NOTES TO AN ARTICLE I NEVER SEEM TO WRITE...
CONSIDER IT A DATA DUMP
Anthrax...
an example of "elusive information"
IN THE YEARS BEFORE...
• Operation Clear Vision: reconstructing Russian anthrax bombs (1997-2000)
- State Department objected: violation of biowarfare conventions
State Dept. official quoted as saying: "A bomb is a bomb is a bomb."
- Pentagon, CIA insisted, went ahead with research.
- Suspended by White House in 2000.
• Revival of programs under Bush administration.
- Operation Jefferson (West Jefferson, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Institute)
- Supermarket terrorism ($1 million budget)
- Sept. 4th: Judith Miller allowed to report from facility by Pentagon after French objection.
Next to Old Rec Hall, a 'Germ-Making Plant'
New York Times
September 4, 2001
By JUDITH MILLER
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04BIOW.htmlCAMP 12, NEVADA TEST SITE, Nevada - In a nondescript mustard-colored building that was once a military recreation hall and barbershop, the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities.
Adjacent to the pool tables, the shuffleboard and the bar stands a gleaming stainless steel cylinder, the 50-liter (53- quart) fermenter in which germs can be cultivated.
The apparatus, which includes a latticework of pipes and other equipment, was made entirely with commercially available components bought from hardware stores and other suppliers for about $1 million - a pittance for a weapon that could deliver death on such a large scale.
The factory was built by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that works to contain the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Officials said the project was intended to assess how hard it would be for a terrorist or rogue nation to assemble a germ factory.
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9/11/01
- Sept. 11th: White House staff (Cheney people) put on Cipro.
- Lexis reveals several dozen stories with warnings about potential for anthrax attacks in the weeks between Sept. 11 and beginning of attacks (many cited by Ed Lake at his "anthrax investigation" site). Rumsfeld, Hyde, Bush all deliver scare stories Oct. 1.
- SEPT. 24: Agriculture Dept. orders no crop duster flights (supposed Atta & anthrax connection)
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SEPT. 16: PATRIOT Act proposed.
SEPT. 18: Postmark of Trenton, NJ anthrax mailings to NY Post and NBC (also CBS? ABC?)
SEPT. 22: First symptoms in NY area (undiagnosed).
OCT. 2: USA PATRIOT Act introduced in Congress.
OCT. 3: BOB STEVENS DIAGNOSED WITH INHALATION ANTHRAX. No letter ever found.
OCT. 4: Tommy Thompson, from the White House:
"I want everybody to understand that sporadic cases of anthrax do occur in the United States....
t this point in time, it's an isolated case, and there is no other indication anybody else has got anthrax."
Patrick Leahy expresses opposition to USA PATRIOT Act.
OCT. 5: Bob Stevens dies.
OCT. 9: Postmark of Trenton, NJ mailings to Daschle & Leahy (Kennedy? Levin?).
USA PATRIOT Act blocked in committee by Feingold.
---
The Congress that rushed through the USA PATRIOT Act nearly unread was the same Congress that was packing and rushing out of Washington because the leadership of the opposition Democrats had been subjected to an anthrax attack.
I consider this fact inseparable from any discussion of how the USA PATRIOT Act was passed. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, received an anthrax letter within days of questioning the original draft of the USA PATRIOT Act. The Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, also received a letter at the same time. Soon after, both reversed themselves and dropped their objections to the legislation, which radically curtails the civil liberties guaranteed in the U.S. Bill of Rights.
By way of anthrax, Congress was terrorized and broken.
The anthrax attacks of October 2001 should have put an end to doubts about the "War on Terror" and the likelihood that elements of the U.S. government are willing to stage inside-job terror attacks on American soil. Instead the attacks have been forgotten, although at the time they were trumped up into something even bigger than 9/11.
Unlike the case of 9/11, the facts about the anthrax attacks are simple, clear and close to conclusive - certainly meeting the standard of "probable cause" to suspect a government covert operation.
-The Bush government revived an anthrax program early in 2001 on orders from Cheney and had developed a new milling process just before Sept. 11. Incredibly, this was called "Project Jefferson" (!).
