CNN Anthrax Attacks Propaganda Exposed!

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Bioterror fight may spawn new risks

As field of study expands, concerns grow about potential pathogen leaks; 'Accidents are more likely'

By Scott Shane
Sun National Staff

June 27, 2004

The federal government has responded to the threat of bioterrorism with a spending blitz that has already surpassed the annual cost of the Manhattan Project to build the first atom bomb. But as illustrated by a recent mishap in which a Frederick lab inadvertently shipped lethal anthrax across the country, the biodefense push might be creating new hazards even as it seeks to make the country safer.

The flood of new money - $14.5 billion spent since 2001 - has drawn scores of new researchers and facilities into the field, creating more possibilities for the release of anthrax and other "select agents," the legal term for pathogens with bioterrorist potential.

Known incidents have been few, but scientists say the proliferation of places and people involved in germ experiments in the United States - 11,119 workers in 317 labs approved to date - inevitably boosts the chance of accidental leaks or deliberate diversion of germs.

In addition, the Bioterrorism Act of 2002 requires that the location of labs handling lethal pathogens be kept secret, giving citizens no way to find out what research is being conducted in their neighborhoods.

Martin E. Hugh-Jones, a veteran anthrax researcher at Louisiana State University, says he has been "amazed" by the influx of people into his field.

Before 2001, with only a dozen U.S. research groups studying anthrax, "we all knew each other by first name," Hugh-Jones says. Today, when he reviews anthrax research proposals, "I see a lot of names I've never heard of. ... On a probabilistic basis, there's more of a risk of accidents or attacks," he says.

While advances have been made toward new ways to detect anthrax, Hugh-Jones says that overall, "I think we've spent an awful lot of money, and I'm not sure we're much better off."

Richard H. Ebright, a Rutgers University biochemist and critic of the expansion, said the lure of funding has drawn neophytes into the field. "With the expansion of the biodefense effort - especially to institutions and individuals without experience with lethal biological agents - accidents are more likely," he says.

"I think people will find it surprising that 11,000 people are cleared to work with the most dangerous agents, which have little importance for public health outside the bioterrorism field," Ebright says.

Passed in the aftermath of the anthrax letters that killed five people in 2001, the Bioterrorism Act imposed tough new regulations on germ research. Safety experts say that while researchers complain about paperwork, the rules have unquestionably raised awareness of the threat and added accountability to a field with lax recordkeeping.

Stefan Wagener, president of the American Biological Safety Association, says the law prompted some labs to destroy little-used stocks of germs, sometimes forgotten in freezers, that might have posed a hazard.

"I would say the impact has been positive," says Wagener, a microbiologist who oversees the Canadian government's highest-security biodefense lab, in Winnipeg, Manitoba. "But has the law made the United States safer from an insider's bioterrorist attack?

"That's harder to answer."

It is also an important question, because the FBI has focused its investigation of the still-unsolved anthrax attacks largely on U.S. biodefense facilities rather than foreign terrorist groups. The letters contained a strain of anthrax used mainly in a few U.S. and foreign labs supplied by the Army's biodefense center at Fort Detrick.

Since registration began last year, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have inspected and fully certified 235 facilities nationwide and given provisional approval to 82 more to work with anthrax and other select agents. The 11,119 people who work in them have been cleared by the FBI, which checked them against criminal and terrorist databases.

Not all applicants have passed muster. The CDC has denied three labs' applications and "suspended" nine others, indicating that a provisional approval was revoked, said Ted Jones, acting director of the Select Agent Program.

The FBI's Monte D. McKee, who oversees the checks on lab workers, will say only that "less than 1 percent" of lab workers have been turned down, usually because of a criminal record. The check does not involve confirming the worker's academic or work credentials, or interviewing associates, he says.

Because there was no previous count of labs or researchers, it's impossible to measure the growth precisely. But most observers say that while red tape has driven some scientists out of the field, new research money has attracted a greater number.

The National Institutes of Health's database of research grants shows that the number of projects involving anthrax soared from 28 in 2000 to 253 last year. NIH projects mentioning "bioterrorism" and related words climbed from 25 in 2000 to 665 last year.

"The number of institutions working actively with select agents has skyrocketed," says Edward Hammond, who tracks biodefense research for the Sunshine Project, a Texas-based watchdog group. "In terms of accidental release, I think we're unquestionably less safe than we were before 2001."

The federal spending increase has been so rapid that even the government seems to be having trouble keeping track. In April, when President Bush issued a sweeping directive to step up the nation's defenses against bioterrorism, the White House said the government had spent $10 billion on biodefense since 2001. The Department of Health and Human Services counted $12.9 billion the same day.

But Ari Schuler, an analyst at the Baltimore-based Center for Biosecurity of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, did a more complete search and documented $14.5 billion in federal spending on civilian biodefense since 2001. For the 2005 fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, President Bush has requested a record $7.6 billion, more than 18 times the budget in 2001.

For the years 2002 to 2005, average annual biodefense spending comes out to $5.4 billion a year - more than the annual spending in 2004 dollars on the Manhattan Project, the World War II quest for an atomic bomb, or the Reagan-era Strategic Defense Initiative, a missile defense program.

Some of the money has gone into buying a stockpile of antibiotics and improving communications between local, state and federal health authorities. But much has gone to hands-on research on dangerous germs.

Some of the new work is being done at Southern Research Institute in Frederick, which accidentally shipped the potentially lethal anthrax to research collaborators in Oakland, Calif.

Thomas G. Voss, a microbiologist who oversees SRI's homeland defense work, said that before late 2001 the Frederick lab had handled only mild vaccine strains of anthrax.

Since then, he said, virulent strains have been used for research on vaccines, antibiotics and detection methods.

In March, SRI shipped vials of a liquid anthrax mixture by Federal Express in a sealed container to Children's Hospital Oakland Research Institute in California for a vaccine study. The anthrax was of a virulent strain, but SRI workers had tried to kill the bacteria before shipping it by immersing the vials in hot water, Voss said.

Only early this month, after two groups of mice inoculated with the supposedly "inactivated" anthrax sickened and died, did the Oakland researchers suspect something was awry. Tests showed the anthrax bacteria were alive.

At least seven people working on the Oakland project were given antibiotics as a precaution, officials said. None has developed symptoms of anthrax.

SRI officials did not return phone calls last week. In an earlier interview, Voss said the company would review its procedures for killing anthrax. But he said, "The take-home message is, this is biology, which can be unpredictable."

CDC spokesman Von Roebuck said the agency is monitoring SRI's self-review. But he said that while the incident suggests that "there's a tradeoff" in safety with growing numbers of labs conducting biodefense work, the registration and background checks "certainly raise the safety level."

The Bioterrorism Act requires labs to report the theft, loss or release of pathogens. The CDC was unable to provide the number of such incidents, but Jones said there have been "not very many."

Jones said the law's confidentiality requirements prohibit him from saying whether SRI is registered to handle select agents. "I'm not confirming or denying that this [SRI] is a registered entity," he said.

The confidentiality rules, designed to prevent terrorists from learning the location of germ stocks, also keeps the public in the dark, says Hammond, of the Sunshine Project.

"There is legitimate information to withhold - such as the combination to the lock on a lab's freezer," Hammond says. "But the mere fact of which institutions are using select agents, which agents they're using and what they're doing with them should be made public."

Copyright (c) 2004, The Baltimore Sun

Link to the article:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nation ... 8679.story

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Spertzel, Benador teams, and Israeli-US/UK Dual Loyalist-Traitorous- "Hasbara" Jews had a hand in murdering Dr. Kelley...IMHO... call it CIA/MI6--- it's just JEW... plain and simple... he had the details on Richard Spertzel's lies and likely had the data on him when he was murdered... apparently MI6 or another agency confiscated data from him shortly after his murder.   -- The CSR

-----

Iraq whistleblower Dr Kelly WAS murdered to silence him, says MP

By FIONA BARTON

Last updated at 00:18 20 October 2007

    * Comments (36)
    * Add to My Stories

Weapons expert Dr David Kelly was assassinated, an MP claims today.

Campaigning politician Norman Baker believes Dr Kelly, who exposed the Government's "sexed-up" Iraq dossier, was killed to stop him making further revelations about the lies that took Britain to war.

He says the murderers may have been anti-Saddam Iraqis, and suggests the crime was covered up by elements within the British establishment to prevent a diplomatic crisis.

Scroll down for more ...

David Kelly

'Murdered': Weapons' expert David Kelly
Read more...

    * Why I know weapons expert Dr David Kelly was murdered, by the MP who spent a year investigating his death

The LibDem MP, who gave up his front bench post to carry out his year-long investigation, makes his claims in a book serialised exclusively in the Daily Mail today and next week.

The official Hutton Inquiry into the death of Dr Kelly ruled in 2004 that he slashed one of his wrists with a garden knife and took an overdose after being "outed" as the mole who revealed the flawed argument for invading Iraq.

But Norman Baker is convinced the scientist was murdered.

He says he was told by a secret informant that British police knew about the plot but failed to act in time and that the death was later made to look like a suicide to prevent political and diplomatic turmoil.

The highly-respected MP's personal quest to uncover the truth about Dr Kelly's death was prompted by deep concerns over the circumstances surrounding the apparent suicide.

He - and a group of eminent doctors - were greatly troubled by the evidence presented to Lord Hutton.

They claimed medical evidence proved that the alleged method of suicide - the cutting of the ulnar artery in the wrist and an overdose of co-proxamol painkillers - could not have caused the scientist's death.

Mr Baker said: "The more I examined [Lord Hutton's verdict], the more it became clear to me that Hutton's judgment was faulty and suspect in virtually all important respects."

His findings are today revealed in the first extract from his book The Strange Death of David Kelly. In it, he claims:

? No fingerprints were found on the gardening knife allegedly used by the scientist to cut one of his wrists;

? Only one other person in the whole of the British Isles committed suicide in the same way as the scientist allegedly did in 2003;

? There was an astonishing lack of blood at the scene despite death being officially recorded as due to a severed artery;

? The level of painkillers found in Dr Kelly's stomach was "less than a third" of a normal fatal overdose.

The Lewes MP also suggests that the knife and packs of painkillers found beside Dr Kelly's body were taken from his home in Southmoor, Oxfordshire, during a police search after his death and later planted at the scene.

He tells in his book how he was contacted by "informants" during his "journey into the unknown".

One is alleged to have told him Dr Kelly's death had been "a wet operation, a wet disposal".

Mr Baker explains: "Essentially, it seems to refer to an assassination, perhaps carried out in a hurry."

Another secret contact told him that a group of UK-based Iraqis had "named people who claimed involvement in Dr Kelly's death".

The informant was later the victim of "an horrific attack by an unknown assailant".

The MP, who has repeatedly called for the police to re-open the case, alleges that the scientist had "powerful enemies" because of his work on biological weapons. A colleague of Dr Kelly, Dick Spertzel, America's most senior biological weapons inspector, confirmed to Mr Baker that the scientist was "on an Iraqi hit list".

Mr Baker alleges that opponents of Saddam Hussein feared Dr Kelly would "discredit" them by revealing "misinformation" they had deliberately planted to bolster the case for Britain and America's intervention in Iraq.

The MP claims Kelly's integrity might have "signed his own death warrant".

The book also alleges that British police "had got wind of a possible plan to assassinate Dr Kelly but were too late to prevent his murder taking place".

The MP suggests that the police may have tried to make the killing appear to be a suicide "in the interests of Queen and country" and to prevent any destabilisation of the sensitive relationship between the Allies and Iraq.

Mr Baker adds: "It is all too easy to dismiss so-called conspiracy theories. But history shows us that conspiracies do happen - and that suicide can be staged to cover murderers' tracks.

"All the evidence leads me to believe that this is what happened in the case of Dr Kelly."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z0jdFFBE8w

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

US Jews working from the inside...

Libby's Drafts of Powell's
UN Speech Could Be
`Smoking Gun' To Impeach Cheney

by Michele Steinberg

On Feb. 7, 2003, Lyndon LaRouche, then a candidate in the 2004 Democratic Presidential primaries, warned the nation—especially the other Democratic Party candidates—after the Feb. 5, 2003 speech delivered to the UN Security Council special session on Iraq, by then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, that Powell was the "apparent victim of a hoax."

LaRouche said: "A suddenly unleashing, already raging international scandal over certain dubious elements included in U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell's UNO Security Council address, tends to discredit my Democratic Party rivals even more more than a Powell who was plainly carrying out a mission crafted by others.

"For example, U.S. credibility is under assault as today's Reuters' 'World News' dispatches featured breaking news which strongly suggests that Colin Powell's UNO Security Council address was, in significant part, a hoax based on cooked-up documents of Britain's Blair government." (For the full statement, see "Powell Apparent Victim of Hoax.")

As documented in the Feb. 21, 2003 issue of EIR, large parts of Powell's speech were based on a British intelligence assessment, issued by British Prime Minister Tony Blair's office, which had been prepared by a think-tank run by Barry Rubin, an American neo-conservative, and then passed into British intelligence. Rubin's dossier, in turn, was based on a graduate student thesis, written nearly 20 years earlier!

But, there is far more to the story, as EIR has exposed. Rubin was an extension of the long arm of Dick Cheney's disinformation apparatus, run out of his office by his national security aide, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, with a direct "stovepipe" from the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans (OSP), run by Libby's cronies, neo-cons Douglas Feith and Paul Wolfowitz, the No. 3 and No. 2 officials in the Pentagon. In Feb. 21, 2003, EIR wrote:

"Rubin, a transplanted Israeli citizen, still spends a good deal of time in the United States. On Feb. 4, [2003] 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 [Richard] Perle, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, Laurie Mylroie, former UN weapons inspector Richard Spertzel, and former Iraqi weapons scientist Khidhir Hamza."

Today, there is no question the speech was a hoax.

"I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who had been an advisor to Powell for 16 years, and who served as his chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, and had worked on the speech. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life," Wilkerson told CNN in an August 2005 documentary, "Dead Wrong—Inside an Intelligence Meltdown."
'Book of Evidence'

The following report is an outline to enable investigators in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senate to conclude not only that Powell's speech was a hoax—but that it was one cooked in Cheney's office.

According to a former high-level intelligence professional, who also served for decades in the U.S. Armed Forces, Libby's drafts could provide "the smoking gun." Powell reportedly tossed the 90-page draft (or by some accounts, drafts), that Libby and Cheney's office were trying to force him to deliver to the UN, "in the garbage," because it was so unsubstantiated. Instead, he spent 3-4 days at CIA headquarters trying to verify each piece of information he would use at the UN. But several reports say that Libby was there, breathing down Powell's neck, and trying to reinsert the material that Powell had rejected—even on the day of the speech. (See "Yes Dick, You Are a Liar," EIR, Dec. 9, 2005.)

The Libby drafts will probably show the details that Cheney's office was maintaining its own intelligence shop, gathering information that had been rejected by intelligence professionals, a former CIA official told EIR. Congressional investigators could get "behind the curtain" of what Cheney and Libby were deliberately doing to manufacture intelligence, by reviewing those drafts. Where did Lewis Libby get his information? How did it get funneled into him? The Senate must investigate this question.

Another senior Washington intelligence source told EIR that Libby would not have dared to shove a draft of a speech down the throat of the Secretary of State, unless he was doing it for Cheney and had Cheney's okay.

Libby has now been indicted for perjury: lying to Federal investigators. Could his crime have stemmed from a doctrine of lying and misleading the American people—and Congress—to achieve a war that could not be justified? As 2006 begins, and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence conducts its crucial "Phase II" investigation of the lies that led up to the Iraq War, the most crucial "book of evidence" for that investigation must be the Libby draft of Powell's speech.

EIR cannot comment directly on the Libby drafts, as they are still secret.

We can show that the key allegations in Powell's testimony were false and unreliable, and that much of the false information came from a nefarious network of rogue intelligence operations run by Cheney. And sources for the false information include New York Times reporter Judith Miller and Ahmed Chalabi, the head of the Pentagon-funded Iraqi National Congress, and its intelligence unit, the Information Collection Program (ICP).

In addition, Congressional investigations have established that the intelligence community withheld from Congress—and possibly from Powell—crucial information that debunked allegations that Iraq was aiding and training al-Qaeda.

Finally, a Dec. 20, 2005 report of House Judiciary Committee Minority Staff, issued by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the ranking member on that committee, indicates that Powell doctored transcripts of alleged wiretapped conversations between Iraqi officials, in his UN testimony, to enhance his allegation that Iraqi officials were hiding evidence from UN inspectors.

There are already enough statements by Powell and his longtime assistant, Colonel Wilkerson, for the Senate Intelligence Committee to call Libby, and every single person involved in creating and delivering that UN speech, for a full investigation. For example:

In the Los Angeles Times, Nov. 20, 2005, on the source "Curveball," who provided faked information on "mobile bio-weapons labs," that Powell played up, Powell says: "I was not pleased. What really made me not pleased was they [the CIA and DIA] had put out a burn notice on this guy, and people who were even present at my briefings knew it."

In a 2005 interview with ABC-News interviewer Barbara Walters, Powell said the speech was a "blot" on his record, and "I'm the one who presented it to the world, and [it] will always be part of my record. It was painful. It is painful now."
Two Levels of Hoax

The final version of Powell's speech contained fake statements so numerous, that one can only imagine what he had to discard from drafts that were shoved on him by Libby and Dick Cheney's office.

Why this elaborate hoax? Simply put, the Administration's case for war was going down the tubes in January 2003, because of the ongoing and successful inspections by the UNMOVIC, the UN team on bio-chemical weapons, headed by Dr. Hans Blix and by the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Dr. Mohammed ElBaradei. The UN inspectors had made repeated visits to every supposed "WMD site" that U.S. and British intelligence had identified, and every one was a dry hole.

As the investigation will show, the Iraqi defectors' network of Chalabi had been scrambling to come up with new "intelligence." The scramble dates to at least February 2002, when Amb. Joseph Wilson, sent on a CIA mission to Niger, had determined that the allegations that Iraq had purchased uranium yellowcake from Niger, were groundless. But the new "intelligence," compiled through the Iraqi National Congress's ICP, where information from Chalabi controlled Iraqi defectors became "intelligence," was so hasty and sloppy that the hoaxes can now be documented.

Powell on the Iraqi nuclear sites: Much of the information Powell presented came from an Iraqi National Congress-promoted defector, Saeed al-Haideri, who claimed to have worked at dozens of secret WMD sites in Iraq. A CIA polygraph exam exposed him as a liar. Yet, within weeks of the CIA assessment, Judy Miller, then with the New York Times, was given access to al-Haideri for interviews which were featured prominently in the newspaper. Cheney gave a series of speeches based on the Miller article, and al-Haideri was praised by name in White House statements.

Powell on "aluminum tubes": Powell not only asserted that the "aluminum tubes" seized from a ship bound for Iraq in 2000, were for centrifuges for the nuclear program, but he ranted, foolishly, that critics inside the intelligence community who had pointed out that it was impossible for those tubes to be used for the centrifuges, were dead wrong. The aluminum tubes story was again, a "Cheney special," which again had originated in a New York Times story by Judith Miller, on Sept. 8, 2002.

Do these two cases of Miller's articles spreading what turned out to be false intelligence on Iraqi WMD suggest that she had a role as a White House channels for disinformation? Miller later surfaced as having a special relationship with Scooter Libby, and was one of the earliest recipients of the classified information from him about the identity of CIA covert agent Valerie Plame, the wife of Ambassador Wilson, who had debunked the Niger yellowcake story.

Powell on the "mobile trailer bio-weapons labs": He said that biological weapons production facilities existed on trucks, and on train cars, even illustrating the point with a slide show. The whole story was a "Curveball" concoction. In November 2005, five members of the German intelligence agency, BND, were allowed to divulge to the Los Angeles Times, how many times, and how intensely they had warned the United States intelligence services that Curveball was a fabricator, who also turned out to be an Iraqi National Congress stringer—related to one of Chalabi's bodyguards.

Powell on the al-Qaeda/Saddam Hussein conspiracy: Powell went on for pages, about the "decades-long experience" of the ties between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. But the U.S. Senate learned—long after Cheney's pre-emptive war against Iraq—that the White House, CIA, and DIA, had withheld crucial evidence that the information about the al-Qaeda/Iraq links was faulty.

On Nov. 23, 2005, National Journal reporter Murray Waas wrote that the Senate Intelligence Committee was involved in a pitched battle with the White House to get them to turn over to the committee a copy of the Sept. 21, 2001 "Presidential Daily Briefing" which was prepared for George W. Bush, and informed him that there was no evidence whatsoever linking Iraq to al-Qaeda, or the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11. The White House had never revealed this to the Intelligence Committee until August 2004—after the committee had completed its pre-election report on the intelligence failures! The briefing has still not been turned over to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

Then, on Nov. 29, 2005, Colonel Wilkerson told BBC in an interview that the administration had misused intelligence from captured al-Qaeda member al-Shaykh al-Libi, who claims that he has been the victim of torture. Wilkerson said he is beginning to have "concerns" that the White House was not "simply fooled," but had lied.

"One is the questioning of Shaykh al-Libi, where his confessions were obtained through interrogation techniques other than those authorized by Geneva. It led Colin Powell to say at the UN ... that there were some pretty substantive contacts between al-Qaeda and Baghdad. And we now know that al-Libi's forced confession has been recanted and we know—we're pretty sure that it was invalid.

"But more important than that, we know that there was a Defense Intelligence Agency dissent on that testimony even before Colin Powell made his presentation. We never heard about that."

Wilkerson is referring to a DIA memo from February 2002, which was declassified on Oct. 26, 2005, at the request of Senators Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Carl Levin (D-Mich.), both members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Wilkerson also says that the al-Libi disinformation was withheld from Powell.

The DIA's disowning of al-Libi's statements had also been withheld from the U.S. Senate, says Senator Levin, who is also on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That DIA finding "is stunningly different from repeated Administration claims of a close relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda," said Levin in a Nov. 6, 2005 statement. "Just imagine the impact if that DIA conclusion had been disclosed at that time. It surely could have made a difference in the congressional vote authorizing the war."

The DIA memo comments on al-Libi's claims that al-Qaeda forces went to Iraq:

    "This is the first report from Ibn al-Shaykh in which he claims Iraq assisted al-Qaida's CBRN [Chemical, Biological, Radiological or Nuclear] efforts. However, he lacks specific details on the Iraqis involved, the CBRN materials associated with the assistance, and the location where training occurred. It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers [emphasis added by Levin]. Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest." The DIA memo also said, "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control."

Levin also stated that a CIA report on al-Shaykh al-Libi from the same time period said that he was not in a position to know anything about such training. There are also reports that al-Libi recanted his statements.

Levin and Rockefeller are now asking that four other DIA documents about Iraq be declassified.
Chalabi Gloats

In February 2004, when it had come out that David Kay, head of the U.S. occupation inspection teams, had concluded that there are no Iraqi WMD, Ahmed Chalabi gloated to the London Telegraph, "We [the Iraqi National Congress] are heroes in error. As far as we are concerned, we have been entirely successful, our objective has been achieved. That tyrant, Saddam, is gone, and the Americans are in Baghdad. What was said before is not important." But Chalabi's, and Cheney's, coverup is breaking apart.

Mark Bender, George R. Canning, Carl Osgood, Jeffrey Steinberg, and Scott Thompson also contributed to this article.

http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2006/3 ... peech.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Spertzel was on her team...

------

The Andean condor among the hawks
By Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON - 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.

Part of their success, of course, is attributable to their own close ties to the administration. Some, such as former Central Intelligence Agency chief James Woolsey, and American Enterprise Institute (AEI) fellow Richard Perle, for example, used their access as members of the Defense Policy Board (DPB) to enhance their credibility as players with inside information.

And many of the same group could credit their polish and polemical skills with dominating the talk shows on television and radio and the opinion pages in the nation's major newspapers.

It also no doubt helped that most of the group had known each other for many years, often worked with the same organizations and think tanks, and subscribed to the same basic ideology that had a clear and consistent story line: Saddam Hussein is evil and dangerous; the US is good and benign; and if we don't get him first, he will try to kill us.

The simplicity and consistency of that message - however questionable the evidence to support it may turn out to be - were appealing in themselves, particularly to television, on which about 80 percent of the public relies for their international news.

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.

Also found among her client list are other major war-boosters, including former New York Times executive editor and now New York Daily News columnist, A M Rosenthal; Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer; the Council on Foreign Relations' resident imperialist, Max Boot; and Victor Davis Hanson, a blood-and-guts classicist and one of Vice President Dick Cheney's favorite dinner guests.

Aside from her success in getting her clients distributed all over the television dial at critical moments in the march to war, what is particularly remarkable about Benador is the speed with which she has built what is obviously a thriving business, based on 17 to 18-hour work days, the personal attention she gives to both her clients and her media contacts, and her conviction that what her clients say is true and right.

"In general, I do agree with their views," Benador told Inter Press Service during an interview this week in the plush lobby of what is Washington's only grand hotel in the European style, the Willard. "So when I represent them, I can really convince another person."

New York-based Benador Associates is less than two years old, but has a star-studded client roster of 38 people, most of them Middle East specialists. Benador estimates that she arranges for her clients each week between 15 and 30 interviews on US and foreign television. In the same period, she places an average of about five op-eds by them in the most influential newspapers, such as the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. And none of that includes what she considers her main responsibility - to get her clients influential and, if possible, lucrative speaking engagements.

She downplays her achievements and importance, noting that media demand for prominent neo-conservatives was spurred "not because of Eleana Benador, but because of the long overdue need to address the threat of terrorism".

Benador was born in Lima, where she was crippled by polio while very young. At the age of seven she moved with her family to Paris, where she remained when they returned to Peru when she was 16. She attended the Sorbonne in Paris and the Catholic University in Lille and later studied and worked in Vienna and Geneva, where she met her husband, a Swiss art dealer. After nine years of raising their now 14-year-old son, Benador returned to work, dividing her time between "anti-terrorism" and art history.

She then joined the Middle East Forum (MEF), a Philadelphia-based think tank headed by neo-con Daniel Pipes, whose recent nomination by President George W Bush to the board of the US Institute for Peace has stalled as a result of strong criticism from Arab-American, Muslim and civil-rights groups, who accuse him of inciting hatred against Muslims.

Benador left the MEF in October 2001 to create Benador Associates, and credits Woolsey and Rosenthal, in particular, with helping her get started. "Woolsey really opened his doors for his other friends," she said. Woolsey has long been close to Perle, who has his own network of neo-cons based at AEI, including Ledeen, Hillel Fradkin, Michael Rubin, Meyrav Wurmser and Laurie Mylroie, all of whom have been outspoken and influential hawks on Iraq. And all are Benador clients.

Her client list also includes a number of Muslims, such as Amir Taheri, Ismail Cem, Fereydoun Hoveyda, Tashbih Sayyed and Mansoor Ijaz, all of whom supported the war and have called for Bush to extend the "war on terrorism" to other Middle Eastern countries. Another prominent Muslim represented by Benador, Shaykh Kabbani, created an uproar in the Muslim community in 1999 by charging that most US mosques were preaching extremist views.

Benador also represents two controversial Iraqis - Kanan Makiya and Khidhir Hamza - associated with the Iraqi National Congress led by Ahmad Chalabi, who has been strongly supported by neo-conservatives in the administration and the DPB. Hamza, a former nuclear scientist, has been especially controversial due to his repeated warnings in the media about Iraq's alleged reconstitution of a nuclear-weapons program. Hamza and Makiya, says Benador, are "really my most powerful voices right now".

The publicist says that she sees her work as "more of a mission than a business", a mission in which her Muslim clients play a key role. "I'm totally convinced that in our world to get peace we need to make peace with moderate Muslims," according to Benador. "If they are not our allies, we will never have peace. They are the ones who can defeat their own extremists, and they are the first victims of Muslim extremists. This is something I'm very firmly fighting for."

