Ken, your argument as to Daschle is nonsense. He was head of the legislative body in charge of appropriations to Egypt and Israel.

Contrary to the pundits who just associate Al Qaeda with a “big bang,” a key modus operandi of the Vanguards of Conquest was targeted assassination. It was widely known known among intelligence analysts that Zawahiri was seeking to weaponize anthrax for use against US targets, had threatened to use anthrax if the EIJ #2 was not released, and then sent anthrax to those responsible for the appropriations the next day.

The Vanguards of Conquest said that the attempt on Prime Minister Sidki’s life in November 1993, in which a schoolgirl was killed, was to avenge the mass arrests and executions of militants seeking to topple Mubarak’s government. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad group specializes in armed attacks against high-level Egyptian government officials, including Cabinet ministers. The group had a “hit list” that included tens of Egyptians to be killed by the group, including journalists. Targeted assassination of people in symbolic position was the modus operandi of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad — not the “big bangs” characteristic of Al Qaeda. Al-Jihad has had a role in most foreign terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies over the past 20 years. The group is most well known for its first, the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

In May 1987, a Major General was shot outside his home in Cairo. Several EIJ members and two Islamist Group members were arrested in connection with the attack. In November 1990, six members of EIJ were arrested in connection with the murders of People’s Assembly Speaker and five security men on October 12, 1990.

In September 1993, a Lebanese newspaper reported that EIJ plan to kill Yasser Arafat was uncovered by the Egyptian police. In 1992, Islamic Jihad activists murdered an author, Faraj Fodah, who had openly supported Israeli-Egyptian peace. The secular columnist in his last article had suggested that the militants were motivated by sexual frustration more than politics.

In August 1993, the same year as the bombing of the World Trade Center, al-Jihad attempted to assassinate Egyptian Interior Minister by firing on his motorcade and detonating a homemade bomb. The group also made an attempt that year against Prime Minister with an explosion which occurred about 500 yards from his home as his motorcade passed.

In March 1994 Egypt’s higher military Court passed death sentences in absentia that included Tharwat Salah Shehata, Yasser al-Sirri, ‘Isam Muhammad ‘Abd-al-Rahman for the assassination attempt on Prime Minister Atef Sedki on November 25, 1993. In 1994 al-Jihad militants were linked to two unsuccessful attempts to bomb the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Manila. In June 1995, the Vanguards of Conquest claimed responsibility for a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

In December 1995, the Vanguards of Conquest sent a communiqué warning Pakistan to stop extraditing militants to Egypt, or “it will pay a heavy price.” That month, Egyptian Security forces arrested 56 terrorists after being tipped off by an EIJ informer. The group was accused of planning to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak on 1995 using 550 pounds of explosives to blow up the President’s motorcade.

In June 1998 Egyptian security authorities arrest seventeen members on charges of forming an Al Jihad cell in east Cairo. Resulting confessions revealed that Al Jihad was planning to assassinate a number of public figures and security officers. That month, Jihad members al-Najjar (head of Al Jihad in Albania), and Majed Mustapha are arrested in Albania, reportedly with the aid of the Central Intelligence Agency, and extradited to Egypt in late June 1998. An August 1998 Statement issued by the Information Office of the Jihad Group in Egypt vows revenge on the United States for the extradition of three Al Jihad members from Albania to Egypt.

In September 1998, a number of senior EIJ and IG leaders in London were arrested, including the EIJ cell members who had faxed the claim of responsibility for the embassy bombings. In April 1999, after verdicts in the “Returnees from Albania,” the Vanguards of Conquest and Al Jihad issue separate threats of retaliation. Of the 107 accused, 87 defendants were found guilty, including Canadian Mahmoud Mahjoub.

The group was involved in October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, and then in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. US Post Office employee Sattar was told that supporters of the blind sheik Abdel-Rahman were responsible for the blast, the purpose of which was to negotiate his release. Abdel-Rahman advised that Sattar should stay out of the negotiations which should be left to the lawyers.

Throughout these years, an estimated 70 Egyptian militants were rendered by the US to Cairo prior to 9/11 and the anthrax mailings. The fact that targeted assassination was the modus operandi of the US-based islamists — and that the motivation was retaliation for the detention of senior leaders and to create leverage aimed at their release — was established by the first of a series of terrorist attacks in the US — the assassination of radical rabbi Meir Kahane by Egyptian Nosair, who had emigrated from Egypt in 1981.

The commentators like Ed who argued that Al Qaeda just goes for the “big bang” — like Mr. Lake — were overlooking the modus operandi of the Vanguards and what was known about Ayman’s biological program through “open source” materials. Ed, as demonstrated by his comment above, has never purported to know anything about the Egyptian Islamic Group or Egyptian Islamic Jihad.

In his March 2007 confession to a military tribunal, KSM admitted to having been involved in a plot to assassinate a number of former American presidents (including Jimmy Carter), Pope John Paul II and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. In December 2007, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. In January 2008, it was revealed that Jabarah, the go-between KSM and Hambali had vowed to avenge the death of a friend by killing FBI agents and prosecutors he knew and apparently intended to use some steak knives he had secreted. To suggest that Zawahiri and his colleagues do not use targeted assassination as their modus operandi — indeed, to not appreciate that it is the EIJ’s key modus operandi — totally misses the mark. But to the same effect, for you to suggest, Ken, that targeting of Daschle was to throw folks off the scent totally misses the mark also.

Mr. Dillon wrote: “These errors also appear to have permitted the Bush Administration to cover up the embarrassing Jdey story and thereby to carry out its policies with much more credibility and public support than it deserved.”

Is it really credible that the Bush administration would “cover up” the MURDER of five people by al Qaeda and, instead, point the finger at some supposely INNOCENT scientist working for the U.S. government?

The anthrax attacks were one of the main motivations for going to war with Iraq! It was incredibly embarrassing to the Bush administration when it turned out that Iraq had no involvement with the attacks. Pointing the finger at al Qaeda would have been PERFECT, if they had any evidence to support it!

Is it really reasonable for any intelligent person to believe that the Bush administration had proof that al Qaeda was behind the attacks but covered up for al Qaeda? That seems about the most ridiculous BELIEF anyone could dream up. It makes absolutely NO SENSE whatsoever. It says they covered up a minor embarrassment by promoting a MAJOR embarrassment for themselves. AND HUNDREDS OR THOUSANDS OF AMERICANS WENT ALONG WITH THIS “COVER UP.” Who is supposed to believe that?

One key to understanding of Amerithrax is the September 10, 2001 once-classified report titled “Risk Assessment of Anthrax Threat Letters”.

After a January 2001 anthrax threat, Canadian defense research team undertook to assess the risk. The report titled “Risk Assessment of Anthrax Threat Letters” issued September 10, 2001. In contrast to a 1998 study by William Patrick that had been requested by Dr. Hatfill’s employer SAIC, the Canadian study found considerable exposure to those in the room resulted when such a letter was opened. Bacillus globigii spores (in dry powder form) were donated by the US Department of Defense (Dugway Proving Ground, Utah). “The letter was prepared by putting BG spores in the center of a sheet of paper, folding it over into thirds, placing the folded sheet into the envelope and sealing using the adhesive present on the envelope. The envelope was then shaken to mimic the handling and tumbling that would occur during its passage through the postal system.” The aerosol, produced by opening the BG spore containing envelope, was not confined to the area of the desk but spread throughout the chamber. Values were almost as high at the opposite end of the chamber, shortly after opening the envelopes. 99% of the particles collected were in the 2.5 to 10 mm size range. The report explained: “In addition, the aerosol would quickly spread throughout the room so that other workers, depending on their exact locations and the directional air flow within the office, would likely inhale lethal doses. Envelopes with the open corners not specifically sealed could also pose a threat to individuals in the mail handling system.”

More than 80% of the B anthracis particles collected on stationary monitors were within an alveolar respirable size range of 0.95 to 3.5 µm. Thus, the simulant performed very well. Those who continue to argue that the Daschle product was so advanced beyond what the US could do are mistaken. Indeed, the more notable question is why such a good product was prepared in response to a threat letter sent to an immigration minister. The reason perhaps is that authorities suspected that it was Al Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad that sent the letter. The CIA and CSIS apparently feared that the Vanguards of Conquest would use good stuff.

The CIA knew EIJ intended to use anthrax — from the proclamations of Jaballah’s friend, the captured military commander Mabruk and Jaballah’s brother-in-law’s former law partner al-Zayat. Authorities knew Al Qaeda was getting technical assistance from scientists — and that many of the senior Egyptian leaders had advanced or technical degrees.

Canadian officials explained they e-mailed the study to the CDC soon after reports of the discovery of anthrax at the American Media Inc. headquarters in Florida. The e-mail, however, was never opened, reports the lead CDC anthrax investigator, who regrets that he never read the email. “It is certainly relevant data, but I don’t think it would have altered the decisions that we made.” At one point, about 2,000 CDC employees were working on the anthrax matter. This Canadian report was perhaps the single most important scientific data point for the CDC to take into account. It certainly was one of the most important reports for the FBI to take into account. Bail was denied by decision on October 5, 2001. Then highly potent anthrax was sent the next day just as had been promised. But Ayman had returned to the target of his greatest interest — rather than a Canadian immigration minister, he and Shehata and their colleagues targeted the minister who oversaw the Department of Justice and appropriations to Egypt and Israel, and who gave his name (”the Leahy Law”) to the law that permits continuing appropriations to Egypt in the face of allegations of torture. Zawahiri never makes a threat he doesn’t intend to try to keep.