- A week before Sept. 11, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon was experimenting in the "defensive" development of anthrax milling methods. Government scientists were assigned to put together home-made laboratories, using only materials available commercially, on the sparse budget of a mere one million of your taxpayer dollars. When this was revealed, the Pentagon said they weren't actually taking the final step, of milling live spores (although I wonder why, once ready, they would not want to see how well their lab works). The idea of the exercise, supposedly, was to see what terrorists might whip together from store-bought items. The French got wind of this program and complained to a United Nations committee, since the biowarfare convention outlaws all research, including "defensive research." To allay these concerns, the Pentagon invited an NY Times reporter, our old friend Judy Miller, to the Texas base where the experiments were held.*
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04GERM.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04BIOW.html-On Sept. 11th the White House immediately put some of its staff, reportedly including Cheney himself, on Cipro. How did they know to pick this antibiotic, out of the many available? How could they guess that anthrax (or another pathogen against which Cipro can protect) was coming? This is the subject of a discovery suit by Judicial Watch: how did they know?**
-A wave of stories immediately after Sept. 11th announced that anthrax was the likeliest next attack. We were even threatened with a specific sequence of future attacks: anthrax, smallpox, plague. (They've been drumming up the smallpox scare ever since the anthrax attacks stopped.) Of all the hundreds of biowar germs and literally thousands of types of terror attacks, why was this idea circulated so prominently? Who was behind spreading these stories? Why so specific?
-Suspect Hatfill, while working biowarfare research at SAIC/Batelle Memorial in 1999, commissioned his colleague in science, William Capers Patrick, the renowned dean of American biowarfare research, to write a report on modalities that terrorists might employ in sending anthrax through the mail.
-The report from that study specified an ideal spore concentration and weight of anthrax sample per envelope. These were the amounts that were then reportedly used in the attacks on Daschle and Leahy. In other words, the anthrax attackers may have had access to this secret report.
----
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg:
"A classified report dated February, 1999 discusses responses to an anthrax attack through the mail. The report, precipitated by a series of false anthrax mailings, was written by William Patrick, inventor of the US weaponization process, under a CIA contract to SAIC. The report describes what the US military could do and what a terrorist might be able to achieve. According to the NY Times (12 Dec. 01) the report predicted about 2.5g of anthrax per envelope (the Daschle letter contained 2g) and assumed a poorer quality of anthrax than that found in the Daschle letter. If the perpetrator had access to the materials and information necessary for the attack, he must have had security clearance or other means for accessing classified information, and may therefore have seen the report and used it as a model for the attack."
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28334-2002Oct27?language=printer
----
-The anthrax went first to the headquarters of the country's biggest tabloid owner (National Enquirer and Florida Sun-Sentinel). The Enquirer had printed a series of anti-Bush "conspiracy" stories, including one claiming that McVeigh was still breathing after his execution. The Enquirer also published embarrassing pictures of the Bush twins drunk, which had gotten much play on Drudge and similar outlets. Was this an object lesson to the media? (Note: never established how it got to Bob Stevens; no envelope located; theory that it may have been spread from one floor to another by a vacuum cleaner .. or was he directly hit, via keyboard?)
-The wife of the paper's editor, Stevens's boss, had rented an apartment to Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi. Was the paper going to do a story about this that would not have fit the official 9/11 line?
--At this point, the FBI on a request from Iowa State University allowed the destruction of a stockpile of original Ames strain samples on Oct. 13, days after the Bob Stevens case became known. Why?! This was a precaution?!
-The next group of attacks hit the New York media. The letters arrived just as the Afghanistan campaign began and caused maximum coverage of nothing but anthrax. For a vital week or two, both the Afghanistan campaign and the 9/11 investigation became secondary concerns to the media.
-At that point the FBI immediately called off one-half of the thousands of agents who were working on 9/11 and put them to work on anthrax.
-The third wave of attacks, the one that exactly fit the specifications of the secret paper commissioned by Hatfill, was sent first to Daschle and Leahy - the majority leader of the Democratic opposition in the Senate, and the Democratic head of the Judiciary Committee.
-The government said the anthrax powder sent to Daschle and Leahy had been put through a much more sophisticated process of milling to aerosolize the spoors, such as would require advanced technology from a state weapons program.
-This exceptional piece of constituent mail arrived at Daschle and Leahy's offices about a week after the USA PATRIOT Act was submitted to the Congress. Leahy had initially opposed the Act, and requested clarification of its more extreme provisions from Ashcroft. Ashcroft never answered.