Nor are all her clients dyed-in-the-wool neo-cons. She also represents columnist Arnaud de Borchgrave, a right-winger who has opposed the neo-cons' Mideast policy as tilted too far toward Israeli interests.

Benador says that she is now trying to work more with companies that are investing in the Middle East and need up-to-date analysis of the situation there from her clients. She has also launched an effort to present programs on "anti-Americanism" on US university campuses using her clients as featured speakers.

(Inter Press Service)
 

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EH15Aa01.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Doctors Seek to Reopen Inquest in to Death of U.K. Weapons Expert
By Chris Dade.
Subscribe to author
Dec 5, 2009 by ■ Chris Dade


Six doctors, convinced that the man said to have revealed how the government of Tony Blair exaggerated the threat posed by Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction did not commit suicide, are pressing for a new inquiry in to the man's death.
In July 2003, 59-year-old Dr. David Kelly, the head of microbiology at the Porton Down biowarfare research laboratories near Salisbury, Wiltshire in the Southwest of England, was found dead in woods near his home in the neighboring county of Oxfordshire.
Dr. Kelly had cuts to his left wrist and three packets of a painkiller known as co-proxamol, there was only one tablet remaining out of the 30 that would have been contained in three packets, were found on or near to his body.
As the London Times reports the discovery of Dr. Kelly's body came only three days after he had appeared before the U.K. Parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee. His appearance before the committee was linked to accusations, which he denied, that he provided information that was used in the making of a program for BBC Radio 4, broadcast two months earlier.
During the program it was suggested that the U.K. government, then led by Ton Blair, had "sexed up" a dossier which contained information on the weapons of mass destruction in the hands of then leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein. The purpose of the 2002 dossier was to justify the invasion of Iraq that had taken place in March 2003.
An inquiry in to Dr Kelly's death, chaired by Lord Hutton, was subsequently held and in early 2004 the inquiry concluded that the man who, says the Daily Express, had visited Iraq on 37 occasions, with another trip due around the time of his death, to ascertain how many weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein did actually possess, bled to death from the cut on his wrist and also overdosed on co-proxamol.
However the suicide verdict reached by the Hutton inquiry, which Sky News notes was suspended before it had even begun, by Lord Falconer, at the time the Lord Chancellor, has always been disputed by a number of people within the medical profession.
Dr. Michael Powers QC, a former assistant coroner, is adamant that the cut to the ulnar artery in Dr Kelly's left wrist could not have caused death by bleeding. Furthermore toxicology reports allegedly indicated a level of co-proxamol in Dr Kelly's body consistent with him having taken a normal dose of the painkiller and inconsistent with him having taken 29 tablets.
And Dr. Powers, who has confirmed that Dr. Kelly suffered from heart disease that was not severe enough to have killed the weapons expert, and is unhappy that the inquiry, classed by Lord Falconer as "fulfilling the function of an inquest" by invoking the Coroners Act, was conducted by a person who is not a coroner, namely Lord Hutton, is one of six doctors taking legal action in an attempt to have the inquest in to Dr. Kelly's death reopened.
The London Times quotes Dr. Powers - joined in the legal action by trauma surgeon David Halpin, epidemiologist Andrew Rouse, surgeon Martin Birnstingl, radiologist Stephen Frost, and internal general medicine specialist Chris Burns-Cox - as saying of the death of Dr. Kelly, who said in a phone conversation just prior to his death that it would be no surprise if his body "was found in the woods":

    Suicide cannot be presumed it has to be proven. From the evidence that we have as to the circumstances of his death, in particular the aspect of haemorrhage, we do not believe that there was sufficient evidence to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he killed himself.
    There are many times in political life that the country needs to have an answer and the desire to have an answer overwhelms the desire to get the right answer. There is that pressure to find a conclusion.
    I have no doubt that many of us when we read about this thought that he had killed himself. But you cannot be certain.
    Everyone's death is significant. This death had a significance which was greater and I feel that the process of the investigation of death ought to have been a thorough one. That was not provided for him

The aim of the legal action is to force the matter before the High Court and Attorney General Baroness Scotland will being contacted with a view to achieving that aim.
There are those who believe that Dr. Kelly was murdered.
 :x

Richard Spertzel, responsible for the 1994-1999 search for any biological weapons held by Iraq and the head of a UN inspection team that cooperated with Dr. Kelly, is one individual who believes that his erstwhile colleague was indeed murdered. According to a report in the Daily Express in July Mr Spertzel has asserted that he and Dr. Kelly were both on an assassination list compiled by the regime of Saddam Hussein and that it was Iraqi agents operating in the U.K. who killed the British weapons expert.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/283276

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Old news from the EIR's Steinberg but worth a look over:

Powell-Blair Iraq Dossier Was Cooked In Israel
By Jeffrey Steinberg
Executive Intelligence Review
http://www.LaRouchePub.com/eiw
2-18-3

According to media accounts, the 10 Downing Street "dossier," cited favorably by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell in his disastrous Feb. 5 report to the United Nations Security Council, was plagiarized from an American graduate school paper, based on information more than a decade old. The scandal that erupted when the Blair dossier hoax hit the press, seriously undermined the credibility of those war party advocates of an immediate Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. As Lyndon LaRouche wrote, Powell was set up by a gang of public relations flacks who can't think straight.
 
So far, so good. But a deeper probe into the scandal reveals that there was good reason that the spin-meisters at the Coalition Information Center--the Washington-London civilian government propaganda unit that crafted both the Blair dossier and major portions of Secretary Powell's own lighter-than-air book of evidence--did not reveal the sources of their information. The entire cooked intelligence picture was "Made in Israel." It was cooked up at a right-wing think-tank complex notorious as a hotbed of radical Likudnik propaganda, and with links to the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney, via his Chief of Staff Lewis Libby and his former client, Marc Rich.
 
The essential facts are as follows: Two days before Powell's UN appearance, 10 Downing Street issued a 16-page paper, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation," purportedly based on high-level British intelligence data. In fact, at least 11 of the 16 pages were lifted, verbatim, from an Israeli journal, {Middle East Review of International Affairs}, whose sole proprieter is Dr. Barry Rubin, an American-born Israeli citizen. The 11 pages were drawn from two articles, by Ibrahim al-Marashi and Robert Rabil, that appeared in the September 2002 edition of that journal.
 
Al-Marashi's article, a profile of Iraqi intelligence, was drawn, largely, from Iraqi government documents confiscated during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Al-Marashi, in turn, heavily footnoted his article to other, earlier stories published in Rubin's obscure online journal, by Amazia Baram, the journal's deputy editor.
 
This was no bit of grammar school plagiarism. The public relations team that put together the Blair and Powell propaganda drivel were themselves linked to Rubin and his fellow Israeli pranksters, through Ahmed Chalabi's discredited and corrupt Iraqi National Congress (INC).
 
Chalabi, University of Chicago protege of the late utopian Albert Wohlstetter, then fugitive swindler, was adopted as the Iraqi oppositionist-of-choice by Israeli "X Committee" agent and chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle and his British Arab Bureau handler, Dr. Bernard Lewis, in the 1980s.
 
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.
 
THE COALITION INFORMATION CENTER
 
It takes two to tango. The Blair dossier--based on the cooked-in-Israel propaganda of Rubin--and the Powell UN speech, were both largely the work of the Coalition Information Center (CIC), an Anglo-American government propaganda unit set up to counter opposition to the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, and later transformed into a permanent shared venture of the White House and 10 Downing Street.
 
According to recent news accounts in {New Yorker} magazine and the {New Republic}, the CIC was the brainchild of Gen. Wayne Downing (USA-ret.)--who was chief of counter-terrorism at the National Security Council until last June--and his deputy, former CIA officer Linda Flohr. The two hired a discredited public relations firm, the Rendon Group, which had a reputation for burning through government cash, but which had been instrumental in the launching of Chalabi's INC. Downing, before joining the White House team, was the "military advisor" to the INC. In mid-February, Downing was in India, as part of a delegation from the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), another thinly-disguised Israeli espionage and recruiting front which targets retired American military and intelligence officers.
 
John Rendon, a Jimmy Carter-era Democratic National Committee executive director, made his connections to Team Bush in 1989, when he handled the propaganda for the overthrow of Gen. Manuel Noriega. In Panama, Rendon hooked up with CIA Iran-Contra operative Flohr, who got Rendon the propaganda contract for Operation Desert Storm. In 1991, President Bush signed a Presidential Finding, authorizing a covert campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein, and Rendon got an estimated $150 million in CIA cash to manufacture a Potemkin Village opposition to the Baghdad regime, built around Chalabi. According to investigative reporters Seymour Hersh and Jeff Stein, most of the CIA money went to overpaid public relations consultants, posh London flats, flights on the Concorde, and even more suspect cash diversions. Ultimately, the CIA Inspector General got into the act, and Rendon was dumped by the Agency.
 
Things improved for this crowd, once again, when "Bush 43" came to town. Flohr, who had gone to work for the Rendon Group after retiring from the CIA in 1994--and working for Oliver North's bullet-proof vest company--was tapped by Downing to join him at the National Security Council (she is now officially listed as the director of counter-terrorism for the NSC and director of security for the Office of Homeland Security). Not only did Rendon put together the CIC, but, following Sept. 11, 2001, he won a $100,000 per month Pentagon contract to work for the short-lived Office of Strategic Influence. This was a black-propaganda unit inside the Feith's "chicken-hawk intelligence agency" led by William Luti, a retired Navy captain who was seconded to the Pentagon from the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney. When the {New York Times} exposed the planned OSI agitprop unit, the plans were scrapped, but Rendon retained the Pentagon cash-flow.
 
_____
 
For a personal update, call EIR, toll-free, at 1-888-347-3258. Say you "saw it on Rense.com."
http://www.rense.com/general34/COOKED.HTM

Probably not to the depth where the necessary arrests would have to be made

A couple of essential facts worth consideration: Two days before Powell's infamous UN appearance, 10 Downing Street issued a 16-page paper, "Iraq: Its Infrastructure of Concealment, Deception, and Intimidation," purportedly based on high-level British intelligence data. In fact, at least 11 of the 16 pages were lifted, verbatim, from an Israeli journal, Middle East Review of International Affairs, whose sole proprieter was Dr. Barry Rubin, an American-born Israeli citizen. The 11 pages were drawn from two articles, by Ibrahim al-Marashi and Robert Rabil, that appeared in the September 2002 edition of that journal. This garbage was then passed off as having been verified by UK intelligence services by the cabal of traitors nested in Downing St.

According to three current biographies, Prof. Barry Rubin was 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.

Rubin, a transplanted Israeli citizen, still spends a good deal of time in the United States. On Feb. 4 2003, 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 counted among its clients the entire neocon chicken-hawk apparatus. Among the other speakers with Rubin were Benador clients Richard Perle (an Israeli agent), Michael Ledeen (an Israeli agent), Frank Gaffney (an Israeli agent), Laurie Mylroie (a fucking idiot)  

Taken in conjunction with the tool specifically set up to disseminate the black propaganda, the Office Of Special Plans set up by Dumsfeld and headed by Douglas Feith (an Israeli agent), into willing governmental apparatus hell bent on mass murder - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jul/17/iraq.usa

"In the days after September 11, Mr Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, mounted an attempt to include Iraq in the war against terror. When the established agencies came up with nothing concrete to link Iraq and al-Qaida, the OSP was given the task of looking more carefully....William Luti, a former navy officer and ex-aide to Mr Cheney, runs the day-to-day operations, answering to Douglas Feith, a defence undersecretary and a former Reagan official. The OSP was an open and largely unfiltered conduit to the White House not only for the Iraqi opposition. It also forged close ties to a parallel, ad hoc intelligence operation inside Ariel Sharon's office in Israel specifically to bypass Mossad and provide the Bush administration with more alarmist reports on Saddam's Iraq than Mossad was prepared to authorise. "None of the Israelis who came were cleared into the Pentagon through normal channels," said one source familiar with the visits. Instead, they were waved in on Mr Feith's authority without having to fill in the usual forms."

Here's an excellent documentary on the subject in the US:

http://video.google.co.uk/videoplay?doc ... 0057137878   


- an episode of the Dutch documentary program "Tegenlicht" about the Israel lobby in the USA. This documentary (April 2007) was created as a result of the controversy created by Mearsheimer and Walt's "The Israel Lobby" article. Featuring interviews with Mearsheimer, geostrategist Lawrence Wikerson, Richard Perle, historian and critic Tony Judt, John Hagee, former Congressman Earl Hilliard, Kenneth Roth of Human Rights Watch, Michael Massing and Daniel Levy.

http://randombanter.net/index.php?topic=8540.0

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Assessment of the DoD Embedded Media Program

http://www.militaryreporters.org/pdfs/embed%20study.pdf  (page 85)

On 12 February 2003, OASD(PA) began sending e-mails to bureau chiefs/NMRs
to provide them with their organizations' embed opportunities. The e-mails provided the
number of embeds by type (ground, maritime, air), the number of embeds by specific
major ground units, and the number of embeds by air bases. They did not include the
ultimate assignment for each embed. During the Bureau Chiefs' meeting on 27 February,
the DASD(PA) stated, "When we made the decision to centralize this process, we made
that decision because we wanted to make sure that the right news organization across the
spectrum of international, domestic and all forms of medium got properly represented on
the battlefield. But we made a conscious decision to do that down to the division level
where there is a PAO and a division commander, where the embed can discuss the type
of coverage he/she wants to do." To support the local and regional medias' needs for
their readers and viewers, the OASD(PA) POC tried to match their embed allocations
with military units in that region. E-mails were sent to 212 media organizations, with
allocations to fill 731 of the 775 embed allocations in Table V-1. It did not include
44 allocations for the 82ABN, 173ABN, or 3ACR. A caveat stated that not every country
hosting U.S. forces had agreed to accept journalists, so some embed opportunities might
require additional time for approval and some may not be executed at all.
.......

Attendees at the media training courses were told that their costs would not
exceed $300, but no data are available on the actual costs charged to the attendees at each
course. Based on the $300 amount, the media organizations that sent the most individuals
(15) paid $4,500, and the total cost to the media for 232 students did not exceed $69,600.
Media organizations that sent embeds to a hostile-environment training courses paid
approximately $3,000 per individual. Centurion Risk Assessment Services charges
$2,500 per person for their 5-day course, and the Pilgrims Group charges $3,200 per
person for their 6-day course.92 Another company used by media organizations that
offers similar training is AKE Limited.
The military provided embeds the PPE for chemical and biological protection,
and the media organizations were responsible for providing body armor, helmets, and any
other protective equipment desired. During the ASD(PA) Bureau Chiefs' meeting on
14 January 2003, the DASD(PA), in response to a question about why DoD would not
furnish it, stated, "We have had discussions with many of you in this room about that. To
be quite honest with you, there's a fair amount of concern that if we put our military flack
vests on you, if we put our military helmets on you, if we provide protective clothing for
you beyond the NBC suits, you begin to look very much like a soldier, a sailor, or a
marine that's out there, and so we've gotten a fair amount of push-back from that." Estimates
of expenditure per individual for body armor and helmet ranged from $1,000 to
$1,500. Embeds attached to ground units also needed to purchase additional personal
equipment if they did not already have it (e.g., a tent, a sleeping bag, a ground pad, canteens,
and so forth). For additional protection, OASD(PA) made smallpox vaccine and
anthrax vaccine available to embeds. It was voluntary and not a perquisite for
embedding. The vaccine cost per dose was $5.80 for smallpox and $94.96 for anthrax.93
The smallpox vaccine required 1 dose and the anthrax vaccine required 6 doses,
administered over 18 months. Thus, the total cost for all 7 shots was $575.56. No data
were available to indicate how many embeds received the shots.
92

[Jenny Lake]

Great job in the thread, CSR, showing the value of the anthrax attacks in pressuring for war. It leaves no room for doubt about the centrality of the event to 9-11.

But there is still an Official Story about anthrax that doesn't fit. I cobbled together a timeline from the news with a few 'angles' added to bring up some new questions and look at the roles of involvement -- if you guys will bear with me. I don't want to belabor this thread so I made this as a way of cutting-to-the-chase.

Questions:

Could it be that First Victim, Bob Stevens of American Media Inc., was a carefully orchestrated murder? Gaps and inconsistencies in the news stories of Bob's death suggest room for this as likely. NO contamination was found in his home, not one spore to report. Credible testimony said Bob had symptoms on Wed. Sept. 26.That night he stayed late at his AMI office and should be "on camera" entering, moving, and exiting the building (refer to Ed Lake's thesis which doesn't mention that). Somebody knows exactly what Bob did at work on the night before he was leaving for North Carolina at 7am on the 27th.

Who were the owners and what were the business interests of American Media Inc.?  

Two accounts of Bob checking in at JFK Medical Center exist (next to Lantana Airport where they don't allow jets). He either walked in semi-incoherent or was comatose. Spinal fluid was flown by corporate jet to Arizona for hasty confirmation of anthrax by a Los Alamos specialist, Paul Keim, who made an effort to determine the strain. This was the beginning of a three-ring circus about a weaponized strain. The practice of fractional jet-ownership means that companies no longer have a proprietary interest in their 'rides'.  Private jets come equipped with pilots and crew. Is it probable that Bob was contaminated elsewhere (North Carolina, perhaps) and his office was planted with anthrax spores after the AMI employees were barred from re-entry? This event is key. The "anthrax strain evidence" has been discredited.

*

The next two victims were Postal workers. Shortly after their deaths, a Postal Service forensics specialist, Roy W. Geffen, announced that they believed only three anthrax letters were circulated in the mail, opposing the publicized theory that seven letters had been sent. The USPS had the power to launch its own investigations into 'mail (and wire)  fraud' which often led to indictments in phoney securities and assisted in drug smuggling cases. This makes a wide motive against the Post Office. USPS workers also maintain a public service 'exposure' website called Judicial Watch. It's been suggested that the anthrax contamination cost "billions" to the USPS and there are additional deaths and illness that officials omit. On the subject of the six contaminated post offices in South Florida, the media goes silent; no names, no illness, no deaths. In the apparent route of postal processing, the closer to end-point delivery, the more lethal the 'letters' became. Bob's workplace, AMI, was reputedly swarming with spores. Why wasn't one South Florida case of anthrax reported among the postal workers there?

*

The last two victims were a 'hospital supply room' worker in Manhattan who lived alone and rode the subway to and from the Bronx every day, and a random-seeming 'little old lady' in Connecticut. A theory of cross-contaminated mail is supposed in the deaths of these two women but officials found NOTHING except for a slightly 'positive' envelope in another town almost two miles away from the Ct. woman.

*

The Washington D.C. anthrax trail is unexplainable by means of cross-contaminated letters. Other anthrax-tainted mail was recorded elsewhere (like Kansas City, Mo. and Indianapolis) and outside the country. This "trail" must be telling a story. To complicate matters, President Bush asked the children of America to send letters to the White House for the children of Afghanistan --the same day the 'Daschle Letter' was opened in the Hart Building, Ari Fleischer told the press, more than 10,000 letters flooded the mailrooms in a 12-hour period.

 

TIMELINE

 
2001
–"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." http://www.anthraxattacks.net/2009/07/t ... ry-solved/
–In April [2001].., Gulfstream Aerospace parent company General Dynamics announced it would purchase Galaxy Aerospace for $330 million cash"...Galaxy is headquartered at Ross Perot's Alliance Airport outside Fort Worth
–"In the spring and summer of 2001, eight additional hijackers arrived in the United States and settled in Florida. Nine opened SunTrust bank accounts. Three others arrived in San Diego, rounding out the five-man team based in California. http://www.sptimes.com/2002/09/01/911/F ... _lau.shtml
*
–July 10 — "Gloria [Irish] first met one of the terrorists when he walked into the office of her company, Pelican Realty, around July 10."
http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/misc2.html#ne011031
*
– "In August 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld resumed the [BioPort anthrax] vaccine program, but only on a limited basis"..http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/fbirushjudgement.html
*
Sep 1 — "a Canadian study published on Sept.1, 2001...indicated that anthrax particles might be small enough to seep out of microscopic pores in envelopes" [see footnote] http://www.ndu.edu/ANTHRAX%20CHRONOLOGY.pdf  
–[snip] Early September 2001: NY Times Investigation reveals Battelle to make genetically altered anthrax. In the first few days of September 2001 – immediately prior to the attacks of the 11th, the New York Times carried a major investigation which at any other time would have been a story of huge significance...It revealed three secret bio-defence projects at a time when the American people believed none was taking place. One – run by a contractor – Battelle – was to create genetically altered anthrax...
–[snip] September 4. 2001: Details have emerged regarding a number of biological weapons research programs initiated by the United States. Under "Project Bachus," Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) officials constructed a BW production facility using only materials readily available on the commercial market and produced "simulated" BW agents in 1999 and 2000...[The New York Times, September 4 and 5, 2001..]
*
The [snip]s are from the 'heartson' timeline.  http://www.heartson.com/Politics/anthra ... eline.html
*
BEFORE September 11 — Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly will later say (see Nov.1) that they received several anthrax threat letters before 9-11; Hannity will declare his matched the anthrax-containing, block-lettered envelopes.
*
September 11
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ap ... 58_000.htm  .."On the night of the Sept. 11 attacks, the White House Medical Office dispensed Cipro to staff accompanying Vice President Dick Cheney as he was secreted off to the safety of Camp David, and told them it was "a precaution," according to one person directly involved..."
*
Sep 18 –"Investigators believe seven letters containing anthrax spores were mailed....Two recovered letters did not have a return address but were postmarked 2001-09-18 in Trenton, New Jersey"..  http://mindprod.com/politics/anthrax.html
These two letters were sent to NBC News and the New York Post
*
Day-by-day Anthrax Attack from Sep 18 to Dec 8
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/Bioter/chron ... vents.html
*
Sep 19 –this is the recalled day that AMI editor Bob Stevens and others opened the "Jennifer Lopez" love letter [not anthrax]
*
Sep 20
–NBC  letter, addressed to Tom Brokaw, is postmarked Sept.20 from St. Petersburg, Fla..."The Brokaw letter matched two other biothreat letters....One was sent to Judith Miller [opened Oct.12]...and the other to Howard Troxler, a columnist for the St. Petersburg Times." http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/Bioter/messageanthrax.html
*
 http://www.anthraxattacks.net/2009/07/t ... ry-solved/ ..."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...."
*
Sep 21 –The NY Post, Johanna Huden, "determined to be the first victim", notices a blister on her finger which bursts the next day...She goes to a doctor on Sept. 29 but is "not properly diagnosed for weeks". The Post letter was never opened.
*
Sep 22 –Hamilton postal center; Richard Morgano "has two mosquito-bite-sized spots on his arm"
*
Sep 24 –Boca Raton, AMI; Ernesto Blanco "has onset fatigue which turns to fever, cough on Sept.28″
*
Sep 25 –Phillip Zack sent a letter to the FBI implicating Dr. Assaad
          –Stephanie Dailey, in the American Media Inc. mailroom, opens a second letter, believed to contain the anthrax that contaminated the Boca Raton building. (refer to Ed Lake)
*
Sep 26 –Bob Stevens first showed symptoms of sickness, according to his wife Maureen and their doctor Larry Bush, and yet he left for a 5-day driving trip to his daughter's home in North Carolina(?)..."Mr. Stevens had traveled with his wife to visit a daughter and go hiking in North Carolina, but became ill on the drive back to Florida." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/16/science/the-doctor- s-world-cdc-team-tackles-anthrax.html?pagewanted=2  
 
Sep 28 -- child of ABC News employee is exposed and develops cutaneous anthrax..."when Dr. Borkowsky first examined the infant's skin lesion on Oct. 2, tests showed no evidence of anthrax. The infant also suffered kidney damage, bleeding and a type of anemia that rapidly destroyed red blood cells and required four blood transfusions. "The syndrome this child had had never been described in anthrax" but had been linked to spider bites, Dr. Borkowsky said...[on Oct.12] Dr. Mostashari said the infant's lesion looked exactly like the one that he had seen four hours earlier in Erin O'Connor, 38, the first recognized anthrax victim in New York City.  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/scien ... ng-it.html
*
Oct 1 –AMI coworker Ernesto Blanco is hospitalized at Cedar Medical Center in Miami for pneumonia; Blanco has chronic respiratory disease. Overnight, at 2am on the 2cd, Bob Stevens checked into JFK Medical, adjacent to the Lantana Airport which has a ban on jet traffic –Stevens' spinal fluid was flown by jet to Arizona on the 3rd.
     — http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/19/us/na ... -case.html  "The woman at CBS developed cutaneous anthrax, the most treatable form of the disease, on her cheek on Oct. 1."...."Dr. Richard P. Fried told the city health department on Oct. 1 that a patient might have anthrax." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/nyreg ... orida.html
*
Oct 2 —[overnight] at 2am, Maureen Stevens drove her husband to the hospital.  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/16/scien ... gewanted=2 ..."the patient himself was unable to communicate — he was in a coma when he arrived at the hospital in Atlantis, Fla., and died without regaining consciousness. So health workers had to interview his wife and family to reconstruct what he did during the preceding two weeks. ...In all their work, the epidemiologists "found nothing that was suspicious," said Dr. James M. Hughes, a top C.D.C. expert who oversaw the investigation from Atlanta....Meanwhile, C.D.C. workers sought advice from Dr. Philip S. Brachman, an expert in anthrax epidemiology and a former director of the Epidemic Intelligence Service...Dr. Brachman said he reviewed his records from his days as an officer with the epidemic service in the late 1950's and early 1960's, when he investigated anthrax cases that developed among workers exposed to contaminated goat hair and wool at three mills in North Carolina and one in South Carolina. The mills are now closed, but given how long anthrax spores can live in the environment, Dr. Brachman wondered if Mr. Stevens could have contracted the disease in one of the cities where the mills had been."
*
http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/Hatfill,Stephen.shtml "Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen reports that on October 2, 2001 – just two days before the first anthrax case was reported in Boca Raton, Florida and a week and a half before the first anthrax was sent through the mail to NBC News in New York – Advanced Biosystems received an $800,000 grant from NIH to focus on very specific defenses against anthrax: http://www.counterpunch.org/madsenanthrax.html "
*
Oct 3 –" 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. (Flam 9/1/2008) The media will first report that the anthrax was the Ames strain on October 10. (Breed 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)." http://www.historycommons.org/entity.js ... endly=true
 