Bill Patrick, who often worked with George Mason University students in northern Virginia, had written a report in 1999 for a consultant SAIC at the request of Dr. Steve Hatfill. As one bioterrorism expert commented about the report: “Anytime you pick something up like this, and it seems to layout the whole story for you months or years before the fact, your immediate response is to step back and say ‘whoa, something may be going on here. “Our attacker may very well have used this report as something of a — if not a template, then certainly as a rule of thumb.”

The Canadian experiments in 2001 showed that if anthrax spores were finely powdered, a letter could release thousands of lethal doses of the bacteria within minutes of being opened. Furthermore, large amounts of material leaked out of sealed envelopes even before they were opened. By then, more than two dozen federal government employees knew of the Canadian studies, which showed that a real anthrax threat letter was a far more dangerous weapon than anyone had believed. Within days, a dozen more people were informed of the now highly relevant experimental findings. One FBI squad was focused on people who may have known of the study — such as William Patrick’s friend, Dr. Steve Hatfill. Another squad would be focused on the usual suspects and their friends. For the next seven years, the investigation would be shrouded in great secrecy. Five months after the FBI announced that Amerithrax had been solved, the case remains open.

The February 2001 PDB to President Bush should be the first and foremost document sought in any Congressional any review of Amerithrax. For that matter, it should be declassified and made part of the 4,200 pages of 911 Commission documents to be made available on January 14, 2008 at the national archives.

On January 23, 2001, Mr. Justice Nadon issued an order holding that the Court did not have jurisdiction to decide the constitutional and Charter issues raised by detainee and dismissed that part of the motion. A letter was received January 30, 2001 at the Citizenship and Immigration Office threatening to use anthrax. It was sent to Immigration Minister Elinor Caplan who had co-signed the detention certificate. Authorities suspected that the letter was sent by militant islamists in protest over the detention of Mahjoub, who ran Bin Laden’s farm in Sudan. Mahjoub had been sentenced in absentia to 15 years in prison in 1999 by Egyptian authorities for his involvement in Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Now, he was being detained without charges under an order cosigned by Immigration Minister Caplan and threatened with deportation.

Suspecting Mahjoub of being a shura member of the Vanguards of Conquest and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the Canadian intelligence officials alleged Mahjoub had significant contacts with persons associated with international Islamic terrorism including Osama Bin Laden, Ahmad Khadr, Essam Marzouk, Vanguards founder Ahmed Agiza, and Osama Bin Laden’s principal procurement agent for weapons of mass destruction Mubarak Al Duri.

When the letter was received in January 2001, the letter was sent by Department of National Defence jet to the Canadian Science Center for Human and Animal Health in Winnipeg for examination. Authorities also sent the filters from the Jean Edmonds building’s ventilation system. Authorities said they were treating it as a possible terrorist act against the department and noted that it “was the first time a government department has been targeted in this way.” The Ottawa alert came after one of the employees working in the Minister’s office opened a plain white envelope at 11:15 a.m. The employee discovered powder and a piece of paper in the envelope. Police refused to reveal from where it had been mailed. An internal government memo distributed to staff said “an initial analysis of the envelope revealed some traces of bacteria.”

The question now is: who else is on Jaballah’s or Mahjoub’s Friends and Family Calling Plan?

A sound-the-alarm theory is only plausible to the extent that the person had access to classified threat intel information and was intentionally making it look like Zawahiri was responsible (for example, by patterning the Al Hayat letter bombs). It’s my impression that Dr. Ivins did not know more about Zawahiri’s Zabadi program than what he read in the newspapers. I doubt he had ever heard of the Al Hayat letter bombs or even knew about the threat to use anthrax relating to EIJ #2 Mahjoub’s detention.

Bail was denied on October 5 and the mailer immediately rushed to mail the potent stuff to the two Senators most responsible for appropriations to Egypt and Israel.

Reader wrote: “Ed says the White House would have no reason to want to keep secret their suspicion that Ali Al-Timimi accessed biochemistry information relating to the concentration of anthrax using silicon dioxide.”

Hmmm. I said that? Where? When?

Claiming I said things I never said appears to be just an excuse for endless ramblings that have nothing to do with anything I wrote.

What I said was that it is IDIOTIC to believe that hundreds or thousands of Americans will all conspire to “cover up” a crime by al Qaeda and blame an innocent American.

Ed,

Consider the suppression of information relating to NSA wiretapping. Not even the DOJ #2 (who in charge of signing off on foreign intelligence intercepts) knew that the NSA wiretapping Al-Timimi. Or engaged in warrantless wiretapping of any US citizen calls. When information is so closely held, no one can blame the DOJ #2 for knowing what he had not been looped in on.

Claire Fraser-Liggett, professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and director of the University of Maryland Institute for Genome Sciences was the adviser to Amerithrax on genetics. She asks, “What would have happened in this investigation had Dr. Hatfill not been so forceful in his response to being named a person of interest. What if he, instead of fighting back, had committed suicide because of the pressure? Would that have been the end of the investigation?” “I have complete confidence in the accuracy of our data,” Fraser-Liggett says, but she says it does not indicate Ivins is guilty.

Ken Alibek, the former head of the Soviet bio-weapons programme suggests that ‘If I were a terrorist, I would certainly not use a strain known to be from my country.’” To the same effect, Bruce Ivins would not have used the strain — a special mixture of the US Army strain — for which he was the “go-to” person.

The Washington Post has explained: “Back at the bureau’s Washington field office, agents were reconstructing the history of RMR-1029. A giant flow chart, covering most of a wall, recorded each discovery about the origins of the spores and what Ivins did with them. But the agents wondered: Could others, besides Ivins, have gotten access to the flask of spores?” The Post article continues: “The question drives much of the skepticism about the FBI’s case. At a news conference in August, bureau officials estimated that as many as 100 people potentially had access to the biocontainment lab where Ivins kept his collections. Investigators have maintained that other possible suspects were ruled out, but they have never explained how. It is one of the gaps that independent experts and lawmakers have raised since Ivins’s death.” Journalist Joby Warrick writes: “In interviews, FBI officials said the list of 100 names included USAMRIID scientists as well as anyone with even a tenuous connection to Ivins’s lab, such as visitors or janitors.” “Still, dozens of people were cleared at various times to enter USAMRIID’s Building 1425, where Ivins worked and kept his spore collection.”

One expert, Dr. C.J. Peters, summarizes: “Knowing that this strain was originally isolated in the U.S. has absolutely nothing to do with where the weapon may have been prepared because, as I tried to make the point, these strains move around. A post doc in somebody’s laboratory could have taken this strain to another lab and it could have been taken overseas and it could have ended up absolutely anywhere. Tiny quantities of anthrax that you couldn’t see, that you couldn’t detect in an inventory can be used to propagate as much as you want. So that’s just not, in fact, very helpful.” The FBI estimates that, at a minimum, 100 had access to the flask in Bruce Ivins’ lab. Ft. Detrick scientists point out that it used to be stored in a different lab in 1997, bringing the number to 200-300 people.

The New York Post reports that “multiple facilities outside of Fort Detrick were sent RMR-1029 for their own research, including government laboratories, the Battelle lab and academic institutions like the University of New Mexico.”

In a number of patents by University of Michigan researchers in Ann Arbor, Tarek Hamouda and James R. Baker, Jr., including some before 9/11, the inventors thank Bruce Ivins of Ft. Detrick for supplying them with Ames. The University of Michigan patents stated: “B. anthracis spores, Ames and Vollum 1 B strains, were kindly supplied by Dr. Bruce Ivins (USAMRIID, Fort Detrick, Frederick, Md.), and prepared as previously described (Ivins et al., 1995). Dr. Hamouda served as group leader on the DARPA Anti-infective project. A patent application filed April 2000 by the University of Michigan inventors explained:

“The release of such agents as biological weapons could be catastrophic in light of the fact that such diseases will readily spread the air.

In light of the foregoing discussion, it becomes increasingly clear that cheap, fast and effective methods of killing bacterial spores are needed for decontaminating purposes. The inventive compounds have great potential as environmental decontamination agents and for treatments of casualties in both military and terrorist attacks. The inactivation of a broad range of pathogens … and bacterial spores (Hamouda et al., 1999), combined with low toxicity in experimental animals, make them (i.e., the inventive compounds) particularly well suited for use as general decontamination agents before a specific pathogen is identified.”

In late August 2001, NanoBio relocated from a small office with 12 year-old furniture to an expanded office on Green Road located at Plymouth Park. After the mailings, DARPA reportedly asked for some of their product them to decontaminate some of the Senate offices. The company pitched hand cream to postal workers. The inventors company, NanoBio, is funded by DARPA. NanoBio received a $3,150,000 defense contract in 2003.

Dr. Hamouda graduated Cairo Medical in December 1982. He married in 1986. His wife was on the Cairo University dental faculty for 10 years. Upon coming to the United States in 1994 after finishing his microbiology PhD at Cairo Medical, Dr. Hamouda was a post-doctoral fellow at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in downtown Detroit. His immunology department biography at Wayne indicates that he then came to the University of Michigan and began work on the DARPA-funded work with anthrax bio-defense applications with James R. Baker at their company NanoBio.