- Senate offices were shut down and Capitol Hill went into an uproar. For weeks, as employees lined up for doses of antibiotics, Hazmat and FBI agents poked around in the Senate.
- By the end of that month the Republican-majority House chose to run home. As they left, they cast their votes for the USA PATRIOT Act and its negation of the U.S. Constitution. As Republican Congressman Ron Paul has made clear, most of them did not even receive a text of the 300-page final version of the USA PATRIOT Act before they voted for it, let alone read it.
- The Senate soon followed suit, also approving USA PATRIOT.
- Reports told that Sens. Kennedy and Levin, two other liberals, had also received anthrax letters, although no photos of these letters were published.
- The notes included with the anthrax letters to Daschle, Leahy and Tom Brokaw tried to point the blame at Arab perpetrators, but these were clumsy and transparent. ("Allah is Great" instead of "God Is Great" or "Allah Akhbar.") In childlike, block capital letters.
- The news at first wanted to blame it on Arabs, or Iraq. Why should that damned Osama bin Laden hate the Democratic leadership, as opposed to Republican leaders?
- Only days later did reports arrive of anthrax being found in mail to the White House, Pentagon, Federal Reserve, CIA, etc. All of their mail had by then been very safely isolated on military bases. No details about these alleged attacks have been released. We have not seen copies of the letters, as was the case with the letters to Daschle, Leahy and Tom Brokaw. There have to my knowledge been no follow-up reports on the provenance of the anthrax employed in these cases.
How strange how the first attacks, the only ones that had a chance to get through, went to the Democratic leadership!
- Suddenly, the anthrax wave stopped as quickly as it had begun. The biggest U.S. media story of October 2001 was effectively swept away. The media obediently switched to the taking of Kabul and spent November 2001 preparing us for a thoughtful Thanksgiving, with endless soul-searching stories asking how our country could have ever produced Johnny Taliban Walker.
- Anthrax has since been mentioned only rarely and out of context, as when Powell had the gall to hold up a vial of white powder at the UN and ask where Saddam is hiding his anthrax (much of which was provided by the US in the 1980s). Well, Colin, where are you keeping yours?
-All the foreign anthrax letters reported at various times in 2001 have been dismissed as white-powder hoaxes.
-It was established quickly that the anthrax to Leahy and Daschle was of recent production, with high-quality, weaponized spores such as can be produced only by a specialist at an advanced facility; and that the lineage goes back to Fort Detrick, Maryland and the Ames strain used by American biowarfare programs.
-For all this, the anthrax perpetrator(s) made an obvious effort to minimize casualties and target the letters very specifically to individuals. The same amount of anthrax could have been spread in a fashion causing many more deaths.
-Having gotten as far as Stephen Hatfill, the FBI investigation stalled. Hatfill has been a "person of interest" for more than two years, his house has been invaded several times by sniffer-dog teams, and the FBI even drained a pond near his house to see if he had grown anthrax spores in it; but no further progress has been reported in the investigation.
- Could it be that the "lone perpetrator" thesis is not sustainable, and they don't want to deal with the implications?
What can we conclude?
Unlike Sept. 11th, the anthrax attacks were a selective wave of terror. The confirmed letters, the ones that resulted in the deaths of six people, were targeted at specific individuals: reporters, news media personalities, and four leading Democratic senators. This was by design, there was nothing random about it. The perpetrators have not been presented and so we can only speculate about their motives, but there is no doubt about the direct and predictable effect of their design: the attacks were perfectly sequenced and timed to cow the opposition, force through the Patriot Act, make an exampe of deviant journalists, divert the 9/11 investigation, and frighten and occupy the media during the first phase of the Afghanistan war. The attacks provided important reinforcement in keeping these various actors from questioning the official post-Sept. 11th atmosphere of terror and panic. They were the key step in initiating the formal transformation of American society and law.
In simpler words, the anthrax attacks look exactly as though they were planned and executed by a black-ops or damage-control team working on behalf of the Bush regime's goals, either as rogues or as appointed hitmen. They may have hit Bob Stevens as a revenge job, they hit the media to shut them up, and they hit Daschle and Leahy to intimidate them into accepting the USA PATRIOT Act. We might compare the crew who were responsible for this to Nixon's Plumbers, except that they were more sophisticated and effective in their choice of methods; or, perhaps, they simply had better protection among their sponsors.
That is the hypothesis so far that best covers all of the above facts. In this case, there is no doubt which way Occam's razor cuts. Anthrax was almost certainly an inside job.