     —..."the Florida Department of Health laboratory was able to provide a rapid diagnosis of anthrax, thanks to the efforts of technicians who had recently completed a training course as part of the Laboratory Response Network funded with bioterrorism response money." http://www.ndu.edu/centercounter/ANTHRA ... NOLOGY.pdf
*
Oct 4 –An "unusual" large team of 15 epidemiologists from the CDC are dispatched (13 by private jet) to South Florida
        — news media and  AMI employees are informed of Stevens' condition
Oct 5 –Stevens dies at JFK Medical Center (Lantana). Another worker at AMI, chief librarian Martha Moffet, is 'out' with pneumonia at the time. Investigators go to the Stevens' home, seal it with crime-scene tape, and test for anthrax. They find nothing.
     —St. Petersburg, hoax letter postmarked this day to Judith Miller (and presumably Howard Troxler)
*
Oct 7 –[Sunday] AMI lawyer and VP Michael Kahane is called at 4 p.m. to evacuate and close the building. Hours of phonecalls ensue to instruct AMI employees to report to the health department in the morning.
*
Oct 8 --500 or more people show up at Palm Beach Health Dept. for swab tests and antibiotics.
*
Oct 9 –two letters to Senators Daschle [opened in the Hart Building office Oct.15] and Leahy [opened by experts Dec.5] are postmarked from Trenton. These bear the return address "Greendale School"
      — Troxler, from the St. Petersburg Times, receives a hoax letter that matches the Brokaw and Judith Miller letters
      –"Ms. O'Connor's case [NBC News] of cutaneous anthrax was diagnosed on Oct. 9, rattling the city and setting off an intense investigation into its source...Dr. Fried said that on Oct. 1, after he first examined Ms. O'Connor, he told her she might have an infected spider bite or Lyme disease, but he did not mention anthrax...he re-examined Ms. O'Connor on Oct. 3 and on Oct. 8, when the lesion had developed into a black crust, which is characteristic of cutaneous anthrax.  But Dr. Fried and the health department were perplexed because anthrax did not grow on the culture taken from the skin lesion."   http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/nyreg ... orida.html
*
Oct 10 –Stephanie Dailey, from AMI's mailroom, is the third employee to test positive for anthrax and the last confirmed case in Florida –all Florida cases (3) are limited to AMI, despite contamination in 6 post offices
*
Oct 12 –Judith Miller opens a hoax letter at her office  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judith_Mil ... rnalist%29   ..."Born in New York City to a Jewish father and an Irish Catholic mother, Judith Miller grew up in Miami and Los Angeles, where she graduated from Hollywood High School....Judith Miller attended Ohio State University...She graduated from Barnard College in 1969 and received a master's degree in public affairs from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. In 1971, while at Princeton, Miller traveled to Jerusalem to research a paper. She became fascinated with the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and spent the rest of the summer traveling for the first time to Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon"...Miller started at the Washington bureau of the New York Times in 1977, part of a new post-Watergate intake. She and her boyfriend Steven Rattner, also a Times reporter, became close friends of Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., the son of the publisher of the Times....For several summers, Miller and Rattner shared a weekend house on the Eastern Shore of Maryland with Sulzberger and his wife Gail. In 1992 Sulzberger became publisher of the Times in his own right."...
*
Oct 15 –Daschle letter is opened  ".. 31 workers on Capitol Hill were exposed to anthrax spores from a contaminated letter sent to the office of Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/19/us/na ... -case.html
*
Oct 16 — White House press briefing, "QUESTION: Ari, can you talk about what the volume of mail response is to the White House, from the president's request that children send in dollars for children in Afghanistan?
QUESTION: And also is there any concern at the White House that the president solicited this mass mailing right before we have all these concerns about what's in the mail?....FLEISCHER:..as of yesterday afternoon the White House had received some 8,000 pieces of correspondence addressed to the children of Afghanistan, and then by 9:15 this morning it had been upped to 18,000. So obviously it's coming in, and the president is very pleased.."    http://edition.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0110/16/se.16.html
*
Oct 17  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/17/us/na ... ictim.html  "Dr. John Agwunobi, the Florida secretary of health, said that health officials had tested 1,100 people, only 3 of whom have tested positive for anthrax exposure....But Dr. Agwunobi made no mention of five additional American Media employees who senior company executives have said tested positive for anthrax antibodies....State health officials also said today that they were testing a summer intern at American Media for exposure to anthrax after he suddenly became ill and was hospitalized on Sunday with flulike symptoms, a high fever and possible pneumonia...."He had a little fever," said Hank Arizmandi, the student's father. ' They thought the low-grade fever might be attributable to recent dental surgery. Jordan had a nasal swab for anthrax that came back negative. At the hospital, he was also given a blood test for anthrax.' "
*
Oct 18  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/18/nyreg ... orida.html  " Three days before anthrax was first detected in Florida, a Manhattan doctor called the New York City Department of Health to report a suspicion: one of his patients might have contracted anthrax."
*
Oct 19  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/19/us/na ... -case.html   The response to the new anthrax case at CBS News was decidedly lower-key....The CBS News building, on West 57th Street in Manhattan, was not evacuated. Workers — including the woman who tested positive for anthrax spores — remained at their jobs. And health officials did not recommend antibiotic treatment for large numbers of workers. All this was in sharp contrast to the response at NBC when a case of cutaneous anthrax was diagnosed in an assistant to Tom Brokaw on Oct. 9, said Dr. Stephen M. Ostroff, an epidemiologist from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention."
*
Oct 21 –Thomas Morris Jr., Brentwood Road (Wash, DC) postal worker, dies
*
Oct 22 –Joseph Curseen Jr., Brentwood postal worker (from Clinton, MD), dies. Mr. Leroy Richmond, who was diagnosed with inhalation anthrax, is expected to recover. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/23/us/a- ... gewanted=1
Leroy Richmond worked at an express mail facility by the Washington-Baltimore International Airport where he sorted out mail headed to Brentwood and then delivered it there.
     –A stamp center in Kansas City, Missouri isolates mail from Brentwood after employees wastebaskets test positive; "On Monday Oct.22, Stone ordered the trays [from Brentwood] set aside and shrink-wrapped. None of the Brentwood mail has tested positive for anthrax...and it was unclear how the  employees trash might have been contaminated...200 workers were advised to take antibiotics as a precaution" http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2001/oct/3 ... _found_at/  
*
Oct 23 http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/23/scien ... rfare.html  "Protection against biological and chemical attack was never very high on lists of national priorities — until the days after Sept. 11, when it collectively occurred to Americans how vulnerable they were." [wrote Lawrence K. Altman MD, of the NYTimes]
*
Oct 24 – http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/24/us/a- ... e-fly.html "We don't have much data on humans," said David R. Franz, former commander of the Army's germ-defense laboratory at Fort Detrick, Md. "Most of what we know is based on 3,000 monkeys.  There is hardly any human data on the effects of inhaled anthrax spores."
 — "The inspector in charge of the U.S. Postal Inspection Service's main forensic laboratory told [AP news]..that investigators were confident there have been only three anthrax-tainted letters sent through the mail...'I still think we're dealing with three letters' said Roy W. Geffen, who runs the lab in suburban Virginia. 'That's the best information we have.' " http://www2.ljworld.com/2001/oct/31/hos ... rker_dies/
*
Oct 25  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/25/us/na ... -told.html .."Dr. Schuchat [CDC] said, "In the Washington, D.C., area, very nonspecific, unimpressive symptoms in a postal worker should be taken extremely seriously." She added that experience so far has shown that a patient whose symptoms "would not cause an excess amount of concern" can quickly become critically ill....Yet the diagnosis can be a major challenge for even the most astute doctors....Centers for Disease Control officials warn that for all their epidemiological value, nasal swabs have little or no value in diagnosing anthrax in patients...Dr. Fleming added that studies in monkeys suggested that anthrax spores disappeared quickly after appearing in the nose."
 
Oct 30 –"Investigators could not find even a single spore of anthrax near Ms. Nguyen's home in the Bronx, or at Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital where she worked" http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/26/us/a- ... gewanted=8
 
Oct 31 –fourth victim, Kathy Nguyen, a worker in the basement supply room at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, dies from inhalation anthrax. Her work area was once the mailroom.
..."the source of Nguyen's infection remains unknown. A co-worker's suspicious lesion has been determined not to be anthrax." ...."it is not known what mail she might have handled at her job at the Manhattan Eye, Ear and Throat Hospital, or at home in the Bronx. So her death appears to broaden the population that must be concerned about vague flulike symptoms."
"Kathey Nguyen..an immigrant from Vietnam who lived alone..and commuted by subway..died at Lenox Hill Hospital....[she] had been too sick to help the..investigators" . http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2001/oct/3 ... rker_dies/  Nguyen's job was distributing supplies around the hospital. White House spokesman, "Ari Fleischer said a coworker of Nguyen has a suspicious lesion...There are no results yet, he said...'Somebody is trying to kill the American people by sending anthrax through the mail' Fleischer said."
*
Nov 1 — "Fox News Channel..Sean Hannnity and Bill O'Reilly were hit by threatening letters similar to those laden with anthrax....The letters arrived before Sept. 11...[and] bore a postmark from Indianapolis, where the Post Office discovered yesterday that some of its equipment is contaminated...Hannity said that he'd begun receiving suspicious mail last winter and again in August.... The 'Hannity & Colmes' co-host revealed that in addition to the letters with an Indianapolis postmark, "one or two were from Trenton (N.J.), "where traces of anthrax have also been reported." Hannity said he hasn't gotten any more..since the Sept. 11 attacks and hasn't been tested for anthrax exposure."  SOURCE: newsmax.com  http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/misc2.html#ne011031
http://archive.newsmax.com/articles/?a=2000/1/29/125952  "Jan. 31, 2000 –WEST PALM BEACH, FLA. — William Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times of London, has joined..NewsMax.com ...NewsMax.com has, in its first 15 months, become the leading news site on the web" [Rees-Mogg, Vice-Chair of the BBC Board of Governors (1981-1986)]..."Prudential Securities stated that NewsMax.com is "one of the web's truly great new sites"..."In November 1999, NewsMax.com expanded into the financial news arena with..MoneyNews.com". Rees-Mogg is the Chairman of Newsmax Media, originally registered by Christopher Ruddy in Nevada on 8-20-1998, filed in Florida, Sept., at 560 Village Blvd, Ste. 120, West Palm Beach 33409
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsmax_Media "Christopher W. Ruddy started Newsmax.com on September 16, 1998, supported by a group of politically conservative investors, including the family of the late Central Intelligence Agency Director William J. Casey. Later, Richard Mellon Scaife, his former employer at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and a supporter of conservative causes, invested in the fledging company.[2] One of the initial board members was author James Dale Davidson who edited a financial newsletter that had shared Ruddy's interest in the alleged suicide of President Bill Clinton's aide, Vincent Foster. Davidson's co-editor, Lord Rees-Mogg, former editor of The Times and Vice Chair of the BBC" —later became chairman of Newsmax Media
http://www.answers.com/topic/christopher-ruddy - Long Island, NY native; alumnus of London School of Economics and Hebrew University, Jerusalem; media fellow of Hoover Institution; former New York Post and and Pittsburgh Tribune-Review contributor.
The Times (London) and The New York Post are owned by Rupert Murdoch  (News Corporation)
*
Nov 4 –WASHINGTON: The anthrax scare spread further as deadly spores were discovered at yet another mail distribution center in New Jersey, while investigators in Washington studied a suspicious letter sent to the US Treasury Department.
The New Jersey Department of Health and Senior Services announced late on Saturday that one of the environmental samples taken by the FBI in the Bellmawr Mail Distribution Center last Wednesday came back positive...Health officials focused their attention on the Bellmawr center after a Delaware resident who works there came down with skin anthrax".. http://www.dawn.com/2001/11/05/int7.htm  ..."CNN reported on its website that the mailroom at a Veteran's Administration Hospital in Washington has tested positive for the presence of the bacteria."
– http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/04/us/na ... ttack.html  "The government has begun taking steps to cope with the possibility of a terrorist attack involving smallpox by training doctors to recognize the disease and by vaccinating small teams of experts...Last week, the disease centers vaccinated about 140 members of epidemiologic teams that can be summoned at a moment's notice"
*
Nov 6 –" Anthrax arrives in Russia in US mailbag
The US consulate in Yekaterinburg, Russia, reports that one of six diplomatic mailbags received from Washington Oct 25 tested positive for anthrax spores. The consulate asked Russian health authorities to test the mail Oct 26 after a State Department mailroom employee in Virginia contracted anthrax. Yekaterinburg, formerly called Sverdlovsk, was the site of an anthrax disaster due to an accidental release in 1979." http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/conten ... h-nov.html
*
Nov 10 –  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/11/us/na ... enate.html "The E.P.A. conducted tests of Mr. Daschle's office on Nov. 10 and on Nov. 15, in part to answer the question of whether the spores would stick to an object or become airborne again. The office, and the entire Hart Senate Office Building, have been closed for decontamination since Oct. 26."
*
Nov 15 –"$3.2 billion Kennedy-Frist bioterrorism bill introduced
Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Bill Frist, R-Tenn., introduce a bill to authorize spending $3.2 billion to combat bioterrorism. The bill would authorize $1.5 billion for state and local preparedness in fiscal 2002, including hospital preparedness, and $400 million to improve oversight of the nation's food supply."...
*
Nov 16 — The Leahy letter is "discovered Nov. 16 in a barrel of unopened congressional mail" where it leaks "like a sieve"
*
Nov 20 – "Anthrax traces in Kennedy and Dodd offices...offices are both in the Russell Senate Office Building."
*
Nov 21 –Ottilie Lundgren, 94, of Oxford Connecticut, dies of inhalation anthrax. Tests in and around her home come back negative, baffling authorities..."Lundgren died at Griffin Hospital in Derby the same day the CDC confirmed that she had inhalation anthrax. CDC spokeswoman Nicole Coffin says testing so far has shown that the strain of anthrax that killed Lundgren was similar to anthrax found in other recent cases."  http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/conten ... h-nov.html
Nov 23 – "Chilean and U.S. officials confirmed the first reported case of a deadly strain of the bacteria in mail outside the United States. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta confirmed on Thursday that a letter sent from [[Zurich]] Switzerland to Chile was tainted with anthrax. The letter had been sent to Dr. Antonio Banfi, a pediatrician at a children's hospital in Santiago."

*
Interestingly, this link provides a description of Israeli art students who were 'caught' and profiled by the DEA  carrying passports issued in Buenos Aires,Argentina and Santiago, Chile  http://www.911-strike.com/dea-il-spy.htm

The Royal Society of Liechtenstein "administrative functions are conducted in Zurich" http://www.seattlepi.com/archives/1987/8701100366.asp ; and they had a Florida address --this is a tie-in to Agora, Inc. of Baltimore which has business enterprises and colleagues all over Palm Beach County/South Florida. The "Royal Society" connection uncovers the 1991-1992 "Goldcor" stock swindle involving Joel S. Nadel, a CIA front for drug-smuggling, Agora-promoted penny stock from Israel, "naked shorting", In-Q-tel, SEC fraud...and on it goes. Joel Nadel hired Ira L. Sorkin (Bernie Madoff's lawyer too)back in 1992 when his partners were caught up in the DEA's WALL STREET cocaine bust. One of Agora's founders, James Dale Davidson, is named above in connection to NewsMax.com.

*

News from http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/conten ... h-nov.html :

Nov 25 – "The Sep 11 events have led to new opportunities to address preparedness and consequence management, says Margaret A. Hamburg, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration who heads the foundation's biological projects."

Nov 27 — "Smallpox virus can be homemade"

Nov 28 — "US to buy 155 million doses of smallpox vaccine
United States health officials agree to buy 155 million doses of a new smallpox vaccine from a partnership between Acambis, a British-based company, and Illinois-based Baxter International.." http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/conten ... h-nov.html

[[Acambis was acquired by Sanofi-Aventis in 2008 http://citizen2009.wordpress.com/sanofi-aventis/]]

Dec 3   http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/03/us/a- ... hreat.html    .."Suddenly, the United States Postal Service was recognized as a spore-spreading system.  In the last three days, even the most enigmatic of the five anthrax deaths — the cases of a Connecticut widow and a New York City hospital worker have been shown to have possible links to the mail. Letters that passed through a Hamilton, N.J., sorting center within seconds of the tainted letters sent to two senators on Oct. 9 had gone to the neighborhoods of these two victims, investigators discovered....Many conundrums posed by the postal assaults will not be resolved quickly, officials said....There is still nothing leading investigators back toward the source of the anthrax, Mr. Mihalko said."

Dec 4, 2001  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/scien ... ng-it.html  .."Until the intentional spread of anthrax in recent months, only 18 cases of inhalation anthrax had been reported since 1950, and 227 of the skin form from 1955 to the beginning of the intentional spread this fall."...

Dec 19 — http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/hcourant.html   The Hartford Courant  ...".Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a microbiologist affiliated with the Federation of American Scientists, earlier this month.. predicted that the perpetrator is an American microbiologist with access to weaponized anthrax, that likely came from a government lab or one contracted by the government."

*

Dec 25 –  http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/25/healt ... nowns.html  "Thousands of postal employees and workers on Capitol Hill who took antibiotics because they were exposed to anthrax two months ago now face a difficult new medical decision: whether to take an anthrax vaccine to forestall the slim and theoretical possibility that they may still develop the disease....health officials last week were forced to do what they rarely do — confess ignorance about the risks of a disease and its treatment options....For example, on Sept. 21, a few days before the first cases in the outbreak of the deliberate spread of anthrax, Tommy G. Thompson, the health and human services secretary, confidently said on CBS's "60 Minutes," 'We're prepared to take care of any contingency, any consequence that develops or any kind of bioterrorism attack.'...Because the vaccine has never been used to prevent anthrax after people have been exposed to spores, its effectiveness in such circumstances is unknown and it is classified as experimental."

*

"According to statistics from the CDC, its laboratories and other members of the agency's Laboratory Response Network tested over 125,000 samples during the period following the first reports of the outbreak. In several cases, some state and local laboratories were so overloaded with testing requests that they contemplated setting up triage procedures to prioritize tests...the reported difficulties in meeting testing demands highlight the need for those laboratories to ensure a surge capability for possible future bioterrorist incidents. Ensuring adequate laboratory capacity was one of the issues raised during a December 2001 meeting convened by the CDC to examine lessons learned from the anthrax response and to chart a research agenda for preparing for future attacks." http://www.ndu.edu/centercounter/ANTHRA ... NOLOGY.pdf

2002

Jan 06, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/06/us/na ... error.html  "While it is too early to glean a set of precise lessons for a future bioterror attack — particularly since no suspect has yet been charged in this one — the officials acknowledge that the handling of the outbreak was marked by a catalog of miscalculations, missteps and misunderstandings about bioterrorism in general and anthrax in particular....In late September [of 2001], Secretary Thompson told television viewers that the government was prepared to deal with any kind of bio terrorism attack."

Jan 20 –the Hartford Courant names Phillip Zack, reporting on his past associations at Fort Detrick and the harassment directed at coworker Dr. Ayaad Assaad. Owner of the Hartford Courant: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tribune_Company  "The Tribune Company is a large, employee-owned,[1] American multimedia corporation based in Chicago, Illinois. It is the nation's second-largest newspaper publisher, with ten daily newspapers and commuter tabloids including Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Hartford Courant, Orlando Sentinel, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, Baltimore Sun and the The Morning Call, among others."

March 26, 2002  http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/26/healt ... tacks.html  Dr. Jeffrey P. Koplan, the departing director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, defended again yesterday his agency's handling of the anthrax attack ..as he announced that he would become vice president for academic health affairs at Emory University...news reports suggested that he was leaving under pressure....In the last three years, C.D.C.'s budget has doubled to $7.7 billion from $2.5 billion in 1998."

May 5, 2002 — " Jerome Hauer became director of the federal Office of Public Health Preparedness (OPHP), succeeding Dr. D. A. Henderson from Johns Hopkins Institute"  http://911review.org/Sept11Wiki/Hauer,Jerome.shtml

Aug 16 — "US Sen. Bill Nelson said today he is drafting legislation to require the federal government's assistance in cleaning up the anthrax-contaminated American Media Inc. building at the Arvida Park of Commerce....Nelson said he is working with Sen Lieberman to find a solution..to create the new homeland security agency"  http://billnelson.senate.gov/news/details.cfm?id=244107

Aug 29 —  http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/30/us/th ... -pill.html  "Most postal, government and news people who were advised to take an antibiotic to prevent inhalation anthrax a year ago failed to complete the full course of therapy, a federal study has found....No cases of anthrax developed, including among those workers who took no antibiotics at all....56 percent of those advised to complete the course did not. It also found that mild and transient adverse reactions like headache, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, stomach aches and diarrhea occurred commonly among people taking the antibiotics prophylactically....This is believed to be the first large-scale study of prophylactic antibiotic therapy for inhalation anthrax....Federal health officials had recommended a 60-day course of an antibiotic for more than 9,300 workers who were exposed to anthrax spores in four states and the District of Columbia in 2001....The study did not include those people who were told to stop taking antibiotics after laboratory tests determined that they had not been exposed...Ciprofloxacin was the drug used most often in the initial days of the anthrax attacks. It can cause convulsions as well as other adverse effects on the brain and central nervous system, and also lead to rupturing of the Achilles tendon and others.....The anthrax study was conducted at six sites where spores were released in Connecticut, Florida, New Jersey, New York and Washington, D.C. "

Dec 6, 2002 — "Judicial Watch filed a complaint on December 6, 2002 for criminal investigation with the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia concerning the October 2001 anthrax contamination of the Brentwood Postal Facility. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court rejected our petition for writ of certioari on May 11, 2006."

[Jenny Lake]

Timewise, Bob Stevens was the 8th person contaminated in the official reconstructed version. These people developed cutaneous anthrax and saw doctors before him:
Victims:
-
Johanna Huden, New York Post, she's the 'index patient' (Sept. 21) who never opened the anthrax letter "near" her desk.
-
Richard Morgano; Hamilton postal center, reached into the sorting machines and had lesions by Sept.22
-
[ maybe a worker at Hamilton acct. office, x-contamination]
Erin O'Connor, NBC
Teresa Heller, West Trenton letter carrier (x-contamination)
Claire Fletcher, CBS - had a face lesion Oct. 1 reported that day by her doctor -  no letter found
[infant son] ABC, exposed Sept.28, lesion by Oct 2, developed serious illness - no letter found
    _______
AMI - 3 cases, only Florida cases
*Bob Stevens, AMI --alive but comatose Oct 3, had anthrax confirmed 10/2-10/3
Ernesto Blanco, AMI --he was ill before Bob, on Sept.24. Something pneumonia/flu-like was going around AMI.
Stephanie Dailey, mailroom  AMI (remembered letter opened on Tue. Sept.25) --she just got back from a two-week vacation, so her memory is credible to me even though it's written up as "on or about Sept.25". The vacation return would tend to fix the timing better. Dailey never felt sick at any time but got a positive swab result on Oct.10
   _______
 
Leroy Richmond, airport postal center worker who carried mail to Brentwood; Mr. Richmond from Stafford,Va. went to the hospital in Falls Church to recover.
*Thomas Morris Jr,, Brentwood Road postal center
*Joseph Curseen Jr, Brentwood Road postal center
*Kathy Nguyen, Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat, NO known source (coworker with a lesion doesn't have anthrax),
A Bellmawr, NJ worker (Delaware resident) has skin anthrax
*Ottilie Lundgren, Oxford Connecticut, NO known source (a piece of 'spore' mail is found in the next town when by chance the elderly next door neighbor died of something pneumonia-like and the investigators tested his home and neighbors, turning up one positive piece of mail --almost 2 miles from Mrs. Lundgren)
(*fatalities)
 
 
Trail of Contamination (so far, in progress)
 
Florida :
–#1 victim from Lantana (checked into JFK Medical Center)
–AMI, Boca Raton, where two letters were opened, the J-Lo package (not anthrax) and the 'real' threat addressed to the National Enquirer containing anthrax from the letter opened by Stephanie Dailey in her office, which was in or near the first floor mailroom." (J-LoLetter link below). It could have been mailed from a South Florida p.o. and it could have been a hoax. Ms. Dailey was not even slightly sick at any time, though on Oct.10 she heard back that her swab was positive.
–six post offices
New Jersey :
–Hamilton mail center –all four anthrax letters in evidence, stamped 'Trenton' were processed here (CDC graph, http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/J-LoLetter.html)
–Hamilton accounting office
–Bellmawr (35 mi. from Hamilton)
–Princeton mailbox (Aug. 2002)
New York :
–NewYork Post, 1211 (6th) Ave. of the Americas
–ABC News, West 66th St
–NBC News, 30 Rockefeller Plaza
–Governor Pataki's office
–CBS News, West 57th St.  
–#4 victim, Manhattan Eye, Ear & Throat Hospital
–USPS Morgan Center
–Mayor Giuliani's office (incoming package)
Washington, DC and outlying region
–18 area buildings
–14 Senators' offices
–3 House offices
–#2 and #3 victims, Brentwood USPS facility (Brentwood Road NE, Wash.DC)
–Falls Church, VA (hospital): man who sorts express mail near Baltimore-Washington Int'l Airport and carries it to Brentwood Road– Mr. Leroy Richmond of Stafford, Va. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford,_Virginia
–Howard University
–Langley, VA
United States
–#5 victim from Oxford Connecticut, no contamination!
–Indianapolis, IN (sorting equipment), see Nov 1 on the Timeline
–Kansas City, MO  http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2001/oct/3 ... _found_at/
Outside United States
–Kenya
–Argentina
–Brazil
–Lithuania (US Embassy mailbag)
–Pakistan
–India
–Chile (letter from Zurich to Santiago)
–Russia, Yekaterinburg (US consulate mailbag)
 
 
Can we make sense of 3 athrax letters in the mail as the USPS lab suggested?
 
If the Postal forensics were right and only 3 anthrax letters circulated in the system, which ones could they be?

[Jenny Lake]

...don't answer those, about the 3 letters...just my musing with floating facts. It puts the USPS at odds with the gov't storyline.
There's a lot to know, including a "new normal" about pathogens, they say, where even one spore, or 20 spores could start an infection.
One of the official spokesman from a government agency said the anthrax attack was "death by a thousand cuts".
Maybe he's right.
The postal 'machinery' was allowed to operate unabated far longer than an astutely managed system under attack should have been. This caused a cumulative aggregation of anthrax spores -- a thousand cuts -- to concentrate in sorting equipment. It could have come from dozens or hundreds of letters processed along the same route mailed by any number of people anyplace within the route -- a thousand paper cuts. New York City had a contaminated postal center but no anthrax cases reported among its workers. Why, when leaking envelopes at the point of origin in New Jersey caused lesions?
Kansas City's mid-October mail from Brentwood was not contaminated --but their own workers' wastebaskets tested positive! How?
These odd facts need a home theory to nestle into.
If this was as complex as September 11, manufacturing postmarks was a piece-of-cake. Maybe one, two, or none of the 'evidence' letters actually contaminated the postal route. Maybe the real anthrax letters that dirtied up the postal centers were mailed to and from the perpetrators themselves and the rest were specially made plants, either deposited directly to addressees, or entered into the postal system close to their targets.
But I'm musing again....