The University of Michigan researchers presented in part at various listed meetings and conferences in 1998 and 1999. The December 1999 article titled “A Novel Surfactant Nanoemulsion with Broad-Spectrum Sporicidal Activity of against Bacillus Species” in the Journal for Infectious Diseases states:

“B. anthracis spores, Ames and Vollum 1B strains, were supplied by Bruce Ivins (US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases [USAMRIID], Fort Detrick, Frederick, MD) and were prepared as described elsewhere. Four other strains of B. anthracis were provided by Martin Hugh-Jones (Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge.”

In the acknowledgements section, the University of Michigan authors thank:

Shaun B. Jones, Jane Alexander, and Lawrence DuBois (Defense Science Office, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency) for their support.
Bruce Ivins, Patricia Fellows, Mara Linscott, Arthur Friedlander, and the staff of USAMRIID for their technical support and helpful suggestions in the performance of the initial anthrax studies.

Martin-Hugh-Jones, Kimothy Smith, and Pamela Coker for supplying the characterized B. anthracis strains and the space at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge).

Robin Kunkel (Department of Pathology, University of Michigan) for her help with electron microscopy and a couple of others for technical assistance and manuscript preparation.

The researchers found that their nanoemulsion incorporated into the growth medium completely inhibited the growth of the spores. Transmission electron microscope was used to examine the spores.

The authors explained that “The nanoemulsions can be rapidly produced in large quantities and are stable for many months *** Undiluted, they have the texture of a semisolid cream and can be applied topically by hand or mixed with water. Diluted, they have a consistency and appearance similar to skim milk and can be sprayed to decontaminate surfaces or potentially interact with aerosolized spores before inhalation.”

A March 18, 1998 press release had provided some background to the novel DARPA-funded work. It was titled “Novavax Microbicides Undergoing Testing at University of Michigan Against Biological Warfare Agents; Novavax Technology Being Supplied to U.S. Military Program At University of Michigan as Possible Defense Against Germ Warfare.” The release stated that “The Novavax Biologics Division has designed several potent microbicides and is supplying these materials to the University of Michigan for testing under a subcontract. Various formulations are being tested as topical creams or sprays for nasal and environmental usage. The biocidal agent’s detergent degrades and then explodes the interior of the spore. Funding, the press release explains, was provided by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Defense.

In a presentation at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) on September 26, 1998, Michael Hayes, a research associate in the U-Michigan Medical School, presented experimental evidence of BCTP’s ability to destroy anthrax spores both in a culture dish and in mice exposed to anthrax through a skin incision. “In his conference presentation, Hayes described how even low concentrations of BCTP killed more than 90 percent of virulent strains of Bacillus anthracis spores in a culture dish.” Its website explains that the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy is the “[p]remier meeting on infectious diseases and antimicrobial agents, organized by the American Society for Microbiology.”

An University of Michigan Medical school, Medicine at Michigan, (Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1999) explained:

“In studies with rats and mice in the U-M Medical School under the direction of James R. Baker, Jr., M.D., professor of internal medicine and director of the Center for Biologic Nanotechnology, the mixture, known as BCTP, attacked anthrax spores and healed wounds caused by a closely related species of bacteria, Bacillus cereus. (The letters BCTP stand for Bi-Component, Triton X-100 n-tributyl Phosphate.)

Baker describes the process as follows: “The tiny lipid droplets in BCTP fuse with anthrax spores, causing the spores to revert to their active bacterial state. During this process, which takes 4-5 hours, the spore’s tough outer membrane changes, allowing BCTP’s solvent to strip away the exterior membrane. The detergent then degrades the spores’ interior contents. In scanning electron microscope images, the spores appear to explode.” The rapid inactivation of anthrax bacteria and spores combined with BCTP’s low toxicity thus make the emulsion a promising candidate for use as a broad-spectrum, post-exposure decontamination agent.
***
The research is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the central research and development organization for the U.S. Department of Defense.”

Dr. Baker, by email, advises me that Ivins did the studies involving Ames for them at USAMRIID. He reports: “We never had Ames and could not have it at our UM facilities.” Before September 2001, it’s office was described as in the basement of a downtown bank which seems to describe 912 N. Main St., Ann Arbor, just west of University of Michigan campus.

An article in the Summer of 2000 in Medicine at Michigan explains:

“Victory Site: Last December [December 1999] Tarek Hamouda, Amy Shih and Jim Baker traveled to a remote military station in the Utah desert. There they demonstrated for the U.S. Army Research and Development Command the amazing ability of non-toxic nanoemulsions (petite droplets of fat mixed with water and detergent) developed at Michigan to wipe out deadly anthrax-like bacterial spores. The square vertical surfaces shown here were covered with bacterial spores; Michigan’s innocuous nanoemulsion was most effective in killing the spores even when compared to highly toxic chemicals.”

As Fortune magazine explained in November 2001: “Then bioterror struck…. It moved to a bland corporate park where its office has no name on the door. It yanked its street address off its Website, whose hit rate jumped from 350 a month to 1,000 a day.” NanoBio was part of the solution: “in the back of NanoBio’s office sit two dozen empty white 55-gallon barrels. A few days before, DARPA had asked Annis and Baker if they could make enough decontaminant to clean several anthrax-tainted offices in the Senate. NanoBio’s small lab mixers will have to run day and night to fill the barrels. ‘This is not the way we want to do this,’ sighs [its key investor], shaking his head. ‘This is all a duct-tape solution.’ ” James Baker, founder of Ann Arbor’s NanoBio’s likes to quote a Chinese proverb: “When there are no lions and tigers in the jungle, the monkeys rule.”

It’s naive to think that Al Qaeda could not have obtained Ames just because it tended to be in labs associated with or funded by the US military. As just one example, US Army Al Qaeda operative Sgt. Ali Mohammed accompanied Zawahiri in his travels in the US. (Ali Mohamed had been a major in the same unit of the Egyptian Army that produced Sadat’s assassin, Khaled Islambouli). Ali Al-Timimi was working in the building housing the Center for Biodefense funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (”DARPA”) and had access to the facilities at both the Center for Biodefense and the adjacent American Type Culture Collection. Michael Ray Stubbs was an HVAC system technician at Lawrence Livermore Lab with a high-level security clearance permitting access. (That was where the effort to combat the perceived Bin Laden anthrax threat was launched in 1998.) Aafia Siddiqui, who attended classes at a building with the virulent Vollum strain. She later married a 9/11 plotter al-Balucchi, who was in UAE with al-Hawsawi, whose laptop, when seized at the home of a bacteriologist, had anthrax spraydrying documents on it.

The reality is that a lab technician, researcher, or other person similarly situated might simply have walked out of some lab that had it. What was NanoBio’s old street address? Why is Aafia Siddiqui associated with an address at 1915 Woodbury Drive in Ann Arbor? An Assistant United States Attorney has claimed in open court (in the opening argument in United States v. Paracha) that Aafia was willing to participate in an anthrax attack if asked.

Among the documents found in Afghanistan in 2001, were letters and notes written in English to Ayman Zawahiri by a scientist about his attempts to obtain an anthrax sample. One handwritten letter was on the letterhead of the Society for Applied Microbiology, the UK’s oldest microbiological society. The Society for Applied Microbiology of Bedford, UK, recognizes that “the development and exploitation of Applied Microbiology requires the maintenance and improvement of the microbiological resources in the UK, such as culture collections and other specialized facilities.” Thus, Zawahiri’s access to the Ames strain is still yet to be proved or disclosed, but there was no shortage of possibilities or recruitment attempts by Ayman. One colleague of his estimates that he made 15 recruitment attempts over a many year period. Dr. Keim observes: “Whoever perpetrated the first crime must realize that we have the capability to identify material and to track the material back to its source. Whoever did this is presumably aware of what’s going on, and if the person is a scientist, they can read the study. Hopefully, the person is out there thinking: When am I going to get caught?”

The FBI has not yet identified the location of the 8 isolates downstram from Ivins’ flask known to be an identical match — or the 100+ people it says had access. For the US Attorney Jeff Taylor to make it seem, however, that only Ivins had control over anthrax that was genetically identical was fallacious. The more commonsensical point would be that Ivins would have no reason to use anthrax so directly traceable to him by reason of being a mix of Ames strains. The person who acquired it likely acquired it by stealth. A careful murderer does not use the gun registered in his name — he steals a gun from someone else.

I wrote: “What I said was that it is IDIOTIC to believe that hundreds or thousands of Americans will all conspire to “cover up” a crime by al Qaeda and blame an innocent American.”

And Reader responded: “Thousands haven’t, Ed. Indeed, the matter has been strictly compartmentalized. Not only did the scientists know nothing of the investigative leads, but the one investigative squad was not privy to the work of the other investigative squad.”

That’s called “rationalizing.”

While the ongoing investigation may have been compartmentalized, once a suspect is identified, compartmentalization MUST end. You can’t have people still hunting someone else for a crime when the culprit is known. That would say you do not believe you have the right person. When you have the culprit, you need to make sure that NO ONE has solid evidence pointing to someone else.