In fact, this is the thesis that many people subscribe to when speaking off the record in the the world capital of paranoia itself, Washington, DC.
And what has Daschle done or said about these facts? Are Brokaw and Rather really unaware of all this? They have chosen not to defend themselves against what are, in effect, attempts on their own lives.
This is the context in which we should view the Jan. 2002 call from Cheney, the premature Cipro-taker, to Daschle, the anthrax recipient. Cheney threatened Daschle of dire consequences if he should push too hard for a 9/11 investigation in the Congress. This single call led to a series delays in the Congressional joint inquiry of Sept. 11, which finally opened in June 2002.
Daschle - and Leahy, and all the other Senators including Kerry and Edwards - are so scared, or so compromised, or otherwise being blackmailed with other threats, that they have not risen to this challenge. I don't envy or accuse them, but how can you expect these guys to ever confront the Bush mob?
(*NOTE: What justification is there for programs like "Jefferson"? This program not only finds out what terrorists might do, it no doubt discovers ways to do it that they might not have thought of themselves. The government scientists gain the astonishing insight that there's fuck-all they can do to stop evil biology students from engaging in such activities if they so wish. And the program's results will be written up in a little "defensive" manual on how to make your own anthrax lab. One day, probably soon, that will end up in the hands of one of our freedom fighters somewhere... and a years down the line he or his successor will use it against the U.S., thus setting off the next round of "defensive" activity on our part. At least it's lucrative!)
(** Note 2: Interestingly, earlier in the year one Jerome Hauer took up his new job under Tommy Thompson at the Health Department, as the advisor for bioterrorism. This is the same Jerome Hauer who developed the West Nile spraying program and, ahem, the Office of Emergency Management on Floor 23 of WTC 7, during his tenure as a terrorism adviser to the City of New York. And the same Hauer who claimed to have gotten John O'Neill his last job, as counter-terror chief at the WTC, where he died on Sept. 11th.)
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Following is interview with JOHN JUDGE (has a detail wrong: FBI was contacted by U of Iowa 10 days AFTER the first anthrax envelope was mailed, during the "Bob Stevens phase" of the attacks, and hence a smoking gun destruction of evidence! According tot the story the University wanted to destroy it, and asked the FBI if they could, and the FBI allowed this. Was front page of NY Times.)
"Anthrax - didn't come from abroad, the trail led to door of Ft. Detrick and then it stopped. They realized from its DNA signature that it was Ames screen-which means U. of Iowa, which had an archive of all the known pathenogenic strains of anthrax_.if you inhale
it's a lot more lethal_. People would order various strains from them in order to work on cures for it or work to weaponize it. Once they identified it as Ames strain, it would have been possible to go back to Ames and figure out which particular batch this came from and then that batch would have had a paper trail of who had ordered that batch, but 10 days before the first Anthrax envelope was mailed, (this was recorded by the NY Times, and this was called a "bungling" of the investigation) FBI contacted the U. at Ames and convinced them to destroy the entire 70 year archive. So, there's absolutely no paper trail left. But there is information in the public record info about Project Jefferson and Operation Clear Vision, both running in year up to 9/11 reported on September 4th and 5th, it was a international scandal, USA was doing projects and experiments with chemical and biological elements that violated international treaties that the US had signed. They claimed that they had to because something similar was going on in Russia. Project Jefferson was first ordered by Rumsfeld when he came in to Pentagon, he tasked the DIA to generate the next generation of Anthrax. Anthrax should be genetically altered to be more resistant to the normal antibiotics (which was the case with this), and more weaponized, more distributable. _was weaponized at a level they had never seen. In other words, the earlier weaponization had gotten it down to 2 or 3 billion spores per gram, this was over a trillion spores per gram. It was a very lethal weapon. It couldn't have been developed by some guy in a lab. But on September the 9th, two days before the attack, the DIA held a press conference here in DC and announced they had developed the next generation of anthrax. Also, right on 9/11 the White House staff was told to go on Cipro. There was also a huge contract with Bioport, who put that out right before the attack. The Peace Center began when all this was a twinkle in some geneticist's eye.
SH: What are your conclusions about Anthrax?
JJ: Well, I think that this was another domestic terrorist attack that had the signature of US intelligence, or military intelligence on it. I think that that's where people have been reluctant to look.
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