[Jenny Lake]

Dec 1 2001 -- "Investigators have found a trace of anthrax bacteria on the outside of a letter sent to a residence in Seymour, Conn., about 1½ miles from the home of an elderly widow who mysteriously died of the disease last week....The newly discovered Seymour letter -- a business letter sent to an estate liquidator who works from home -- was postmarked in Trenton, N.J., and dated Oct. 9 -- the same day that letters containing billions of deadly spores were mailed to Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.)....Joxel Garcia, Connecticut's public health commissioner, emphasized that the Seymour letter bore only the slightest contamination. "Very, very small amounts -- one colony," he said.
...On the reverse side of most mail, a machine prints a faint orange bar that reveals the date, time, location and machine that sorted that piece of mail.Then an automated sorter scans the destination information for each piece into a computer. It is that computer file that led investigators to 88 Great Hill Road in Seymour, home of John S. Farkas, 53."  http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/anthraxtraceconn.html

 

"A MadCowMorningNews investigation has revealed that San Diego defense contractor Titan Corp is at the center of a private intelligence network engaged in a broad range of criminal activities with seeming impunity, everything from drug trafficking to white collar crime that includes massive stock fraud cumulatively totaling billions...The companies involved market products to businesses and consumers that were originally developed for grandiose defense schemes like the U.S. Stars Wars program, or dreamed up in the labs of the CIA, Mossad and other intelligence agencies....
...Titan Corp's most curious partner, Miami attorney Michael D Farkas.... Today Farkas and Beni own a company attempting to market Israeli anti-missile technology to U.S. airlines and owners of commercial aircraft." http://www.madcowprod.com/11062006.html

[Jenny Lake]

Of course, it is Titan's still-unexplained involvement with both Michael Farkas and the company he founded, SkyWay Aircraft of St Petersburg, FL., which is ultimately the firm's most intriguing criminal connection...
Skyway is the company recently in a spotlight of unwanted media attention (okay, a flashlight of attention, from only the MadCowMorningNews) as the owner/operator of "Cocaine One," the DC9 caught carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine in Mexico in April for which no one, apparently,  is responsible." http://www.madcowprod.com/11062006.html

Lebanon: Makram Majid Chams of Titan Corp , 9/11 fame sues Daniel Hopsicker
Makram Majid Chams of Lebanon,Saudi Arabia,Titan Corporation, San Diego,and Venice,Florida during events leading up to 9/11, and last known to be with W Bush's allies in Saudi Arabia,is suing Daniel Hopsicker of http://www.madcowprod.com !Daniel Hopsicker also investigated and wrote,'Barry and the Boys',about Mena, Arkansas, Barry Seal and the drug trafficking scandal of the Iran-Contra era of the 1980s.... Daniel Hopsicker's take on his situation : Titan Corp Contractor Sues The MadCowMorningNews http://www.madcowprod.com/11072006.html ................................................................................................................ Daniel Hopsicker in his own words regarding Makram Majid Chams : 5.5 Ton Cocaine Bust Reveals New Details of 9.11 Attack http://www.madcowprod.com/05172006.html Makram Chams owned a Kwik-Check convenience store in Venice, where the biggest overseas money transfer to the terrorists, $70,000 from the UAE., was sent, according to the testimony of FBI agents during the 9.11 Commission hearings. Actually the FBI testimony never mentioned Chams, or his store. They did however show the receipt for the money order at the final hearing of the 9.11 Commission, which we attended. And we were already familiar with the address where the money order went: 201 Nokomis Avenue. Makram Cham's Kwik-Chek... Strangely, Chams left town soon after the 9.11 attack, abandoning a thriving convenience store which has stood vacant ever since. In a story in the Sarasota Herald Tribune, reporter Earle Kimel, who first broke the story of Mohamed Atta’s American girlfriend, Amanda Keller, called Chams' abandoned store “A pocket of urban blight in the otherwise smartly tailored suit of downtown Venice.†Just another freak coincidence? - Daniel Hopsicker ............................................................................................................... Strange thing is that Chams,who fled for Saudi Arabia after 911,(and not to Afghanistan or Iraq but to Bush's Saudi allies for protection),and who was or is also suing Titan Corporation as a former employee, was the very one who cashed the $70,000 check from Dubai at his convenience store and Kwik Check conveniently located in Venice,Florida to aid Mohamed Atta's and terrorist flight school activities in Venice,Florida pre 9/11!"  http://beirut.indymedia.org/ar/2006/11/5889.txt  

 poor old Ottlie Lundgren!...is it a coincidence, ya think?

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Just a quick note that Farkas is a Sephardic Jewish last name.

Below, is a report on Benador and their Propaganda for an  "Iran" War...

-------

Tuesday, May 23, 2006
When you want war -- call BENADOR
The whiff of war pervades the air, and we all know what the first casualty is. emptywheel at the Next Hurrah notes that

    ...Judy is back on the Neocon payroll (or at least some faction thereof), and that John Bolton is pursuing regime change. And that, by association, Judy got her toes wet on the Iran warmongering at the same time as her former speakers bureau, Benador Associates, started placing outrageously fraudulent stories to justify a war.

The reference is to Amir Taheri, the guy behind the recent propaganda yarn that Iran had passed a law to make Jews wear identifying insignia. From Greg Sargent at The Horse's Mouth:

Meanwhile, Amir Taheri, the fellow who penned one of the original stories, has posted a press release on the site of his rep Benador Associates that is anything but a mea culpa. Taheri seems to be standing by the story, though he concedes that his "column was used as the basis for a number of reports that somehow jumped the gun." He doesn't address the small problem that the law appears to have made no mention of religious minorities, only saying that his "sources" are telling him that the ideas of special markers for followers of Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism are "being discussed," though we're not told by whom.

Obviously, Taheri still hopes to convince the gullible that his fiction is factual.

Here is the web page for Benador. And here is a very revealing quote about Benador from the Asia Times of August 15, 2003 :

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.

More:

    New York-based Benador Associates is less than two years old, but has a star-studded client roster of 38 people, most of them Middle East specialists. Benador estimates that she arranges for her clients each week between 15 and 30 interviews on US and foreign television. In the same period, she places an average of about five op-eds by them in the most influential newspapers, such as the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

She acquired that kind of clout in two years? Such things do not happen by accident. Hard work alone won't do the trick. This woman is connected. I would bet that someone else -- some larger organization -- set up Benador.

Her husband, you may be intrigued to learn, is a Swiss art dealer. I don't yet know his name, but I feel fairly sure that he owned the Galerie Benador in Geneva. He may be Emmanuel Benador, the Picasso expert. If that guess is correct, then perhaps Arianna Huffington -- who wrote a book about Picasso -- can tell us more about the Benadors.

I wonder if Eleanor made her initial connections with neocon "parapoliticians" (if I may be allowed such a term) via her involvement in the art world?

Incidentally, another Benador-linked neocon is the well-known propagandist Laurie Mylroie, who co-wrote a book on Saddam Hussein with Judith Miller. Dr. Barry Rubin, the proprietor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (often considered a MOSSAD front) is also in the Benador orbit.

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2006/05/ ... -much.html

[Jenny Lake]

An anthrax blog notebook in progress: http://thirdring.wordpress.com/

[Jenny Lake]

Michael D. Farkas and SkyWay Communications (SkyWay Aircraft)

http://www.madcowprod.com/08082006.html
"Last week we reported the discovery that SkyWay Aircraft  had been leasing a "repair" facility for more than $20,000 a month at DFW Airport in Dallas—even though the company had nothing to repair— from Richard Rainwater, called "George W. Bush's biggest supporter" and "the power behind the throne" in news accounts during Bush's first Presidential campaign.

New evidence unearthed since then has begun to fill in the picture of an operation which boasted a bewildering international cast of characters, in San Diego, Israel, Miami, Dallas, and in the case of two prominent principals, on the lam...

SkyWay Aircraft was not a real entity"...  

..Since the MadCowMorningNews was successful last month in obtaining the FAA registration records for "Cocaine One," the accumulating evidence has all pointed to a clear conclusion: the DC9 carrying 5.5 tons of cocaine was a CIA plane which belongs to the Agency's no-longer-totally-secret airline...

...Along with GenesisIntermedia, the stock of two other companies was used to generate fraudulent loans in the Stockwalk scam. One was a company called Holiday RV. Stores. The other was Imperial Credit Industries.  Michael Farkas is involved with both firms.

Holiday R.V. Stores was owned and controlled by Michael Farkas, through a holding company he founded called Atlas Recreational Holdings.  Michael Farkas and Adnan Khashoggi were partners in a $300 million scam. It was called "the largest brokerage industry failure in more than 30 years."

Michael Farkas, is also on the board of Genesis Realty, founded by Ramy El-Batrawi, a man who is clearly no piker when it comes to pilfering money from a public company...His GenesisIntermedia exploits put Glenn and Brent Kovar's $40 million theft at SkyWay in the shade...

...Before leaving the ties between Michael Farkas and Ramy El-Batrawi and Adnan Khashoggi, we discovered a story from the St Paul Pioneer Press (where the fraud bankrupted one of that city's biggest firms) that may help explain our contention that what we are witnessing is the daily workaday transactions of a very large but still-invisible organization:

"SEC filings show ties among Imperial, Holiday and Genesis," reported the Saint Paul Pioneer Press on April 22 2002.

The Israeli Connection, Pt. 1

"For example, El-Batrawi owns a private company called Genesis Diversified Investments, which is an investor in a company called Aviation Group that in 2001 merged with a British Columbia company called Travelbyus."

"Lee Sanders, the chairman of Travelbyus is a director of Holiday. Riley is a former chief executive of Holiday and its largest shareholder. Riley also is among the largest shareholders of Imperial."

Michael Farkas' connections to right wing Israeli political parties, and to Israeli Mossad,  have already been ably covered by others. Farkas was listed in 2005 as president of Manhigut USA. This is the US branch of the Israeli Manhigut Yehudit, involved in fundraising  for the radical settlers who were trying to resist the Gaza withdrawal...he is also the American sales agent for anti-missile technology developed by Israel Aircraft Industries, and is a Director of spy technology company CCS...

[Jenny Lake]

interesting enough...
John S. Farkas (88 Great Hill Rd.), who possessed the only anthrax-contaminated mail in the vicinity of the last victim, Ottlie Lundgren, lived up the road from her church, the Immanuel Lutheran Church at 25 Great Hill Rd., Oxford.
The secluded house of Mrs. Lundgren where she lived alone was on Edgewood, which is a looping U-shape road off Great Hill, in between the Farkas house to the west and the church down the hill to the east. The only thing that separated them was an invisible town line. Ottilie was apparently regular as rain, attending church, the local library, the same restaurant...
News reports listed Mr. Farkas as an estate liquidator --there is a nearby Auction/Liquidator in Seymour called Keystone Auctions-- but John Smith Farkas is (at least now) an 'art dealer', graphic artist, and Director of Education at Gibbs College, Farmington, Connecticut.
Here's more, showing his artwork at a gallery in the Chelsea district of NYC:
http://www.newcenturyartists.org/artist ... arkas.html
The New Century Artists promote the under-represented, such as gays and lesbians, they say... the top Farkas image looks a bit 'homophile' to me...
Their gallery in NYC also shares an address with Agora Gallery at 530 West 25th St.
http://www.agora-gallery.com/
Note Mr. Farkas's education: University of New York, Rochester Inst. of Technology, Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore...
He was the first curator for the Town of Fairfield Art Collection, the same town that invested its pension funds with Bernie Madoff.
...now, there is Agora Inc. of Baltimore, lurking by association all over South Florida...penny stock fraud, Gloom and Doom financial news, travel, offshore investment, CIA connections...
these coincidences just keep adding up.
Michael Farkas married a 'model' named Rebecca J. Brock, who has New York art and fashion connections...

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

A quick note on Israeli Mole Captain William Luti:

--------

Notes on Captain William Luti USN Retired

Assessment: The WL model indicates that Luti is a way over his head and probably manipulated by agents of influence of a foreign power. His loyalty and patriotism are certainly open to question based on his pattern of activities and associations and should be looked into by the proper authorities. I suspect that he has been involved in the planting of disinformation and propaganda designed to push the US to invade Iraq. If this is the case he may be subject to charges. If there was an attempt to "deal up" to break the case Luti seems like an easy target.

Is William J. Luti a spy for Israel ? Is Bill Luti an Israeli mole operating under Doug feith and Paul Wolfowitz. CBS indicates that an analyst is "a" mole for Israel but I suspect that there are several. The Office of Special plans under Luti apperas to have operated as a Mossad propaganda machine. One has to assume that if the FBI is investigating special scrutiny must be applied to Abram N. Shulsky, Director of Office of Special Plans and F. Michael Maloof. If it is an analyst then watch Shulsky and Maloof. My advice to the FBI is too lean on Bill Luti since I think he is most likely to crack. They may find more then just one mole in the Pentagon.

See FBI Suspects Israel Has Mole in Pentagon -- CBS

William J. Luti
Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs

Runs Office of Special Plans under Douglas Feith. Not widely trusted or respected outside of NeoCon circles.

Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Near Eastern South Asian Affairs and Special Plans William Luti at a Pentagon press conference on June 4, 2003. DoD photo by Helene C. Stikkel. (Released)
   
Luti not trusted by State Department

Senior State Department officials are said to be particularly displeased with William Luti, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Near East and South Asian Affairs. Luti, a retired Navy captain and Gulf War combat veteran who served on Vice-President Dick Cheney's staff last summer, is seen by people at State as so obsessed with an immediate overthrow of Saddam that he hasn't thought through the consequences. Luti's supporters, however, include Richard Perle. The New Yorker: Fact
Luti Called Gen. Zinni a Traitor

In an official meeting at which Kwiatkowski was present, Luti openly called Marine General, former Chief of Central Command, and Middle East envoy Anthony Zinni, a "traitor" for having reservations about the march to war, and open contempt and calls for Secretary of State Colin Powell to resign were common. What she observed until her voluntary early retirement was nothing less than a full-scale assault on the intelligence and policymaking apparatus of the United States. She witnessed intelligence and careful analysis being replaced with propaganda, falsehoods and manipulation and fed to the Congress and the Executive Office of the President. This "fear peddling" was, Kwiatkowski writes, "designed to take Congress and the country into a war of executive choice, a war based on false pretenses." Dual Loyalties: Pro-Israel influence on US policy

"Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the Administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities." The New Yorker: Fact

http://www.amconmag.com/12_15_03/article3.html

http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/schu ... hulsky.php

Luti is seen as Cheney's man in the DOD. He does not appear to fit the dual loyalty profile but he is at the very center of the "goings on" in the Pentagon. Agent of influence, fellow traveler, or maybe just not that bright it is hard to tell just where Luti fits into the Likudnik apparatus.

The Office of Special Plans relied heavily on data gathered (or manufactured) by Israeli intelligence agencies particularly Mossad and also on information provided by Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, or I.N.C. To lend credibility to the doctored material the same information was leaked to Likudnik shills such as Judith Miller of the New York Times and Columnist William Safire. By citing anonymous sources reporting the same information they could make the phony data look more solid.

Dual Loyalties: US DOD: Feith and Luti on U.S. Intelligence Issues in Iraq and Iran - 6-4-03

Dual Loyalties: Tufts E-News -- William J. Luti : A Defining Role

Dual Loyalties: Dr. William J. Luti: Strategic Responses to New Security Challenges

Dual Loyalties: The New Yorker: Fact - Luti, Wolfowitz, and Chalabi
   

Pentagon on Feb. 11, 2004. Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Special Plans and Near Eastern and South Asian
Affairs William Luti. DoD photo by R. D. Ward. (Released)

DoD Briefing on Policy and Intelligence Matters
The Feith & Luti Show June 4, 2003

Seen on http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/luti/luti.php

"William J. Luti Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs
      Institutional Affiliations

            Center for Security Policy: Participant in various CSP events, including its 2002 Keeper of the Flame award ceremony, which also counted on the participation of Douglas Feith, Peter Rodman, Dov Zakheim, Pete Aldridge, Richard Perle, and James Schlesinger

      Government Posts/Panels/Commissions
            Special Adviser to Vice President Richard Cheney for National Security Affairs (Middle East) (2001)
            Commander, USS Guam (1997-98)
            Office of House Speaker Newt Gingrich: Congressional Fellow (1996-97)
            Served on USS John F. Kennedy during 1991 Gulf War

      Education
            The Citadel: B.A. in History    
            U.S. Naval War College: M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies
            Tufts University: M.A. and Ph.D. in International Relations"

http://southwestasia.blogspot.com/2004/ ... le-in.html

      STRATEGIC STUDIES GROUP XVIII http://www.nwc.navy.mil/ssg/former.htm

Investigations update

I need to update the "neo-convicts" post already.

First, all four investigations I mentioned yesterday may be the same.

The Franklin case is apparently linked to the Plame leak and linked to the Feith op and linked to the Chalabi case.

Former CIA agent and current MSNBC talking head Larry Johnson said the other day that the Franklin affairs "was linked to the investigation on the forged uranium documents." I've found a MSNBC transcript from August 27 on LexisNexis:

    I've heard about this investigation for, you know, several months now. And you know it is -- it actually is tied into the forged memo regarding the sale of uranium to Iraq from Niger.

    (CROSSTALK)

    JOHNSON: What I've been told is that there's a strong belief that the forgery was carried out by Israel in an effort to help build up the evidence to allow the United States to justify going to war. So, this whole thing that started with the outing of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer, started growing and expanding when they saw that there's this forged memo and then people linked to the office of -- in the office of Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Fife [sic] at the Department of Defense were seen as having some very close contacts and sharing information with the Israeli intelligence sources.

The Marshall, Rozen, and Glastris story doesn't mentioned Israeli agents present at the Franklin/Rhode meetings with Ledeen, Ghorbanifar and SISMI in Rome.

Hmmmm.

Warren Strobel of Knight-Ridder more directly makes a connection that I suggested yesterday. The Franklin-Israel investigation does tie directly to the Chalabi-Iran leaks:

    An FBI probe into the handling of highly classified material by Pentagon civilians is broader than previously reported, and goes well beyond allegations that a single mid-level analyst gave a top-secret Iran policy document to Israel, three sources familiar with the investigation said Saturday.

    The probe, which has been going on for more than two years, also has focused on other civilians in the Secretary of Defense's office, said the sources, who spoke on condition they not be identified, but who have first-hand knowledge of the subject.

    In addition, one said, FBI investigators in recent weeks have conducted interviews to determine whether Pentagon officials gave highly classified U.S. intelligence to a leading Iraqi exile group, the Iraqi National Congress, which may in turn have passed it on to Iran....both center on the office of Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's No. 3 official.

Richard Sale of UPI links several investigations together indirectly. For example, he ties the "non lawful" intelligence op Feith was allegedly running to the neocons in Vice President Cheney's office -- the primary area of interest to the Plame investigators, apparently:

    [William] Luti, a former Navy captain, switched to the Pentagon from Vice President Richard Cheney's staff, according to a congressional investigative memo.

    According to other congressional memos, Luti was made deputy undersecretary and reported directly to Feith.

    Luti also presided over the NESA office that worked closely with OSP "with sometimes an interchangeable staff," according to one congressional memo described the OSP "as a loose group of acolytes and hired hands" for Cheney, and (Cheney's chief of staff) I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Feith -- all "performing a mixture of intelligence, planning and other unspecified operational duties in support of preordained policy."

In regard to the Chalabi leak, Sale specifically discusses Harold Rhode a great deal, saying that he has had his security clearances lifted in the past (as did Ledeen in the '80s) and may even now be on administrative leave:

    According to one former senior U.S. intelligence official who maintained excellent contacts with serving U.S. intelligence officials in the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, "Rhode practically lived out of (Ahmad) Chalabi's office."

    This same source quoted the intelligence official with the CPA as saying, "Rhode was observed by CIA operatives as being constantly on his cell phone to Israel," and that the information that the intelligence officials overheard him passing to Israel was "mind-boggling," this source said.

    It dealt with U.S. plans, military deployments, political projects, discussion of Iraq assets, and a host of other sensitive topics, the former senior U.S. intelligence official said.

Sale also reports that Michael Ledeen worked on a contract basis for OSP under Feith!

Cheney's office, where Libby and Hannah worked, dispatched Luti to Feith, who already served as boss to Franklin, Ledeen, and Rhode. Did these guys prompt someone (Israel? Italy?) to cook up the Niger uranium story, burn Plame when that forgery was found out, and leak all kinds of state secrets to their pals in Israel and the INC? And then, Chalabi screwed them all over by leaking to Iran?

http://rpayne.blogspot.com/2004_08_01_archive.html

http://www.newsfollowup.com/flowchart.htm
http://www.newsfollowup.com/bioport.htm

----------

# Other "strategic" events:

# January 1998
Philip Odeen (Reynolds + Reynolds/TRW) mentions in a testimony:
"...the future we face in 2020 will be very different. A whole host of new challenges and opportunities are emerging. While we may find ourselves facing enemies on traditional battlegrounds, it is far more likely that we will face very different adversaries and that our conflicts will include locations in space, throughout our information networks, in highly urbanized areas, within the undeveloped and developing world and, perhaps even on our own soil. Our adversaries will include not just the armed forces of nations, but also international criminals and terrorist groups..."

# May 1998
On May 28, 1998, future anthrax suspect Stephen Hatfill and Jerome Hauer (OEM, WTC 7) speak together at a CFR meeting about "Building a 'Biobomb': Terrorist Challenge"

Seisint is established in 1998 and started to work on an anti-terror data-mining program, later renamed to MATRIX (the Multistate Anti-TeRrorism Information eXchange).

The company is located on 6601 Park of Commerce Blvd Boca Raton, FL 33487.
In October 2001, the American Media Building in Boca Raton (4950 Communication Ave, later moved to Broken Sound Ave) is attacked with Anthrax. Both offices are 4-5 minutes away from Seisint.

http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/05/289643.shtml

[Jenny Lake]

Here's an update on http://www.thirdring.wordpress.com/
 
The disturbing anomaly about the Brentwood Rd USPS contamination is this : One of the inconsistencies of timing in the Brentwood Rd. contamination is the claim that the postal workers were exposed from a sorter-machine cleanup that used blower equipment on the morning of October 11. Mr. Richmond's lawsuit 'discovery' revealed that the Daschle letter did not pass through the facility until the 12th . By then, several lawsuits were in progress and it wasn't in anyone's interest to reconcile this discrepancy. While Mr. Richmond was in the hospital, and memories were fresh, his Brentwood supervisor came to his bedside to help reconstruct the exact sequence of events that led to his exposure. It was agreed that Mr. Richmond's cleaning activity on the the 11th was the cause of his infection and the three other infected workers. (See the Washington D.C. page for more)

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

The Connection between 9/11, Anthrax and Iraq

    Dr. Graeme MacQueen | May 1, 2010

Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/v/xmRNoDNH-Ps

Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/v/IZ0ft3NaZy0

Part 3:
http://www.youtube.com/v/HEDdVPbR1Tc

Part 4:
http://www.youtube.com/v/eJVDxEiCCl8

Part 5:
http://www.youtube.com/v/75bkUQF1lpI

http://alethonews.wordpress.com/2010/05 ... -and-iraq/

[Jenny Lake]

I think it's really interesting that this recent rendition of the anthrax retrospective is so predictable. MacQueen heads right down the road to Nowhere with an UNSOLVABLE premise based on the "weaponization" of spores. He's chosen an undefeatable position, because this part of the review is the most contradictory, most tricky and unobtainable for its classified nature, and tiresomely exhaustive to sort. We'll all just take his word for it, eh? This kind of "proof" always depends on "who" you believe, not "what", and since everybody with access to a spore photo, Q-tip, baggie and a badge has made every kind of imaginable statement about the weaponized anthrax, it's a winners choice.
 
He made no effort to actually describe the events of the anthrax attack itself, throwing the falsehoods of 9-11 back on the table as an all-purpose conspiracy. If the US military inside-jobbers did 9-11, of course, they did anthrax too. And he reiterates the statements of scientists who confirmed the sophisticated quality of the D.C.-bound powder, who actually said it was never seen before and unknown within any national bioweapons program, so NATURALLY he concludes it must have come from an ultra-super-secret insider US lab and Batelle just wont 'fess up, darnit!
 
By-passing MacQueen's third proposition altogether, his hot-dog theory [you don't know what's in it, but some of it can't be good for ya] doesn't meet enough of the knowable facts. The evidence has become convincing to me that "weaponized" (as in really really special) anthrax was never processed through the mail. Yes, somebody provided some frighteningly deadly stuff near the end-points of the story. A coordinated group did do it and they had lots of inside help. Maybe not lots, just "key" helpers. I think the victims were pre-selected. I think the interagency havoc during the response was evil-ly counted on. And more than ever, I think the money trail is the hottest road to Is-ra-hell.  
 
 
These are more story features just added to my blog.
 
http://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/
The deadliest of the "in evidence" letters, comprising four of a suspected seven, was the Leahy letter. It was found on November 16, 2001, shortly before the last recorded fatality in Connecticut, in a quarantined batch of undelivered mail. It was thought to have been delayed behind the Daschle letter which was opened Oct.15, because of mistaken routing to the State Department's mail facility,  but it was missing a special stamp from the State Dept. machinery. CDC investigator Jim Hayslett tracked down the Leahy Letter's Washington journey and learned from the senator's aide that, in fact, the Leahy letter was delivered and returned unopened when the gravity of the Daschle letter contamination was known. Senator Leahy's office tested negative for anthrax. Over a month later, when the letter turned up in undelivered mail, the envelope bore a mysterious pinhole.
   The official story asks us to believe that a 94-year-old woman in Connecticut died from cross-contaminated mail. As proof of a theory, on November 30, officials found a neighbor one mile away with a saved letter bearing "an anthrax spore, a tiny amount" that had followed the Leahy letter through the New Jersey sorting machine by 15 seconds. And that's it – proof of a theory. The neighbor's house and family turned up zero contamination. The local post office and the victim's home and belongings turned up zero contamination. But the lingering question is whether or not Mrs. Lundgren's neighbor, artist and "estate liquidator" John Smith Farkas, may have been involved in some deeper way with or without his knowledge. Among the 'interesting persons' of September 11th is New york/Miami lawyer who was well-connected to the CIA and Israeli Mossad, named Michael D. Farkas. As yet, the research neither proves nor disproves a connection between these men, however in the world of high-finance and fine-art, they are drawing closer and closer...
 
Earlier, in the Florida contamination at the National Enquirer where no letters had been saved, the remembrance of a woman employee who worked in the mailroom office, was that "on or about" September 25 she opened a powdery letter at her desk. She continued to use her office for two more weeks before the American Media Inc.'s building was closed down two days after the death of the SUN tabloid photo editor on Oct.5. She remained healthy and well, even through the diagnosis of having anthrax spores on her nasal swab. Her mailroom office later tested 'hot' for anthrax and the building had air-borne microscopic contamination throughtout its three-stories, but there were no spores found in the air ducts near her workstation....an enigma indeed.
   Photo editor, Bob Stevens, was said to have visited Duke University on or before the day his infection became acute, a recollection of his wife Maureen and known to be true by North Carolina health officials. No reports of Mr. Stevens' activity or purpose at Duke has been offered in the mainstream press, but according to the "Special Libraries" of news archivists used by the tabloids, only two places in the country house the information and personnel Experts on the terror events of September 11- Harvard and Duke Universities. Was Bob visiting for professional reasons regarding 9-11? Did he have a personal interest in 9-11 or was there another reason? The ongoing 'wrongful death' lawsuit of Mrs. Stevens and her family, hinging on the 'lone perpetrator' theory, have fundamentally 'gagged' any case information until well into 2011, when the case may finally be allowed to proceed.
   The first two inhalation-anthrax cases which happened in Florida, to Mr. Stevens and co-worker Ernie Blanco, were both administered in 'medical centers' belonging to HCA, the Hospital Corporation of America, a large-scale hospital manager belonging to Senator Bill Frist, MD, and his family (founded by Frist's father). Frist became the Congressional 'anthrax' spokesman and also took a chair at CSIS, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which participated in bioterror drills that included various anthrax attack scenarios. Mr. Blanco survived, thanks in great part to a 'miraculous' coincidence concerning a minor car accident on a Miami street involving the mother of a DoD anthrax expert. Blanco's son-in-law was nearby, working at his car dealership job when the lady came in to negotiate for a car. This fateful connection led to Ernie Blanco's case being advised from afar by top docs in the US military.
 