Compartmentalization doesn’t change the number of people involved in conspiracies. The people who are lying about Dr. Ivins being the culprit would be involved in one conspiracy. The people who do not step forward to say that they have evidence that Dr. Ivins is innocent would be involved in another conspiracy.

So, we would still be talking hundreds or even thousands of conspirators.

Ed, the isotope ratios do not support your Ivins Theory. See August 2008 affidavit.

I was at an event the day of Bruce Ivin’s suicide with 3-5 people who had worked with him for the past 20 years.

They said that the FBI drove him to suicide, made him crazy. The final act was when they confiscated his life’s work and prevented him from returning to his lab. They took away everything he had been working on for the past 30 years.

Anyone who has done molecular biology for a living knows that returning to the lab at any hour, after hours, weekends, holidays, holy days, to check on OD’s (optical density, which measures growth rate of cultures) is “normal”, not abnormal activity.

There is no doubt that the strain in the letters came from Ft Detrick & Ivin’s lab. There is no doubt the postage-paid envelopes came from the post office on Seventh Street.

Both Ivin’s lab and the 7th St post office were routinely accessed by thousands of individuals per month from 1990 to 2001.

In the USA, a basic principle of law is that a person is innocent until proven guilty by a jury of his peers. This has never been attempted.

Jim,

This is not true.

“There is no doubt the postage-paid envelopes came from the post office on Seventh Street.”

It is what US Attorney Jeff Taylor, as I recall, said in the press conference but was a misstatement. The affidavit explained that the Dulles distributing facility distributed throughout Maryland and Virginia.

No problem.

For the record, I do not work for SAIC, USAMRIID or anywhere else on Ft Detrick. I am allowed/entitled to express my opinion and I do not believe Dr Ivins in responsible based upon everything I have read & observed.

I am willing to investigate specific information locally. If you have a specific theory you need help substantiating, let me know.

Reader,

I may be able to get some handwriting from former colleagues at RIID.

I am in the Molecular Biology field. The sequencing data you make reference to is standard work any researcher would be conducting. The data I am waiting to see is the “definitive” sequencing that was supposed to be published in a peer-reviewed journal from the government labs that conducted some “cutting edge” sequencing project.

There is speculation as to what this new method might be, but I believe is relates to minor shifts in the full length sequence as there is an inherent “mutation rate” in all bacterium. These small changes assessed relative to other known strains would be able to pinpoint specific growth date of the germ within a narrow window of time. Presumably, these would be matched against strains found in the Ivins lab.

To the best of my knowledge, this data has not been presented, yet.

Reader wrote: “Contrary to Mr. Lake’s unsupported claims, Dr. Ivins had an alibi and could not have travelled to make the second mailing. He could not have gone unnoticed and returned at 5 a.m.”

You keep saying they are my claims when they are FACTS stated by the FBI and the DOJ.

Ivins ROUTINELY worked late hours at the lab. Ivins STATED that he was having problems at home and worked in the lab to avoid going home.
Ivins had many things of deceiving his wife and made no secret of them.
Ivins had NO ALIBI for the times of the mailings.
Witnesses STATED that Ivins had a habit of driving long distances to mail things, so they wouldn’t be traced back to him.

When you say that Ivins COULD NOT have traveled to make the second mailing and COULD NOT have gone unnoticed and returned at 5 a.m., you are once again stating that YOUR BELIEFS override the KNOWN FACTS.

That may be good enough for you, but it would NOT work in a court of law.

Reader wrote: “When in fact he has alibi established by 3 adults.”

So, you’re saying that there is a DOCUMENT somewhere that says members of his family have testified that on the night the second batch of letters would have been mailed, they were waiting up for him and can firmly state that he was AT HOME?

Where is this document?

And they remember this, even though they weren’t questioned until weeks? months? or was it YEARS after the incident?

Or are you simply saying that his family does not BELIEVE he was the anthrax mailer, and you are extrapolating everything from that?

Do you really want to discuss all the cases where family members cannot believe that their loved ones are murderers, even though the facts say they are?

There ARE documents which show when Ivins was in the lab. And they show that he DID have the time to drive to New Jersey.

Here’s what official documents say:

“Investigations revealed that Dr. Ivins informed people that he would drive places but tell his wife he was in the laboratory, and set back the odometer in his car. This information is significant because Dr. Ivins regularly worked at night, and could legitimately use it as an excuse with his family to explain his absence from home.”

Source: http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/anthrax/Search-Warrant-08-124-M-01.pdf

Jim H wrote: “There is speculation as to what this new method might be, but I believe is relates to minor shifts in the full length sequence as there is an inherent “mutation rate” in all bacterium. These small changes assessed relative to other known strains would be able to pinpoint specific growth date of the germ within a narrow window of time.”

Since mutations are purely RANDOM, this makes no sense. The fact that mutations occur RANDOMLY in - say - one in a billion replications cannot be used to pin point any time. The numbers are just AVERAGES. The last two mutations could just be 5 or 10 replications apart.

Plus, if there was some method of determining from mutants when bacteria was grown, that would have been mentioned in the roundtable discussion. The dating method they discussed was Carbon-dating for the spores.

As I understand it, the mutant-related scientific evidence in the anthrax investigation has to do with the fact that specific mutations were found in only 8 samples out of 1,072. And 7 of those 8 samples were “daughter” spores from the 8th sample: the “mother” spores in the RMR-1029 flask. There is a scientific paper being written to explain the scientific basis for concluding that this testing STATISTICALLY eliminates the other 1,064 tested samples from being sources for the attack anthrax.

Reader wrote: “There is not one shred of evidence indicating his guilt:”

We went over this in the other thread. To justify your beliefs, you list things which prove NOTHING and ignore all the ACTUAL EVIDENCE. Here are some of the FACTS pointing to Dr. Ivins’ guilt:

1. He was in charge of the RMR-1029 flask containing the “mother” spores which produced the attack anthrax “daughter” spores.

2. He had worked with Bacillus anthracis for over 20 years and had all the necessary expertise and equipment to prepare the spores in the anthrax letters.

3. He accessed the locked room where the RMR-1029 flask of spores was stored at the times the attack anthrax would have been prepared.

4. He worked alone and unsupervised in his lab for long hours at night and on weekends during the time the attack anthrax would have been prepared.

5. He had no scientific reason or verifiable explanation for working those hours or at those times.

6. He had MULTIPLE motives for sending the anthrax letters.

7. He tried various ways to mislead investigators when they started to suspect him.

8. He had NO ALIBI for either of the times when he could have driven to New Jersey to mail the letters.

9. He was known to drive long distances and to use various methods to mail letters and packages so they could not be traced back to him.

10. He had multiple connections to the New Jersey area where the anthrax letters were mailed.

11. He had serious mental problems, which appear to include murderous impulses.

12. The pre-stamped envelopes which were used in the attacks had print defects, and one of the post offices which sold the envelopes with those print defects was a post office which Dr. Ivins used.

13. His wife ran a day care center at the time of the attacks, and the facts indicate that a child of about 6 was used to do the actual writing on the anthrax letters.

14. Investigations found no evidence that someone other than Dr. Ivins sent the letters.

15. There is no evidence that Dr. Ivins could not possibly have sent the anthrax letters.

There may also be other facts pointing to Dr. Ivins which have not yet been disclosed by the FBI. The case has not been officially closed. And it is known that many scientific reports with details of the scientific investigation are being written, are going through the peer-review process and/or are awaiting a publication date in scientific journals.

I don’t know when the FBI will officially close the case, because I don’t know exactly why they haven’t already closed it. They know Ivins did it, so I can only assume that they are keeping the case open to justify the cost of further checking out such things as the source of the silicon and other matters related to the microbial forensics of the case.

errata - “Similarly, everyone is just crediting that the envelopes were distributed in Maryland and [Virginia].”

Let me describe what constitutes credible evidence of a design or intent — or evidence of modus operandi. The Defense Intelligence Agency gave a taste of such evidence under FOIA.  After an October 2001 bombing raid at a Qaeda camp in Darunta, Afghanistan US forces found 100+ printed, typed, handwritten pages of documents that shed light on Al Qaeda’s early anthrax planning. A June 1999 memo from Ayman to military commander Atef said that “the program should seek cover and talent in educational institutions, which it said were ‘more beneficial to us and allow easy access to specialists, which will greatly benefit us in the first stage, God willing.’

90 of the 100 pages are the photocopies of journal articles and the disease handbook excerpts. Some pages are letters between a scientist who was attending conferences sponsored by Porton Down (the next year taken over by USAMRIID). The 1999 letters described his visits to labs including one that had thousands of pathogens.

The documents confirmed that it was Zawahiri’s plan to use established specialists and the cover of universities and charities as cover for weaponizing anthrax.

So don’t be distracted by those sorority panty raids, Ed. Or be waylaid over Wikipedia editing. Focus on operatives associated with NGOs and/or universities that Zawahiri used in infiltrating US biodefense. And imagine a post-911 world where national security information may be withheld from the public.

We may learn more what the government suspected if and when the NSA intercepts of Ali Al-Timimi are disclosed. Not even the judge or prosecutor was privy to the intercepts. So your view that there is not still severe “compartmentalization” is uninformed.

