his deal with CAMR. In 1998, he arranged a leveraged buyout of the Michigan Biological Products Institute. MBPI, which originally had been owned by the state of Michigan, held the exclusive contract for providing the U.S. government with anthrax vaccine. While its vaccine worked well against the Vollum strain of anthrax (used by Russia), it was more problematic against the Ames strain. So it had conducted tests with the virulent Ames strain on guinea pigs, mice and monkeys with mixed results. BioPort's spokeperson confirmed that it had access to the virulent Ames strain for testing on animals. To take over MBPI, Mr. El-Hibri became an American citizen, and gave retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a large block of stock in Intervac, one of the corporations involved in the maneuver. The controlling shareholder was the same I&F Holdings used to take control of the British biotech lab, CAMR. He then renamed the company BioPort. BioPort, which controlled America's anthrax vaccine, was apparently of some interests to scientists in Afghanistan since an environmental assessment report of its planned laboratory renovations was turned up in the house of a Pakistani scientist in Kabul.

So far, the offshore availability of anthrax has been overshadowed by the search for a domestic lone wolf. Since the lethal bacteria could have been stolen from either a foreign or domestic lab, weaponized in a stealthed bio-warfare facility overseas and sent in ziplock bags to the person mailing the letters, The investigative focus needs to be widened.

http://edjayepstein.blogspot.com/2009/1 ... apart.html


--------
Keep in mind about Epstein:

GEORGE BUSH JR. in 1976 employed Billy Joe Lord. Lord was
Lee Harvey Oswald's roommate on the ship in 1959 when
Oswald defected to the Soviet Union. Lord filed an
affidavit with the FBI against Edward Jay Epstein the last
person to interview de Mohrenschildt before he committed
suicide after Epstein's writers threaten Lord to go to his
employer, hinting that his father was CIA Director.
Lord filed his March 15,1977 FBI complaint against Epstein
and his writers of being CIA agents. Lord had no way of
knowing that Epstein would be the last person to interview
George de Mohrenschildt two weeks later an hour before de
Mohrenschildt placed a shotgun in his mouth to clear his
conscience of his role in the JFK assassination. In 1976
Lord was an employee of Bush Exploration and oil company
in Midland, Texas and would not tolerate being threaten by
Epstein and his writers. They threaten Lord that if he
didn't cooperate they would go to his boss George Bush Jr.
at the time Bush Sr. was CIA Director and corresponding
with George de Mohrenschildt in August of 1976. The
letters between Bush Sr. and de Mohrenschildt are missing
from the CIA records as are more than 200 other Top Secret
Documents while Bush was CIA Director.On May 20, 1963
Oswald's friend, CIA agent George de Mohrenschildt a
$300,000 line of credit from Prescott Bush's banking firm
for a CIA-trust Bank. This was three days before de
Mohrenschildt would met with Vice-President, Lyndon Baines
Johnson for a second time which was before the JFK
assassination.

http://www.theinfounderground.com/forum ... =20&t=8971

( I personally think De Mohrenschildt was actually a Crypto-Jew from Russia. The city in Russia he came from was 70% Jewish at the time of his birth. -- The CSR.)

Epstein's misdirection...from the Israeli Mossad angle? Note he mentions the connection between Richard O. Spertzel and Ivins... of course Richard Spertzel was a member of the NeoCon team at Benador...

Monday, December 21, 2009
The Anthrax Case Falls Apart

The vast anthrax investigation, code-named Amerithrax, ended as far as the public knew on July 29 2008 with the death of Dr. Bruce Ivins, a microbiologist/wiki/Biodefense at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, at the nearby Frederick Memorial Hospital. The proximate cause of death was an overdose of the pain-killer Tylenol. No autopsy was performed, and there was no suicide note. Less than a week after his apparent suicide, the FBI declared Dr. Ivins to have been the sole perpetrator of the 2001 Anthrax attacks, and the person who mailed deadly anthrax spores to the NBC, the New York Post, and Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy accompanied by a photo-copied warning. These attacks killed 5 people, closed down the Senate's Office Building, caused a national panic, and nearly paralyzed the postal system. The FBI's 6 year investigation of it was the largest inquest in its history, involving 9000 interviews by its agents, the issuance of 6000 subpoenas, and the examination of tens of thousands of photo-copiers, typewriters, computers, and mail-boxes.
But., as massive as it was, it failed to find a shred of evidence that identified the Anthrax killer– or even a witness to the mailings. With the help of a task force of scientists, it found a flask of anthrax that closely matched through its genetic markers the attack anthrax. This flask had been in the custody of Dr. Ivins, a senior biological warfare researcher, who had published no less than 44 scientific papers over three decades, and who was working on developing vaccines against anthrax. As custodian, he provided samples of it to other scientists at Fort Detrick, the Battelle Memorial Institute, and other facilities involved in Anthrax research. According to the FBI's reckoning, over 100 scientists had been given access to it. Any of these scientists (or their co-workers) could have stolen a minute quantity of this anthrax and, by mixing it into a media of water and nutrients, used it to grow enough spores to launch the anthrax attacks. Consequently, Dr. Ivins, who was assisting the FBI with its investigation, as well as all the scientists who had access to it, became suspects in the investigation. In what approached an inquisition, they were intensely questioned, given polygraph examinations, and played off against one another in variations of the prisoner's dilemma game. And their labs, computers, phones, homes, and personal effect were scrutinized for possible clues.
As the Amerithrax proceeded over more than a half a decade, the FBI ran into frustrating dead ends, such as its relentless 5 year pursuit of Steven Hatfill, that ended with his exoneration in 2007 and his receiving a $5.8 million settlement from the US government as compensation for the damage inflicted on him. Another scientist became so stressed by the FBI's games that he began to drink heavily and died of a heart attack. Eventually, the FBI zeroed-in on Dr. Ivins. Not only did he have access to the anthrax, but FBI agents suspected he had subtly misled them into their Hatfill fiasco. A search of his email turned up pornography and bizarre emails which,, though unrelated to anthrax, suggesting that he was a deeply disturbed individual. As the FBI turned the pressure up on him, isolating him at work, and forcing him to spend what little money he had on lawyers to defend himself. He became increasingly stressed. His therapist reported that Ivins seemed obsessed with the notion of revenge and even homicide. Then came his suicide (which as Eric Nadler and Bob Coen show in their documentary The Anthrax War was one of four suicides among bio-warfare researcher.) Since Dr. Ivins odd behavior closely fit the FBI's profile of the mad scientist it had been hunting, his suicide provided an opportunity to finally close the case. So it pronounced Dr. Ivins the anthrax killer.
But there was still a vexing problem– Silicon.
Silicon was used in the 1960s to weaponize anthrax. Through an elaborate process, anthrax spores were coated with silicon to preventing them from clinging together so as to create a lethal aerosol. But since weaponization was banned by international treaties, research anthrax no longer contains silicon, and the flask at Fort Detrick contained none. Yet, the anthrax grown from it had silicon, according to the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. This silicon explained why when the letters to Senators Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle were opened, the anthrax vaporized into an aerosol. If so, then somehow silicon was added to the anthrax. But Dr. Ivins, no matter how weird he may have been, had neither the set of skills nor the means to deliberately attach silicon to anthrax spores. At minimum, such a process would require highly-specialized equipment, such as a jet mill, that did not exist in Ivins' lab– or, for that matter, anywhere at the Fort Detrick facility. As Richard O. Spertzel, a former bio-defense scientist who worked with Ivins, explained, the lab didn't even deal with anthrax in powdered form, adding "I don't think there's anyone there who would have the foggiest idea how to do it." So while Dr. Ivins' death provided a convenient fall guy, the silicon content still had somehow to be explained.
The FBI's answer was that the anthrax contained only traces of silicon and those, it theorized, could have been accidently absorbed by the spores from the water and nutrient in which they were grown. No such nutrients were ever found in Ivins' lab, nor, for that matter, did anyone ever see Dr. Ivins attempt to produce any unauthorized anthrax (a process which would have involved him using scores of flasks.) But since no one knew what nutrients had been used to grow the attack anthrax, it was at. least possible that they had traces of silicon in them which accidently contaminated the anthrax.
Natural contamination was an elegant theory that ran into problems after Congressman Jerry Nadler pressed FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in September 2008 to provide the House Judiciary Committee with a missing piece of data: the precise percentage of silicon contained in the anthrax used in the attacks. The answer came seven months later. According to the FBI lab, 1.4% of the powder in the Leahy letter was Silicon. "This is a shockingly high proportion," explained Dr. Stuart Jacobson, an expert in small particle chemistry. "It is a number one would expect from the deliberate weaponization of anthrax, but not from any conceivable accidental contamination." Nevertheless, in an attempt to back up its theory, the FBI contracted scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California to conduct experiments in which anthrax is accidently absorbed from a media heavily-laced with silicon. When the results were revealed to the National Academy Of Science in September 2009, they effectively blew the FBI's theory out of the water. The Livermore scientists had tried 56 times to replicate the high silicon content without any success whatsoever. Even though they added increasingly high amounts of silicon to the media, they never even came close to the 1.4 percent in the attack anthrax. Most results were indeed an order of magnitude lower, with some as low as .001 percent. What these tests inadvertently demonstrated is that the anthrax spores could not have been accidently contaminated by the nutrients in the media. " If there is that much silicon , it had to have been added, " Jeffrey Adamovicz, who supervised Ivins work at Fort Detrick, wrote to me. He added that the silicon signature in the attack anthrax could have been added via a large fermerntor– which Battellle and other labs use" but "we did not use a fermentor to grow anthrax at USAMRIID [and] We did not have the capability to add silicon compounds to anthrax spores."
If Dr. Ivins had neither the equipment or skills to weaponize anthrax with silicon, then some other party, with access to the anthrax, must have done it. Even before these startling results, Senator Leahy had told Mueller , "I do not believe in any way, shape, or manner that [Ivins] is the only person involved in this attack on Congress." So, even though the public believed that the Anthrax case had been closed more in 2008, the FBI investigation was back to square one in late 2009.

Labels: Anthrax ivins silicon

posted by Edward Jay Epstein at 5:30 PM

http://edjayepstein.blogspot.com/2009/1 ... apart.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Epstein never mentions the Israeli Mossad but he does mention the "Arabs" in a prior article... he's showing the evidence but hiding the killers behind the Kitchen door...

Next Door to Mohammed Atta

translated from Die Zeit 41/2002 October 2, 2002

by Oliver Schröm

Note: This report appears to based mainly on questionable and previously discredited sources, mainly a DEA investigation report on the so-called art students. Blogger Bruce Rolston fact-checks a number of Die Zeit's claims in this story. I'm inclined to go along with Rolston's interpretation and to disregard this article. Oliver Schröm's responds to these questions here, but nothing in his reply mitigates my skepticism. Stefan.

Israeli agents were living in Florida and tailing the future death pilots -- until their cover was blown.

On April 30 of last year the US Air Force sounded an alarm. The security division of the Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City warned of an "intelligence ring of Israeli art students". American law enforcement agencies had earlier learned that a noticeably large number of Israeli students had applied for jobs at software development and technology firms that primarily served government agencies. The obvious suspicion was that the young Israelis were members of a spy ring. A specially formed task force, consisting of employees of the DEA, INS and Office of Security Programs, looked into the matter.

The young Israelis were placed under surveillance and their personal details were analyzed by computer. Die ZEIT obtained the 61-page final report, according to which, 120 Israelis, organized into cells of four to six persons, formed a tightly organized and efficient espionage network. A few of the putative students were actually specialists on eavesdropping, radio technology, or counter-terrorism.