In Washington D.C. at the Brentwood Road mail center, four cases of inhalation anthrax resulted in two fatalities. One of the two survivors remains today 'unidentified'. He does not appear in the subsequent lawsuits. Brentwood employed approximately 2,000 workers, and this man was said to be among them. Curiously, the other survivor, Mr. Richmond, was best friends with the two who died and he worked part of his time at an express package facility by the Washington-Baltimore Int'l Airport, some long distance outside D.C. Off work, the three met regularly to play cards and pray together, Mr. Richmond himself being the common point of contact. (Anthrax is not contagious – only spores can initiate infection). Richmond was the first to sicken enough to seek treatment. During his hospitalization which began Oct.19, he was enabled by his Brentwood plant manager to remember the details of how he became infected. It was agreed and reported in the news at the time, that an unusal request by his manager for Mr. Richmond to clean a Brentwood letter-sorting machine on the morning of October 11 was the infectious cause. At least one of the deadly "weaponized" letters, the Daschle letter, did not pass through the equipment until 7:10 am the next day, on the 12th. Either the contamination was already present, or the timing is wrong. Should we believe the Leahy letter caused this contamination when it did not leave a spore behind at the senator's office? So far, details of the Leahy letter's timing through Brentwood cannot be found.
   In a class-action suit brought against the Postal Service by Brentwood workers, it was revealed that mid-managers were instructed by their superiors to LIE to the floor supervisors about possible contamination and keep the workers on the job. In a surreal twist of visualization, regularly uniformed postal employees carried on their normal duites while health officials in hazmat space-suits walked around them taking samples. The lawsuit only mentions the Daschle letter, stamped on the morning of October 12. After the Daschle letter was opened on the 15th, hours later the FBI carefully ferried it over to Fort Detrick for analysis by Dr. John Ezzell –Dr. Ezzell was said to have called the anthrax powder inside "the Face of Satan". He said in all his years as a bioweapons expert, he had never seen anything as concentrated or imagined an aerosol as finely produced.  
   Despite his careful technique and state-of-the-art protective barriers, Dr. Ezzell took the "very painful" step of inhaling bleach solution for fear of anthrax. He went home and baked all his mail in the family kitchen and then prepared a public statement for the internet, encouraging everyone to use their ovens to 'autoclave' their own mail.
Fortunately, John Ezzell's fears aside, the Face of Satan didn't leave anthrax spores in anyone's airways on Capitol Hill. Staffers and Capitol Police who might have breathed in spores turned out to test positive for bacterial antibodies only. Washington D.C. did not report any known contamination to any other letter or package mail. Just the Daschle and Leahy letters. Spores, however, seemed to be all over D.C. mailrooms in miniscule amounts, causing closures and general havoc.  Up to that point in time, the medical significance of tiny amounts was not a matter of concern. It was the later Connecticut case that began changing doctors' minds. They really were very impressed, the news told us,  that Ottilie Lundgren could have been infected by near-undetectable amounts of anthrax. Another neighbor of Mrs. Lundgren was impressed enough to cover his entire house with heavy-gauge plastic and duct tape.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Thursday, June 22, 2006
RERUN: Judith Miller and Bill Patrick, tainted warriors for the biodefense

This week's pleasing tale of the Mubtakkar of Death reminded me of how there is always a market for big reporter literature of Doomsday put off and black future implied. In October of 2001, we were still in the middle of Amerithrax and I reviewed Judith Miller's book, Germs, for the Village Voice.

That book, as well as her minor connection to the Amerithrax case, was a selection of incredible stories -- some true, some probably greatly exaggerated or delivered with more embellishment than necessary -- and it made her an instant terror expert and celebrity. She was common on the evening news and the talk show of her friend, Larry King. Peddled by a famous right wing speaker's bureau, Benador Associates, along with a host of neocons urging the case for war in Iraq, Miller was ubiquitous in the news on bioterror.

Eventually she was swept out the door by the New York Times, which in a fit of self-examination, had looked at her reporting on weapons of mass destruction from the front-lines of the war with Iraq and found it wanting. Patrick, who had been another big newsmedia favorite on bioterror, had long gone silent. He had been questioned by the FBI in connection with the Amerithrax case when the investigation turned to the theory that the mailed anthrax was of domestic origin.

It was said that Patrick became a consultant, perhaps unpaid to the FBI, after they had cleared him of suspicion. Whatever had happened, the American guru of biowarfare was muzzled. No longer did he tell tales of how good his microbial preparations had been. Newspaper articles on him flying about the country to deliver seminars on bioterror, one -- for example, in Hollywood, for an audience of the well-to-do and reported in the Los Angeles Times, stopped. His rambles to reporters on how easy it was to dispense powders of silent death over Maryland and the capitol were silenced. With the Iraq war a mess, the preliminary reporting on it a disgrace, and Amerithrax unsolved, the world moved on right over Miller and Patrick, removing her from the big word processor and zipping their flapping lips.

Here's my old review on Germs:

===========

Plagued Out Book by Times Reporters Overexposes Readers to Bioterror

On Sunday, October 14, Judith Miller of The New York Times wrote of her personal anthrax scare, "As I washed my hands and tried to dust off the powder that clung to my pants and shoes, I thought about what Bill Patrick, my friend and bioweapons mentor had told me . . . "

We should all be so lucky to have as friend and "bioweapons mentor" someone who, according to Miller's book, Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War, infected "volunteers" with Q fever microbes to see what dosages were effective in producing illness, a man who was "overjoyed" when a field test on animals went south and people who weren't supposed to get sick did, because it proved his team of sorcerer's apprentices were producing "a product that was very, very good." The reader is informed that everyone survived. That made it all right?

In a better world, a Bill Patrick would have been given the bum's rush a long time ago, but, like it or not, we are saddled with him as one of our bioterror gurus. Why? Because the inverse logic seems to be that if you spent most of your life making things to sicken people fatally, you are, perhaps, more valuable as an adviser on the subject of biological evil, malfeasance, and mischief than someone who benightedly dedicated their life to defeating infectious diseases.

Patrick's fermentations seep through almost the entirety of Germs. He's Dr. StrangeBug, talking to a military group about how the U.S. supposedly had a plan to attack Cuba with two microorganisms to pacify it ("killing less than two percent of the population"), deriving statistics on how many people might be slain or made seriously ill with his viruses and bacteria, giving a now unintentionally idiotic play-by-play description of how someone with his expertise could hose down half the people in the World Trade Center with tularemia armed only with a trusty garden sprayer.

In Germs (Simon & Schuster), Miller and her co-authors, Times journalists Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, cover a wide swath of people, groups, and nations who have, at one time or another, been deeply engaged in this nasty game. While almost all of it has been published in the Times or elsewhere, it probably has not previously been as thoroughly annotated.

In the quest to inform readers on the subject of biological weaponry, the pro forma rule in writing on the subject has been horrification for the sake of horrification. One need only look at the reputation of Richard Preston, the genre's equivalent of the splatter-movie director. In influential investigative articles on bio-terror for The New Yorker and a novel about the same, The Cobra Event, Preston never met a virus that did not melt bodies, induce people to mutilate themselves, or cause the spurting of quarts of black and red ichors. In this respect, Miller and her co-authors' work stands out, being largely free of nauseating descriptions of the terminal stages of disease.

But Germs is also filled with well-researched arcana that, while academically interesting, would have little meaning with regards to the current predicament, in which tiny lots of bad stuff touch small numbers through the mails. While the authors could not foresee into what milieu their work would be published, the book is still too much about big numbers and the alleged capacity for creating thousands of illnesses with blinding speed.

The minute attention to the bureaucratic arguments involved in working out the details of the technology of killing is deadening. For example, just how interested are you in knowing the debate over how much anthrax it would take to kill perhaps half the people in Washington, D.C. A five-pound bag? An 80-pound bag? Or a 50-pound bag? It turns out, Germs reveals, that Patrick had the answer: The 50-pound bag. And Bill Clinton's Defense Secretary William Cohen certainly exaggerated when he held up a five-pound bag of sugar on TV and said that if it was anthrax it could do the same. Hey, knock yourself out.

The savage dilemma of Germs and books of the type is that, without exception, they implacably develop into a generic litany of speculations, extremely terrible news--some hearsay, some not--and fearsome applications said to be possible right now or in the not-too-distant future. Common sense dictates that if it is all true, we will only be spared a gruesome end by blind luck or intervention of the deity.

Germs, according to Larry King on Monday, is a national bestseller. Maybe so, but if you think you've been overexposed to anthrax already, avoid it like the plague. Please have mercy, dear authors. We get the idea.

posted by George Smith at 9:29 AM

http://www.dickdestiny.com/blog/2006/06 ... trick.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Judy Miller: Reporter or (Israeli) Operative?

By: Phoenix Woman Monday March 26, 2007 6:00 pm    



As anyone who has followed the Plame case knows, a prime consideration among the news people discussing the case was whether journalism was damaged by Judith Miller's being made to testify and to reveal a source.  Most newsies now say that it was not, but — as emptywheel notes in her recent FDL post on the subject — the NYT's Max Frankel is still defending both Judy Miller and his paper on this issue.

Is this a legitimate consideration?  This depends in part on whether one sees Miller as a disinterested observer, merely reporting a story — or as an actively partisan operative for a particular political faction.  It also depends on whether or not Miller has outed other story sources, and whether it's ever OK to out a story source – and remember, Frankel is implying that the outing of a source is A Very Big No-No and is Never Ever Done.  

Let's look at the disinterested observer/reporter angle first.  

Judith Miller herself has explicitly rejected the traditional role of journalist as someone who examines the facts regardless of whether they hurt one's preconceived notions; as quoted by Michael Massing in The New York Review of Books in its February 26, 2004 issue, she says the following in response to being asked why she didn't include commentary from WMD skeptics in her stories:  "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal."  In other words, she's not a reporter, she's a stenographer for the Bush team.  (Miller would soon furiously claim to have been misquoted, but Massing, in the letters section of the March 25, 2004 NYRB, firmly stood behind his quotation of her: "Judith Miller is simply wrong. During my hours of interviews with her, she requested that I read back all of the quotes that I wanted to use, and I readily agreed. I distinctly remember reading back the quote in question, and I distinctly remember her approving it. I did this not 'reluctantly' but willingly and patiently, precisely so that I could guarantee accuracy and avoid the type of claim she is now making.")

But we don't even need Miller's own words — words she's tried to disavow — to see that she isn't so much a reporter as she is an operative with an agenda.  As is clear to anyone who has been reading about this case at this site, DailyKos, The Next Hurrah, Eschaton, or pretty much anywhere else in the reality-based community over the last few years (not to mention emptywheel's excellent book Anatomy of Deceit), Miller was as much in the hip pocket of Ahmad Chalabi as were the rest of her neocon friends in the Bush Junta – so much so that she actually ordered around American soldiers on Chalabi's behalf.  (Trust me, I only wish I were kidding about that.)

As for the whole "outing a source is a no-no and is never ever done" gambit, well, guess what?  As emptywheel pointed out way back in the summer of 2005, Judith Miller has burned at least one source before (in this case, Amy Smithson), without needing to be hauled off to jail first — and nobody was running around saying that this spelled The End Of Journalism As We Know It.  Funny how none of Miller's defenders seem to know this little bit of her history.

But aside from this hypocrisy about the alleged sanctity of sources, Miller, as a person whose newspaper career spans three decades, should also be aware that in old-school journalism, if a source screws over a reporter with bad information, the reporter is free to out the source.  In fact, it is the reporter's duty to out a lying source.  As Atrios said, and reporters John Gizzi and David Freddoso at the conservative outfit Human Events demonstrated in 2004, "A source lies to you, and you find out, you burn him.  Period."   And goodness knows that Judy's sources fed her the most egregious garbage over the years, as the corrections to her articles attest.

Now, Max Frankel must know all of this.  He has to, he's a Timesman — one might almost say THE Timesman.  But his loyalty to the paper, and to a disgraced ex-Timeswoman who brought shame upon the paper (and, I suspect, a touch of loyalty to the ideology espoused by Miller and her neocon friends), not to mention the utter refusal overall to admit that (just like with Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee) they were hosed by the Republican Noise Machine, is interfering with his vision.   Otherwise I can't see how he would have let such a fundamentally dishonest piece as this one escape his keyboard.

http://firedoglake.com/2007/03/26/judy- ... operative/

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Interesting connection with Luti and Northrup Grumman... not good that these Scam Jews who spread disinfo on Iraq and helped plan NeoCon attacks against the USA get into these positions of power in the increasingly "Israelized" Military Industrial Complex. -- CSR

William Luti

# Northrop Grumman: Vice President of Strategy, Information Systems
# National Security Council: Former Special Assistant to the President
# Department of Defense: Former Deputy Undersecretary for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs


William Luti, a corporate executive with Pentagon contractor Northrop Grumman, is a retired Navy captain with close ties to neoconservatives and other hardline factions in the Republican Party. An early proponent of the Iraq War, Luti first came to national attention during the debate surrounding the use of faulty intelligence preceding the 2003 invasion. As an aide to Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith, Luti helped oversee work at the Office of Special Plans (OSP), the controversial Pentagon intelligence shop that was spearheaded by Abram Shulsky and was the alleged source of much of the misinformation about Saddam Hussein's purported weapons programs and ties to Al Qaeda. [1]

After leaving the George W. Bush administration, Luti joined Northrop Grumman as a vice president of one of its information divisions. According to his Northrop bio, Luti "is responsible for leading the development of the [Information Systems] sector's long-range strategic plan and annual operating plan working closely with the divisions, government relations and business development groups. He also represents the IS sector on the Northrop Grumman Corporation Strategic Development Council." [2]

A naval officer for over 26 years, Luti became involved in right-wing politics in the late 1990s, when serving as an aide to then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA). After leaving Gingrich's staff, Luti served his final major assignment for the Navy as captain of the USS Guam. When George W. Bush became president in 2001, Luti went to work for Vice President Dick Cheney, then retired from the Navy a few months later to join Feith's team at the Pentagon. [3] By the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, Luti was more closely affiliated with the neoconservative civilians in the Pentagon than with the military brass, and in July 2005, after Feith resigned, Luti left the Pentagon to join the staff of the White House National Security Council. [4]

Seymour Hersh first documented Luti's role in the faulty intelligence on WMD in a May 2003 New Yorker piece about the Office of Special Plans. According to Hersh, the OSP, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz and began operating soon after the September 11 attacks, "brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community. These advisers and analysts ... produced a skein of intelligence reviews that ... helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq. They relied on data gathered by other intelligence agencies and also on information provided by the Iraqi National Congress, or INC, the exile group headed by Ahmed Chalabi." [5]

Hersh reported that by late 2002, the Office of Special Plans had overshadowed the CIA and the Pentagon's own Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and become Bush's main intelligence source on Iraq's WMD and on Saddam Hussein's alleged Al Qaeda connections. He wrote that "[a]lthough many people, within the administration and outside it, profess confidence that something will turn up, the integrity of much of that intelligence is now in question. The director of the Special Plans operation is Abram Shulsky, a scholarly expert in the works of the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Shulsky has been quietly working on intelligence and foreign policy issues for three decades; he was on the staff of the Senate Intelligence Committee in the early 1980s and served in the Pentagon under Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle during the Reagan administration, after which he joined the Rand Corporation. The Office of Special Plans is overseen by Under-Secretary of Defense William Luti, a retired Navy captain. Luti was an early advocate of military action against Iraq, and, as the administration moved toward war and policymaking power shifted toward the civilians in the Pentagon, he took on increasingly important responsibilities." [6]

In March 2004, an expose by Karen Kwiatkowski, a former Pentagon staffer in Luti's section, cast more light on Luti's activities at the OSP. Kwiatkowski noted that Luti apparently helped coordinate the OSP's efforts with Cheney's office, and that he would frequently and ostentatiously boast about his close work with Cheney's then-chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. She claimed that Luti was bullying toward subordinates and critics and in a meeting once referred to retired Gen. Anthony Zinni as a "traitor" for his skeptical attitude toward the Iraq War. Luti was, however, notably deferential to Shulsky, who was ostensibly his subordinate. [7]

Kwiatkowski also revealed that Luti had clashed with Bruce Hardcastle, the section's intelligence staffer from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). She wrote that "Luti and possibly others within OSP were dissatisfied with Hardcastle's briefings, in particular with the aspects relating to WMD and terrorism. I was not clear exactly what those concerns were, but I came to understand that the DIA briefing did not match what OSP was claiming about Iraq's WMD capabilities and terrorist activities. I learned that shortly before I arrived, there had been an incident in NESA [the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia desk] where Hardcastle's presence and briefing at a bilateral meeting had been nixed abruptly by Luti. The story circulating among the desk officers was 'a last-minute cancellation' of the DIO [defense intelligence officer] presentation. Hardcastle's intelligence briefing was replaced with one prepared by another Policy office that worked nonproliferation issues. While this alternative briefing relied on intelligence produced by DIO and elsewhere, it was not a product of the DIA or CIA community, but instead was an OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] Policy 'branded' product—and so were its conclusions. The message sent by Policy appointees and well understood by staff officers and the defense intelligence community was that senior appointed civilians were willing to exclude or marginalize intelligence products that did not fit the agenda." [8]

Nearly a year before Kwiatkowski went public with her allegations, W. Patrick Lang, a former Middle East expert at the DIA, had come forward with similar conclusions. In an interview with Seymour Hersh, he said that "the Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government's foreign policy, and they've pulled it off. They're running Chalabi. The DIA has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there's no guts at all in the CIA." [9]

An unnamed Pentagon official familiar with Luti's work said that the deputy undersecretary's arrogance strained relations with his colleagues. "It's very difficult to inform people who already know it all," said the official. A former intelligence official commented, "Basically [Luti] didn't like other people's information if it didn't agree with his opinion." Luti called his critics "either confused, malicious, or both." [10]

Unlike most of the neoconservatives who were involved in war planning during the Bush administration, Luti has a military background. He served as a naval weapons officer beginning in the mid-1970s, but went back to school in the late 1980s to study strategy and diplomacy at Tufts University's Fletcher School, receiving his Ph.D. in 1990. He then served on the USS John Kennedy during the 1991 Gulf War. According to his Northrop Grumman bio, Luti's  varied assignments as a naval officer have included "the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Executive Panel and the CNO Strategic Studies Group. He commanded an aviation squadron, an amphibious assault ship and an amphibious ready group. He is also a veteran of the 1991 Desert Storm air campaign. He received many honors during his naval aviation career, including the Legion of Merit, the Meritorious Service Medal and the Strike/Flight Air Medal. In 2005, he received the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Defense Department's highest civilian award." [11]

According to a Washington Post profile, Luti forged ties with leading neoconservatives through their shared interest in the Strangelovian nuclear war strategist Albert Wohlstetter: "In the early 1990s, while deputy director of the chief of naval operations' executive panel, a civilian advisory group, Luti became interested in the views of one member, strategy guru Albert Wohlstetter. A mentor to Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Defense Policy Board member Richard N. Perle, and several other prominent conservative defense thinkers, Wohlstetter became Luti's entree into their world. From there, while still in the Navy, Luti became a congressional fellow in the office of then-Speaker Gingrich. His time there, in part spent working on legislation related to arming and training Bosnian Muslims, again brought him into contact with interventionist conservatives." [12] Randy Scheunemann, a director of the Project for the New American Century who worked with Luti on Iraq issues while he was on Gingrich's staff, told the Post, "We were talking with people like Perle and Wolfowitz about doing the right thing in Bosnia." [13]

      Education
          o The Citadel: B.A. in History, 1975
          o Naval War College: M.A. in National Security and Strategic Studies, 1986
          o Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University: Ph.D. in International Relations, 1990

The Right Web Mission

Right Web tracks militarists' efforts to influence U.S. foreign policy.
Sources

1. Seymour Hersh, "Selective Intelligence," New Yorker, May 12, 2003.
2. Northrop Grumman, "William J. Luti," (PDF) (accessed on June 4, 2009).  
http://www.northropgrumman.com/informat ... illiam.pdf
3. Thomas E. Ricks, "Iraq War Planner Downplays Role," Washington Post, October 22, 2003.
4. Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough, "Luti Moves," Washington Times, July 15, 2005.
5. Seymour Hersh, "Selective Intelligence," New Yorker, May 12, 2003.
6. Seymour Hersh, "Selective Intelligence," New Yorker, May 12, 2003.
7. Karen Kwiatkowksi, "The New Pentagon Papers," Salon.com, March 10, 2004.
8. Karen Kwiatkowksi, "The New Pentagon Papers," Salon.com, March 10, 2004.
9. Seymour Hersh, "Selective Intelligence," New Yorker, May 12, 2003.
10. Thomas E. Ricks, "Iraq War Planner Downplays Role," Washington Post, October 22, 2003.
11. Northrop Grumman, "William J. Luti," (PDF) (accessed on June 4, 2009).
12. Thomas E. Ricks, "Iraq War Planner Downplays Role," Washington Post, October 22, 2003.
13. Thomas E. Ricks, "Iraq War Planner Downplays Role," Washington Post, October 22, 2003.

Early 2002: Office of Special Plans Ignores DIA Intel That Contradicts Its Assumptions on Iraq

Bruce Hardcastle, the Defense Intelligence Agency officer assigned to Bill Luti, provides Luti's office, the Office of Special Plans, with intelligence briefings. But his reports are not utilized by Luti or his colleagues, because they do not support neoconservatives' assumptions about Iraq's weapon capabilities and terrorist activities. [Salon, 3/10/2004 Sources: Paul O'Neill]


June 2002: INC Letter Reveals 'Direct Flow of Information' to Cheney

The Iraqi National Congress (INC—see 1992-1996) sends a letter to the Senate Appropriations Committee asking that the INC's "Intelligence Collection Program" be transferred from the State Department's oversight to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA)'s HUMINT (Human Intelligence) Service. In what former DIA official Patrick Lang will later call "a clumsy act of indiscretion," the letter reveals that there is, in Lang's words, "already a direct flow of information from the INC into the hands of Bill Luti [a senior official at the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans—see September 2002 ] and John Hannah, the latter being Scooter Libby's deputy in [Vice President] Cheney's office." [Middle East Policy Council, 6/2004]

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.js ... lliam_luti

April 16, 2006: Cheney's Staff Powerful, Secretive, and Highly Influential, Reporter Finds
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John Hannah.John Hannah. [Source: PBS]Dick Cheney's Office of the Vice President (OVP) is so cloaked in secrecy, journalist Robert Dreyfuss reports, that it routinely refuses to provide a directory of staff members or even the numbers of staff and employees. Dreyfus writes, "Like disciplined Bolsheviks slicing through a fractious opposition, Cheney's team operates with a single-minded, ideological focus on the exercise of American military power, a belief in the untrammeled power of the presidency, and a fierce penchant for secrecy." The list of current and former staffers includes, as of April 2006: former chief of staff Lewis Libby; his replacement, David Addington; top national security advisers Eric Edelman and Victoria Nuland; neoconservative and hardline Middle East specialists such as John Hannah, William Luti, and David Wurmser; anti-Chinese Asia specialists such as Stephen Yates and Samantha Ravich; a varying number of technocratic neoconservatives in other posts; and an array of communications specialists, including "Cheney's Angels": Mary Matalin, Juleanna Glover Weiss, Jennifer Millerwise, Jennifer Mayfield, Catherine Martin, and Lea Anne McBride. It is known that Cheney's national security staff was assembled by Libby from various far-right think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Hudson Institute, and the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), as well as carefully screened Cheney supporters from a variety of Washington law firms. [American Prospect, 4/16/2006] Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to former Secretary of State Colin Powell, will recall in early 2007: "A friend of mine counted noses [at the office] and came away with 88. That doesn't count others seconded from other agencies." [Washington Monthly, 1/7/2007]
'Cabal' of Zealots - Wilkerson calls Cheney's inner group a "cabal" of arrogant, intensely zealous, highly focused loyalists. Recalling Cheney's staff interacting in a variety of interagency meetings and committees, "The staff that the vice president sent out made sure that those [committees] didn't key anything up that wasn't what the vice president wanted," says Wilkerson. "Their style was simply to sit and listen, and take notes. And if things looked like they were going to go speedily to a decision that they knew that the vice president wasn't going to like, generally they would, at the end of the meeting, in great bureaucratic style, they'd say: 'We totally disagree. Meeting's over.'" The committee agendas were generally scuttled. And if something did get written up as a "decision memo" bound for the Oval Office, Cheney himself would ensure that it died before ever reaching fruition."
Sidestepping the NSC - The National Security Council (NSC) is designated as the ultimate arbiter for foreign policy options and recommendations for the president. But, according to Wilkerson, Cheney's office and the NSC were often at loggerheads, and Cheney's "shadow NSC" had the upper bureaucratic hand. Cheney "set up a staff that knew what the statutory NSC was doing, but the NSC statutory staff didn't know what his staff was doing," says Wilkerson.
China Threat - Cheney's Asia advisers, Yates and Ravich, were most often encountered by Wilkerson. They helped drive Cheney's agenda for China, which was obsessive to the point of paranoia. China was a grave, if long-term, threat to the US, they believed. The US must begin strongly cultivating Taiwan as a counterbalance to China, whom they asserted was preparing for military action against the US. Former US ambassador to China Charles Freeman compares Yates to the Defense Department's Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith; all three believed, Freeman says, that China was "the solution to 'enemy deprivation syndrome.'"
Iraq Policy - Cheney's current and former staffers played an even larger role in shaping the administration's Iraq policy than is generally known, and Cheney "seeded" staffers in other departments to promote his war agenda. Luti left the OVP in 2001 to join the Department of Defense, where he organized the Office of Special Plans (OSP). Wurmser, an AEI neoconservative, joined the Pentagon and created the forerunner of the OSP, the Counterterrorism Evaluation Group, which helped manufacture the evidence of connections between Hussein and al-Qaeda. Wurmser worked closely with Hannah, Libby, Luti, and another Pentagon official, Harold Rhode. Ravich worked with neoconservative Middle East analyst Zalmay Khalilzad to build up Ahmad Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, their designated supplanter of Hussein.
US or Israel Interests? - Many of Cheney's most influential staffers are pro-Israeli to the point where many observers wonder where their ultimate loyalties lie. David Wurmser is a standout of this group. Wurmser worked at WINEP with Hannah, then joined the AEI, where he directed that group's Middle East affairs, then joined Feith's OSP before moving on to Bolton's inner circle at the State Department, all before joining Cheney in the OVP. Most outsiders consider Wurmser's ideas wildly unrealistic. A former ambassador says of Wurmser, "I've known him for years, and I consider him to be a naive simpleton." [American Prospect, 4/16/2006]

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.js ... lliam_luti

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

AIPAC Trial and an Update of Past Events

By Ryan Dawson

Two AIPAC employees have been on trial for spying on the US and giving classified information to Israel. They were indicted in 2005, and so far here have been the postponed trial dates for the case that threatens the most powerful foreign lobby (which is not registered as a foreign agent, even though attorney general RFK ordered that they should register but then somebody shot him):

- April 20th 2006
- May 23rd, 2006
- August 7th, 2006
- October 7th, 2006
- June 4th, 2007
- September 19th, 2007
- January 16th, 2008
- April 29th, 2008
Now May 27th, 2009 (maybe)

And then best of all AIPAC itself is on trial with Rosen on June 5th, 2009.

On top of that Steve Rosen one of the two agents on trial, is suing AIPAC for 5 million dollars. Rosen and his fellow AIPAC employee Keith Weissman were caught taking classified information in meetings with Lawrence Franklin an employee for Douglas Feith Under Secretary of Defense for Policy who met with uncleared Israeli generals in the DoD during the run up to the war with Iraq and who created a special office called the Office of Special Plans which cherry picked information and passed on known false information from Israel to the office of the vice president. Franklin was sentenced to 12 years in jail. Feith resigned. And Rosen is suing AIPAC. The information that Israel took pertained to Iraq and Iran's capacities to make nuclear weapons. It was essential to know what the US knew and more importantly what they did not know about Iraq and Iran in order for the Israelis to cook up cases for war.

Iraq-is-building-a-bomb was one of the prewar lies which justified a hurried invasion by stating we can't wait for the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud. To further this myth Judith Miller a New York Times employee who was romantically involved with a Mossad Lawyer and then Dick Cheney's chief of staff, Lewis Libby, reported that Iraq was gathering aluminum tubes for centrifuges in a nuclear reactor. Over lapping this story were reports of Saddam buying yellow cake Uranium (U3O8) from Niger. Miller had been used before during the 1993 world trade center bombing where she tried to blame that on Iraq (it was actually our own FBI) and the OKC bombings which she also tried to blame on Iraq. She also gathered other bogus "reports" about Iraq from the INC and spouted off that Iraq had VX gas and Anthrax.