The US DOJ cannot currently discuss the issue because his prosecution is ongoing after Dr. Al-Timimi’s sentence to life plus 70 years was reversed because of the warrantless NSA wiretapping issue.

I wrote: “5. He had no scientific reason or verifiable explanation for working those hours or at those times.”

Reader responded: “And I have no good reason for working my hours at these times. Neither do you. And if we ask you 4 years from now, you won’t have any specific recollection.”

But scientists keep records. And so do I. I CAN go back and look at the records to see what I was working on at the time of the attacks. If Ivins was doing anything related to his real work, he should have been able to do that, too.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t add another item to my list. I just shows that your argument is invalid.

There is only a broad characterization (a claim) about an interview in 2005 in which Dr. Ivins described his role in the experiments as not critical. You have not seen the log books. They have not been produced. You do not know the level of detail they typicaly provide (or don’t provide). Moreover, because of gag orders, co-workers are not in a position to show you are mistaken (other than the reference by someone not bound about the 19 projects he had going).

The evidence is on one of the keys day of evening hours he had to take time off during the day in connection with something involving his daughter and he was making up the time.

So it once again is a situation where you are just accepting spin — accepting characterization — without awaiting the documentary evidence.

Now that’s fine if the reason you are spending time on a Saturday is to be a cheerleader (without the benefit of any of the evidence). But what would the point be of that? And 4 years later would you be able to justify to an FBI agent why you were bothering to spend the time?

Ed, Aafia Siddiqui was captured carrying lengthy notes on anthrax written in her handwriting in mid-July 2008.

Then the FBI swabbed Dr. Bruce Ivins, who supplied Ames to the Ann Arbor researchers, for human DNA.

Then Dr. Ivins committed suicide.

Why did the FBI swab Dr. Ivins for DNA?

There was no human DNA on the letters. Were they swabbing him to see if DNA on lab equipment or a vial or a flask or slide matched his? Were they swabbing him for DNA to see if he made a transfer from the flask without registering it formally under 1997 regulations? If he did would that make him an accessory before the act? Would that put him in the position of a gun dealer who unwittingly failed to comply with a formal regulation relating to the transfer of a weapon — that then was stolen and used in a murder?

Before committing suicide did he just visit your website at the Frederick Public Library? (You had added the bit I gave you about Mueller saying he was confident the investigation would be solved?) Did he also visit my website where I posted that Aafia had been captured?

I’ve always argued that it appeared she had been kidnapped in Spring 2003 and was being secretly held. I’ve argued that it was analogous to the detention of respected orthopedic surgeon Amir Aziz where the ISI held him, and Americans questioned him for 29 days (after he treated Atef and Bin Laden). The highest levels of government denied that they had him until he was deposited outside his home. Apparently, in national security matters, governments feel justified in engaging in deception. This makes for a very awkward fit with legal proceedings and adherence to the rule of law. (The fusion of law and national security at the DOJ would be less of a concern if the DOJ had not been politicized.)

The US DOJ denied Aafia was in custody after two senior DOJ officials had first told NBC that she had been captured; they then recanted and (incorrectly) told the NBC person it was a different woman. Publicly, they announced that she was still wanted for questioning by the US DOJ which technically was true.

One reason I had concluded that Aafia Siddiqui had been rendered was the second-hand account report by her uncle in Pakistan. I have never known him to tell me anything inaccurate (and I tend to ask a lot of questions). When he chooses to answer, I’ve never known him to say something that was not true. Below is the account he provides of Aafia’s visit with him in January 2008 — a half-year before she is picked up. (He addresses this issue of the biochem notes in her bag).

A psychiatrist has opined that Aafia is not competent to stand trial. Her next hearing is in 3 days. You assume compartmentalization in Amerithrax has been lifted. If only the facts surrounding Aafia Siddiqui’s case or Amerithrax — or the just resolution — were so clear.

Aafia’s uncle writes me:

“Salient Features of the visit of Dr. Aafia Siddiqui at the residence of her uncle Mr. S. H. Faruqi at Islamabad, Pakistan
On 22nd to 24th of January, 2008.

My door bell rang up on 22nd January in the evening about half an hour after the sun set. I personally went out. A gentleman in plain Pakistani clothes (shalwar qameez) said that he had brought a lady in his car (white Suzuki car) from Karachi Company bus stand (Sector G-9, Islamabad) who wanted to see me. I went near the car. A lady in black ‘burqa’ (Muslim women’s dress to hide the body contours) came out saying “O uncle I am Aafia”. Her complete body and face (except eyes) were hidden under the ‘burqa’ but I recognized the voice to my complete satisfaction. She was Aafia. I was greatly surprised and perplexed too but soon regained my normalcy and welcomed her and embraced her. I asked her to enter my house but she refused and instead requested me to take her to some isolated and peaceful place where she could talk to me in privacy. When I insisted on her entry to my house, she screamed and asked me not to insist on that as it would simply result in the destruction of my house as well as herself. On this I asked the same car driver (an employee of Ministry of Foreign Affairs using his car as a taxi after office hours) to drop us at the nearby located Taj Mahal restaurant in the Jinnah Super Market.
He did it.

Dr. Aafia and myself sat at Taj Mahal restaurant for about one hour and later at Captain Cook fast food restaurant (also located in the Jinnah Super Market) for about 1? hour and talked on Dr. Aafia’s circumstances. Later I accommodated her in room no. 29 of ‘Islamabad Inn’, Street no. 44, F-7/1, Islamabad declaring her as my daughter. She passed one night at this guest house and the following day and the night between 23rd and 24th January at my house. I also called my sister Mrs. Ismat Siddiqui (Dr. Aafia’s mother) from Karachi on 23.1.08 early morning. Myself and my wife had quite detailed talks with Dr. Aafia about her last 5 years, about her captors, places of captivity and about the possibilities of her further staying at my house etc. The gist of these talks is summarized in the following points:
1. Throughout her stay at Islamabad Dr. Aafia did not show her face to anybody except to me (intentionally or un-intentionally) for a glimpse at Taj Mahal restaurant. She also did not put of her ‘burqa’ for even a minute.
2. When I had a glimpse of her face at Taj Mahal restaurant I noted that her face was not her normal face but has been changed apparently through plastic surgery especially at her nose which was totally changed. Her eyes were of course unchanged. hen I questioned Dr. Aafia as to who and where changed her face through plastic surgery? she simply said:
“Nobody”
3. Dr. Aafia had a national identity card issued by the relevant department of the govt. of Pakistan in which there was a photograph which was not of the ‘original’ Aafia. It was quite different. Also it was of some Research Scholar of the Karachi University. The name of the lady was also different.
4. Dr. Aafia said she was then kept at some place in Lahore. She was released temporarily to collect data regarding some Al-Quaida suspects. But she slipped from there, took an Islamabad bound bus from some bus stand and came over to Islamabad.
5. Dr. Aafia told that since her abduction in 2003 she has not seen her 3 children and does not know any thing about them.
6. Throughout her stay at Islamabad Dr. Aafia insisted that arrangements may be made to send her to Taliban in Afghanistan as according to her they would not hand her over to her “enemies”.
7. She told that her American captors were more well behaved than the non-American ones.
8. She told that she did not know as to which different places she has been kept over the past years. Whatever she remembered was that she had remained in complete isolation. Those supplying her food were using hand gloves and face masks. They never spoke to her.
9. Her mother tried to give her an amount of Rs. 5,000/- while she was departing for Lahore on the morning of 24th January. At first she refused to accept but later accepted the same.
10. Almost whole of the night of 23rd and 24th January 2008 which she passed at my residence in a bed room she was found praying or reading Quran on the prayer rug at the floor of the room and not on the sleeping bed.
11. When told that we were calling some journalists for her interview, she very seriously opposed it and remarked that it will be simply killing her.
12. She earnestly appealed that we should not try to detain her then rather wait till the ouster of president Pervaiz Musharraf when she hopes to be released.
13. Dr. Aafia told us that of lately there had been a change and she had been transferred to a new place and to a new agency. She said that the new people were much better than the previous ones. They were looking after her well and had granted freedom of ‘outing’ from time to time.
14. Throughout her stay with us I felt that she had been ‘bugged’ and somebody sitting at Lahore or Islamabad was listening what she and we were speaking. I felt it from her behaviour (trying to keep, at times, her voice very low and her praises for Americans).
15. Dr. Aafia was carrying a large size black coloured parachute cloth made hand bag which was weighing about 5 to 7 kg. She never allowed anybody at my house to open it and see its contents. When asked about the contents by me she told that these were some books which her captors had allowed her to keep.”

Ed, how many grand juries are considering Amerithrax? One? Two? If two, where is the second one located?

Do you think Aafia Siddiqui is going to be indicted on additional terrorism charges?

Do you think at Guantanamo KSM will provide details of his role as head of the cell weaponizing anthrax?

At Guantanamo, do you think Aafia’s husband al-Balucchi or al-Hawsawi will provide details of the anthrax spraydrying documents found on al-Hawsawi’s computer that was seized at the home of a bacteriologist? What happened in the prosecution of that bacteriologist?

What documents were on Aafia’s thumb drive?

As some Senator famously said of Amerithrax:

“If the case is solved, why isn’t it solved?”

This is another great article by Kenneth Dillon. Your right Kenneth the anthrax mailings couldn’t have been done by al Qaeda.