The Israelis were arrested, interrogated and subsequently deported. In the world of intelligence, espionage among friends is an everyday occurrence. In this case too many people were involved for the matter to be covered up. But both the Israeli government and American authorities tried to downplay it.

Not until after the attacks of September 11 did the consequences of the spy ring become clear. Apparently the agents were not interested in military or industrial facilities, but were shadowing a number of suspects, who were later involved in the terrorist attacks against the US. According to a report of the French intelligence agency that Die ZEIT examined, "according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells."

According to the report, the Mossad agents were interested in the leader of the terrorists, Mohammed Atta and his key accomplice, Marwan al-Shehi. Both lived in Hamburg before they settled in Hollywood, Florida in order to plan the attacks. A Mossad team was also operating in the same town. The leader, Hanan Serfati, had rented several dwellings. "One of Serfati's apartments was located on the corner of 701st St. and 21st Ave. [sic] in Hollywood, right near the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi.", French intelligence reported later. Everything indicates that the terrorists were constantly observed by the Israelis. The chief Israeli agent was staying right near the post office where the terrorists had a mailbox. The Mossad also had its sights on Atta's accomplice Khalid al-Midhar, with whom the CIA was also familiar, but allowed to run free. The Mossad apparently warned their American counterparts several times about the terrorists, especially about al-Midhar. The American government later admitted that they had received such warnings prior to September 11. But at most that there were attacks planned against American installations outside the United States.

Die ZEIT has learned that a few weeks before the attacks, Israeli intelligence gave US authorities a list with names of suspects who were staying in the US for the purpose of preparing attacks. Apparently not until shortly before September 11 did the CIA recognize that al-Midhar was dangerous and asked law enforcement agencies to look for him.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The full list at Benador (could just as well be AEI or AIPAC):

June 19, 2006
The Specific People For Whom Accuracy Is An Unaffordable "Luxury"

It's rare that America's premier propagandists come straight out and say that, in these dangerous times, factual accuracy is a "luxury" we can't afford. But as I noted below, Eleana Benador of the PR firm Benador Associates did just that in an interview with the Nation:

    Benador, who said her client [Amir Taheri] was "traveling in the Middle East," was impatient with dissections of his work. Terming accuracy with regard to Iran "a luxury," she said, "My major concern is the large picture. Is Taheri writing one or two details that are not accurate? This is a guy who is putting his life at stake." She noted that "the Iranian government has killed its opponents." Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad "says he wants to destroy Israel. He says the Holocaust never happened.... As much as being accurate is important, in the end it's important to side with what's right. What's wrong is siding with the terrorists."

Benador Associates, of course, represents many of the those who were most strident in calling for war with Iraq. Now their clientele is extremely strident in calling for war with Iran.

Do the factual standards Eleana Benador espouses apply to her clients besides Taheri? It seems fair to assume so, given their extremely impressive track record of lying. (For one example, involving Benador client Richard Spertzel, see here. If anyone feels like conducting a research project, I guarantee there are literally hundreds more.)

So who are these people for whom accuracy is a luxury? Here are a few of the most prominent, taken from the Benador website. No one who's spent any time awake since 1993 will be surprised:

David Gelernter
Alexander M. Haig, Jr.
Victor Davis Hanson
Charles Krauthammer
Michael A. Ledeen
Laurie Mylroie
Richard Perle
Richard O. Spertzel
Amir Taheri
James Woolsey
Meyrav Wurmser

(Note that Judith Miller, while no longer listed, is a former client.)

The entire list is below.

Ali Al-Ahmed
Ali Ahmed Al-Baghli
Nir Boms
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Ismail Cem
Leon Charney
Ariel Cohen
Saad Eddin Ibrahim
Rachel Ehrenfeld
John Eibner
Hillel Fradkin
Ilana Freedman
David Gelernter
Dr. Stephen Gullo
Michel Gurfinkiel
Alexander M. Haig, Jr.
Victor Davis Hanson
Fereydoun Hoveyda
Mansoor Ijaz
Raphael Israeli
Charles Jacobs
George Jonas
Stanley H. Kaplan
Efraim Karsh
Charles Krauthammer
Herbert I. London
Lord Lamont of Lerwick
Michael A. Ledeen
Kanan Makiya
Paul Marshall
Andrew C. McCarthy
Michael Meyer
Hassan Mneimneh
Laurie Mylroie
Ayman Nour
John O'Sullivan
Yossi Olmert
Salameh Nematt
Richard Perle
Walid Phares
Richard Pipes
Dennis Prager
David Pryce-Jones
Tom Rose
A.M. Rosenthal
Jano Rosebiani
Tashbih Sayyed
Natan Sharansky
Michael Shrimpton
Richard O. Spertzel
Amir Taheri
Paul Vallely
Ruth Wedgwood
James Woolsey
Meyrav Wurmser

http://www.tinyrevolution.com/mt/archives/000982.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

A good run down that exonerate Ivins. Note Spertzel's quote:

Sean Sailor

March 2, 2010

After a 8 year investigation the FBI officially closed it's "Amerithrax" case last month claiming deceased microbiologist Bruce Ivins "acted alone" in the October, 2001 anthrax mailings that resulted in the deaths of 5 people.

This however, is one "conspiracy theory" only an outright loon would believe, as it lacks any evidence linking Mr Ivins to the crime, even circumstantially.

A quick rundown of the facts are:

Nothing ties Ivins to the letters. Nothing ties the anthrax to Ivins either. He was one of over 100 others that had access the same materials. Material that was not of the type sent in the letters. Ivins did not have access to the type of weaponized anthrax used in the attack, nor was he able to make it himself.

   "In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I'm one of them," said Richard O. Spertzel, former deputy commander of USAMRIID

Indeed, an electron microscope, which costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, would be needed to manufacture such a highly refined product. Not to mention years of specialized training that Ivins also lacked.

There must be something that ties this crime to Ivins? the incredulous reader might be asking himself at this point. No and no again I will answer, there is none.

The FBI' s released documents show there was no evidence, no testimony, no witnesses and no confession of guilt. These same FBI documents reveal that the majority of the investigation centered upon finding something sexual in nature to hang upon Mr. Ivins.

Lacking any evidence that he was somehow linked to the terrorist attacks, the FBI then targeted the investigation on Ivins' sex life and preferences.

Hundreds of FBI man hours were then spent investigating what kind of magazines Ivins enjoyed, his sexual preferences and making calls to mail order purveyors of marital aids to see if someone might remember him.

Weeks of Special Agent time was poured into finding out if Ivins was the same man who played a few songs at a sorority house in Nashville decades ago.

Amazingly, no one could remember.

Ivins spent tens of thousands of dollars defending himself against a case that, in the end, centered around his sexual proclivities and had nothing to do with the capital crime for which he was "suspected" of.

A read through the available case documents shows a man many years active in his church and charities such as the Red Cross, with no criminal record.

A man who was, in the words of a colleague, "hounded" by the FBI with multiple raids upon his home, interrogations, surveillance and compelled grand jury appearances. He passed 2 lie detector tests, survived multiple audits of his workplace and went through an incredible amount of strain.

In the end however, the FBI was unable to link Mr Ivins in the Amerithrax attacks no matter how many panty sniffing FBI agents went into the field to investigate sorority houses.

The FBI would have had to give up, until a curious thing happened on July 27, 2008: Bruce Ivins killed himself.

In the end, the "dangerous" scientist killed himself with Tylenol, leaving no suicide note. Even though he had protested his innocence to the end and had recently emailed a friend that he had no intention of killing himself.

Just days after Ivins' "suicide" the government stance changed from that of being unable to charge him, to that he did it. Not only that, but lacking any evidence that he did do it, they were never the less sure he acted had alone.

On August 6, just 10 days after Ivins death, U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor, officially made a statement that Ivins was the "sole culprit" in the 2001 anthrax attacks.

That has been the official government line since that time, culminating in the FBI official closing of the case with the same pronouncement.

Again, lacking any evidence tying him to the terrorist attacks, they have instead accused Mr. Ivins of being a cross-dresser and point out that they found girly magazines when going through his trash.

The mainstream press in America, like the lap-dogs that they are, sensed the tone of how they were to cover it from that point and have obliged the government almost completely since that time. Ignoring the fact that no evidence exists to link Ivins to the crime, they smear him as  the "anthrax letter scientist" cross-dresser that's "into bondage".

Fox News, whose commentators regularly accuse anyone that suggests 9/11 needs to be re-investigated as being a "nut" that thinks something as preposterous as 'our own government" was responsible, has no problem saying the same with the Amerithrax case. They have to. Everyone knows the anthrax came from Ft. Detrick.

For some reason, instead of "our own government" its a Benedict Arnold amongst us. Something that must never have occurred to them concerning 9/11. Because they keep saying "own government" as if every single person in the government down to the lowest postal worker would have had to been in on it.

No problem with that in the Amerithrax case though. No mention of it being a "loony" idea that "our own government" did it, no commentators stating that the FBI position is "blasphemous".

So much for an "inside job" being crazy: MSM loves the idea with the Ivins case. They don't even need any evidence. Nor are they interested in any. It's good enough for them to quote a FBI agent as saying that he heard Ivins himself say he was a cross-dresser, then proceed to list what the FBI found in their panty raids.

As to the Amerithrax crime?  They covered that part in the headline Anthrax Letter Scientist 'Obsessed' With Bondage, Sorority. What more proof do you need?

As for myself, none.

I have all the proof I need to know that the MSM would get on the airwaves tomorrow and announce that the moon was made of cheese- if only they could be convinced that it's the official government position on the matter.

Sean Sailor March, 2010
http://seansailor.wordpress.com/

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

One year later propaganda, pinning it on Al-Ciada before the Iraq War. Here Spertzel begins to suggest it was Iraq that created the Anthrax if not Al-Ciada:

Al Qaeda, Anthrax and Ayman

means, opportunities, motive, and modus operandi

Copyright 2002 Ross E. Getman, Esq.

    November 20, 2002 rev.

    (Note: Footnoted authorities are linked.)

        Vice President Cheney, CIA Director Tenet, Gorbachev, the former chief arms inspector in Iraq, and the former head CIA agent in Iraq all have said that they believe that Al Qaeda is responsible for the anthrax attacks. A growing number of commentators agree -- urging that the publicly known evidence about means, opportunity, modus operandi and motive in the Amerithrax investigation points to Al Qaeda.(1) The argument, however, is far stronger than has been made to date.

             First, Al Qaeda has had anthrax since at least 1997. Dr. Ayman Zawahiri's right-hand man confessed that Zawahiri succeeded in obtaining anthrax and intended to use it against US targets.

             Second, Senators Daschle and Leahy likely were targeted because of the appropriations to military and security forces that have prevented the militant islamists from achieving their goals. The appropriations are made pursuant to the "Leahy Law." The FBI's involvement in muslim countries is deemed to interfere with the sovereignty of those countries. Senator Leahy is Chairman of both the Judiciary Committee overseeing the FBI and the Appropriations Subcommittee in charge of foreign aid to these countries.

             Third, the Egyptian islamists sent letter bombs a few years ago to newspaper offices in New York City and Washington, D.C. in connection with the earlier bombing of the World Trade Center. The letter bombs were sent in connection with the treatment of the Egyptian islamists imprisoned for the earlier attack on the WTC. The apparent purpose of the letter bombs --which resulted in minimal casualty -- was to send a message. (There is an outstanding $2 million reward)

           A number of additional miscellaneous issues are addressed below. The issues are marked by conflicting evidence but are consistent with Al Qaeda's responsibility: to include the FBI's profile; the hijacker Ahmed's leg lesion; the reported inquiries about cropdusters; Atta's travel to Prague and alleged meeting with an Iraqi official; the dubious "Hatfill theory"; the question whether the letter to AMI was the Jennifer Lopez letter; the Fort Lee, New Jersey $100,000 processor; and the "confirmed cases" of anthrax in Pakistan.