All these lies fell apart. Iraq did not have a reactor to put aluminum tubes (which isn't even physically possible, you need graphite). The INC was made of Iraqi defectors who simply read from an OSP script on what to say and were later placed in positions of power in the New Iraqi government just as PNAC writers had called, desired and pushed for long before the war. The Yellow cake claims were based on crude forgeries. In fact they didn't even forge the right person's name and instead they put down an obsolete foreign minister who had not been in the government since the 80s. And According to Italian reports Franklin again along with Israel hawk Michael Ledeen were responsible for passing on these forged documents over to the British cell who then gave them to the OSP. Most of all Iraq did not have and WMD and they didn't have VX gas. The anthrax claim was also false but this was very interesting. You see this claim tried to connect Iraq to the 911 attack in the US.

The mythology went like this. After the 911 attack there was a follow up attack of anthrax letters. Now at that time everyone believed that the anthrax came from Al Qaeda. The letters were mailed from within the US starting on Sep 18th.

However because planes were ordered to stand down after the attacks this caused a general screw up in the mail around DC resulting in the first anthrax laced letter not being opened until much later in October. The first media reports about the letters were also in October. However the PNAC group's Weekly Standard already had reports out saying that a lead hijacker in 911 had met with Iraqis in Prague. This report came out just 7 days after the attack, Sep 18th the same day anthrax was mailed. Later they would expand this lie and say not only did Al Qaeda meet with Iraqis but they also were given anthrax. Of course no meeting ever took place. Interestingly SOMEONE sent a letter to the Justice Department saying that a scientist in Maryland, Dr. Assad, was responsible for a biological weapons attack using anthrax. The problem is that whoever sent this letter on the 20th somehow knew of an anthrax attack before it happened. This may have been done to make it look like the warning must be true. However the letter didn't just warn of an attack, it reported like they knew who might have done an attack that already happened. It also reported that the writer and Assad had worked together in the past. So the huge problem is no attack had happened because none of the anthrax letters had been opened yet!

The suspect accused was not in the locations of where the letters were sent at the time they were sent or even days before or after. Furthermore the accused suspect was a man who worked with another man named Philip Zack who had actually been caught stealing anthrax from their lab in 1992 months before the first World Trade Center Truck bombing of Feb 1993. Zack was released not for stealing biological weapons but for racially motivated attacks on his co-worker. This same Co-worker Assad was now being blamed for mailing anthrax by an anonymous writer who someone knew or correctly guessed that there was going to be a biological attack on the US coincidentally using anthrax a weapon he had been busted doing illegal research with and illegally stealing from a lab he was no longer even supposed to be working for. Zack's colleague Dr. Marian Rippy still worked in the lab and let him in on late nights, all of which has been caught on film.

It makes one wonder why Zack was not at least questoined by the FBI in its long goose chase to find out who mailed anthrax.

It gets deeper. In Oct of 2001 reports came out from Zionist run News papers that at the meeting in Prague (which never happened) Iraqis passed anthrax to Atta who then must have given it to other Al Qaeda members who mailed it after 9/11. The papers sited Israeli security forces as their sources.

The London Times reporter in the UK who first made the report later died in his apartment. The New York Observer which made the reports in the US is owned by Jewish Billionaire Charles Kushner's son. Charles Kushner later went to jail after blackmailing his own sister's husband with a honey trap. Kushner hired a prostitute to sleep with his brother-in-law in a hotel where the whole act was secretly recorded. Kushner's sister pushed forward anyway and got him thrown in jail. What is interesting is that Kushner was the man who paid for an Israeli national to come to New Jersey and gave him a salary. He also gave the Governor of New Jersey money indirectly as a "consultant". It would be revealed that Governor McGreevey was infact a closet homosexual who was having sexual relations with Cipel the Israeli national who Kushner had arranged to come to the United States AND WORK FOR THE GOVERNOR. This Israeli got a job as the Head of Homeland Security for the state and was allowed to inspect the nuclear facilities and land a 6 figure salary job.

One must ask the question that the FBI apparently didn't. How could Israeli security forces WITNESS a transfer of anthrax from Iraqis to Al Qaeda in a meeting in Prague when Iraq didn't have any anthrax, Atta never had a meeting in Prague, and the anthrax used in 911 didn't even come from Al Qaeda it came from within the United States from the United States' own labs!?

Obviously the Israelis were lying. Furthermore isn't it interesting that the first paper to report it was owned by the man who also set up a honey trap on the governor as well as his own family and arranged for an Israeli national to come over (out of the blue) to work for the governor and get a position in security.

Whoever sent the anthrax tried very hard to blame Al Qaeda for it. Ultimately after chasing around Steven Hatfill around for years which resulted in a 5.8 million dollar settlement, the FBI landed on its final suspect Bruce Ivins who in less than a month after being targeted, allegedly killed himself. Ivins worked at the same lab as Dr. Rippy and Dr. Zack, but he was not in the locations of the mailing.

Whoever sent anthrax somehow knew where the Al Qaeda cells were because they went down to the same locations in Florida and New Jersey and sent anthrax. If you think that Bruce Ivins drove down to Florida and then up to New Jersey and mailed anthrax and then got back to Maryland in time to show up for work in less than 18 hours, you must be crazy or you work for the FBI. There is no way Ivins could do that at least not by himself. And how would he know where to go? No, the anthrax was sent by the same people who lied about witnessing it being transferred from Iraqis to Al Qaeda.

This was a false flag attack by Israel. It would be discovered that Israeli spies were also located right next to the alleged Al Qaeda cells in Florida and New Jersey. Furthermore a Mossad front company would be busted in New Jersey which was using moving vans. One such van was busted on 9/11 with traces of explosives and cheering Israelis who were filming the 9/11 plane attack. Later police stopped two other vans with explosive devices, on on or near the George Washington Bridge and one at Ground Zero. Men were arrested. The reports of the truck bombs came out live and then were quickly removed from the media as fast as the steel from the towers was shipped to China.

And it gets worse. When the anthrax was mailed there were also a few anthrax hoax letters mailed. The press blamed these on copy cat attacks. There is a problem with this however. The news reports about the anthrax mailings came AFTER some of the hoax letters were post marked. Thus whoever sent the hoax letter also knew about an attack. They assumed that the Sep 18 letters would be opened sooner than they were. Guess who got anthrax hoax letters? Judith Miller of the New York Times and Fox News.

On the other side Israeli enemies in the US Senate got real anthrax letters mailed to them with weapons grade materiel inside. This shows that this anthrax was made by or stolen from a state power. This could not have been cultured from a dead cow by a nerd in his basement. This anthrax had complex accelerates on it, and this too was at first blamed on Iraq.

But now we know. Iraq did not have any VX gas, anthrax, or nuclear bombs or even programs. Al Qaeda did not send the anthrax and the lies claiming all these things were based on crude forgeries piped through an Israel cabal later busted spying on the US and Israel sources who witnessed things at a meeting that never even happened. On top of it all Israel has the means, the location, the timing, and the motivations to send the anthrax and blame their enemies. They are busted in the largest spy-ring ever uncovered in the US, the head of security is an Israeli National, and there is a front company for the Israel Mossad busted on a day where at least two and maybe three vans were packed with explosives just like the 1993 bombing with Josey Hadas.

None of this hit the media. No shock there they wont even report the racial colonies that Israel builds in the West Bank instead they call then Jewish Neighborhoods that are "defended" from attackers of irrational religious extremists.

To this day there is no reporting in the MSM about the Niger forgeries or the Israeli spy rings or the AIPAC employee trial. The New York Sun which reported on the trial has now gone under. Ask yourself why is this? Other lies about the war have been reported. But why has the anthrax case, the truck bombs, the spy rings, and AIPAC case, and the Niger Forgeries, all of which are known things, not been reported by the MSM in the US?

It gets worse.

Back when AIPAC was illegally gathering Intel on what the US knew and didn't know about Iraq AND Iran's nuclear capacities, a branch of the CIA working on tracking nuclear weapons proliferation was actively trying to figure out what the truth was. In this process they uncovered something else. Employees of the American government were illegally selling arms. The Nexus of the trade went through the ATC (American Turkish Council) a lobby for the Military industrial complex which benefited greatly from the Iraq war, and is located in the gateway of the drug trade from the "liberated" poppy fields of Afghanistan to Europe. The ATC is basically a miniature AIPAC with all the same players involved. And FBI whistle blower named Sibel got wind of these dealing through translating and before she could come out with it she had a gag order slapped on her and she was threatened with jail time.

Quote: Immediately after 911, the FBI arrested a bunch of people suspected of being involved with the attacks – including four associates of key targets of FBI's counterintelligence operations. Sibel heard the targets tell Marc Grossman: 'We need to get them out of the U.S. because we can't afford for them to spill the beans.' Grossman duly facilitated their release from jail and the suspects immediately left the country without further investigation or interrogation.

Let me repeat that for emphasis: The #3 guy at the State Dept. facilitated the immediate release of 911 suspects at the request of targets of the FBI's investigation. And I had reported a year before that this was just something I noticed by watching CSPAN and a red-flag popped into my head as they were going over the funding for the war.

The CIA's team which would have been on the trail on these illegal trades, and would have known what Iraq and Iran really had or didn't have in regards to nuclear weapons, was ruined. Valarie Plame a clandestine CIA agent in the outfit in charge of tracking nuclear weapons, was ousted by Lewis Libby and Karl Rove. In doing this her front companies BJA was also exposed. Because of this the entire unit was compromised and a dark cloud was created over the capacities of Iraq and Iran. From that the lies about both countries building a bomb continued. It is still being claimed by hardcore Neocons about Iran. Libby went to trial and was convicted but Bush commuted his sentence.

Again no media reporting on this. Sure it was on the web. It was on Antiwar.com and whatreallyhappend.com and this site rys2sense.com and some others but by an large it was never reported and of course never connected to the larger picture.

All of this and more has been reported by Ryan Dawson's Iraq 911 PNAC all roads lead to Israel, report. And can be viewed in the Film War By Deception. Full screen version available here

The film is 3 hours. I don't claim to be a movie maker. But all of the information is in there. It's been out since 2004 on this website in an older film as well as in text. And the text was just globbed together reports from my blogs which were written as things were happening. I correctly nailed the OSP and Libby as it was made, correctly stated Iraq did not have any WMDs before the war started, correctly predicted the 7/7 bombing which resulted in my websites being deleted and that is when we started Rys2sense. I correctly stated that Ivins would become a fall guy after Hatfill won his settlement. This site knows what is up. There is absolutely no reason to dabble into goofy pointless stuff such as "Freemasons" "Illuminati" "Bavarian Death Cults" "Space creatures" "Lucifarians" etc. All of that is pointless infotainment for people to make a buck. Don't be a sucker. It's damaging because it makes us all look insane. Nothing sinks credibility like end times cultist, religious rhetoric, and science-fiction/comic book fantasies. Please be an adult.

 
War By Deception Part I 37min

  http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid ... 533&hl=en#
War By Deception Part II 58min

 
War By Deception Part III 19 min

 
War By Deception Part 4 51 min

 
165 minutes of truth. Pass this video around. NO MORE WARS for Israel!

http://www.rys2sense.com/anti-neocons/v ... 69#p121369
-Ry

http://www.davidduke.com/general/aipac- ... _9283.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Tuesday, August 5, 2008
The Anthrax Killer? Richard Spertzel



Is this is the man who made the anthrax that killed five people soon after 9-11? I think so.

Of course, the FBI are protecting him by pointing the finger at others. And Spertzel himself is busy weighing in with his expert opinion to confuse the media, and using his high-level contacts to confuse investigations, just to muddy the waters.

But I think this is the guy. Richard Spertzel.

He is on the books at Benador Associates (with Amir Taheri, Charles Jacobs, Charles Krauthammer, Dennis Prager, Herbert London, James Woolsey, Laurie Mylroie, Meyrav Wurmser, Michael Ledeen, Michael Rubin, Natan Sharansky, Richard Perle and others), he's a regular on Murdoch's FOX News, he writes articles for the Murdoch WSJ. You get the picture?

Zionist. Neocon.

Of course, he was not working alone.

More articles from Spertzel here and more investigation ongoing at Glenn Greenwald's blog, where a highly informed commenter recently said:

    "Spertzel is really scary and seems to just taunt the world from the neocon perspective."

Spertzel has repeatedly insisted that the anthrax sent to Daschle and Leahy was very highly sophisticated:

    "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, chief biological inspector for the U.N. Special Commission from 1994 to 1998. "And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good."

One the one hand that is a boast. On the other hand it is a threat.

Now ask yourself why the head of the FBI has been protecting this man for nearly seven years?

UPDATE: Spertzel is of course loudly telling people that he doesn't believe that Bruce Ivins was the killer. Given that the FBI has not been able to make a strong case against Ivins, and they know it, that's not really surprising. It helps give Spertzel some much-needed credibility in the public eye.

The DoJ has just released documents (PDFs here) related to the case but are not going to close the case yet "because of incomplete administrative details". Yeah, like a motive! And proof!

This is the motive currently being bandied about:

    Authorities were looking at whether Ivins may have released anthrax to test a vaccine he was working on, another official said.

I don't have time to read through all the docs today, but details emerging don't indicate any bombshell of proof. It's hard to believe the FBI really thought they could charge and convict Ivins on this evidence alone.

    According to one affidavit made public, Ivins submitted false anthrax samples to the FBI, was unable to give investigators "an adequate explanation for his late laboratory work hours around the time of" the attacks and sought to frame an unnamed co-worker.

    He was also said to have received immunizations against anthrax and yellow fever in early September 2001, several weeks before the first anthrax-laced envelope was received in the mail.

Um, wouldn't everybody working in an anthrax lab be taking immunizations regularly? But that bit about framing an unnamed co-worker is interesting: was that Assaad, or Hatfill?

Then there's the corporate element, and an email that much is being made of:

    [Ivins] was under pressure to assist a private company that had lost federal approval to produce an anthrax vaccine and sent a suspicious e-mail a few days before the anthrax attacks.

    The e-mail warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists "for sure have anthrax and sarin gas" and had "just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans." The affidavit said the language in the e-mail was similar to warnings in the anthrax letters, such as: "WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. . . . DEATH TO AMERICA . DEATH TO ISRAEL."

Note how WaPo reproduced that text in the original CAPS, just to make sure you saw it. But what's new? It's already been established (e.g. his letter to the local paper) that Ivins was a Christian Zionist, but so was the whole Fort Detrick lab (see Camel club antics). And no doubt half the USA had similar thoughts after 9-11. I mean, Bin Laden hates Jews? Duh!

And if Ivins really believed, as many others did, that Al Quaeda might have anthrax, surely that would explain his late nights in the lab after 9-11. OTOH:

    The spike in his evening hours began in mid-August, almost a month before the Sept. 11 attacks, investigators said.

That's a little harder to explain. But it's still not incriminating evidence.

And then there's this:

    Moreover, the envelopes that held the letters were "federal eagle" envelopes, so-named because of the eagle perched on a bar bearing the initials "USA" in the upper right-hand corner, and bore tiny but tell-tale defects that searchers determined were bought from a post office in Maryland or Virginia, the official documents relate.

    And of the 16 government, commercial and university laboratories that had virulent anthrax strains like the one used in the deadly mailings, only one was located in Maryland or Virginia — the Fort Detrick lab where Dr. Ivins worked before his July 29 suicide, the documents say.

Yeah, real tight evidence right there. Not.

http://ridingthejuggernaut.blogspot.com ... rtzel.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

'Why I'm certain my friend Dr Kelly was murdered'

By Andrew Malone
Last updated at 8:18 PM on 10th July 2010

Mai Pederson

His friend: Mai Pederson has damming new evidence to suggest Dr David kelly's death was not a suicide

They used to walk the streets of Baghdad together after dark.

She liked to clear her head after the tensions of the day; he wanted to compensate for the missed strolls he normally took in the Oxfordshire countryside near his home.

But these nightly outings for David Kelly, the ill-fated weapons expert, and Mai Pederson, his beautiful young U.S. military interpreter, also provided an intriguing insight into how perilous the British scientist's position had become.

A senior member of a United Nations inspection team in Iraq, Kelly's mission was to discover whether Saddam Hussein was hiding weapons of mass destruction - and to determine whether America and Britain would go to war.

The stakes could not have been higher.

To help him deal with obfuscating Iraqi officials, he was assigned Pederson, a gifted linguist with the U.S. Air Force who also had secret, high-level links to American intelligence.

Beguiled by his mysterious younger colleague, Kelly asked if he could walk with Pederson at night.

And so an unlikely relationship blossomed on the dark streets of Baghdad.

That friendship deepened when, one night in 1998, five years before the U.S. and Britain invaded, the pair shared a life-or-death experience on a stroll around the Iraqi capital.

Suddenly, a red laser dot appeared on the British scientist's clothes over his heart: an unseen sniper had him in his sights.

The laser beam moved slowly upwards until it was trained on the centre of Kelly's forehead.

Amid unbearable tension, the red dot remained there for what seemed like an age.

The sniper didn't pull the trigger - it was simply a warning. Iraqi officials brushed off the incident, sniggering that it was just 'kids playing around'.

But Kelly knew his life was in grave danger, informing his younger companion that he had been told by intelligence sources that he was number three on a Saddam Hussein death list as a result of his work.



David kelly

The late Dr David Kelly is pictured leaving The House of Commons, Tuesday July 15, 2003, after giving evidence to the Commons select committee.

Shrugging off the risks, he told Pederson he couldn't abandon his mission, but that he expected to be found dead in the woods near his home in Oxfordshire, rather than in Iraq.

It was a claim he repeated to other close friends. It turned out to be a chillingly accurate prediction.

Memories of those tense, heady days and nights came flooding back for Mai Pederson this week as the seventh anniversary of the death of David Kelly, her close friend and confidante, approaches on July 17.

It is a tragedy which continues to be cloaked in controversy.

'We started out as work colleagues and he became like an older brother to me,' she told me when we met this week in America.

'He was a man of impeccable integrity, honour, dignity and respect. His family meant everything to him, as did his work.

'It is time the facts came out.'

Pederson hasn't met with Kelly's wife since his death, but Mrs Kelly did testify to the Hutton inquiry that Pederson was 'influential' in his life and had become a family friend.

Kelly, as is now well-known, was found dead in the woods near his home in July 2003, having supposedly used a blunt knife he'd had since he was a boy to hack into a tiny, deep vein and bleed to death - even though little blood was found at the scene.

Despite leaving no note for his wife or his beloved daughter, who was due to get married three months later, the government's Hutton Inquiry into his death concluded in 2004 that Kelly committed suicide after being named as the source of a BBC report suggesting that Tony Blair's spokesman 'sexed up' intelligence about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction in order to justify going to war against Iraq.

After repeated calls for a full inquest into Kelly's death, the Labour government instead decided that official papers about the affair should be kept secret for an unprecedented 70 years - and, even more bizarrely, the reason for that decision is itself a state secret.

But now, amid signals that the new British coalition government may re-examine this utterly perplexing case, Kelly's former translator - and spiritual soul-mate - has come forward to give the saga a dramatic, compelling new twist.

In damning evidence to the new attorney general, Dominic Grieve, who has indicated his 'concerns' about the case, Pederson revealed that Kelly could not have killed himself by hacking into his wrist - because he could only move his arm with difficulty due to an old injury.

'He couldn't even cut a steak,' says Pederson, holding her own arm out stiffly to mimic his disability.

'He hurt his elbow and was incredibly weak in that arm.'

She also rubbished claims he had taken 29 Co-Proxamol painkiller pills before cutting his wrists, saying he struggled to swallow pills.

For Kelly suffered from 'unexplained dysphagia' - a syndrome that can make it almost impossible to swallow pills, while food and other substances are ingested without a problem. This has been confirmed by other friends.

Pederson recalls offering him a pill for a headache which he refused, saying he couldn't swallow any pills and explaining he'd had the problem for years.

Speaking exclusively to the Mail, the twice-divorced Pederson - who is fluent in five languages - insisted that she was determined to honour the memory of a 'kind, brilliant man' by unearthing the truth about who really killed him, saying: 'This cries out for a formal, independent and complete review.

'If that means stirring the ashes, so be it.

'The death of David Kelly is not just about him or about the tragedy for his family - it affects all of us. The facts don't add up and the responses from the British government don't add up.'

More than anyone else - even, perhaps, including Janice, Dr Kelly's widow - Pederson knows the truth about Kelly's frame of mind at the time of his death, and, intriguingly, how he had even made plans for the future once the fuss over the BBC story had died down.

From the time in the late Nineties that they became acquainted, they made an unlikely pair. He, introverted and studious; she, Kuwaiti-born to Egyptian parents and vivacious.

According to an ex-husband, she was actually an American spy with eyes that could 'bewitch' any man.

After meeting in Iraq in 1998, right up to the day of Kelly's death, the pair spent as much of their time together as possible. When they were apart, they regularly kept in touch by phone and email.

Other staff on the UN weapons inspections team in Baghdad assumed the bearded, scruffy English scientist was as dull as he looked.

But after he started accompanying Pederson on her walks, she discovered a different side to Kelly.

While she listened in silence,she says, he chatted away animatedly about his wife and children and how he loved taking daily walks in the woods near his home. She found it distracting and relaxing.

Indeed, the pair became as close as it's possible to be without sharing a bed.

In the following years, Kelly made frequent trips to America to see her(he was often in the U.S. on UN business and for meetings with other top scientists).

He was also reputedly thinking about moving there permanently.

Between dozen of trips to Iraq on inspection tours, as Britain and America sought a legal case for war against Saddam, the pair met regularly at locations around the U.S from California to Alabama.

In a sign of just how deep their friendship went, Kelly was even officially registered as living at three houses Pederson owned in America.

This was,apparently,simply a favour to enable him to have US. credit cards with an American mailing address.

A devout agnostic, Kelly decided to convert without informing his wife ­ to the Baha'i faith, the ancient Persian religion of which Pederson was a follower.

He gave up alcohol and started attending Baha'i meetings.

Not surprisingly, colleagues whispered that the pair were having an affair.

Could it have been true? 'I did not have an affair with Dr Kelly,'Pederson says firmly.' His family meant everything to him. I'd met his wife and daughters.

'His work was his mistress.'

Now 49,with piercing brown eyes, Pederson says the British academic - who was 20 years older - was not her type and it would, in any case, have been a court martial offence under U.S. military regulations to have an affair with a married man.

Yet her decision to submit this new dossier of evidence to the British government has reignited the politically charged debate about whether Kelly was murdered.

Already she has been attacked by John Rentoul, official biographer of the former prime minister (and, ironically, a columnist for The Independent, which denounced the Hutton Inquiry), has branded publication of her claims as' contemptible'.

BBC journalist Tom Mangold, meanwhile, denounced Pederson as a conspiracy theorist who must'believe in the tooth fairy' and demanded to know why she had taken so long to speak out.

Yet Pederson has tried to give evidence ­ repeatedly.

In fact, less than a month after Kelly's death, she agreed to meet two British detectives who flew out from London to question her.

She spent two days telling them all she knew about the case ­ and explaining why she believed the scientist could not possibly have committed suicide.

Yet, like many others in this saga of contradictory evidence and unanswered questions, her attempts to shed light on Kelly's physical ­ as well as mental ­ condition have been repeatedly rebuffed.

Indeed, two days after British police interviewed her and promised she would not be named on account of her sensitive work with the military her name was leaked to the then Labour supporting Times newspaper and she was portrayed as a shadowy Mata Hari figure.

While his family say Kelly was depressed, Pederson says he was nothing of the kind.

He had even phoned her at the height of the drama surrounding the row about the leaks to the BBC about the 'sexed-up' Iraq weapons dossier, cheerfully saying he was driving to a place in the West Country to escape the Press and that he would come out to see her in a couple of months.

Alarmed by the media attention after her identity was disclosed, Pederson moved in to Air Force accommodation to live in seclusion.

There, she privately offered to give evidence to the Hutton Inquiry on condition that her identity was disguised  as it had been for British intelligence agents called to give evidence.

Hutton refused. More recently, frustrated by the lack of action over her evidence, her Washington lawyer Mark Zaid sent a letter last year to Baroness Scotland, the then Labour Attorney General.

Receipt of the letter was acknowledged in a single line reply from her office.
But,again,nothing happened.

Now,however, Pederson hopes someone will finally listen.

And yesterday she received a much more sympathetic response from the office of new Attorney General Dominic Grieve, advising her to speak to the group of doctors currently launching their own legal challenge to make all documents relating to his death public.

She does not, she insists, have a 'smoking gun' ­ evidence of who killed Kelly or why.

But she's convinced he was murdered.

'None of it makes sense ­ anyone can see that,' she says.

The suggestion that Kelly could have been murdered by British government agents seems preposterous.

But did the Establishment have evidence that a 'hit' was planned against Kelly by Iraq and fail to act?

There have been repeated rumours that police were aware he had gone missing long before his family reported him overdue from his walk.

Or could Iraqi exiles have silenced him because his claims (about there being insufficient evidence of weapons build up to justify an invasion of their country) were at odds with their desire to see Saddam deposed?

In truth, Mai Pedersondoesn't know the answers. But what she does know is that the official story has gaping holes.

She says:'The more time that passes with the Government ignoring the contradictory evidence, the more conspiracy theories will grow ­and faith and trust in the Government will lessen.

Legitimate questions deserve answers.

'The British Government owes him, his family and the country the full truth,whatever that might be.

Dr Kelly can no longer speak, so we must do so for him.'

There is, of course, a way for the new government to try to put an end to the controversy ­ by seeking answers to the unanswered questions.

If there really is nothing to hide about the baffling death of Dr David Kelly, why, then, does so much remain hidden?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... dered.html

[Jenny Lake]

1949 — "In 1949 and 1950 [Dr. Frank Olson] worked briefly on "Operation Harness", a joint US-British effort to spray virulent organisms –so-called BW antipersonnel agents– around the Caribbean, decimating untold thousands of plants and animals. At the time of his death Olson was developing a new, portable, and more lethal form of anthrax that could be put into a small spray can....According to his son Eric, Frank Olson also learned that the Americans were deploying Anthrax against enemy troops in Korea" http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/Chase.html

http://thirdring.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/timeline/

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

A long article from 2003, the author although JewTribe makes the connections. Warning that it has subtle disinfo since it focuses on "Islamists" instead of the JTribe-Sayanim-JPuppets that pulled off 9/11 and the Anthrax attacks. Does give an indication of the "confusion" between Islamic countries and the attacks on 9/11 due to J-Tribe disinformation. At this point in the game... reading between the lines hiding J-Tribe crimes yet blaming the incompetent "Goyim" is child's play... he makes lists and deflects the focus from Jews... -- CSR



========
"Whereas the inhabitants of the Indian peninsula are Hindus whose hearts have been full of hatred towards Muslims, therefore, India is the most important base for us to work there from against Pakistan," David Ben Gurion, quoted in the Jewish Chronicle, August 9, 1967.


In his 2006 memoir In the Line of Fire, President Musharraf wrote that Omar Saeed Sheik "is a British national born to Pakistani parents in London" in December 1973.

Omar Sheikh was reportedly a contemporary of England cricket captain Nasser Hussain at the private Forest School, in Snaresbrook, in the UK. (BBC Profile: Omar Saeed Sheikh)

Omar Sheik attended the London School of Economics (which reportedly has links to MI6).