State sponsored terrorist wouldn’t tape all the seams of the envelopes and include warnings notes addressed to the person who opens the letter.

The first set of letters was contaminated and the anthrax was unprocessed making it less likely to cause inhalation anthrax. It is likely the first letters were sent to separate the anthrax letters from the anthrax hoax letters that had been on the rise since 1996.

The second set of anthrax laced letters was processed to be more likely to cause inhalation anthrax. They were mailed on the same day the news reports were reporting that the FBI believed that the mail was involved. Which made it more likely a person opening a letter with a warning note would seek really seek immediate medical attention.

Also the second set of letters contained a note that stated “We have this Anthrax” to lead the investigation to organizations that had the Ames strain of anthrax.

Krolson wrote: “This is another great article by Kenneth Dillon. Your right Kenneth the anthrax mailings couldn’t have been done by al Qaeda.”

Did you read anything in the article beyond the title?

Kirk,

Kenneth thinks that North American operatives are responsible for the anthrax mailings. He thinks Jdey is the mailer. Jdey was expected to be part of 911 and unexpectedly pulled back (but not due to cold feet). He worked with both KSM and Hambali (two key anthrax planners). Jdey once was said by the FBI to be trained in biology. He disappeared at the time of the mailings.

Kenneth is a professionally trained historian (Ivy league PhD) and former intelligence analyst.

A senior militant who met with Atef, Zawahiri and Bin Laden to discuss these issues in Kandahar confirms that deterring the invasion against Afghanistan was a key purpose of the threatened use of WMD (i.e., anthrax).

In November 2007, a former leader of an armed Islamic group in Libya, Numan Bin Uthman, wrote an open letter to al-Qaeda second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri telling him that Jihadi groups in Arab countries have failed and that the strategy of using nonconventional WMD to deter an invasion of Afghanistan was a misguided and failed strategy.

In his letter to Zawahiri, the Libyan jihadist Numan Bin Uthman wrote:

“Dear Doctor Ayman, as I told you during a meeting in Kandahar [in Afghanistan] in 2000,

***

Uthman also said that he had taken part in an important al-Qaeda summit in Kandahar, Afghanistan in 2000, in which al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden had defined search for and use of weapons of mass destruction as a “Sharia obligation”.

“During this occasion, I had a strong dispute with the martyr Abu Hafs al-Kumandan [Commander Abu Hafs aka Mohammed Atef, Al Qaeda’s military commander], because he was heavily involved in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.”

Ayman Zawahiri was reporting to Atef about anthrax weaponization program codenamed Zabadi. Atef died when a missile landed on his head in November 2001.

The jihadist’s letter to Zawahiri continues:

“He wanted to use these weapons to dissuade the United State from attacking Afghanistan.”

The fellow goes on to explain that instead OBL/Zawahiri merely caused the invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq and did the Movement great harm.

Relatedly, Ali Al-Timimi had a stern warning not to invade Iraq hand-delivered to every member of Congress on October 6, 2002 — the first anniversary of the mailing to Senator Leahy and Senator Daschle. It was in the name of Bin Laden’s sheik.

Ken and I do not think it was “state-sponsored” — unless you count infiltration of the UK and US biodefense establishment.

    At a December 2002 conference held by “Accuracy in Media,” former State Department analyst Kenneth Dillon noted that Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), the key component of al Qaeda under Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, head of al Qaeda’s biowarfare program, likely targeted Senator Leahy because of his role as head of a panel of the Senate Appropriations Committee that had developed the so-called “Leahy Law” in 1998. Dillon explained, “According to the wording of the Leahy Law, the U.S. Government was authorized to ‘render’ suspected foreign nationals to the government of a foreign country, even when there was a possibility that they would be tortured, in ‘exceptional circumstances.’ When the Leahy Law was applied to send EIJ members captured in the Balkans back to Egypt, Zawahiri fiercely denounced the United States. So Leahy was a high-priority target.”

    That aid goes to the core of Al Qaeda’s complaint against the United States. (The portion going to Egypt and Israel constituted, by far, the largest portion of US foreign aid, and most of that is for military and security purposes.) Pakistan is a grudging ally in the “war against terrorism” largely due to the US Aid it now receives in exchange for that cooperation. The press in Pakistan newspapers regularly reported on protests arguing that FBI’s reported 12 agents in Pakistan in 2002 were an affront to its sovereignty. There was a tall man, an Urdu-speaking man, and a woman — all chain-smokers — who along with their colleagues were doing very important work in an unsupportive, even hostile, environment. The US agents — whether CIA or FBI or US Army — caused quite a stir in Pakistan along with the Pakistani security and intelligence officials who accompanied them. In mid-March 2003, Washington waived sanctions imposed in 1999 paving the way for release in economic aid to Pakistan. Billions more would be sent to Egypt, Israel and other countries involved in the “war against terrorism.”

    The commentators who suggest that Al Qaeda would have had no motivation to send weaponized anthrax to Senators Daschle and Leahy as symbolic targets — because they are liberal — are mistaken. The main goal of Dr. Zawahiri is to topple President Mubarak. He views the US aid as the chief obstacle and is indifferent to this country’s labels of conservative and liberal.

The best guide to Ayman Zawahiri’s intent are Ayman’s words. He explained his motives in an October 2001 book.

   As Kenneth explained above, Senator Leahy, one of my favorite Senators, was targeted in Fall 2001 in part precisely because of the issue of the rendition and torture of EIJ leaders. The folks connected to the WTC 1993 prosecution overseen by Judge Mukasey were responsible for the anthrax mailings. (History will Judge Mukasey’s tenure as Attorney General by whether he understands the correct analysis of Amerithrax.)

    After the assassination of Anwar Sadat, Cairo attorney Montasser al-Zayat first met blind sheik Abdel-Rahman after Montasser had been tortured for 12 hours. He was near a mental breakdown. Abdel-Rahman came over to where he was huddled in a corner of a cell, bent over and whispered: “Rely on God; don’t be defeated.” Mohammed had spoken the words in the Koran. Al- Zayat would become one of Sheik Omar’s most trusted legal advisers and a lawyer on the defense team of El Sayyid Nosair. Nosair was the Egyptian who served as Abdel-Rahman’s bodyguard and was tried in New York in 1990 for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane. In March 1999, attorney al-Zayat was representing defendants in a massive prosecution of jihadists in Cairo. He told the press that Ayman Zawahiri would use weaponized anthrax against US targets because of the continued extradition pressure and torture faced by Egyptian Islamic Jihad members. Two senior EIJ leaders then on trial were saying the same thing to the press and in confessions.

    US Postal employee Sattar, who had been the blind sheik’s spokesman after his 1993 arrest, in a 1999 Frontline interview spoke of the role of appropriations and torture in fueling the islamist rage:
“this is the same old story happening again, and again, and again. American government don’t get it. The American government [is] deceiving the American people. They’re not telling them what’s really going on. You can kill Osama bin Laden today or tomorrow. You can arrest him and put him on trial in New York or in Washington.”
“Tomorrow you will get somebody else, his name probably will be different, Abdullah, or Muhammad. It’s not going to end. Until you, take a hard, and a good look at your policies in the Islamic world and the Muslim world, as long as you’re supporting dictators like Mubarak as long as you are giving aid to regimes that [are worse] to their people than Saddam Hussein, things will get ugly, and you cannot control the emotion of people when you are tortured in Egyptian prison by an American trained Egyptian officer. He is torturing you, and he is bragging that he was in the United States getting his training, when the equipment that he is using is American made.”

    The founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad Kamal Habib (who wrote for the quarterly magazine of the US charity Islamic Assembly of North America) told scholar Fawaz Gerges:

“The prison years also radicalized al-shabab [young men] and set
them on another violent journey. The torture left deep physical and psychological scars on jihadists and fueled their thirst for vengeance. Look at my hands — still spotted with the scars from cigarette burns nineteen years later. For days on end we were brutalized — our faces bloodied, our bodies broken with electrical shocks and other devices. The torturers aimed at breaking our souls and brainwashing us. They wanted to humiliate us and force us to betray the closest members of our cells.

I spent sleepless nights listening to the screams of young men echoing from torture chambers. A degrading, dehumanizing experience. I cannot convey to you the rage felt by al-shabab who were tortured after Sadat’s assassination.”

While Kamal Habib wrote for the jihad-supporting Assirat, Al-Timimi was on the Board of Advisers.

    In a videotape that circulated in the summer of 2001, Zawahiri said “In Egypt they put a lot of people in jails — some sentenced to be hanged. And in the Egyptian jails, there is a lot of killing and torture. All this happens under the supervision of America. America has a CIA station as well as an FBI office and a huge embassy in Egypt, and it closely follows what happens in that country. Therefore, America is responsible for everything that happens.”

    An August 29, 2001 opinion column on Islamway, the second most read site for english speaking muslims, illustrates that the role of “Leahy Law” was known by educated islamists:

“There is an intolerable contradiction between America’s professed policy of opposition to state-sponsored terrorism, exemplified by the Leahy Law, and the U.S. Congress’ continuing sponsorship of Israeli violence against Palestinians.” The article cited “References: CIFP 2001. “Limitations on Assistance to Security Forces: ‘The Leahy Law’” 4/9/01 (Washington, DC: Center for International Foreign Policy) Center for International Foreign Policy Accessed 8/28/01.Hocksteader, Lee 2001.