         The FBI, for its part, reports that it is vigorously testing many alternative hypotheses.(2) The FBI has said that authorities do not know whether the perp is American or Foreign.(3) Asked if the possibility of an overseas perpetrator is still open, an investigator says, "Absolutely. Until we get a good suspect identified, we're looking at all theories."(4)

    Means and Opportunity: Al Qaeda's Biochem Program    

        Bin Laden purchased anthrax a few years ago from a supplier in North Korea.(6) The Moro Front, an Indonesian radical group associated with Bin Laden, arranged for the purchase, but Bin Laden's own name was reportedly on the purchase order.(7) Dr. Ayman Zawahiri had a list of 100 US and Israeli targets to use it against.( Thus, while the question of the source of the Ames strain used in the Amerithrax mailings is problematic and addressed more fully below, Al Qaeda's acquisition of anthrax for the purpose of using it as a weapon against the US has been known for a long time. Indeed, Vice President Cheney and his staff knew to take Cipro on 9/11, a full week before the first anthrax letter was mailed.(9)

        In 1999, the Federation of American Scientists ("FAS") detailed the facts relating to Bin Laden's purchase of anthrax in 1997 (relying on the translation of confessions and court testimony of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members).(10) At the same time the pro-Bin Laden Jihad elements obtained the anthrax and other pathogens, they diversified the targets and did not limit them to the blowing up of installations. They launched joint action with other groups and organizations, both local groups and others operating outside their countries. The group has maintained the objective of seizing power in Egypt since the coup planned by Jihad in 1981 and despite the Egyptian government's success in cracking down on the organization.(11)

        Upon the merger in 1998, the most senior planners in Al Qaeda relating to tactics and biological weapons were Egyptian Islamic Jihad, to include Ayman Zawahiri, Mohammed Atef, and Abu Khabab. Zawahiri is the real "brains" behind 9/11, not Bin Laden.(12) While the US government views the two groups as having merged in 1998, author Peter Bergen suggests that they have essentially been the same organization, with the merger having occurred some years before that.(13) Formerly the head of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Zawahiri assumed the #2 position after Bin Laden upon a merger of some of Islamic Jihad into Al Qaeda a few years ago.(14) Zawahiri was in charge of Al Qaeda's biological weapons program. Zawahiri's wrath against the United States is thought to have sharpened in 1998 upon the extradition of some islamic jihad members to Egypt from Albania.(15)

        In 1998, Zawahiri took time out from his travels to create some computer documents describing his biological and chemical program, which he code-named "Curdled Milk."(16) The project apparently included work on a pesticide/nerve agent that used a chemical to increase absorption (and was tested on rabbits and dogs).(17)

        Zawahiri was assisted by Midhat Mursi (alias Abu Khabab).(18) An Egyptian chemical engineer, he ran the camp named Abu Khabab. Abu Khabab's whereabouts are still unknown. Al Qaeda's experimentation with its chemical weapons is now featured on the nightly television news picturing a dog being put to death. Disturbing scenes of death show Al Qaeda's capability with what appears to be cyanide gas, which Al Qaeda contemplated using recently in Indonesia -- dispensing it by perfume bottles -- and reportedly in the Tube in London.(19)

        There have been even more dramatic reports concerning an Al Qaeda facility in northern Iraq where there was testing of chemical and biological weapons (such as ricin, which is derived from castor beans) on barnyard animals and a human.(20) It apparently is protected by a radical Kurdish group in an area not controlled by Saddam Hussein.(21) ABCNEWS reported that there is evidence the terrorists tested ricin in water, as a powder and as an aerosol. They used it to kill donkeys and chickens, and at one point, the terrorists allegedly exposed a man to the toxin in an Iraqi market and followed him home and watched him die several days later.(22) In Afghanistan, documents were found indicating that Al Qaeda was doing research relating to plans to use botulinum to kill 2,000 people.(23) According to Stephen Younger, director of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, however, Al-Qaida's interest in biological weapons has been focused mainly on anthrax.(24) One lab contained a centrifuge for separating liquids and an oven in which slurried agents could be dried.(25)

        Dr. Ayman Zawahiri's home in Kabul tested positive for anthrax. (26) It has never been reported that the test was a false positive or that the anthrax was determined to be naturally occurring. Similarly, 5 out of 19 labs tested positive for traces of anthrax.(27) The Kabul office of Pakistani scientist Sultan Bashiru-din Mehmood also contained documents indicating an interest in anthrax -- to include calculations relating to the aerial dispersal of anthrax by a balloon. US-hating (Taliban) Mullahs oversaw the anthrax vaccine laboratory, much to the consternation of the scientist in charge of the lab. (28) In late November, an AP photo showed something at the lab described as "anthrax spore concentrate."(29)

        John Lindh told interrogators that, according to battlefield rumors, a biological attack was expected to be a "second wave."(30)

        Zawahiri traveled widely in his attempts to obtain and weaponize anthrax and other terroristic missions -- he traveled to Malaysia, Iraq, Russia and United States. For example, Zawahiri traveled to the US in 1991, 1995 and possibly 1998 under an alias.(31) He went to California, New York and DC (and apparently Texas at one point). Zawahiri sometimes was accompanied by a New Jersey pharmacist and a California doctor (a former classmate who denies knowing who Zawahiri was). They were joined by a former US Army sergeant and key Al Qaeda operative, Ali Mohammed.(32) Zawahiri went to Russia in 1997 where he was imprisoned for 6 months. (The Russians never learned his real identity.) (33) In 1998 he went to Baghdad.(34) According to Newsweek, U.S. operatives in Afghanistan discovered evidence indicating that one or more Russian scientists were helping al-Qaeda weaponize anthrax.(35) US News had an account of a reporter's encounter with a Filipino carrying papers from Dr. Zawahiri (allowing free lodging) and bragging about his ability to manipulate anthrax.(36)

        Dr. Richard Spertzel, the former UN inspector in Iraq, says that the product here was well within Iraq's capability. UNSCOM determined that the Iraqi weapons program produced dried anthrax as well as the more primitive wet form.(37) Spertzel and others agree that Iraq would likely have Ames -- having first sought it in 1988 (and security being so lax at so many laboratories that had it).(38)

        Given that we know where Saddam lives, and he is a survivalist, he would want to maintain deniability in the event he had assisted in the anthrax mailing. As former Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek has explained, a terrorist state sponsor would want to use a strain that was not associated with it.

        Spertzel states: "Iraq certainly knows how to produce 100 percent pure spores. That is a technique that they developed ... which is capable of giving them the kind of concentrations that we are seeing in the Daschle letter."(39)  The bottom-line, however, remains that Iraq is just one of a number of possibilities. Al Qaeda had purchased anthrax for the intention of using it against US targets and Zawahiri sought out the necessary expertise in his travels. (40)

        The genetic analysis of Dr. Keim, from Northern Arizona, had promised to remove all doubt potentially as to the source of the anthrax. Hopes have long since faded according to press reports. Timothy D. Read, whose work at the Institute for Genetic Research in Rockville, Md. provided the FBI with its first genetic roadmap for anthrax, has said that the differences identified by his team could not pinpoint the source.(41)

        The research is reported in "Science."(42) The analysis is directed to showing the similarity between various samples of Ames. According to many reports, Ames was widely distributed to universities throughout the world. But even under the most conservative estimate (such as made by Dr. Hatch Rosenberg), the strain was sent to 15-20 labs. The "Science" article does not address the testing done with respect to isolates from the vast majority of labs where Ames was known to be. 15 labs remained to be tested. (Note that the date of the lab isolate presumed by some to be Ft. Detrick was not disclosed in the article.)

         One expert, Dr. C.J. Peters, summarizes:

        "Knowing that this strain was originally isolated in the U.S. has absolutely nothing to do with where the weapon may have been prepared because, as I tried to make the point, these strains move around. A post doc in somebody's laboratory could have taken this strain to another lab and it could have been taken overseas and it could have ended up absolutely anywhere. Tiny quantities of anthrax that you couldn't see, that you couldn't detect in an inventory can be used to propagate as much as you want. So that's just not, in fact, very helpful."(43)

        Ft. Detrick sent its Ames strain to places like Porton Down in Great Britain and Suffield in Canada.(44) We can reasonably assume that Ft. Detrick did not send it directly to any supplier in North Korea. Presently, there is no information in the public record as to the strain that Bin Laden purchased in 1997. Informed analysis requires that at least that much be determined.

        Working on the assumption that the anthrax purchased from the North Korea supplier was not Ames -- which is a huge and perhaps reckless assumption -- then the question relevant to an Al Qaeda theory is what access to the US Army strain might have been accomplished by someone with 1) a multi millionaire (Bin Laden) backing his play, and 2) a lot of Muslims who believe in his Islamist cause (for example, toppling the Egyptian and Saudi regimes). The possible sources include Russia, Iraq, the US Army, or a facility that obtained Ames from the US Army or other researcher who had it.

        This was the instinct of the Administration from early on, according to Woodward's Bush at War:

        "They turned to the hot topic of anthrax. The powder in the letter mailed to Senator Daschle's office had been found to be potent, prompting officials to suggest its source was likely an expert capable of producing the bacteria in huge amounts. Tenet said, "I think it's AQ -- meaning Al Qaeda."

        "I think there's a state sponsor involved. It's too well thought-out, the powder's too well refined. It might be Iraq, it might be Russia, it might be a renegade scientist, perhaps from Iraq or Russia."

        "I'm not going to talk about a state sponsor." Tenet assured them.

        "It's good that we don't." said Cheney, "because we're not ready to do anything about it."

        The technique to weaponize the anthrax was not the one used by the US Army. (William Patrick's process involved freeze drying and chemical processing whereas it was the Iraqi process that involved spraydrying.)(45)

        It appears, according to US bioweaponeer William Patrick, that the electrostatic charge was not removed.(46) This is contrary to what numerous press accounts have reported (based on assumptions outside observers were making dating back to last Fall). Moreover, former Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and Harvard biologist Meselson have opined that there was no special coating.(47) Any silica-like coating, Drs. Meselson and Alibek say, may have been naturally occuring. Both of these points seem to indicate that the production was not state-sponsored, industrial production.

        An article in the New York Times in May 2002 noted the views of the bioweaponeer experts Alibek and Patrick based on the admittedly sparse information available:

            "As federal experts investigated the residual Daschle sample, they found the picture becoming fuzzier. On one hand, the concentration of the anthrax was extraordinarily high — roughly equal to that made in the abandoned American germ weapons program, a trillion spores per gram.    But federal experts now say the particles turned out to have a large size range. While single spores predominated, the experts said, some Daschle clusters ranged up to 40 microns wide — far too big to penetrate human lungs. A micron is one-millionth of a meter, and a human hair is 75 to 100 microns wide. The big clusters suggested the powder was far less than weapons grade.   Private experts disagree on just how much less. Ken Alibek, a former Soviet germ official who is now president of Advanced Biosystems, a consulting company in Manassas, Va., called the Daschle anthrax mediocre.   'It was not done with a regular industrial process,' Dr. Alibek said in an interview. 'Maybe it's homemade.' ...    But William C. Patrick III, a scientist who made germ weapons for the American military and is now a private consultant on biological defense, rated the Daschle anthrax as 7 on a scale of 10.    'It's relatively high grade,' Patrick said, 'but not weapons grade.' (48)

    Dr. Spertzel, on the other hand, remains more impressed with the quality of the product. Perhaps everyone would agree, however, that there is much information that has not yet been disclosed about the process used to weaponize the anthrax, and perhaps that is as it should be.