"It is believed in some quarters that while Omar Sheikh was at the LSE he was recruited by the British intelligence agency MI-6," Musharraf wrote. "It is said that MI-6 persuaded him to take an active part in demonstrations against Serbian aggression in Bosnia and even sent him to Kosovo to join the jihad"

========

There's Something About Omar:
Truth, Lies, and The Legend of 9/11
by Chaim Kupferberg

http://www.globalresearch.ca , 21  October 2003

The URL of this article is: http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310A.html

        It was almost an afterthought.  On March 1, 2003, the War On Terror had finally served up the alleged paymaster of 9/11 - a shadowy Saudi by the name of Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi.  Yet his arrest just happened to coincide with the capture of a much bigger fish - the reported 9/11 mastermind himself, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - thus relegating Mustafa Ahmed to the footnote section of the "official" 9/11 Legend.  But there was another, more explosive side to this tale. Only seventeen months before, a former London schoolboy by the name of Omar Saeed Sheikh was first exposed as the 9/11 paymaster, acting under the authority of a Pakistani general who was in Washington D.C. on September 11, meeting with the very two lawmakers who would subsequently preside over the "official" 9/11 congressional inquiry.  Omar Saeed, as reported back then by CNN, was acting under the alias of...Mustafa Ahmed.  So where is Omar now?  Sitting in a Pakistani prison, awaiting his execution for the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl - while another man fills the shoes of his pseudonym.  What follows is a reconstruction of one of the most extensive disinformation campaigns in history, and the chronicle of a legend that may now shine a devastating spotlight on some of the cliques behind 9/11 - and the FBI Director covering the paper trails.

     

    "The hijackers left no paper trail," proclaimed FBI Director Robert Mueller on April 30, 2002.  "In our investigation, we have not uncovered a single piece of paper...that mentioned any aspect of the Sept. 11 plot."  Yet in the weeks immediately following September 11, Mueller and his FBI had left the public  with a very different impression - an impression that conjured the vision of truckloads of paper documents pointing any number of ways to the culpability of Osama Bin Laden for the events of 9/11.  For one, there was the infamous handwritten "checklist" found not only in hijacker Mohamed Atta's abandoned luggage, but also in the car rented in hijacker al-Hazmi's name, discovered at Dulles Airport, and which included lofty Arabic prayers alongside last minute reminders to bring "knives, your will, IDs, your passport, all your papers."  But more importantly, the treasure trove in al-Hazmi's glove compartment yielded a paper trail that led all the way to London - and to the arrest of a potentially major suspect.

    On September 30, 2001, as reported in the Telegraph by David Bamber, British prosecutor Arvinda Sambir announced that authorities had arrested Lotfi Raissi, whose name was found in al-Hazmi's rental.  A further search of Raissi's apartment had yielded up a video clip starring Raissi with alleged hijacker Hani Hanjour - all in all, another circumstantial slam-dunk in the snowballing case against al-Qaida.  Or was it?  For by April of 2002 - when Mueller made his "paper trail" declaration - Raissi would go free for want of evidence.  

    As we will shortly see, Raissi was being set up to play his part in a prearranged drama, one in which a definitive money trail leading to al-Qaida would be announced just in time for the October 7, 2001 launch into Afghanistan.  Yet a brief, almost innocuous, article in the October 9 Times of India would lay havoc to this plan, necessitating a massive cover-up and a search for an alternative smoking gun that would unveil itself before a skeptical world audience on December 13, 2001 as the Official Bin Laden Videotape Confession.

    An essential player in that original plan was Omar Saeed Sheikh (hereafter Omar Saeed), a 27 year-old London-born man of Pakistani parentage who had attended the London School of Economics before answering the call of militancy, heading off to Bosnia, and from there, to Pakistan, where he would make his "bones" in a 1994 kidnapping, serving time in an Indian prison until being bartered out for hostages in a 1999 airplane hijacking.  Packing a lifetime into the next two years, Omar Saeed caught the eye of the so-called militant faction of Pakistan's ISI (the Pakistani CIA), rounding out his curricular vitae by tinkering around with the al-Qaida computer network in Afghanistan.  

    Omar Saeed made his public post-9/11 debut on September 23, 2001, on the very same day that his pseudonym, Mustafa Ahmad, made its own post-9/11 debut through President Bush's Global Terrorist Executive Order, in which a "Shaykh Sai'id (aka Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad)" was mentioned as a financial operative in al-Qaida, among a list of 27 individuals and entities slated to have their assets frozen. On September 23, Nick Fielding of The Sunday Times reported: "British officials have now asked India for legal assistance in seeking the whereabouts of Omar [Saeed] Sheikh.  British security services confirmed this weekend that they wanted him for questioning."  

    A week later, on September 30, 2001, we found out why, when David Bamber of the Telegraph reported:  "Police also believe that ... Omar [Saeed] Sheikh, who is British, trained the terrorists in hijacking techniques." As Bamber implied, Omar Saeed was working in cahoots with Lotfi Raissi, who was just recently arrested and charged with training the hijacker pilots.  In other words, in less than three weeks after 9/11, authorities were closing in on Raissi and Omar Saeed, the alleged trainers of the alleged hijackers.

    Now all that remained was to furnish a "smoking gun" link to al-Qaida by way of a money trail, all in time for the planned October 7 invasion of Afghanistan. On the very day that the Telegraph outed Raissi and Omar Saeed as the 9/11 trainers, ABC News This Week announced that a $100,000 money trail had been traced in Florida from hijacker Atta to "people linked to Osama bin Laden."  

    The very next day, on October 1, Judith Miller of the New York Times reported that hijacker Atta received money from someone using the alias "Mustafa Ahmad".  Five days later, on October 6, Maria Ressa of CNN, quoting terrorism expert Magnus Ranstorp, officially unveiled Omar Saeed as the pseudonymous 9/11 money man: "He [Omar Saeed] is ... linked to the financial network feeding bin Laden's assets, so therefore he's quite an important person...because he transfers money between various operatives, and he's a node between al Qaeda and foot soldiers on the ground."  Ressa went on to report: "Because investigators have now determined that [Omar Saeed] and Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad [the pseudonym] are the same person, it provides another key link to bin Laden as the mastermind of the overall [9/11] plot."

    Two days later, on October 8, Ressa revisited the story, this time connecting Omar Saeed to an October 1 attack on the provincial legislature in Kashmir - an incident that led Pakistan and India closer to the brink.  October 8, incidentally, was also one of the very last times that CNN touched upon Omar Saeed - at least until he bobbed up a few months later, on February 6, as the FBI's main suspect in the kidnapping of Daniel Pearl.  Yet by then, CNN - and Maria Ressa - was stricken by a curious case of amnesia, neglecting to mention that Saeed was previously outed by them as the 9/11 bag-man.  Why this sudden silence?  And, more to the point, why did Omar Saeed virtually drop off CNN's radar after October 8?

    Perhaps the answer lies in an October 9 bombshell, courtesy of the Times of India:

        "While the Pakistani Inter Services Public Relations claimed that former ISI [Pakistani intelligence] director-general Lt-Gen Mahmud Ahmad sought retirement after being superseded on Monday, the truth is more shocking. Top sources confirmed here on Tuesday that the general lost his job because of the "evidence" India produced to show his links to one of the suicide bombers that wrecked the World Trade Center. The U.S. authorities sought his removal after confirming the fact that $100,000 were wired to WTC hijacker Mohammed Atta from Pakistan by [Omar Saeed] at the instance of General Mahmud [Ahmad]."  

    In short, the Times of India revealed that Omar Saeed was acting under the direct orders of the head of Pakistani intelligence and not Osama bin Laden.  That in itself could perhaps have been explained away, as it was widely acknowledged that Islamic elements in the ISI were sympathetic to the Taliban and their al-Qaida guests.  Yet tracing the "smoking gun" money trail to General Ahmad created an entirely new smoking gun that led straight back to Washington, D.C. - for General Ahmad had already been reported as having breakfast in the nation's capital with Senator Bob Graham and Representative Porter Goss on the morning of September 11 (Both Graham and Goss would go on to co-chair the joint Senate-House 9/11 inquiry).  In fact, as early as September 9 - two days before 9/11, for those who didn't notice - Karachi News had weighed in with the following observation:

        "ISI Chief Lt-Gen [Mahmud Ahmad's] week-long presence in Washington has triggered speculation about the agenda of his mysterious meetings at the Pentagon and National Security Council... What added interest to his visit is the history of such visits. Last time Ziauddin Butt, [General Ahmad's] predecessor, was here during Nawaz Sharif's government, the domestic politics turned topsy-turvy within days. That this is not the first visit by [General Ahmad] in the last three months shows the urgency of the ongoing parleys."

    If ever there was a paper trail leading to the 9/11conspirators, these articles provided the print-smeared paving.  Taken together, they would conjure up the following plausible scenario:  Omar Saeed, acting under the direction of General Ahmad and the ISI, had provided money and "training" (as reported in the Telegraph) to the hijackers while "false-flagging" himself to the hijackers as an operative of al-Qaida.  The General, on the other hand, may have represented himself to Omar Saeed as acting exclusively under ISI authority, when in fact he was acting under the direction of his American-Anglo handlers.  With Omar Saeed seeding the "legend" of a bona fide money trail leading back to bin Laden, the stage would then be set for Omar Saeed to take the fall as the main patsy providing the smoking gun of al-Qaida complicity for 9/11.  Yet at some point, this carefully enacted "legend" began to unravel once Indian intelligence was able to establish (or just mischievously leaked) Saeed's link with General Ahmad, forcing a reluctant FBI - or, alternatively, a cooperative element in the FBI outside of the hermetically compartmentalized loop - to go along and confirm the findings.

    Naturally, in the light of the Times of India's Oct. 9 bombshell, somebody would have to organize a prophylactic strategy of damage control.  Yet where the original money trail "legend" was carefully, even artfully, crafted, the efforts to perform a partial-birth abortion on it were piecemeal, ill-considered, and - most damaging of all- worked to highlight the participation of individual accessories in the cover-up campaign.

    A comprehensive cover-up strategy would entail four objectives: i) explaining General Ahmad's "sudden retirement"; ii) gradually minimizing the money trail story while subtly transforming it; iii) providing a new "smoking gun"; and iv) carving out an alternative "legend" for Omar Saeed while finding an alternative paymaster.  Of the four objectives, the last one would turn out to be the most convoluted.  

    Meanwhile, the mainstream media - except for a brief mention by the Wall Street Journal - would largely ignore the October 9 Times of India item.  General Ahmad's "sudden dismissal" was accounted for by TIME and The Washington Post as being due to his "pro-Taliban" loyalties - leaving out any mention of an al-Qaida or money trail connection.  With General Ahmad thus safely "out of sight", he was also presumably "out of mind."  Omar Saeed, on the other hand, represented a trickier problem, as the authorities and the mainstream media - CNN at least -  had already gone on record as fingering him as the 9/11 paymaster.  Moreover, Omar Saeed had originally been set up to be a major player in the overall 9/11 "legend".  

    As we will see, many of the players in this carefully plotted, decade-long "legend" - Ramzi Yousef, Mohamed Atta, Ramzi Binalshibh (or bin al-shibh), Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, Zacarias Moussaoui, and the paymaster role - were intricately interconnected in a web of activities and unfolding revelations.    With the definitive identification of a paymaster now put on hold, the full crystallization of the Official 9/11 Legend would also have to await a more opportune time.  In the short term, Omar Saeed would have to disappear, yet due to his prior exposure in the media, and in view of his deep involvement with many of the other players in the legend, his role in all this would ultimately have to be accounted for.  And so, Omar Saeed would need to be reintegrated back into the 9/11 picture by way of an alternative legend, most of which would play itself out after September 11.

    As for the formerly snowballing money trail story, post-October 9, it was gradually being ushered to a slow death of irrelevance, awaiting its temporary replacement with a new "smoking gun."  In the meantime, the "Mustafa Ahmad" pseudonym was being passed on to a new owner - or a number of alternative ones, depending on which media outlet was offering whichever version.  In some reports, the paymaster alias would be tagged to an Egyptian "Shayk Saiid".   In its November 11, 2001 issue, Newsweek bequeathed the alias to a 33 year-old Saudi named "Shaikh Saiid," who was apparently caught on surveillance video picking up a package in Dubai mailed by hijacker Mohammed Atta.  On December 18, 2001, the Associated Press added further details, revealing that "Shaikh Saiid" was also the alias for bin Laden's brother-in-law, Sa'd al-Sharif.  Both items, taken together, would mean that we would have an actual video of bin Laden's brother-in-law picking up a package from one of the hijackers - a smoking gun if ever there was one, and just one more example of the incredible carelessness by which these throwaway details were revealed as "evidence."  In any case, the original smoking gun - the money trail story - was officially supplanted earlier in that week, on December 13, 2001, with the worldwide release of the Official Bin Laden Videotape Confession.

    Now all that remained was to properly dispose of the Omar Saeed "legend."  Whether a new "legend" was being crafted for Saeed right after October 9, or considerably later, is a fact that may never be known with certainty.  What we do know, however, is that Saeed was later linked to a December 13, 2001 suicide attack on the Indian Parliament in addition to a January 22, 2002 attack on the American Cultural Center in Calcutta.

    In fact, January 22, 2002 was a key date for the plan to carve out a new "legend" for Omar Saeed.  As we will see, FBI Director Robert Mueller just happened to be on scene in India, awaiting his crucial role in the unfolding drama - just one day before Daniel Pearl disappeared off the streets of Karachi.

    Enter Daniel Pearl

    We may never know the true motivation that set Daniel Pearl on a quest that would ultimately lead to his grisly demise.  However, thanks to an invaluable article by Robert Sam Anson in the August 2002 issue of Vanity Fair, we do know which key player was involved in guiding him on his quest for knowledge.  

    Mansoor Ijaz is not a man widely known outside his circle, but his intimate connections run deep in Washington's power circles.  A counter-terror expert, a member of the Council On Foreign Relations, a Fox News analyst, as well as a business partner of former CIA Director James Woolsey, Ijaz is represented by the public relations firm of Benador Associates, whose client list reads like a "who's who" of the propaganda heavy-hitters who were pushing for a war in Iraq - Richard Perle (former Chairman of the Defense Policy Board), Woolsey (also a member of the Defense Policy Board), Iraqi scientist ( and chronicler of Saddam's weapons program) Khidir Khamza, former Washington Times publisher (and UPI chief) Arnaud De Borchgrave, anti-Saddam author Laurie Mylroie, Harvard professor/CIA associate Richard Pipes (mentor of Mylroie, and father of Daniel Pipes), and Frank Gaffney, president of the hard-right Center For Security Policy (of which Perle and Woolsey are on the advisory council).  

    The interlocking relationships of members of this clique - or "crew", in the parlance of organized crime - is indeed a testament to the power of networking, yet the astonishing scope of their most recent activities - both in the lead-up to and aftermath of 9/11 - is perhaps indicative of a more covertly sinister tint in the psychological makeup of some members of the political "power elite."

    Ijaz's frequent writing partner, James Woolsey, for example, was one of just 17 participants in a July 2001 bio-warfare exercise dubbed "Dark Winter," a simulation of a mass smallpox attack, co-sponsored by the ANSER Institute of Homeland Security and the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).  Among the other participants was Benador client Arnaud De Borchgrave and New York Times journalist Judith Miller, who had co-authored a book with Benador client Mylroie in the early '90's.  Mylroie's book - an attempt at linking Iraq to 9/11 - was released just weeks after September 11 with a foreword written by James Woolsey.  Around the same time, Judith Miller had just launched her own well-publicized book on the germ warfare threat - within a week or two of her own well-publicized role as one of the very few recipients of an "anthrax" mailing (which turned out not to be anthrax).  

    As for the anthrax threat, a major principal in the company that holds the exclusive license for the anthrax vaccine is former Chair of  the Joint Chiefs of Staff William Crowe, whose business associate in the consulting firm Global Options is - you guessed it - James Woolsey.  

    As for the present smallpox threat, the man charged with overseeing President Bush's mass vaccination policy was another "Dark Winter" alumnus, Jerry Hauer.  Hauer, a former director of Kroll Associates - the security firm at the helm when the Twin Towers fell - is also the man who personally pulled strings in order to get senior FBI official John O'Neill his job as head of security at the World Trade Center.  O'Neill, who had left a 30-year career in the FBI only two weeks before September 11, had perished in the rubble of the Twin Towers on his very first day at the post.  Incidentally, O'Neill just happened to have been the main FBI official in charge of investigating all things bin Laden.

    Given the above social contacts, from Daniel Pearl's point of view, Mansoor Ijaz was indeed the man to meet.  "He [Pearl] wanted me to introduce him to people who could open doors for him," explained Ijaz in Vanity Fair.  One of those doors opened to Khalid Khawaja, a former ISI agent whose militant credentials included a longstanding friendship with Osama bin Laden.  But Khawaja was a liberal militant, counting among his acquaintances both Ijaz and Woolsey, with whom he carried on a lengthy correspondence.  

    With Ijaz's letter of reference in hand, Pearl established contact with Khawaja in Pakistan.  As reported by Arshad Sharif in a February 14, 2002 item from Dawn, "Khawaja claimed that he introduced Mr. Pearl to his contacts and arranged interviews with Taliban diplomats and other people."  According to the "official" record of Pearl's journalistic quest, he was on the trail of Richard Reid, otherwise known as the "shoe bomber."  According to Anson, Pearl believed that Reid was a follower of Sheikh Mubarak Ali Shah Gilani, "a leader of an obscure Muslim militant group named Jamaat ul-Fuqra."

    As Khawaja spins the tale, when Pearl asked for an introduction to Gilani in early January, Khawaja's militant toes went cold.  With Khawaja now purportedly out of the picture, Pearl was left to scrounge up his own contacts.  Eventually, Pearl found a "connected" militant who went by the name of Chaudry Bashir - but who was, in actual fact, Omar Saeed clothed in yet another alias.  Or so that is the "official" version.  If true, our man Saeed had his terrorist appointment book just about crammed with militant activities at the time, for he was, according to Indian intelligence, intimately involved with the man who took responsibility for the terrorist attack in Calcutta on January 22, 2002 - just one day before Pearl's disappearance.  

    On that very day, a militant/gangster by the name of Aftab Ansari called in his claim of responsibility for the carnage.  As for his connection with Omar Saeed, here is how the Times of India reported it on January 22:

        "[Indian] CBI Director P C Sharma told visiting FBI Chief Robert S Mueller that Ansari, who claimed responsibility for [today's Calcutta] attack, had taken a ransom of Rs 37.5 million to free shoe baron Parthapratim Roy Burman through hawala channels to Dubai, CBI sources said.  Out of this amount, Omar [Saeed] ... had sent $100,000 to Atta through telegraphic transfer, CBI sources said."

    What was going on here?  Apparently, the January 22 Calcutta incident was the trigger for an update on the "legend" of 9/11 - and FBI Director Mueller was on scene to play his part in the unfolding drama.  Within hours of the January 22 attack, the Indian Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was circulating news that the main suspect in the Calcutta attack, Ansari, had sent money to Omar Saeed, who then sent it on to Mohamed Atta in preparation for the September 11 attacks. No mention was made of the previously reported involvement of the chief of Pakistani intelligence.  In fact, The Times of India would, within the next few weeks, back away from its October 9 article linking Omar Saeed to the Pakistani General - perhaps at the behest of Indian intelligence.  The 9/11 money, in the CBI's new version, came from an August 2001 kidnapping masterminded by Ansari and Asif Reza Khan.  Unfortunately, Khan was not around by this time to confirm it, as he had already been killed in what was believed to be a staged shootout with Indian police several weeks earlier.  

    The story at this point gets a bit murky, as it becomes difficult to distinguish fact from disinformation, but what is clear is the very real perception of a well-timed and coordinated set-up.  The next day - on January 23, 2002 - Daniel Pearl disappeared off the streets of Karachi, Pakistan after setting up an appointment to meet Omar Saeed, alias "Bashir", for the first time.  Meanwhile, on that very day, Aftab Ansari was arrested by UAE authorities at Dubai International Airport while attempting to board a plane bound for Islamabad.  Also on the very day of Pearl's disappearance, the Los Angeles Times reinstated Omar Saeed back into "mainstream" view by citing a report by India Today, which mentioned the new Saeed/Ansari/9/11 Money Trail connection.   The British Independent, on January 24, also gave voice to the Saeed revelations stemming from the Indian CBI, throwing in, for good measure, an extensive biography of Omar Saeed.  This was followed by a January 27 item in the Telegraph that also touched upon Saeed's link to the Calcutta attack.  

    Why was Omar Saeed suddenly being "resurrected" worldwide within hours of the January 22 attack, after being mostly forgotten after October 9?  It should be pointed out that Saeed's purported links to the Pearl kidnapping were not yet  "known" until February 5, 2002.  In that light, Robert Mueller's subsequent travel itinerary bears closer scrutiny.  As reported by the Los Angeles Times on January 23, "FBI Director Mueller said Tuesday (i.e. January 22) that Indian authorities provided leads in the search for Al Qaeda members and cells, based on arrests in India."  There was no word from Mueller, however, on his reported discussions with the CBI Chief concerning the  9/11 money trail.  

    The very next day - January 23 - Mueller was in Pakistan, just in time for the Pearl kidnapping by Omar Saeed.  Of course, Mueller could not have known by then that the person who was mentioned to him the day before as being the 9/11 paymaster would be involved in the Pearl kidnapping the very next day.  One might even chalk it up to coincidence - or maybe not.  On January 24, Mueller reportedly took up the matter of Omar Saeed with Pakistan President Musharraf.  Was he discussing CBI Chief Sharma's revelations about Omar Saeed and the 9/11 money trail?  As later revealed by an "anonymous" Bush administration official, Mueller was formally requesting the extradition of Omar Saeed - for a 1994  kidnapping of an American tourist.  

    What, according to the "mainstream" media, prompted this sudden, rather overdue, request?  According to the February 24, 2002 issue of Newsweek, Saeed was "secretly" indicted back in November 2001 for that obscure kidnapping.  As reported by CNN on February 28, 2002:  "Justice Department officials won't say what prompted that indictment, which came more than six years after the incident."   It also came several weeks after Saeed was first outed as the 9/11 paymaster.  

    The possibility also exists that the November 2001 "secret" indictment was a late February fiction meant to explain Mueller's sudden interest in Omar Saeed.  For good measure, timed with the Newsweek revelation, Wendy Chamberlin, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, revealed to CBS News that she had preceded Mueller's request with an informal approach to Musharraf concerning Saeed's extradition a few months before.  The reader would be cautioned as to drawing any firm conclusions as to the true nature of the "secret" November indictment.  Instead, one should focus on the compelling circumstantial evidence of a disinformation campaign that appears to be organized around a number of conveniently timed set-ups.  According to CNN, Mueller was also the one who first informed Musharraf of the Pearl kidnapping.  So, to recap: only two days after the Times of India reported Mueller's discussions with the CBI concerning the Omar Saeed link to 9/11, Mueller reportedly discussed Omar Saeed only in connection with an obscure 1994 kidnapping, while broaching a new kidnapping that occurred the day before, which, in a matter of weeks, would publicly be linked to...Omar Saeed.  

    Incidentally, the FBI also happened to be instrumental in coordinating Saeed's eventual capture as the Pearl kidnap mastermind.   As the "official" story had it soon after Saeed's "official" arrest on February 12, the case was solved when the authorities successfully traced a series of e-mails back to one of Saeed's alleged accomplices, who then confessed that he was only acting under Saeed's orders. The government's case, as reported by Zarar Khan of the Associated Press on July 1, 2002, "rests heavily on technical FBI evidence, which traced the e-mails to fellow defendant Fahad Naseem."

    Mueller, incidentally, also played a crucial role in arranging for the deportation of Aftab Ansari from the UAE to India.  Ansari, by reason of the Calcutta bombing,  was delivered to Indian custody on February 9, just three days before Omar Saeed was "officially" arrested for the Pearl kidnapping.  In short, these two purported 9/11 partners had been arrested separately in the same week of February for crimes they had separately committed in the same week of January.

    Meanwhile, Daniel Pearl's chaperone, the "militant" Khalid Khawaja, was beginning to feel the heat due to his involvement in managing Pearl's appointment book.  For a presumed partisan of bin Laden, Khawaja seemed to be unduly concerned about the bad press that Pearl's disappearance was garnering him.  According to a February 15, 2002 article in Dawn by Arshad Sharif: " Khawaja said it was on the intervention of [Mansoor] Ijaz that Newsweek toned down its article which was allegedly raising an accusing finger on him."  In a typical example of post-9/11 news management, Khawaja - presumed friend of Osama bin Laden - shared his correspondence from editor Gretel Kovach of Newsweek:

        "If it is of any consolation, you may have read in the e-mails I sent Mansoor that the Newsweek article would have been much stronger in pointing the finger at you as the person who led Danny into trouble.  Thankfully, I spoke with Mansoor and was able to offer a contrary account - that you refused Danny's request, and that others tricked him into thinking he could meet Gilani."

    Mansoor Ijaz - fellow propagandist and business partner of the ubiquitous James Woolsey - wasn't exactly a disinterested party in the matter, for if it was Khawaja who had led Pearl to his ultimate fate, so, too, by association, would suspicion lie with Ijaz, who had sent Pearl on to Khawaja.

    Meanwhile, Omar Saeed appeared to be at the very broiling geo-political center of the Pakistan-India stand-off.  With Indian authorities publicly highlighting Omar Saeed as the poster boy of Pakistani terrorism,  using him as a cudgel to prod the reluctant Americans into action against the Pakistani ISI,  one could read Mueller's trip to the region as an effort to broker the competing interests of these incompatible allies in the so-called War on Terror.  Publicly, Mueller was in India on January 22 as part of a U.S.-Indo Working Group on Counter-Terrorism.  But as we do not have access to the minutes of those meetings, we might surmise that, behind closed doors, Mueller was negotiating with his Indian counterparts the final dispensation of Omar Saeed within the overall 9/11 Legend.  Not that negotiations were going particularly smoothly - as evidenced by the upsurge in daring attacks against Indian interests in the few months previous.  Yet it seems that a quid-pro-quo had been worked out along the following lines:  the Indian authorities would excise the ISI Chief from their version of 9/11 and instead splice in a less incriminating "gangster" from Dubai as the partner of paymaster Omar Saeed.  In return, the Americans would redouble their efforts in moving against terror groups based out of Pakistan.  

    Mueller, for his part, would deal with this new version of the Omar Saeed/Money Trail Story in the same manner that he dealt with the older version - by ignoring it.  With the Indian CBI now circulating  this new version of the Omar Saeed/ Money Trail Story to various mainstream Western newspapers in the wake of the January 22 Calcutta attack, Mueller would publicly go on record as reserving judgment as to the true culprits and motives behind that incident - while assisting India behind-the-scenes in arranging for the deportation and arrest of Aftab Ansari.  And while the Indian press was widely presenting the Calcutta attack as an Ansari/ISI production, according to the January 23, 2002 Indian Express, the Indian government was backing down on pushing an ISI link to Calcutta after consultation with the U.S. government.  Why the apparent U.S. squeamishness concerning the ISI in regards to the Calcutta attack?  Perhaps due to its proximity to the latest Omar Saeed/Ansari/Money Trail Story being marketed by the Indians - for if the American aim was to gradually erase Omar Saeed from the 9/11 paymaster role and place him in a post-9/11 context,  Omar Saeed would have to come by his ISI connections through a different route, one that would in fact distance him from his reported role on September 11.  In other words, the Americans would need to muddy the waters over Omar Saeed and the role of the 9/11 paymaster.  

    It wouldn't be easy.  As reported by Paul Sperry of WorldNetDaily on January 30, 2002 (i.e. one week before Omar Saeed was first outed as a suspect in the Pearl kidnapping):

    "India's Central Bureau of  Investigation is turning up evidence that is proving inconvenient for the Bush administration as it tries to maintain its shaky alliance with Pakistan.  As administration officials, led by State Secretary Colin Powell, praise Pakistan for its help in the war on terrorism, FBI agents responding to Indian leads are quietly investigating Pakistan-based terrorist groups connected to al-Qaida and the Sept. 11 hijacking."

    In other words, India was apparently putting the screws to the Americans.  If the Americans, for purely pragmatic reasons, had opted to cozy up to the Musharraf regime, India needed insurance to hedge against the possibility that its strategic interests would be harmed through this likely temporary alliance.  In that context, it would be somewhat naive to assume that India just happened to "discover" the Omar Saeed/ ISI Chief/ 9/11 connection through one of those ubiquitous cell phone "intercepts"  - for as early as September 23, 2001, the British government was reported as seeking India's help in locating Omar Saeed.  Moreover, in view of the fact that the Mustafa Ahmad paymaster alias also made its debut on that very day through Bush's Global Terrorist Executive Order, there is perhaps another plausible explanation for India's apparent obsession with Omar Saeed and his activities.  