    The next day, in the same publication, there was an article describing the 21-page document released in Ottawa on August 29, 2001, in which the CSIS claimed that Canadian detainee Jaballah had contacts with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Shehata and sought to deport Jaballah. Shehata was in charge of EIJ’s Civilian Branch and in charge of “special operations.”The nominal President of the Syracuse-based Help the Needy IANA spin-off was moderator of islamway for women. It would be seven more years — not until February 2008 — before the Canadian government for the first time revealed that after coming to Canada in 1996, Jaballah would contact Ayman regularly on Ayman’s Inmarsat satellite phone.

    “They [Senators Daschle and Leahy] represent something to him,” says James Fitzgerald of the FBI Academy’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. “Whatever agenda he’s operating under, these people meant something to him.” To more fully appreciate why Leahy — a human rights advocate and liberal democrat — might have been targeted as a symbol, it is important to know that Senator Leahy has been the head of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, the panel in charge of aid to Egypt and Israel. In addition to the Senate majority leader, anthrax was mailed to the position symbolic of the 50 billion in appropriations that has been given to Israel since 1947 (and the equally substantial $2 billion annually in aid that has been keeping Mubarak in power in Egypt and the militant islamists out of power).

    Within a couple weeks after September 11, a report in the Washington Post and then throughout the muslim world explained that the President sought a waiver that would allow military assistance to once-shunned nations. The militant islamists who had already been reeling from the extradition of 70 “brothers”, would now be facing much more of the same. President Bush asked Congress for authority to waive all existing restrictions on U.S. military assistance and exports for the next five years to any country where the aid would help the fight against international terrorism. The waiver would include those nations who were currently unable to receive U.S. military aid because of their sponsorship of terrorism (such as Syria and Iran) or because of their nuclear weapons programs (such as Pakistan).

    In late September 2001, the Washington Post quoted Leahy: “We all want to be helpful, and I will listen to what they have in mind.” The article noted that he was chairman of both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, which were considering the legislation. “But we also want to be convinced that what is being proposed is sound, measured and necessary and not merely impulsive,” said Leahy. “Moral leadership in defense of democracy and human rights is vital to what we stand for in the world. Acts of terrorism are violations of human rights. Now is the time to show what sets us apart from those who attack us,” he said.

    The options being considered in response to the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington included potential cooperation with virtually every Middle Eastern and South and Central Asian nation near Afghanistan. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” would be the only test for foreign aid. The “Leahy Law” plays a key role in the secret “rendering” of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (Al Qaeda) operatives to countries like Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Algeria where they are allegedly tortured. Richard Clarke, counterterrorism czar during the Clinton Administration, has quoted Vice-President Gore saying: “Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.” Although humanitarian in its intent, the Leahy Law permits continued appropriations to military and security units who conduct torture in the event of “extraordinary circumstances.”

    In an interview broadcast on al-Jazeera television on October 7, 2001 (October 6 in the US) — about when the second letter saying “Death to America’” and “Death to Israel” was mailed — Ayman Zawahiri echoed a familiar refrain sounded by Bin Laden: “O people of the U.S., can you ask yourselves a question: Why all this enmity for the United States and Israel? *** Your government supports the corrupt governments in our countries.”

    A month after 9/11, late at night, a charter flight from Cairo touched down at the Baku airport. An Egyptian, arrested by the Azerbaijan authorities on suspicions of having played a part in the September 11 attack, was brought on board. His name was kept secret. That same night the plane set off in the opposite direction. Much of the Amerithrax story has happened at night with no witnesses, with the rendering of University of Karachi microbiology student Saeed Mohammed merely one example. Zawahiri claims that there is a US intelligence bureau inside the headquarters of the Egyptian State Security Investigation Department that receives daily reports on the number of detainees and those detainees who are released. At the time Ayman Zawahiri was getting his biological weapons program in full swing, his own brother Mohammed was picked up in the United Arab Emirates. He was secretly rendered to Egyptian security forces and sentenced to death rendered in the 1999 Albanian returnees case.

    Throughout 2001, the Egyptian islamists were wracked by extraditions and renditions. CIA Director Tenet once publicly testified that there had been 70 renditions prior to 9/11. At the same time a Canadian judge was finding that Mahmoud Mahjoub was a member of the Vanguards of Conquest and would be denied bail, Bosnian authorities announced on October 6, 2001 they had handed over three Egyptians to Cairo who had been arrested in July. In Uruguay, a court authorized the extradition to Egypt of a man wanted in Egypt for his alleged role in the 1997 Luxor attack. Ahmed Agiza, the leader of the Vanguards of Conquest (which can be viewed as an offshoot of Jihad), was handed over by Sweden in December 2001.

    One islamist, a Hamas supporter, summarized why the anthrax was sent in an ode “To Anthrax” on November 1, 2001: “O, anthrax, despite, your wretchedness, you have sewn horror in the heart of the lady of arrogance, of tyranny, of boastfulness!” In an interview that appeared in the Pakistani paper, Dawn, on November 10, 2001, Bin Laden explained that “The American Congress endorses all government measures, and this proves that [all of] America is responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims.”

    Zawahiri likely was surprised that the plainly worded message of the letters accompanying the anthrax was not deemed clear. Perhaps the talking heads would not have been so quick to infer an opposite meaning if no message had been expressed using words at all. Perhaps the public the sender had relied only on what KSM describes as the language of war — the death delivered by the letters — the pundits would not have been so misdirected. But why was Al Qaeda evasive on the question of responsibility for the anthrax mailings, dismissing the issue with a snicker, and falsely claiming that Al Qaeda did not know anything about anthrax? Simple. Bin Laden denied responsibility for 9/11 until it was beyond reasonable dispute.

On September 16, 2001, he said: “The US is pointing the finger at me but I categorically state that I have not done this. I am residing in Afghanistan. I have taken an oath of allegiance (to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar) which does not allow me to do such things from Afghanistan.” Before that, Ayman had denied the 1998 embassy bombings too. On August 20, 1998, coincidentally on the day of strikes on camps in Afghanistan and Sudan, Ayman al-Zawahiri contacted The News, a Pakistani English-language daily, and said on behalf of Bin Laden that “Bin Laden calls on Moslem Ummah to continue Jihad against Jews and Americans to liberate their holy places. In the meanwhile, he denies any involvement in the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings.” To Ayman, “war is deception.”

The targeted Senators have another connection pertinent to the Egyptian militants. The United States and other countries exchange evidence for counterterrorism cases under the legal framework of a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (”MLAT”). Egypt is signatory of such a treaty that was ratified by the United States Senate in late 2000. For example, when the Fall 2001 rendition of Vanguards of Conquest leader Agizah was criticized, the US explained that it was relying on the MLAT. In the prosecution of Post Office worker Ahmed Abdel Sattar, the MLAT was described. Sattar’s attorney Michael Tigar, at trial in December 2004 explained: “Now, that might be classified, it’s true, but we have now found out and our research has just revealed that on, that the State Department has reported that it intends to use and relies on the mutual legal assistance treaty between the United States and Egypt signed May 3, 1998, in Cairo, and finally ratified by the United States Senate on October 18th, 2000. The State Department issued a press report about this treaty on November 29th, 2001 and I have a copy here.” He explained that “Article IV of the treaty provides that requests under the treaty can be made orally as well as under the formal written procedures required by the treaty, that those requests can include requests for testimony, documents, and even for the transfer to the United States if the treaty conditions are met.”

Reader could you please try to state motive in just a short paragraph. I really want to know your thoughts on the suject.

Thank You

1. My favorite single paragraph regarding what is in the heads of these Al Qaeda supporters was written by Aafia.

In 1995 she wrote this on the subject of extradition and appropriations:

“Pakistani govt. has officially joined the gang of our typical contemporary govts. of Muslim countries. I mean Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and the likes of them. Here’s what I read in this Friday’s issue of the “Muslim News,” something that was confirmed a few days earlier by some articles in local papers like The Boston Globe and the New York Times etc: “BENAZIR ASKS FOR THE WEST’S HELP AGAINST ‘EXTREMISM’. Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister, called on the west to help eradicate religious opposition. She said that Pakistan is a “moderate” Islamic country and it is the first defense line against ‘terrorism,’ and hence needs international support. She added that the arrest of Ramzi Yousef and giving him to the United States is a simple proof.’” [Ramzi Yousef was the mentor of al-Baluchi, Aafia’s future husband, the guy who got the hijackers into the country; he worked in the UAE in the Summer of 2001 and worked with the guy with anthrax spraydrying documents on his computer].’”

2.

FOI letter generator (includes states) -
http://www.rcfp.org/foi_letter/generate.php

For Amerithrax FOI requests generally, see list of component DOJ agencies
http://www.usdoj.gov/oip/attachmentbmay99.htm

Favorite paragraph by the London cleric who made an open call in 1999 (read in mosques) for Bin Laden to use anthrax (to which OBL replied in the affirmative in a public response:

“Using any biological weapons in self-defence is, in Islam, permissible, and I believe that we are currently operating under a defensive jihad. Obviously, we regret what could happen to innocent people, but there are always people who are war casualties or, if you like, victims of war.”