    Motive: The reason Leahy and Daschle were targeted

        The letters to the news organizations were mailed -- coincidentally or not -- on September 17 or September 18, the day the Camp David Accord had been signed in 1978 and then approved the next day by the Israeli knesset.(49) The letter read:

        09-11-01

        THIS IS NEXT

        TAKE PENACILIN NOW

        DEATH TO AMERICA

        DEATH TO ISRAEL

        ALLAH IS GREAT.

        Taking into account the fact that there was no mail postmarked with a Trenton postmark on Columbus Day, October 8, the letter to Senator Tom Daschle postmarked October 9 may actually have been mailed October 6. October 6 was the day Anwar Sadat was assassinated for his role in the Camp David Accord. (Sadat was assassinated on October 6, which was Armed Forces Day. He was killed during an annual holiday parade which marks the day Egypt made a critical successful surprise attack on Israel during the 1973 war). (50)

        The note read:

        09-11-01

        YOU CAN NOT STOP US.

        WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.

        YOU DIE NOW.

        ARE YOU AFRAID?

        DEATH TO AMERICA.

        DEATH TO ISRAEL.

        ALLAH IS GREAT.(51)

        In an interview broadcast on al-Jazeera television on October 7, 2001 -- which was about when the second letter saying "Death to America'" and "Death to Israel" was mailed -- Ayman Zawahiri echoed a familiar refrain sounded by Bin Laden:

        "O people of the U.S., can you ask yourselves a question: Why all this enmity for the United States and Israel? Your government supports the corrupt governments in our countries."(52)

        Senator Daschle is the majority leader of the Senate, which approves appropriations that support the governments in countries such as Egypt, Israel and Pakistan. Senator Leahy is Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, which has oversight jurisdiction over the FBI and INS. (53) That role alone would explain why Senatory Leahy was targeted as a symbol. But to more fully appreciate why Leahy -- a human rights advocate and liberal democrat -- might have been targeted as a symbol, it is important to know that Senator Leahy is head of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, the panel in charge of aid to Egypt and Israel. That aid goes to the core of Al Qaeda's complaint against the United States. (The portion going to Egypt and Israel constitutes, by far, the largest portion of US foreign aid, and most of that is for military and security purposes.)(54) Pakistan is now a grudging ally in the "war against terrorism" largely due to the US Aid it now receives in exchange for that cooperation. In September 2001, the press in the US and in muslim countries discussed the waiver of the curbs under the Leahy Law in light of the war against terror.(55)

        A Hamas activist wrote in an ode "To Anthrax" on November 1, 2001:

        "O, anthrax, despite, your wretchedness, you have sewn horror in the heart of the lady of arrogance, of tyranny, of boastfulness!"(56)

        The "Leahy Law" plays a key role in the secret "rendering" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (Al Qaeda) operatives to countries like Egypt, Jordan and Algeria where they are allegedly tortured. Although humanitarian in its intent, the law permits continued appropriations to military and security units who conduct torture in the event of "extraordinary circumstances." According to the New York Times,

        "Egypt's intelligence service has a reputation for being among the most formidable and ruthless in the Middle East, and several of those arrested in other countries have been sent to Egypt for interrogation or trial. According to evidence gathered for a 1999 trial in Egypt of more than 100 defendants from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the intelligence agents regularly used torture to obtain confessions from suspected terrorists."(57)

        A video clip dealing with the rise of militant Islam in Egypt features a jailed Zawahiri in the early 1980s ferociously condemning torture and other human rights violations by the Egyptian government.(58)

        After 9/11, national security interests sometimes have been deemed to override such concern for human rights. (US officials recently complained about an Egyptian-American academic who has been imprisoned, but Al Qaeda/Egyptian Islamic Jihad operatives have not merited our concern). (59) Dr. Ayman Zawahiri's associates and even his brother have been spirited off by jet planes to destinations where interrogations might be more fruitful.

        In a videotape that circulated in the summer of 2001, Zawahiri said

        "In Egypt they put a lot of people in jails -- some sentenced to be hanged. And in the Egyptian jails, there is a lot of killing and torture. All this happens under the supervision of America."(60)

        One associate of Zawahiri was secretly grabbed in southeast Asia and turned over to Egypt, and a Yemeni microbiologist was seized in Pakistan in October and turned over to Jordan.(61). At the time Ayman Zawahiri was getting his biological weapons program in full swing, his brother Mohammed was picked up in the United Arab Emirates and secretly rendered to Egyptian security forces.(62) According to his recent autobiography, Zawahiri himself reportedly was tortured while imprisoned after the assassination of Anwar Sadat.

        The appropriations to these military and security units have prevented Al Qaeda from achieving its aims. Zawahiri discusses this torture, the secret rendering of jihadists, and the US Aid and cooperation with Egyptian and other military and security forces throughout his 2001 book "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner."(63) The people who suggest that Al Qaeda would have had no motivation to send weaponized anthrax to Senators Daschle and Leahy -- because they are liberal -- are mistaken. The main goal of Dr. Zawahiri is to topple President Mubarak. He views the US Aid as the chief obstacle and is indifferent to this country's labels of conservative and liberal. This US Aid to the security forces is his chief complaint against the United States and has been Al Qaeda's main focus since 1998.

    Modus Operandi: Egyptian Islamists' earlier WTC letter bombs

        This was not the first time the Egyptian islamists sent letter bombs to newspaper offices in connection with an attack on the World Trade Center. A dozen letter bombs were sent to newspaper offices in New York City and Washington, D.C. in December 1996/January 1997. The letter bombs were sent from Alexandria, Egypt, to the London, New York, and Washington, D.C. offices of the newspaper Al Hayat.(64) The paper, owned by a member of the Saudi royal family, is the leading international Arabic-language newspaper.(65)

        Two people were injured when one bomb went off in London. Bombs were also sent to the prison officials at the Kansas prison where the WTC plotters were being jailed. (66) The blind sheik the previous year had given an interview complaining of mistreatment by prison officials and asking that he be avenged. The key WTC bomber imprisoned at Leavensworth had also complained of mistreatment and the conditions.(67)

        One commentator has noted:

            "It has been stated that the tactics of enclosing warnings in the letters shows the attacker did not intend to commit murder. This is nonsense. The death of Robert Stevens was public knowledge before the Senate letters were mailed. The attacker knew full well that he was placing large numbers of people in deadly peril and acknowledged this in the text of the Senate letters. As Brian Jenkins [Deputy Director of Kroll Associates] has famously noted, 'terrorists want a lot of people watching, not a lot of people dead.' The letter tactics were chosen to maximize the scope of terrorism, not to limit or avoid casualties."(68)

         Sending poisonous letter bombs is part of Al Qaeda's modus operandi in that the Al Qaeda operations manual, the most recent version on CD-ROM, had a chapter on "Poisonous Letter." (69) As with the insertion of biologicals into food, the key is mass panic, not mass casualty.

         Al Qaeda is concerned with handling its efforts in such a way as to develop and maintain the Arab hatred of the US and Israel -- and that requires a delicate balance and choice of suitable targets. Zawahiri divines from his religious texts that it is moral to kill American civilians on the grounds that they stood silent as taxpayers while US-bought weapons were used on Palestinians. The al Qaeda shura (policy-making council), however, may deem that Al Qaeda needs to choose the methods of attack carefully so that they are both are effective and calculated to gain the support of others. (Gassing the Kurds ultimately was a public relations debacle for Saddam once the world stopped looking the other way). Just recently Zawahiri was invited to participate by telephone or internet in a conference of islamists in Cairo. The seeds he has planted are bearing fruit. (70) Where there are democratic processes, islamists have made substantial recent gains, to include in Pakistan, Morocco, Bahrain and Turkey.

        When Zawahiri's Islamic Jihad or related egyptian islamist group (led by the blind sheik) sent letter bombs to newspaper offices in Washington, D.C. and NYC in 1997 -- to include the "Parole Officer" and other prison officials where a key WTC bomber was imprisoned -- it apparently was because Al Hayat didn't support the radical islamist cause and because the WTC prisoners had complained of mistreatment. Why would the Islamic Jihad target AMI, the publisher of the National Enquirer? Just a dispute with a landlady over a security deposit? (The wife of the AMI owner was the landlady for some of the hijackers). (71) Was there an early first letter to AMI so that the hijackers would be in a position to receive feedback on the effectiveness of the weaponized anthrax? Or had Bat Boy given Bin Laden the finger prior to 9/11? What coverage did those publications give the blind sheik and the WTC bombers? The FBI is investigating and went back to AMI.(72)

    Miscellaneous

         1. The FBI's Profile. The FBI profile, according to early reports, concluded that the letter writer is an American but is foreign-born (and not a native english speaker). (73) The emphasis in the press reports, however, has always been on the suggestion that the mailer likely is "domestic" rather than foreign -- a lone, male scientist who works in a lab.

        Although the FBI profile has been widely criticized by experts and in editorials in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, Washington Post, The Economist, The Weekly Standard, and other newspapers and magazines, it is more flexible than its critics imagine.(74) The Amerithrax profile of a loner with a grudge permits a variety of motivations, including sympathy with the Islamist cause.(75). It is worth noting that the FBI even uses the word "domestic" to refer to Americans sympathetic with an extremist islamic cause. The Washington Post explained in late October:

        "Everything seems to lean toward a domestic source," one senior official said. 'Nothing seems to fit with an overseas terrorist type operation.'   The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are considering a wide range of domestic possibilities, including associates of right-wing hate groups and U.S. residents sympathetic to the causes of Islamic extremists."(76)

         Indeed, as Attorney General Ashroft has said, an "either-or matrix" is not useful.(77) By way of example, was long-time Al Qaeda operative and former US Army sergeant Ali Mohamed "foreign" or "domestic"? Are the young men from Buffalo -- most of whom were US citizens and born here -- "foreign" or "domestic"? Domestic terrorism expert Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center has never departed from his view noted last October -- that a domestic terrorist (in the conventional sense of native-born and right-wing) is not responsible.(78)

        The FBI's stock profile concerning anthrax was a lone, unstable individual -- last October, the profilers pretty much just reached into the filing cabinet. Surprisingly, the profilers did not adjust their thinking based on 9/11 or the intelligence that Zawahiri had obtained anthrax for the purpose of weaponizing it for use against US targets.(79) In any event, FBI profiler James R. Fitzgerald, head of FBI's Behavioral Analysis Unit, can be forgiven his flawed profile in early November because such a profile is far more useful in supporting warrants in the US in connection with a variety of leads that prudently needed to be pursued.