    Flashback:  Assembling The Legend

    As we shall see, the various elements of the 9/11 Legend were assembled with the help of a number of international players.  Through the Pakistani ISI (an organization, in fact, with close historical ties to the CIA and British intelligence), the Taliban were armed and installed as the resident overlords of Afghanistan.  Under the watchful eye of German intelligence, lead hijacker Mohamed Atta would set up his Hamburg "cell" of conspirators, sharing a flat with senior al-Qaida operative Ramzi Binalshibh.  Through French authorities, particularly with the assistance of Judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere (a friend of John O'Neill), Zacarias Moussaoui (arrested August 2001) and  senior Al-Qaida leader Abu Zubaydah (the first "big fish" captured in March 2002) would work their way into the official 9/11 Legend.  By way of Spanish Police Chief Juan Cotino (who was also a senior figure in Europol), other al-Qaida cells were discovered as further proof of bin Laden's global reach.  In fact, as the 9/11 Legend would have it, Mohamed Atta had rendezvoused with Ramzi Binalshibh in Spain sometime in July 2001, where the two presumably made final preparations for September 11.  Around the same time, the FBI's lead point man on al-Qaida, John O'Neill, was in Madrid to discuss counter-terror issues with Police Chief Cotino.  Thereafter, O'Neill made his last public appearance (before his retirement the next month) at a counter-terror conference held at a three-star hotel in the Spanish resort town of Salou - coincidentally, only a few days before Mohammed Atta had checked into the very same hotel in his last international trip before September 11 (a curious fact reported in John Miller's book  "The Cell").  Atta's previous trip to Madrid had been in January 2001, within days of the very first Europol Conference On Terrorism, also held in Madrid.

    Finally, the United Kingdom served as a major transit point, educational center, and source of "evidence" pointing to the hijackers and various al-Qaida operatives - most notably, Omar Saeed, Zacarias Moussaoui, and Richard Reid, the so-called "shoe bomber."  Thus, the very countries that were so prominent in furnishing the various elements of the 9/11 Legend - "burnishing" it with a globalized gloss - also happened to be the same countries that served as senior partners in the War On Terror.  

    The fact that  France and Germany have since headed up opposition to the War In Iraq should not be taken as an irreconcilable contradiction in this regard.  Rather, just the opposite.  As we shall see, a strategy to cast doubt on the War In Iraq - fuelled by elements in the CIA and some of the more vociferous supporters of the War On Terror - has actually worked to strengthen the credibility of the overall 9/11 Legend.  In counter-point to that strategy lies a fall-back option that "localizes" any potential conspiracy to a "rogue" clique of "hawks" holding President Bush in their ideological sway - the markedly Jewish and pro-Israeli neo-conservatives, an apparent CIA "cut-out" helmed by Richard Mellon Scaife during the Clinton years, then by Richard Cheney in the early months after 9/11 before he mostly disappeared from public view along with his defibrillator, and most famously now, by Richard Perle (a product of the RAND Corporation).  

    As I argued previously in The Propaganda Preparation For 9/11, the Saudis, Pakistanis, and Israelis were set up as the primary alternate foreign patsies to divert attention from the far more plausible (and obvious) involvement of the U.S./U.K./E.U., the very alliance which now spearheads the War On Terror even as it choreographs the Official 9/11 Legend.  As we shall see, with the relatively recent prominence of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as 9/11 mastermind, Iraq now takes its place as a plausible patsy (particularly since Colin Powell's introduction of a new al-Qaeda leader by the name of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Baghdad-based Palestinian whose legend and motives will no doubt grow out of the recently completed War In Iraq).  With regard to the Saudis, their actual involvement was more indirect - as they financed the various Pakistani madrassas (Muslim yeshivas) that served as a farming system for the hordes of wild-eyed Wahhabi idealists looking to set up camp in Afghanistan.   Still, their domination of the Middle East media served to give an impression - to Western eyes - that bin Laden was more intimately known among the Arab/Muslim masses than he was by an insular clique in the Western security establishment.  

    Heading up that clique was Richard A. Clarke, who joined the National Security Council under the first President Bush, and stayed there under Clinton.  As reported by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, "In the web of federal agencies concerned with terror, Clarke was the spider."  Tim Weiner of the New York Times wrote of Clarke on February 1, 1999:  "He has placed proteges in key diplomatic and intelligence positions, creating a network of  loyalty and solidifying his power."  

    It was Clarke who, together with John O'Neill, "discovered" bin Laden as a global terrorist mastermind.  Here, as reported by Lawrence Wright in The New Yorker, was Clarke's version of his discovery:  

    "We'd [O'Neill and I] see CIA reports that referred to 'financier Osama bin Laden' and we'd ask ourselves, 'Who the hell is he?'  The more we drilled down, the more we realized he was not just a financier - he was the leader.  John said, 'We've got to get this guy.  He's building a network.  Everything leads back to him.'  Gradually the CIA came along with us."

    Presumably, Clarke had help in marketing bin Laden - for bin Laden himself would soon enough make his high profile media debut as the declared enemy of American interests the world over, thereby giving the world's only superpower a plausibly sophisticated foe who would overshadow the efforts of one Muslim fanatic (Ramzi Yousef, World Trade Center '93) or one right-wing nutcase (Timothy McVeigh, Oklahoma '95).  Meanwhile, the gregarious John O'Neill would make the global rounds, liaising with various counterparts as he shadowed the presumed activities of Osama bin Laden.  In other words, if one were theoretically to posit the type of operatives who would be most suited to running a highly compartmentalized "op" to develop a global legend of Osama bin Laden, one could find no more conveniently placed men than Richard Clarke and John O'Neill.  Where Clarke would manage the national security rank-and-file through his network of loyalists, O'Neill would be the globetrotter, coordinating the unfolding legend through his counterparts in various countries.  

    In short, Clarke and O'Neill would theoretically be conducting their activities in "plain sight."  Under the cover of counter-terrorism,  O'Neill would be building a terror legend fit for the New World Order - in the same manner that Oliver North in the '80s employed the cover of counter-terrorism to conduct, on behalf of Vice-President Bush,  the illegal arms dealing operations popularly known as Iran-Contra (for which North took a decidedly light rap as the designated patsy).  The main difference would be that where North would eventually be tagged as the moron of Iran-Contra, O'Neill would take his place as the martyr of 9/11.  

    In the few months leading up to September 11, O'Neill - for the first time in his 30-year career with the FBI - would make the headlines in two separate scandals.  The first, reported in July 2001, concerned O'Neill's dispute with Ambassador Barbara Bodine in Yemen, where O'Neill was reportedly pursuing al-Qaida links to the U.S.S. Cole bombing.  As the story had it, O'Neill was too much the cowboy for Bodine's tastes, and so she summarily banned him from returning to Yemen.  The second scandal, reported in August 2001, concerned a briefcase of classified documents that O'Neill had misplaced during a convention in Tampa.  Considering the resolution of the latter scandal - the documents were found, "untouched," a couple hours later - it seemed much ado about nothing.  Yet in the light of O'Neill's subsequent death as head of security for the World Trade Center on September 11, the scandals began to take on a more suspicious tint.  Was O'Neill digging too deep?  A maverick who stepped on too many feet in his efforts to bulldog his way through the hierarchy?  Put bluntly, had the maverick been taken down a notch by a bloated bureaucracy beholden to a "cover-your-ass" ethic?  As Richard Clarke, Jerry Hauer, John Miller, Chris Isham, and O'Neill's friends/colleagues at Kroll Associates would spin it, O'Neill's was the lone voice shouting in the wilderness, warning all who would listen about the approaching bin Laden threat before falling himself, "ironically", at the hands of bin Laden.  

    It was an ingenious cover story - for if O'Neill was a crucial operative in assembling the al-Qaida elements that fed into the 9/11 Legend, then O'Neill's crystallized role as official 9/11 martyr would forever obscure the trail to September 11, and, by extension, leave his most intimate comrades and contacts out of the suspect category.  In short, it would be like reconstructing the murder of Nicole Simpson without O.J. in the tale.  With O'Neill cast as martyr, 9/11 critics would now be left with a mishmash of innuendos and bits and pieces of shadowy conspiracies:  Israeli spy rings that trail off into the ether of Fox News; passenger lists with missing hijackers; and abandoned "put" options.   If the shadowy conspiracy had a face, it was in the image of either Dick Cheney or Richard Perle.  But then again, who marketed them as the latest powers behind the throne? Where were the folks who brought us BCCI, Iran-Contra, and the Warren Commission?  Where were James Baker, Zbigniew Brzezinski, David Rockefeller, Kissinger?

    Assembling The 9/11 Counter-Legends (or, Stacking Your Patsies)

    The events of September 11 gave birth to three parallel threads - or counter-legends - pointing the way to the culpability of three possible foreign suspects, or patsies - namely, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel.  Of the three, the Saudis were the patsies of choice for the mainstream "critics", who were a motley assortment of neo-cons, FBI investigators, or "retired" national security types opposed to the war in Iraq.  The Pakistan/ISI thread to 9/11 flared up most noticeably in the events surrounding the death of Daniel Pearl and the alleged involvement of Omar Saeed Sheikh - events which were used, in fact, to smother the Pakistani/ISI connection to the 9/11 money trail.  As regards Israel, the most radical opponents of the War On Terror were nursed on the twin threads of an Israeli spy ring and a neo-con cabal supposedly at the helm of the Bush Administration.  

    It was not by accident that these three countries were chosen to play the role of second-tier patsies - for each of them contained insular cliques of operatives which had played seminal roles in the covert arms and drug trade - in cahoots with their more senior Anglo-American handlers - throughout the Reagan-Bush years.  Moreover, these countries would make useful patsies for the very reason that they were essentially outside the "established" - i.e. Euro-American - ring of nations.  In other words, if insular cliques of criminal operatives were to be ferreted out of Germany, France, or Italy, no one would think to brand these nations wholesale with the mark of Cain.  The same could not be said of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Israel, whose very security - physical, political, and economic - would be staked to the publicized activities of their own respective political/criminal cliques.  

    Moreover, much of the political and corporate elites within these countries were integrally networked with their American counterparts - indeed, largely subservient to them - to such a degree that they would also serve as useful proxies in building their own counter-legends under Anglo-Euro-American supervision.  In the early stages of  the 9/11 Legend, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were employed as the central bases for building up a terrorist home front within the borders of Afghanistan.  As for Israel - despite its aforementioned spy ring and its supposedly allied neo-con "cabal" - its most direct and public contribution to the 9/11 Legend in fact occurred after 9/11, with the November 2002 coordinated attack on an Israeli-owned hotel and airliner in Kenya - an attack for which Israeli investigators now marshaled evidence as proof of Osama bin Laden's opening shot against the State of Israel (which was more likely Israel's "buy-in" in return for a promised attack on the Saddam Hussein regime).

    Thus, evidence could be amassed to cast aspersions on the activities of each of these three countries, depending on the intended audience.  On another level, political elites within these countries could be assured that any aspersions would be relegated to insular "rogue" cliques.  In the case of Saudi Arabia, a few princes of the Saudi royal family were thus eliminated within days of one another in 2002.  In the case of Pakistan, "rogue" elements within the ISI were publicly purged in the months after 9/11.  Yet in the case of Israel, its apparent "buy-in" through the 2002 Kenya attack served to strengthen, rather than weaken, the thread connecting Israel as a possible 9/11 culprit.  If, in the context of this article, this would appear to be a short-sighted strategy by Israeli political elites, one can only surmise that these elites were blinded -  or assured - by an apparent post-9/11 geo-strategic shift in favor of Israeli interests (i.e. an attack on Iraq) in conjunction with a publicly affirmed surge in influence among its supposed neo-con allies.  

    With three alternative counter-legends in place to co-exist with the Official (i.e. mainstream) 9/11 Legend, the stage was thereby set to muddy the real trail leading to the events of September 11.  With the participation of a global network of well-connected spinmeisters - both passive and active - each of the 9/11 threads could thus be nurtured through a series of carefully calibrated revelations.

    Of all the 9/11 spinmeisters, one of the most effective - and therefore damaging - was Jean-Charles Brisard, co-author with Guillaume Dasquie of  The Forbidden Truth.  Brisard burst on to the mainstream scene shortly after September 11 as one of the first "credible" critics of 9/11, weaving a trail of seemingly incriminating red herrings that will, in all probability, tie up a number of otherwise industrious conspiracy researchers for decades.  In Brisard and Dasquie's version of 9/11, the main protectors of al-Qaida were the Saudis, who in turn were protected by greedy oil interests which sought - through the State Department - to obstruct any investigations that might unsettle their Saudi business associates.  To nail down the point, Brisard recounted his summer 2001 meeting with John O'Neill, in which a frustrated, scandal-ridden O'Neill purportedly confided to Brisard that the "answer" to the al-Qaida riddle lay in Saudi Arabia.  For good measure, Brisard had the well-timed implosion of Enron as a backdrop for his revelation, implicating this now-dead shell of a corporation in a stubborn push for an oil pipeline through Afghanistan (though senior Enron exec - and CIA offspring - Frank Wisner, Jr., was, as it happens, also one of the 17 elite "players" in the aforementioned "Dark Winter" exercise).

    Through Brisard (in addition to Pakistani Foreign Minister Niaz Naik), we learned that the U.S. had made plans as early as June of 2001  to invade Afghanistan by October of that year.  During that summer, as Brisard chronicled it, a number of nations - including Iran, Russia, and India - got together for a four-day conference in Berlin, where the dispute with the Taliban was broached by U.S. diplomats.  The U.S. demanded that the Taliban hand over bin Laden (in addition to negotiating for pipeline rights).  Otherwise, the Americans threatened to blanket Afghanistan with "a carpet of bombs."  

    Brisard's initial theory, then, was that this threat prompted bin Laden to launch a pre-emptive attack against the very nation that was now placing him in imminent peril.  Brisard also seemed to implicate Bush, Sr. by way of his Carlyle Group interests.  But in the end, as Brisard essentially kept bin Laden in place as the sole 9/11 culprit, the aspersions cast on the Bushes, the State Department, "oil interests", et al, would not amount to much - at least from a legal standpoint.  At most, these parties could be judged as too blinded by greed to recognize - and pre-empt - the very real threat from al-Qaida.  However you clothed Brisard's revelations, the "official" 9/11 Legend remained in place.  Al-Qaida was still the defendant (albeit with a new excuse), O'Neill was still a martyr (albeit with a new Saudi gripe), and the Saudis were still suspicious (albeit with possibly a new gripe against Brisard).  Brisard, incidentally, also happened to have written - for French intelligence - the first comprehensive report on the financial structure of al-Qaida, a copy of which was furnished to the Bush administration.  Thus do national security types and their 9/11 critics have a deeper understanding of the 9/11 Legend courtesy of the efforts of Jean-Charles Brisard.

    Brisard's co-author, Guillaume Dasquie, also comes by his own intelligence connections, by way of his role as editor of  Intelligence Online.  It was through Dasquie's efforts that Intelligence Online, in March 2002, announced that it had come into possession of a 61-page "secret" DEA report on a large Israeli spy ring of "art students" who were casing federal buildings several months before September 11.  The "leaking" of this document, in conjunction with Carl Cameron's December 2001 Fox News report on the spy ring, ignited an online firestorm among 9/11 critics - pointing the way, for some, to the Israelis as the main operative agents behind September 11.  

    Yet, as we shall see, in the campaign to paint Israel as the main suspect, here was a case of  mostly right wing sources doling out the goods for largely left wing consumption (with the obvious exception of Justin Raimondo, a political supporter of, and former speechwriter for, Pat Buchanan).  Thus, while the likes of Stephen Emerson, Daniel Pipes, and John Loftus were doing the lecture circuit at Jewish Community Centers across North America, regaling this influential community with insinuations of  possible Saudi and/or Iraqi involvement in 9/11, a more covert - and subtle - plan was afoot to plant the seeds of a new Jewish neocon/Zionist conspiracy among the left wing (i.e. the traditional foothold of the bulk of the American Jewish community).  

    This relatively recent campaign to subvert the left with visions of a Jewish neocon/Zionist conspiracy dovetailed nicely with a more longstanding covert campaign - dating back more than thirty years - to build up a small but powerful right wing contingent of Jews to wean the rest from their knee-jerk liberalism (and thereby sap the strength and vigor of the traditional Democrat wing).  The species of the Jewish "neo" conservative is best represented by Irving Kristol, a self-admitted former Trotskyite who had been a member of the "left-wing" Congress of Cultural Freedom (later exposed as a CIA front) before making a "sudden" right turn in the late sixties, bringing along with him a few other like-minded "disillusioned" Jews from CIA-funded "leftist" groups.  The typical neo-conservative was "neo" in the sense that he would continue to hold liberal social values while espousing hard right (i.e. pro-corporate) economic views and a hawkish foreign policy - pretty much the course that American society has taken in the thirty-odd years since Kristol made his ideological "shift."  

    Though the history is far more complex and detailed than indicated above, the crux of the point is this: in order to neutralize the influential American Jewish community on the subject of civil rights and domestic dissent (where they historically predominated), it was not sufficient only to wean the Jews from the left, but to turn the left against the Jews by now slurring them as right wing, Zionist "imperialists" (best exemplified by Richard Perle, who is actually more a product of the national security community than of the Jewish community).

    In concert with this strategy was a plan - also dating back more than thirty years - to wean the South from the Democrats by promoting a fundamentalist Christianity that grew in counter-point to the overall loosening social values.  The typical fundamentalist Christian Republican would hold conservative social views while espousing  hard right (i.e. pro-corporate) economic views and a hawkish foreign policy (best exemplified by John Ashcroft, who is actually more a product of a deeply cynical political community than of the community of belief).

    With that background in mind, we may now touch upon the national security/conservative clique which has furnished most of the information concerning Israeli perfidy and 9/11.  For our purposes, the story begins on May 7, 1997, when Nora Boustany of The Washington Post first broached the existence of Mega, a suspected code name for a suspected Israeli mole within the upper echelons of the Clinton government.  As reported by Boustany,  the National Security Agency had intercepted a request from a Mossad operative to view a diplomatic letter from Yasser Arafat.  When the operative was heard to ask his superior for the assistance of  someone or something called Mega, he received the reply, "We don't use Mega for this."  

    The story, in fact, broke on the very day when South Korean spy Robert C. Kim was scheduled to deliver a guilty plea after a plea bargain - a similar bargain that was, in fact, dishonored in the case of convicted Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard in the mid-80's.  Kim, like Pollard, had worked in the Office of  Naval Intelligence, though Pollard had worked in the counter-terrorism section.  A week before the Mega story broke - on April 30, 1997 - Pollard had petitioned the Israeli High Court to compel the Israeli government to reveal what it knew about his case.  If a battle was brewing between Pollard supporters (Likud/ neocon elements) and opponents (the Bush/ Baker clique/ Woolsey/the national intelligence apparatus), the May 7 Mega leak by way of the National Security Agency seemed to head it off, publicly raising the specter of yet another Israeli mole.  And then the story ultimately went cold, with no official resolution and - most crucially - no hard details by which to flesh out this possible mole hunt.

    Yet Jeffrey Steinberg of Lyndon LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review has attempted to draw a line between this morsel of an item and a Mega Group that was mentioned by Lisa Miller in the Wall Street Journal on May 4, 1998.  In Steinberg's telling, the Mega Group is, in fact, the shadowy Mega from the Boustany article.  As Steinberg put it, the Mega Group - a select group of Jewish billionaires including Bronfman, Steinhardt, Spielberg, Tisch, and others - had come together to influence U.S. security policy toward Israel.  Yet that was a disingenous - and I dare say, dishonest - reading of the Miller article.  In other words - and this was very clear from the Miller article - their main concern was assimilation and philanthropy, not Israeli national security issues, as Steinberg had reported.   But Steinberg's technique was all too typical - mischievously weaving two totally disconnected items so as to give the impression that he was uncovering bona fide evidence of a fully known Jewish/Israeli conspiracy.  

    Yet taking the thread of a burgeoning Israeli spy conspiracy further, in May 2000,  J. Michael Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez of Insight magazine (the sister publication of the ultra-right wing Washington Times, which is in turn owned by the Moonies) broke the story that the Israelis had possibly compromised U.S. government phone lines, giving them access to sensitive information.  Carl Cameron of Fox News followed this up on May 5, 2000 by reporting on the investigation into the Israeli-founded company AMDOCS, describing "an alleged penetration of U.S. government phone systems."  

    This thread was also taken up by Gordon Thomas, the MI5 (British intelligence) connected editor of the website Globe-Intel.  Thomas, in his book, Gideon's Spies, broached the subject of the Israeli infiltration of the Clinton White House by way of the Mega mole.   He also had alleged that the Mossad had a possible role in the death of Princess Diana; that the Mossad tapped Monica Lewinsky's phone in order to pick up her conversations with President Clinton; and that the Israelis stole the sophisticated PROMIS software, which eventually ended up in the possession of Osama bin Laden.  Incidentally, Gordon Thomas holds himself out as a friend and intimate confidant of Mossad insiders.  We shall return to Thomas shortly, for he - like Brisard and Dasquie - has also played a significant part in lining up new alternate 9/11 suspects (most recently China, in his book Seeds of Fire).

    Picking up the thread, in March 2001 - significantly, several months before September 11 - the U.S. National Counterintelligence Center sent out an advisory for federal employees to be aware that a number of young Israelis were approaching federal agents at their offices and at their residences throughout the country, passing themselves off as art students looking to sell their work - but more peculiarly, identifying themselves as Israeli art students, thereby "red-flagging" themselves for the benefit of the National Counterintelligence Center.  A few months after September 11, Carl Cameron - in December of 2001 - once more visited the issue of Israeli penetration, this time naming a second Israeli company, Comverse Infosys, as having access to nearly all wiretaps placed by U.S. law enforcement.  As part of a four-part series for Fox News, Cameron also cited a "secret" DEA report that chronicled the actions of the aforementioned Israeli "art student" spy ring.  Soon after a transcript of Cameron's report was uploaded on the Fox News website, it was taken offline and purged from the archives - a presumed cover-up that actually raised far more suspicions over Israeli/Jewish influence than the report itself.  

    Perhaps that was the intended effect - as the purpose would be to "red flag" this item for an "alternative" online audience, not for the mainstream couch potatoes who were wedded to the Official 9/11 Legend in any case.  Was Cameron simply a dedicated journalist who was muzzled by his conservative, pro-Israeli, employers at Fox?  Or was he rather a passive disinformation asset, coyly nursing the Israeli thread when told to do so?  On May 13, 2002, with government warnings of a follow-up terrorist attack seeding the media zeitgeist, Cameron red-flagged  the Israelis once more, this time reporting that a rental truck with traces of TNT was pulled over near an army base in the State of Washington.  Once again, suspicious Israelis were discovered as occupants, and once again, the news suspiciously disappeared from the airwaves.  

    There was a curious parallel to the manner by which various Israelis tended to be "pulled over" in the Israeli/9/11 Counter-Legend as opposed to the manner by which various al-Qaida operatives tended to incriminate themselves through those fortuitous cell phone and email "intercepts" in the al-Qaida/9/11 Legend.  On June 23, 2002, ABC News picked up the earlier story of five "suspicious" Israelis celebrating on the roof of their van in the wake of September 11.  When the police had pulled them over and searched the contents of the van, sure enough, they found...box cutters.  And just as sure enough, this story also "suspiciously" vanished without a follow-up.  It is also a curious fact that former CIA counterterror chief/ABC News consultant Vincent Cannistraro lent his own spin on that report.  As I had pointed out in The Propaganda Preparation For 9/11, and as I will show further in this article, Cannistraro has "spun" a great deal of information on the 9/11 Legend.

    While the spy ring story has been neglected by much of the mainstream media, it nevertheless remains in the background, ready to be "mainstreamed" if or when the "official" 9/11 Legend begins to show cracks (or if the resident Israeli government proves to be troublesome).  As I have poin

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Another article on  Benador Associates the group of Jews that likely engineered the Anthrax attacks and helped to plant lies about 9/11.

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Benador Associates

Founded around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by Eleana Benador, Benador Associates is a speakers bureau-cum-public relations firm whose core clientele consisted of neoconservatives and other proponents of an aggressive "war on terror." Among the firm's more well known speakers have been Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, and former CIA director James Woolsey.

Benador (who sometimes spells her first name "Eliana"), announced in 2007 that Benador Associates would be scaled back in "winter 2007" so that she could focus her efforts on a new endeavor, Benador Public Relations. Benador Associates " will become an independent intellectual platform that will continue posting writings by American and Western thinkers as well as thinkers and writers from other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Asia, Southeast Asia, etc., while at the same time it will continue to facilitate the access to experts associated in one way or another with Benador Associates" (PR Newswire, November 19, 2007).

In a 2006 expose about Benador, a Swiss-American originally from Peru who had served as director of Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum, the New York-based magazine Bidoun reported: "Founded, with what Mrs. Benador calls 'serendipity,' on September 10, 2001, Benador Associates has ridden the rising demand for such strident voices. If you read something that advocates regime change in the New York Post, or if you see a 'political adviser' on Fox News suggesting that Israel hasn't gone far enough in its attacks on Hizbullah, there's a good possibility that the appearance has been engineered by Mrs. Benador. She arranges speaking events for her clients, places articles in newspapers for them, and helps them address problems with their public image. Which is good for them, as Mrs. Benador's fifty-plus clients are hardly a lovable bunch. Benador Associates' first member was the late A.M. Rosenthal, an executive editor at the New York Times, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who, in the wake of the attacks on September 11, called for the bombing of the capital cities of Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Sudan."

Other commentators have remarked on Eleana Benador's important role in promoting neoconservatives. Wrote Jim Lobe of the Inter Press Service (Asia Times, August 15, 2003): "When historians look back on the United States war in Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a small group of mainly neoconservative analysts and activists outside the administration were able to shape the U.S. 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 neoconservatives 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."

Indeed, in a 2007 press release Benador characterized herself and her firm thusly: "Ms. Benador has been the mastermind behind Benador Associates, which became the centerpiece of the neoconservative movement in the United States and the West in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11" (see "Announcing the Creation ...," Benador Public Relations).

Benador Associates' expert speakers have included Max Boot, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Hillel Fradkin, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Pipes, Dennis Prager, Paul Vallely, and Meyrav Wurmser. One controversial Benador client was Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who fled to the United States in the early 1990s, where he wrote a book claiming that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear bomb. When pressed on the issue, he denied saying that Iraq had a bomb, despite the fact that he says exactly that in his book's opening pages (see Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2001). Said Benador of Hamza and Iraqi National Congress figure Kanan Makiya in 2003: "[They are] really my most powerful voices right now" (Asia Times, August 15, 2003).

Explaining Benador's decision to found a new, supposedly non-political firm, a press release said that "Ms. Benador announced that in view of the uncertain political situation in America, she is to devote her undivided attention to her new public relations outfit" (see "Announcing the Creation ...," Benador Public Relations). The new Benador Public Relations, "whose areas of expertise—with absolute exclusion of politics—will include: international finance, with investment banking and infrastructure projects as the main chapters in that field; international real estate; science and culture," features photos of Benador with Gaffney and Perle.

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/prof ... Associates

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Amir Taheri, "who published an op-ed in Canada's National Post about an Iranian law that forced Jews to wear a yellow stripe" that turned out to be a fabrication, this week "had a face-to-face with the President as one of a small group of 'experts' on Iraq that visited the White House."
-- Taheri was an Idiot Jew'd Benador Associate