        One intelligence official reportedly has suggested that one reason that the FBI has not emphasized the possibility of a foreign source is that it might require UN involvement in the investigation pursuant to certain biological weapons protocols.(80)

         2. The hijacker Ahmed's blackened leg lesion. One of the hijackers, Ahmed Alhaznawi, went to the ER on June 25 with what now appears to have been cutaneous anthrax, according to Dr. Tsonas, the doctor who treated him, and other experts.(81) Alhaznawi had just arrived in the country on June 8. His exposure perhaps related to a camp he had been in Afghanistan. He said he got the blackened gash-like lesion when he bumped his leg on a suitcase two months earlier. (82) Two months earlier he had been in camp (according to a videotape he later made serving as his last Will and Testament).(83) There are some spiders that on rare occasions bite and cause such a blackened eschar (notably the Brown Recluse Spider found in some parts of the United States).(84)

         The FBI merely says no anthrax was found where the hijackers were.(85) (The FBI tested the crash sites where the planes came down and found no traces of anthrax). No doubt there are some other diseases that lead to similar sores. It is reasonable to credit, though, that it was cutaneous anthrax considering all the circumstances.( 86) Although it may have been unrelated, Atta later came in to a pharmacy with red hands as if he had been working with a chlorine bleach solution, which is used to decontaminate anthrax.(87)

         3. The inquiries about cropdusters. Mohammed Atta and Zacarias Moussaiou reportedly made inquiries about cropdusters.(88) Ahmad Ressam, an Al Qaeda terrorist caught in the United States, revealed that Bin Laden was personally interested in using low flying aircraft to dispense biological agents. (89)

        The CIA, in an October 2002 assessment, reports that, Iraq, for example, "already has produced modified drop-tanks that can disperse biological or chemical agents effectively.  Before the Gulf war, the Iraqis successfully experimented with aircraft-mounted spray tanks capable of releasing up to 2,000 liters of an anthrax simulant over a target area.  Iraq also has modified commercial crop sprayers successfully and tested them with an anthrax simulant delivered by helicopters."(90)

        Anthrax likely can be delivered using the nozzle set-up that some USDA official says Atta imagined (as explained by Secretary Cohen some years ago).(91) Indeed, Secretary Cohen's remarks were found in the Kabul home with papers relating to the aerial delivery of anthrax.

        Some investigators on the team prosecuting Zacarias Moussouai think he wasn't expected to take part in the 9/11 plan as such, but was expected instead to use a cropduster. (French intelligence suggests instead that there was a plan to hijack an international airliner.) It's also unknown what role Atta's roommate, pilot Ramzi Binalshibh, would have played if he had succeeded on one of his four attempts to get into the country. (Ramzi Binalshibh was Atta's former roommate in Germany and was recently captured in Karachi, Pakistan). On the other hand, perhaps the cropdusters related to a chemical or nerve agent. Others reasonably suggest it related to use as a flying fuel bomb. Others even reasonably question that there were ever such inquiries. Based on the interrogation of Famzi Binalshibh, it now appears that the 9/11 planners lost confidence in Moussaoui's discretion, and intended to use him only as a fallback. Whatever the reason for the inquiries -- assuming for the sake of argument they occurred -- perhaps they ran out of pilots (due to Zacarias Moussaiou's arrest and Ramzi Binalshibh's inability to get into the country).(92)

         4. Atta's travels to Prague and the alleged Iraq connection. According to some reports, Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi case handler and obtained the anthrax from Iraq then. (93) The reported transfer of a vial of anthrax, however, is totally unproven (regardless whether the story traces back to Israeli intelligence or instead traces back to Egyptian intelligence). The origin of the story seems to have been based simply on speculation of what might have occurred (at a meeting that has not yet even been established to have occurred).

        In contrast to what most of the senior Czech officials have said, the Prague Post quoted the director general of the Czech foreign intelligence service UZSI (Office of Foreign Relations and Information), Frantisek Bublan, denying the much-touted meeting -- and he also now may (or perhaps not) have been joined by the Czech President.(94) But never let it be said the White House has been consistent on the issue either.(95) Until and unless those Czech officials still claiming there was a meeting produce a photo, we are left with a mush of conflicting and inconclusive reports. The bottom-line is that Al Qaeda did not need Iraq to commit this crime and it is more prudent to limit the conclusion to Al Qaeda's involvement absent additional evidence, particularly when going to war is at issue.

        Mr. Pearl, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense, says there is "powerful evidence" showing Iraq is giving biological and chemical weapons to Al Qaeda.(96) There are some detailed reports by defectors concerning Al Qaeda's coordination with Saddam on biological and chemical weapons beginning in 1998, but those reports all depend on the reliability of those defectors -- the briefs made by President Bush and Tony Blair lacked a "smoking gun" in this regard.(97) The presence of facilities does not tell you much. Implied threats that biological weapons will be used in defense are to be expected given that the US has said it is going to attack Iraq (based on its worst fears).

         A detailed argument relating to the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda can be found online in the trillion dollar complaint against Iraq brought by the law firm Kreindler & Kreindler in connection with 9/11.(98)

         5. The "Hatfill Theory". The FBI official in charge of the investigation, Agent Van Harp, has said in a USA Today interactive chat and elsewhere that the speculation about foot-dragging by the FBI has no basis. As explained in a Wall Street Journal article dated March 26, which was based on information provided by the FBI, the reason for the delay has related to the many scientific, safety and security issues implicated.(99) He emphatically denied the suggestion by Dr. Hatch Rosenberg (first made in a BBC interview) that it was a CIA experiment gone awry.(100) He said all the names of the folks submitted by Dr. Hatch Rosenberg and her contacts in the field had been investigated and did not pan out. (Apparently, five acquaintances in the field had reached the same conclusion and Dr. Rosenberg served as their spokesperson.) The recent hoopla has not produced any publicly known evidence relevant to the anthrax mailings that leads to a different conclusion. Evidence relating to polygraphs or use of bloodhounds under these circumstances are inadmissible precisely because they are unreliable.(101)

        Hatfill's statements were very eloquent, as were the comments of his attorney.(102) The commentary critical of the Rosenberg conjecture and press about Hatfill tends to strike a Richard Jewell theme.(103) Most of all, Dr. Rosenberg's assertion in her February and June analysis that the FBI has determined that an American made the mailing or has excluded a foreign connection is simply mistaken and contradicted by on-the-record statements and real world events (such as the November 1, 2002 press conference given by FBI Director Mueller and marathon month-long interrogation of a top Pakistani surgeon).

         6. Was the letter to AMI the Jennifer Lopez letter? One unresolved question relates to how the anthrax was transmitted to AMI in Florida. (AMI publishes the National Enquirer and other tabloids). Phil Brennan, a conservative commentator who knew the two victims there, reports that he is confident that the letter transmitting the anthrax was sent before 9/11. It consisted, he says, of a goofy love letter to Jennifer Lopez, and included an open soap packet and a cheap Star of David charm.(105) (According to an early National Enquirer report, it also included a cigar).(106) He says Stevens held it up to his face and then put it down on the keyboard (where traces of anthrax were found). Mr. Brennan very well may be right, which would clinch Al Qaeda's responsibility. Note that the publisher's wife was the real estate broker who rented to two of the hijackers. Small world, eh?(107)

        The key expert evidence on this issue of the Jennifer Lopez letter thus far is the New England Journal of Medicine in which Stevens' doctor concludes that the letter, mailed pre-9/11, but opened 9/19 and resulting in symptoms appear 9/30, evidenced an incubation period consistent with inhalational anthrax.(108) (He refers to the 1979 accidental release in Russia). A recent CDC report discusses a second letter of possible interest thought to have been opened on September 25 by a different woman who was exposed.(109) The jury will have to remain out unless and until there is more information on the letter(s) that transmitted the anthrax to AMI. The FBI now has gone back to AMI.(110) The FBI reports that the letter may have been opened in the mailroom -- with the product falling on copy paper that then contaminating all the xerox machines in the building.(111)

         7. The Fort Lee, New Jersey $100,000 processor

        One potential lead reported in the press concerns a $100,000 piece of equipment bought by someone from Pakistan who has pled guilty to a check kiting scheme used to raise the funds used to purchase the processor. (112) A senior expert at the DOD has said that commercially available equipment used to make powdered milk could be used to make powderized anthrax.(113)

         8. The Pakistan anthrax

        The three reported "confirmed cases" in Karachi, Pakistan also are worthy of note. Although there were 100 other hoaxes, including hoax letters sent to other Jang newspaper branches, there was no report about the retesting of letters at the main branch of Jang, Habib International bank and Dell Computer. As of a November 12, 2001, the well-regarded private hospital that had done the lab testing had not yet provided the samples to the Pakistan government for retesting. (114)

    Conclusion

        In the anthrax mailings, Dr. Zawahiri appears to have accomplished the attack on the US "structure" he intended.(115) With the planes, Al Qaeda struck the US trade dominance (World Trade Center) and its military might (Pentagon). If you credit Zubaydah (rather than Atta's roommate Ramzi), Al Qaeda was intending to strike the White House with the plane that went down in Pennsylvania.

        With the anthrax he appears to have rounded out the field that he imagines provides support to Israel -- the legislative branch and media. In addition to the Senate majority leader, anthrax was mailed to the position symbolic of the 50 billion in appropriations that has been given to Israel since 1947 (and the equally substantial $2 billion annually in aid that has been keeping Mubarak in power in Egypt and the militant islamists out of power).

        The statement this June by the spokesperson who explained that Al Qaeda had a right to kill 4 million and had the right to use biological or chemical weapons needs to be factored into the bureaucratic reckoning.(116) The potential downside of not discovering the perpetrator is far greater if that turns out to be the motivation.(117)

    NOTES

    1Jonathan Rauch, "Does Al Qaeda Have Anthrax? Better Assume So," National Journal, June 1, 2002.

    "The Anthrax Trail,"Al Qaeda is still a bioterrorist threat," Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2002.

    David Tell, "Remember anthrax? Despite the evidence, the FBI won't let go of it's 'lone American' theory," Weekly Standard, April 29, 2002.

    Jack Kelly, "Their Faraway eyes", Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 14, 2002.

    Reed Irvine, "Notes from the Editor's Cuff", AIM Report, August 28, 2002.

    "Anthrax probe ignoring foreign links?: Critics question FBI's emphasis on homegrown scientist," WorldNetDaily.com, October 8, 2002.

    "Al Qaeda's Anthrax: Is Osama behind the mail attacks?" MIT Technology Review, April 16, 2002.

    "Biodefense," at Biodefense Sprectrum, Inc. website.

    Phil Brennan, "Alibek Doubts FBI Claims on Hatfill," Newsmax, October 3, 2002.

    Littwin: "Anthrax trail on wrong path?" Rocky Mountain News, September 5, 2002.

    Cliff Kincaid, "Saddam Hussein, Al Qaeda, Anthrax West Nile Virus, and a Scapegoat named Hatfill."

    Ely Karmon, "The Anthrax Campaign: An Interim Analysis," ICT.org October 30, 2001.

    "Cheney: 'Reasonable' to assume anthrax cases linked to terrorists," CNN, October 12, 2001.

    "Gorbachev: Terrorist using anthrax, " CNN, dated October 16, 2001.

    "CIA Officer Warns of Terrorist Strikes in U.S.," NewsMax.com, November 25, 2002 .

    Bob Woodward, Bush at War, at 248 (2002).

    Jennifer Barrett, "Newsweek Poll: Bin Laden to Blame For Anthrax," MSNBC.com

    3 Laurie Garrett, "Clash of agencies hampered inquiry into anthrax mystery, " Newsday, July 23, 2002.

    See also Dan Eggen, "FBI Working to Replicate Type of Anthrax Used in Last Year's Deadly Mailings," Washington Post, November 1, 2002.

    4 David Johnston and William J. Broad, "Anthrax in Mail Was Newly Made, Investigators Say," New York Times, June 22 2002. See also Judith Miller, Fox News interview, July 2, 2002.

    5 Eleanor Clift , "Still Looking For Suspects," Newsweek (June 24, 2002 issue).

    6. Yousef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War On America, at 326.

    7. "Osama bought a batch for 10G," The New York Post, October 24, 2001.

    "Bin Laden Bought Anthrax, E-Coli and Salmonella, Aide Tells Court," The Mirror, October 25, 2001.

    Simon Reeve, The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama Bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism, at 262 (1999).

    8. "Did Bin Laden buy bioterror: trial testimony says he did," San Francisco Chronicle, October 21, 2001.

    9. "FBI & Bush Administration Sued Over Anthrax Documents," Judicial Watch Press Release, June 7, 2002.

    10. "Islamic Jihad 'Confessions' Described" FAS.org, March 6, 1999.

    11. Ibid.

    12. Scott Baldauf, "The 'cave man' and Al Qaeda: A Pakistani journalist who repeatedly interviewed bin Laden says he's not the terror group's main force," Christian Science Monitor, October 31, 2001.

    "Arab elite warms to Al Qaeda leaders," Christian Scientist Monitor, July 30, 2002

    13. Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc., at 205-207 (2001) (paperback)

    14. Betsy Hiel, "Egyptian Islamic Jihad linked to bin Laden," Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, September 15, 2002.

    Rohan Gunaratna, Inside Al Qaeda, at 26 (2002).

    15. "The Man Behind Bin Laden," New Yorker, September 16, 2002.

    16. Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins, "Computer in Kabul holds chilling memos," Wall Street Journal, December 31, 2001.

    17. Judith Miller, "Holy Warriors: Killing for the Glory of God, in a Land Far From Home," New York Times, January 16, 2001.

    18. Ibid.

    19. "Disturbing scenes of death show capability with chemical gas," CNN, dated August 19, 2002.

    "Bin Laden Paid For Bali Bombing," FoxNews, October 20, 2002.

    Judith Miller, "Qaeda Videos Seem to Show Chemical Tests," New York Times, August 19, 2002.

    "Tapes shed new light on bin Laden's network," CNN, August 19, 2002.

    UK: Three Charged Over Terror Plot, CNN, November 17, 2002

    20. "Bush Cancels Iraqi Strike," ABCNEWS August 20, 2002.

    21. "U.S. Monitors Kurdish Extremists", Foxnews, August 21, 2002.

    22. "Bush Cancels Iraqi Strike," ABCNEWS August 20, 2002.

    23. Reuters, "Al Qaeda tested germ weapons," New Zealand Herald, January 1, 2002.

    24. CBSNews, " Weapons Worries," July 18, 2002.

    25. Judith Miller, "Lab Suggests Qaeda Planned to Build Arms, Officials Say," New York Times, September 14, 2002.

    Agence France-Presse, "US finds Al-Qaeda lab built to produce anthrax: report," March 23, 2002.

    "Al-Qaeda might have stockpiled anthrax spores," Times of India, December 10, 2001.

    Tabassum Zakaria, "US: Al Qaeda Tried for Bio Weapons in Afghanistan," Reuters, July 17, 2002.

    Jonathan Weisman, "Possible anthrax lab unearthed near Kandahar, USA Today, March 25, 2002.

    "Al Qaeda: Alive and Killing," Newsweek, November 25, 2002.

    26 "Al-Qaeda: Anthrax Found in Al-Qaeda home," Global Security Newswire, December 10, 2001.

    27. Judith Miller, "Lab Suggests Qaeda Planned to Build Arms, Officials Say," New York Times, September 14, 2002.

    28. Gary Jones, Mirror, November 19, 2001.

    29 Kathy Gannon, "Taliban Showed Interest In Anthrax Research Lab. Scientists Say An Official Paid Frequent Visits" in The Boston Globe, November 22, 2001 (photo caption).

    30. "US biological attack imminent - Taliban", iafrica.com, December 12, 2001.

    "Walker Lindh: Al Qaeda planned more attacks," CNN, October 3, 2002

    31. Peter Waldman et al., "Sergeant Served U.S. Army and bin Laden, Showing Failings in FBI's Terror Policing," Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2001.

    Dale Kasler, "Terrorist ruse hurt giving by Muslims" Sacramento Bee, October 25, 2001.

    "Ex US soldier admits embassy bombings," BBC News, October 20, 2000.

    32. John Sullivan and Joseph Neff, "An al Qaeda operative at Fort Bragg," Raleigh News & Observer, November 14, 2001.

    Steven Emerson, American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us , 55-60 (2002)

    33. Andrew Higgins, Alan Culli, "Saga of Dr. Zawahri Sheds Light On the Roots of al Qaeda Terror," Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2002.

    34. http://www.kreindler.com (trillion dollar 9/11 complaint against Iraq recounts Zawahiri's visits to Iraq)

    35. Jeffrey Bartholet, "Terrorist Sleeper Cells: A U.S.-Based Al Qaeda 'Sleeper Cell' Was Poised to Launch a Post-Sept. 11 Attack on a Major Washington Target; Would-Be Terrorists Went Underground or Fled U.S. Evidence Indicates Al Qaeda Had Russian Help Developing Anthrax; Al-Zawahiri Believed Involved in Bin Laden's Biological Weapons Program." Newsweek, December 9, 2001.

    See also Ken Alibek, with Stephen Handelman, Biohazard: The Chilling True Story Of The Largest Weapons Program In The World -- Told From Inside By The Man Who Ran It, at 272 (1999) (paperback).

    36. "Bravado--and blood--in Taliban territory" US News and World Report, November 12, 2001.

    37. "Russia, Iraq and Other Potential Sources of Anthrax, Smallpox and Other Bioterrorist Weapons," Hearings Before the Committee On International Relations, House of Representatives, One Hundred Seventh Congress, First Session, December 5, 2001.

    38. Ibid. See "Iraqis 'infiltrated UK germ labs'", BBC News, November 16, 2002

    39. Richard O. Spertzel, "U.S. Policy in Iraq: Next Steps", Hearings Before the Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on International Security, Proliferation and Federal Services," March 1, 2002.

    Wendy Orent, "Anthrax in America," The New Republic, October 17, 2001

    40. Milton Leitenberg, Biological Weapons and Bioterrorism in the First Years of the 21st Century  (rev. July 10, 2002)" at pp. 23-33.

    41. "Anthrax probe hits genetic dead end: Despite promise, gene analysis failing to help investigation," Associated Press, June 19, 2002.

    The Institute For Genomic Research, Press Release.

    42. Timothy D. Read, et al., "Comparative Genome Sequencing for Discovery of Novel Polymorphisms in Bacillus anthracis," Science, 296: 2028-2033 (May 9, 2002).

    43. Dr. C.J. Peters, August 30, 2002 on PBS' "Searching for Clues."

    44. Mark Schoofs, Gary Fields and Maureen Tkacik, "The Anthrax Probe Ranges Far and Wide As Investigators Scour Tips, Quotes & Research Trash for Leads," Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2001

    45. Guy Gugliotta, Gary Matsumoto, "FBI's Theory On Anthrax Is Doubted, Attacks Not Likely Work Of 1 Person, Experts Say," Washington Post, October 28, 2002.

    Rick Weiss and Dan Eggen, "Anthrax spores were doctored to be deadlier," The Washington Post, October 25, 2001.

    46. John J. Fialka and Gary Fields, "Static Electricity Present in Anthrax Letters Made Spores Cling, May Have Saved Lives," The Wall Street Journal, dated December 3, 2001.

    Guy Gugliotta, Gary Matsumoto, "FBI's Theory On Anthrax Is Doubted, Attacks Not Likely Work Of 1 Person, Experts Say," Washington Post, October 28, 2002.

    47. Jonathan Rauch, "Does Al Qaeda Have Anthrax? Better Assume So," National Journal, June 1, 2002.

    Scott Shane, "Anthrax powder from attacks could have been made simply: single maker a possibility, scientists now theorize", Baltimore Sun, November 3, 2002.

    Guy Gugliotta, Gary Matsumoto, "FBI's Theory On Anthrax Is Doubted, Attacks Not Likely Work Of 1 Person, Experts Say," Washington Post, October 28, 2002.

    "Powder Used in Anthrax Attacks 'Was Not Routine,' The Washington Post, April 09, 2002.

    48. David Johnston and William J. Broad, "Anthrax Sent Through Mail Gained Potency by the Letter," New York Times, May 7, 2002. See also Richard Preston, The Demon In The Freezer, at 165, 171-172 (2002).

    49. PBS: Online Newshour, "Camp David Accord" (September 17, 1978)

    50. Egypt State Information Service, " October 6, 1973: The Battle of the Crossing."

    51. FBI Homepage, 2001 Press Releases, (Anthrax Letters photos).

    52. Statement of October 7, 2001 following September 11 attack.

    See also "Statement Attributed to Al Qaeda Warns of More Attacks on New York, Washington", FoxNews, November 17, 2002

    "Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'," Guardian Unlimited, November 24, 2002.

    "Interview with Osama bin Ladin," Frontline. May 1998.

    "Interview with Mujahid Usmah bin Ladin." Nida'ul Islam, Oct/Nov 1996.

    "Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, World Islamic Front Statement," February 23, 1998.

    Statement of September, 1996 after return to Afghanistan.

    Al Jazeera TV interview, about October 25, 2001.

    Video tape with visiting sheikh, Kandahar area, mid-November, 2001 (http://www.september11news.com/OsamaSpeeches.htm)

    Videotape, December, 2001.

    53. Senator Patrick Leahy's homepage, Committee Assignments.

    54. Ibid; see also "Figures on US Aid," September 10, 2000.

    PBS, Interview Ahmed Sattar, (1999).

    55. "Congress asked to waive curbs on 'rogue states' Dawn , September 25, 2001. See " Leahy Law".

    See Ayman Zawahiri, "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner," (2001).

    56. Palestinian Hamas newspaper, al-Risala, Translation by Middle East Media Research Institute, report no. 247, (November 7, 2001);

    57. Susan Sachs, "An Investigation in Egypt Illustrates Al Qaeda's Web," New York Times, November 21, 2001.

    See also

    Roland Jacquard, In the Name of Osama Bin Laden, 108, 248 (2002)

    58. PBS video excerpt.

    59. "Fighting An Unholy War," Washington Times, August 18, 2002.

    60. Summer 2001 Al Qaeda videotape.

    61. "US Bypasses Law in Fight Against Terrorism," Washington Post, March 12, 2002.

    62. Andrew Higgins, Alan Culli, "Saga of Dr. Zawahri Sheds Light On the Roots of al Qaeda Terror," Wall Street Journal, July 2, 2002.

    63. Ayman Zawahiri, "Knights Under the Prophet's Banner," (2001).

    64. Diplomatic Security Service, Department of State, "Letter Bomb Incidents".

    65. Robert H. Reid, Associated Press, "Mail bombs sent to Arab newspaper", January 14, 1997.

    66. Susan Sachs, "An Investigation in Egypt Illustrates Al Qaeda's Web," New York Times, November 21, 2001.

    ENN Daily Intelligence Report, January 13, 1997.

    67. "Letter bombs found in Washington area and federal prison in Kansas:FBI considers link to World Trade Center bombing," CNN January 2, 1997.

    68. Paul De Armond, "Insider Diversion: profiling the anthrax attacks," (June 2002 rev.) online.

    69. " Evidence suggests al Qaeda pursuit of biological, chemical weapons," CNN, November 14, 2001.

    BBC, dated October 28, 2001 (remarks of Vice President Cheny on training and manuals relating to these kinds of substances).

    70. "9/11 mastermind invited to Cairo Islamic seminar," Reuters, September 2, 2002.

    71. Phil Brennan, "FBI Rejects Link Between Anthrax, 9-11 Terrorists, Newsmax, August 16, 2002.

    72. Kathy Bushounse, and Kevin Krause, "FBI scouts back issues of tabloids in search for anthrax motive," Sun-Sentinel, August 30, 2002.

    73. Guy Gugliotta, Gary Matsumoto, "FBI's Theory On Anthrax Is Doubted, Attacks Not Likely Work Of 1 Person, Experts Say," Washington Post, October 28, 2002.

    74. Editorial, "Still Waiting For Answers, New York Post April 29, 2002.

    Editorial, "The Deepening Anthrax Mystery," The New York Times, May 11, 2002

    Wall Street Journal, dated September 5, 2002 ("The FBI persists in pursuing the yellow brick road theory of a lone madman laid out by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists.")

    Robert Bartley, "The Hatfill Case: Essential Background," Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2002.

    Editorial, "Al Qaeda is still a bioterrorism threat," Wall Street Journal, dated March 26, 2002.

    FBI Profile Disputed," Global Security Newswire, dated December 6, 2001.

    Edward Jay Epstein, "FBI Overlooks Foreign Sources of Anthrax," Wall Street Journal,

    75. November 9, 2001, Amerithrax Press Briefing.

    See also anthrax-profiler.com .

    76. "Anthrax attacks linked to US extremists," Washington Post, October 28, 2001.

    77. Attorney General John Ashcroft, Press Conference, October 18, 2001.

    78. Ron Martz, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "Experts doubt anthrax a domestic plot," October 19, 2001.

    See also Brian Levin: Militias and bioterrorism, CNN, October 17, 2001.

    79. "Did Bin Laden buy bioterror: trial testimony says he did," San Francisco Chronicle, October 21, 2001.

    80. "Who's Behind the Anthrax Attacks," Newsmax, November 19, 2002

    81. "Al Qaeda-Anthrax Link?", CBS News, March 23, 2002

    82. "Memo on Florida Case Roils Probe," The Washington Post, March 29, 2002, Friday, Pg. A03;

    See Cutaneous anthrax images.

    Thomas W. McGovern, MD, Cutaneous Manifestations of Bioterrorism: Anthrax

    83. Sarah El Deeb, "Hijacker farewell video found," Associated Press, April 15, 2002.

    84. Map showing distribution of Brown Recluse Spider.

    85. "Memo on Florida Case Roils Probe," The Washington Post, March 29, 2002, Friday, Pg. A03.

    "Hijacker's lesion deepens mystery: U.S. official cautions against linking anthrax and Sept. 11 attacks," Baltimore Sun, March 24, 2002.

    86. "Report Linking Anthrax and Hijackers Is Investigated," The New York Times, March 23, 2002.

    87. "Coz: Mohamed Atta Spotted With Possible Anthrax Symptoms," Newsmax , October 12, 2001.

    88. Michael Y. Park, "Bioterror Threat: Myth or Reality?" Foxnews, September 25, 2001.

    89. "Bin Laden's Biological Threat," BBC, October 28, 2001.

    90. "Face to face with Atta," ABCNews.

    91. Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction Programs, October 2002.

    92. Report: Moussaoui tied to 9/11 plot, CNN, November 20, 2002

    "Moussaoui's 9/11 Role Doubted?" CBSNews, July 20, 2002.

    Toni Locy, "Moussaoui case doesn't hinge on role in 9/11," USAToday

    Edward Jay Epstein, Question of the Week, online.

    93. "FBI Overlooks Iraq's Connection to Anthrax Attacks," Newsmax

    "Following the trail of powder," f2 network, October 20, 2001.

    94. Edward Jay Epstein, "The Fog of Scoops."

    "Mohammed Atta in Prague FAQ"

    "Czechs retract Iraq terror link," UPI, October 20, 2002.

    "Prague Discounts an Iraqi Meeting," New York Times, October 21, 2002.

    95. Bob Drogin, Paul Richter and Doyle McManus, "White House says Sept. 11 skyjacker had met Iraqi agent," Los Angeles Times, August 2, 2002.

    96. Pearle warns: 'Powerful' evidence of Iraq-Al Qaida WMD ties World Tribune.com, July 15, 2002.

    97. "Blair's statement to MPs on Iraq," CNN, September 24, 2002.

    Sebastian Rotella, "Allies Find No Links Between Iraq, Al Qaeda," Los Angeles Times, November 4, 2002

    98. http://www.kreindler.com (trillion dollar 9/11 complaint against Iraq recounts Zawahiri's visits to Iraq)

    99. Mark Schoofs and Gary Fields, "Anthrax Probe Was Complicated By Muddled Information, FBI Says," Wall Street Journal, March 26, 2002.

    100. Transcript, "Ask The FBI: The anthrax investigation," USA Today, March 26, 2002.

    See also Dan Eggen and Guy Gugliotta, FBI Secretly Trying to Re-Create Anthrax From Mail Attacks," Washington Post, November 2, 2002.

    101. "FBI's use of bloodhounds in anthrax probe disputed. Techniques: The three California handlers brought in by the bureau are viewed skeptically by many in their field," Baltimore Sun, October 29, 2002.

    102. Hatfill's First Statement .

    Hatfill's Second Statement.

    Victor Glasberg's statement and Q and A session

    103. Robert Bartley, "The Hatfill Case: Essential Background," Wall Street Journal, August 19, 2002.

    "Circle of suspicion: Is the 'evidence' against an undeclared anthrax suspect just coincidences and a colorful past?" US News, August 26, 2002.

    Rachel Smolkin, AJR, "Into The Spotlight", November 2002.

    Editorial: "Person of Interest", Sacramento Bee, August 15, 2002.

    Editorial, Blacklisting Steven Hatfill, Washington Post, September 5, 2001.

    David Tell, "Remember Anthrax?" Weekly Standard April 29, 2002.

    Fred Reed, "Steve Hatfill, Anthrax, and Bushwah," online.

    104. "FBI Ignored Letter in Anthrax Probe," Newsmax August 15, 2002.

    105. National Enquirer. .

    106. Phil Brennan, "FBI Rejects Link Between Anthrax, 9-11 Terrorists," Newsmax, August 16, 2002.

    107. "FBI Ignored Letter in Anthrax Probe," Newsmax August 15, 2002.

    108. Larry M. Bush, Barry H. Abrams, M.D., Anne Beall, B.S., M.T., and Caroline C. Johnson, M.D., "Index Case of Fatal Inhalational Anthrax Due to Bioterrorism in the United States," New England Journal of Medicine, 345:1607-1610, November 29, 2001.

    109. MS Traeger et al., " First case of bioterrorism-related inhalational anthrax in the United States, Palm Beach, Florida, 2001," Emerg Infect Dis , October 2002.

    110. Kathy Bushouse, and Kevin Krause, "FBI scouts back issues of tabloids in search for anthrax motive," Sun-Sentinel, August 30, 2002.

    111. John Murawski, "Anthrax at AMI traveled via copiers," Palm Beach Post, September 15, 2002.

    112.  David Tell, "Who is Syed Athar Abbas," Weekly Standard, July 17, 2002.

    Rocco Parascandola, "Guilty Plea in Fraud Case But Feds Fear Pakistani's Purpose for buying Food Mixer," Newsday , July 15, 2002.

    113. Air Force Journal, May 2002.

    Guy Gugliotta, Gary Matsumoto, "FBI's Theory On Anthrax Is Doubted, Attacks Not Likely Work Of 1 Person, Experts Say," Washington Post, October 28, 2002.

    Timothy P. Carney, "Milling Anthrax: Just a Click Away?" Human Events, October 29, 2001.

    "Tracking Anthrax," PBS, October 17, 2001.

    114. Hannah Bloch, "Some More Spores?: Suspicious packages raise prospect that Pakistan may be the latest target of bioterrorists", TIME, November 12, 2001.

    "Pakistan, other US allies grapple with anthrax scares," Christian Science Monitor, November 5, 2001.

    "Anthrax attacks in Pakistan as US strikes raise tensions," Middle East Times November 2, 2001.

    "Anthrax Found in Pakistan News Office, " ABCNews, November 2, 2001.

    "US Firm in Pakistan Gets Anthrax Letter," rediff.com October 24, 2001.

    "Pakistan reports anthrax exposures," CNN, November 2, 2001.

    "Pakistan to test 3 people for anthrax exposure, " CNN, November 3, 2001.

    Ghulam Hasnain, "Lethal Weapon: With three confirmed cases of anthrax exposure so far, offices in Karachi begin to gear up to face the new threat" Newsline (November 2001).

    "No anthrax in Pakistan: minister," Dawn.com (reporting on 100 hoaxes and confirming that three cases at issue had not yet been retested; urging no need to panic).

    115. Ayman Zawahiri, Knights Under the Prophet's Banner, (2001).

    116. "'Why We Fight America': Al-Qa'ida Spokesman Explains September 11 and Declares Intentions to Kill 4 Million Americans with Weapons of Mass Destruction," Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch Series - No. 388 June 12, 2002 No.388.

    117. "Federal advisers say U.S. unprepared for biological attack," By Laura Meckler, Associated Press, August 27, 2002.

Interesing quotes from Incogman's Blog:

Read this comment left at a blog site:

"I have been a close friend of Dr. Bruce Ivins for years. The FBI needed a scapegoat, especially after Stephen Hatfill, whose foot the FBI ran over, won a $5.2 M lawsuit against them.

The new FBI director needed a capture in this case. So, they took all of the Ft. Detrick anthrax researchers and put them under intense interrogation.

Bruce was a mild, meek and sensitive scientist. The FBI showed his clinically depressed daughter, who was institutionalized in a mental hospital, photos of the anthrax victims, and said "your father did this." They offered his son $2.5 M and a sportscar if he would "rat" on his father.

Bruce could not stand stand up to the constant harrasment by the FBI. So we have lost a very talented researcher

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

OPERATION ENDURING FREEDOM:* LEGAL
DIMENSIONS OF AN INFINITELY JUST OPERATION
DR. BARRY A. FEINSTEIN** (Jew Disinformationalist -- The CSR)

http://www.law.fsu.edu/Journals/transna ... nstein.pdf

(These Citations are pulled from the pages. Lame, idiot Jew attempt to link Iraq/Al Ciada and the Anthrax attacks)   :x

283. Jim Loney, New Anthrax Cases Heighten U.S. Bioterror Fears, at
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/2001101 ... ax_dc.html (Oct. 14, 2001). "We've
seen the enemy in the murder of thousands of innocents, unsuspecting people . . . The
terrorists cannot be reasoned with," U.S. President George W. Bush said as he signed antiterror
legislation into law. "Witness the recent anthrax attacks through our postal service."
Deborah Zabarenko, Sophisticated Process Created Killer Anthrax, at
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/2001102 ... c_118.html (Oct. 26, 2001).
The U.S. President described the anthrax cases in America as "a second wave of terrorist
attacks upon our country." Sandra Sobieraj, Bush Tries to Allay Anthrax Fears, at
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/2001110 ... ush_2.html (Nov. 3, 2001). The U.S.
Government at the time thought that the anthrax scare may have been linked to bin Laden.
Iran Says U.S. Paying for Giving Anthrax to Iraq, supra note 17. For further discussion on
biological terrorism in the U.S. and its possible links with bin Laden, see supra notes 4


17. There were reports that prior to the suicide attacks on America one of the suicide
terrorist hijackers had met on two separate occasions with Iraqi intelligence officers, in June
2000 and in April 2001. Atta Met Twice With Iraqi Intelligence, at http://www.cnn.com
/2001/US/10/11/inv.atta.meetings/index.html (Oct. 11, 2001); see also Czechs Confirm
Suspected Hijacker Met Iraqi, at http://www.cnn.com/2001/WORLD/europe/
10/27/inv.czech.iraq/index.html (Oct. 27, 2001); Did Atta Get Germs From Iraq?, at
http://www.cbsnews.com/now/story/0,1597 ... 2,00.shtml (visited Oct. 28, 2001).
Intelligence agents were investigating whether a second hijacker also had met with an Iraqi
intelligence agent. Czechs Confirm Suspected Hijacker Met Iraqi, supra. Furthermore, Iraq
had been singled out by American investigators as a "prime suspect as the source of the
deadly [anthrax] spores" that resulted in anthrax outbreaks in the U.S., which "have all the
hallmarks of a terrorist attack." David Rose & Ed Vulliamy, Iraq 'Behind US Anthrax
Outbreaks', OBSERVER, Oct. 14, 2001, available at http://www.observer.co.uk/
international/story/0,6903,573893,00.html; Did Atta Get Germs From Iraq?, supra; see also
Stephen Fidler & Carola Hoyos, Attack on Afghanistan Diplomacy: US Looks to Moscow for
Help to Curb Iraq Weapons Inspections, FINANCIAL TIMES, Nov. 7, 2001, available at
http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchi ... =curb+iraq.
The former United Nations Chief Weapons Inspector, Richard Butler, also assessed that there
appeared to be a good likelihood that Iraq was indeed linked to the anthrax outbreaks in the
U.S. Nathan Guttman, The Assistants of the Majority Leader in the Senate Opened a Postal
Envelope and Discovered Anthrax Powder In It, HA'ARETZ, Oct. 16, 2001, at 2A (in Hebrew,
trans. by author) (on file with author); see also Iran Says U.S. Paying for Giving Anthrax to
Iraq, REUTERS, available at http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/2001102 ... ax_dc.html (Oct. 26, 2001).
Butler, in explaining the existence of a possible connection between the anthrax mailings and Iraq, pointed out that "there's a credible report,
not fully verified, that they [Iraq] may indeed have given anthrax to exactly the group that
did the World Trade Center" suicide terrorist attack. CNN.COM, Ex-U.N. Weapons Inspector:
Possible Iraq-Anthrax Link (Oct. 15, 2001), at http://www.cnn.com/2001/HEALTH
/conditions/10/15/anthrax.butler/index.html (visited Nov. 9, 2001). Reports had emerged
following the anthrax attacks in the U.S. regarding Iraqi attempts in 1988 and 1989 to obtain
from British sources the Ames strain of anthrax, the same strain that had been employed in
anthrax mailing attacks in the U.S. William J. Broad & David Johnston, U.S. Inquiry Tried,
But Failed, to Link Iraq to Anthrax Attack, N.Y. TIMES, Dec. 22, 2001, at A1, available at
h t t p : / / d a i l y n e w s . y a h o o . c o m / h / n y t / 2 0 0 1 1 2 2 2 / t s
/u_s_inquiry_tried_but_failed_to_link_iraq_to_anthrax_attack_1.html. But see id. (Iraq, with
a long record of germ warfare arsenal development, has yet to be connected directly with the
anthrax mailings).

Among the evidence that seemed to link Iraq to the October 2001 anthrax mailings in
the U.S. was the fact that Iraq is the only known place that has used an additive in the
production of anthrax called bentonite, which apparently was used in the lethal form of
anthrax contained in a letter sent to U.S. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle.

Laurie Mylroie: Is Iraq Involved with U.S. Terror Attacks?, at http://www.cnn.com/2001/
COMMUNITY/10/29/mylroie/index.html (Oct. 29, 2001). But see Broad & Johnston, supra
(tests conducted in October 2001 had not by then seemed to show any indications of the
existence of aluminum, which is a major component of bentonite). According to retired
microbiologist Richard O. Spertzel, the head of the biological weapons inspections team of the
United Nations in Iraq, the use of bentonite by Iraq in the development of its germ weapons
programs had been considered by Iraq, and the level of sophistication of the anthrax that was
contained in some of the attacks had convinced him and others that Iraq unquestionably
might be behind them. Id. Thus, concluded Rutgers University microbiologist Richard H.
Ebright, who was carefully watching the investigations of the anthrax attacks in the U.S., the
Iraqi connection "should not be dismissed as a desparate reach for a casus belli against Iraq"
and should continue to be examined. Id.

Moreover, there are reports that Iraq was behind the first World Trade Center terrorist
bombing attack in 1993. Sources indicate that that bombing's mastermind, Ramzi Yousef,
may have been an Iraqi intelligence agent. Laurie Mylroie: Is Iraq Involved with U.S. Terror
Attacks?, supra. These inquiries are all increasing the amount of evidence observers say is
massing to the effect that "Saddam Hussein was involved, possibly indirectly, with the 11
September hijackers." Id.; Rose & Vulliamy, supra. According to Stanley Bedlington, a CIA
counter terrorism center senior analyst, "[t]here certainly is no doubt that Saddam Hussein
had pretty strong ties to bin Laden." Peter Eisler, Targeting Saddam: Was There an Iraqi
9/11 Link? Evidence is Thin, But Regime's Links to bin Laden and al-Qaeda Run Deep, USA
TODAY, Dec. 7, 2001, at 1A, available at http://www.usatoday.com/usatonline
/20011203/3667784s.htm. Regular ties have existed between bin Laden's operatives and the
Iraqi regime, according to most of those present and past officials who are watching such
matters, and many believe that al-Qaeda has been assisted by Iraqi operatives in possiby
providing the know-how and where-with-all to manufacture bombs, and in other endeavors --
"the sort of assistance Iraq has provided to any number of terrorist groups." Id. Furthermore,
inspectors with the United Nations weapons inspection team in Iraq in the 1990s discovered
a training camp for terrorists located in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. This secret, separate
facility was the place where apparently non-Iraqi, Islamic radical Arabs were trained to be
terrorists, inter alia learning how through small cells to hijack airplanes using only knives.
Id. Moreover, not only was the CIA counter terrorism center certain that bin Laden was also
receiving money from Iraq, it was suspected that undoubtedly Iraq would attempt to infiltrate
al-Qa'ida with Iraqi agents. According to a Monterey Institute of International Studies
scholar, Tim McCarthy, who also was involved in the weapons inspections by the United
Nations in Iraq, penetrating an operation with Iraqi operatives is exactly the way Saddam
Hussein functions: "Saddam believes in getting inside these sorts of organizations." Id. Iraqi
military intelligence operation chief Wafiq al Samarrai, as well, thinks that Iraqi operatives
have been placed in the al-Qa'ida organization. Id. Intelligence and military personnel are
convinced that al-Qa'ida and Iraq are working closely together. Id. As former CIA director
James Woolsey pointed out: "I don't know what the (Iraq-al-Qaeda) relationship is, whether
it's a 90-10 joint venture or a 10-90 joint venture, and it doesn't matter." Id. He explained
that certain attacks by al-Qa'ida "look like a foreign intelligence service was involved, and we
have a long history of contacts between Iraqi intelligence and al-Qaeda." Id. Woolsey
concludes that "[a]ll of that, plus the (blocking) of the U.N. inspections, is enough." Id.

------

David Kelley's link to Spertzel going back in time. I bet Kelley was going to rat out Spertzel's hand in the Israeli-Mossad Anthrax attacks in S. Florida... and possibly even blow apart the Iraq war planning schemes... possibly by trying to hang Spertzel out to dry in the Jew'd Press with evidence:

Had Kelly decided to work for or against 'The New Jeruselum' of the 'coalition?

It has been suggested that Dr Kelly was passed over for promotion as head of UNSCOM, and instead Richard Spertzel was appointed

"Although he mixed with diplomats, Kelly was not one of them. He found their world shallow. In the corridors of the UN, the talk was about who was up, who was down. It turned out that he was not as up as he had hoped. In late 1994 the UN appointed Richard Spertzel, a US biologist, as head of its bio-weapons investigation in Iraq a role Kelly almost certainly would have liked. Kelly remained an adviser but one step removed from the centre of power. " - source

http://www.declarepeace.org.uk/captain/ ... iburu.html
http://www.ladlass.com/intel/archives/001396.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

This has "Jew" written all over it:

IRAQIS KILLED KELLY TO KEEP GAS ATTACK SECRET
by James Murray

2 August 2009

Sensational evidence suggesting weapons inspector David Kelly was murdered by Iraqis planning to attack Britian is being offered to the Iraq war inquiry.

Retired American microbiologist Richard Spertzel says he is prepared to fly to London to give evidence to diplomat Sir John Chilcot's investigation.

Mr Spertzel, who led the United Nations biological inspection team in Iraq and worked closely with Dr Kelly, says evidence emerged that Saddam Hussein was planning to attack American and European cities with nerve agents contained in over-the-counter perfume bottles.

He says he read witness statements alleging that the deadly agents Sarin and mustard gas were to be used.

In another astonishing twist Mr Spertzel says he was told that he and Dr Kelly were on an Iraqi hit list. "I was number theree and David was number four", he said.

The Swedish executive chairman of the UN inpsection team was warned that he was top of the list and took the threats so seriously that he resigned.

Russian intelligence agencies in Baghdad passed over information about the list but did not disclose how they came across the information, known only among Saddam's inner circle.

When he learned of Dr Kelly's death in July 2003 in woods near his home in Southmoor, Oxfordshire, Mr Spertzel immediately suspected that he had been killed by Iraqi spies.

"It was a very strange death," he said. "We were wary that the Iraqi intelligence services may have been involved. My concern was whether the Iraqis were after David Kelly."

Although an inquiry led by Lord Hutton in 2003-04 decided that 59-year old Dr Kelly took his own life while under pressure over the information he supplied for the "sexed-up" dossier on Iraq, Mr Spertzel keeps an open mind.

"I can't say one way or the other," he said, adding that a murder investigation carried out at the time could have uncovered crucial evidence.

Asked whether he supported calls for an inquest, Mr Sperzel said: "It might be too little, too late. I knew Dr Kelly reasonably well and in my view he was not suicidal."

However, he believes that it would be "very useful" if the Chilcot inquiry looks into the circumstances surrounding the death of Dr Kelly.

"If something turned up that the Iraqi intelligence services was involved in it would eliminate all sorts of arguments," said Mr Spertzel, who gave evidence to a US Senate committee on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability before the invasion in March 2003.

"There is no quesiton in my mind that we had to go in," he added, "Did they have the capability and an ongoing programme? Yes."

Intelligence services had discovered an agreement between Iraq and Syria dating back to 1994 outlining cooperation on the development of biological and chemical weapons.

Mr Spertzel said he established that there were laboratories in Iraq capable of producing biological weapons. He added: "One was making Sarin and mustard gas to be placed in perfume phials bound for the US and Europe."

"Apparently they were designed to mimic just about any manufacturer. That was pretty serious."

Sarin, which causes victims to die a choking death, has a short-shelf life but mustard gas can be stored for years.

It is thought by many people in the western intelligence community that Iraqi biological eapons were driven into Syria before the invasion so the stockpiles could not be found. Syria has always denied the claims.

http://dr-david-kelly.blogspot.com/

RT has it right.

So Saddam Hussein authorises injecting Sarin and mustard gas into perfume bottles, and having them shipped to the West? Given the originator of the claim is from the neocon stable, one has to take the assertions with a pinch of salt. Let's hear more from Dick Spertzel about his sources. -- RT