“Muslim Calls for Bio-Weapon Holy War,” Sunday Times, September 5, 1999

I should add that wanting “to awaken America to the danger of a bioweapons attack following 9/11″ includes a range of sub-motives:

He might have wanted to awaken America to the dangers because he was concerned for the safety of his wife and chidren.

He might have wanted to awaken America to the dangers because he saw a way of profiting from a demand for vaccines.

He might have wanted to awaken America to the dangers because an increased demand for new vaccines would ensure his continued employment.

He might have wanted to awaken America to the dangers because he felt he might become a hero for warning America in time to prevent a catastrophic real attack by al Qaeda.

He might have wanted to awaken America to the dangers because he felt he was smarter than everyone else, and we are all just too stupid to see the dangers.

Given time, I could probably think of a few other “sub-motives.”

Krolson wrote: “If the highly refined anthrax, used in the second letters to the Senators, had been used in the first letters to the media do you think that it is likely that the death toll would have been much greater?

“Possibly in the hundreds if not thousands?”

Yes, the death toll would undoubtedly have been much greater. I don’t know if it would have been in the hundreds, since there are limiting factors - such as where the letters were opened and how many people pass through that area. But, there was definitely enough anthrax to kill hundreds or even thousands IF the culprit had spent time thinking about the best way to MAXIMIZE the death toll instead of taping the envelopes shut and putting warnings into the letters to MINIMIZE the number of infections.

Krolson wrote “Ed: Do you think that it is likely that the mailer waited until the FBI was looking at the mail before they mailed the Senator letters?”

Ummmm. I dunno. Possibly. But my personal feeling is that he was getting frustrated because his first mailing accomplished nothing, PLUS those two Senators were arguing about Civil Rights at a time when millions might be killed at any moment by bioweapons, AND, as a “kicker,” the doctors working on the Bob Stevens case were saying that Stevens might have been infected from some NATURAL source.

To me, that all adds up to motivation for a second mailing to make CERTAIN that everyone knew the danger and the source of the danger - PARTICULARLY Senators Daschle and Leahy.

Thank You Ed: I really do appreciate your responses. I know that you have done your research and are an athority on the subject.

I have looked and tried to find articles that were published during Oct 2001 after Oct 8th. All of the ones that I can find all list the mail link.

Also October 8th was a trunning point in the investigation when:
“October 8th 2001 9 a.m. EDT 1,000 people, American Media employees or other long-term visitors, underwent nasal swab tests and began taking antibiotics from the National Pharmaceutical Stockpile.”

It seems likely that October 8th, 2001 was the date that the scientific and the law enforcement investigations, into the anthrax, join on a conclusion that the Anthrax had been sent intentionally.

I totally agree with you on your statement: “To me, that all adds up to motivation for a second mailing to make CERTAIN that everyone knew the danger and the source of the danger - PARTICULARLY Senators Daschle and Leahy.”

In your valued Opinion: what do you believe would have happened if the letters were sent to Senators on October 1st instead?

Wouldn’t it be likely that Senators Daschle and Leahy would have been infected?

Krolson wrote: “In your valued Opinion: what do you believe would have happened if the letters were sent to Senators on October 1st instead?

“Wouldn’t it be likely that Senators Daschle and Leahy would have been infected?”

Maybe. Probably not, since a lot happens to their mail before they ever see it. Other people handle it. Senators aren’t like typical office workers who work all day in their office. Plus, the letters said “WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.” And security procedures are very different for Senators than for newspaper editors.

I try to work with facts.

The facts say that it takes at least a week to prepare an anthrax powder like what was in the Senate letters. If you go back a week or so from the time when the letters would have been mailed (the night of Oct. the “trigger” might have been the headline in the Washigton Post on September 29: “Demand Growing for Anthrax Vaccine: Fear of Bioterrorism Attack Spurs Requests for Controversial Shot.”

Source: http://www.mvrd.org/AVN/sonnie/news/29Sep01_washingtonpost.htm

I don’t see any facts which say that the culprit was specifically waiting for the FBI to become involved before mailing the second letters. I can’t make any sense of that.

Thank You Ed: I really appreciate your input.

“Reader” How about you?

Your thoughts on motive. If you could in your own words I would truly appreciate it.

It is sometimes hard for me to understand what you are saying with your posting(Reader).

It seems that you are copy in matterial that you have read and you understand, but it is difficult for me to understand what your valued Opinion is.

If you could in your own words.

Thank You!

Thank You Reader!!

I do appreciated your share of your views.

Ed: regarding our prior discussion on the date of October 8th 2001.

It was the date that the Attorney General John Ashcroft held a new conference in Washington stating “We regard this as an investigation that could become a clear criminal investigation”.

http://www.promedmail.com/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1001:7906865921653694::::F2400_P1001_BACK_PAGE,F2400_P1001_ARCHIVE_NUMBER,F2400_P1001_USE_ARCHIVE:1001,20011008.2446,Y

Also it was the same day that U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Thomas Thompson held a news conference stating that the anthrax cases in Florida were being turned over to the FBI for investigation.

We know the person taped the seams of the envelopes and put warnings in each of the letters.

Isn’t likely that the person would also wait until they knew the more lethal letters would be treated differently than the media letters?

Ed: regarding our prior discussion on the date of October 8th 2001.

It was the date that the Attorney General John Ashcroft held a new conference in Washington stating “We regard this as an investigation that could become a clear criminal investigation”.

Also October 8th 2001 was the same day that U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Thomas Thompson held a news conference stating that the anthrax cases in Florida were being turned over to the FBI for investigation.

I have tried to add several links to the articles, but the link is long and all of the postings with that link have been removed.

For myself, I look at the fact that the person took the time to tape all of the seams of the envelopes and included warnings inside. I believe that they did this because they wanted to try and prevent deaths.

I believe that we both agree that if the more lethal letters had been sent to the media, there would have been a lot more people infected with inhalation anthrax.

To me it is a logical conclusion that the person waited until they knew the next person opening a letter with powder and a warning would be sure to report it immediately.

KRolson wrote: “To me it is a logical conclusion that the person waited until they knew the next person opening a letter with powder and a warning would be sure to report it immediately.”

Yes, but you didn’t mail the anthrax letters, did you? So, what YOU would do doesn’t necessarily mean that is what the anthrax mailer did.

It took TIME to prepare the letters. Would the anthrax mailer send them out as soon as they were ready? Or would he sit around with the letters in a Baggie waiting for news that the FBI was on the case?

We can’t be sure he didn’t mail the letters on the evening of the 6th, or on the 7th. The 8th was Columbus Day. At the moment, I can’t recall if there was ever a definitive statement that there was a mail pickup on Columbus Day. If not, anything mailed from the evening of the 6th through the morning of the 9th would be postmarked on the 9th.

It’s certainly POSSIBLE that the anthrax mailer sat around for a few days waiting for the FBI to become involved. But everyone was reading about the Bob Stevens anthrax case, so people would already have been alert to anything mentioning anthrax - like a letter filled with powder containing a note that said “WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX.” And government offices were particularly ready on the alert due to 9/11 and all the media talk of an anthrax attack as a followup to 9/11.

The facts say the culprit MUST have started preparing the letters at least a week before he mailed them. His motivation relates to what caused him to START preparing the letters. Whether or not he mailed them as soon as they were ready seems far less important — and purely speculative. At best, it’s just another argument that the culprit wanted to minimize the number of infections. That’s already clear. No additional arguments required.

Reader wrote: “That is speculation or an assumption.”

You are just being argumentative. That’s non-productive.

The facts say the powder in the letters required at least a week to prepare.

Motivation relates to what caused the culprit to START preparing the letters.

In January 2001, a bail hearing was announced for the Egyptian Islamic Jihad/Vanguards of Conquest #2. A threat to use anthrax was immediately sent to those responsible for the detention and threatened deportation to Cairo. Bail was denied on October 5 and then the mailer rushed to mail the good stuff.

The lawyer for the EIJ spiritual guide had announced in 1999 that Zawahiri intended to use anthrax to retaliate for the rendering and detention of senior EIJ leaders — and the plan was confirmed by the detained EIJ military leader (and another shura leader who was working for Egyptian intelligence services).

The threat to use mailed anthrax was described to President Bush by the CIA in a PDB in early February 2001 that is still classified. See 911 Commission Report.

It was particularly awkward because the Salafi-Jihadi who had infiltrated US biodefense had worked for and been commended by President Bush’s Chief of Staff (and then Al-Timimi was also referenced in the August 6, 2001 PDB about OBL’s plan to attack the US using planes).

The FBI PDB regarding OBL’s plan to use anthrax to retaliate against the rendering of senior EIJ leaders is as plainly worded and as significant as the August 6, 2001 PDB describing his plan to hijack an airliner to free the blind sheik Abdel-Rahman, the spiritual guide for the EIJ. Obama needs to ask to see a copy of the February 2001 PDB about the plan to use anthrax.

The late January threat was sent by the same people who sent letter bombs to the people symbolically responsible for the WTC 1993 plotters. Those letters were sent to newspapers in DC and NYC and people in symbolic positions relating to the detention (for example, the “parole officer” at Leavenworth, a position that does not exist). (The Al Hayat letter bomb investigation is still open and there is a $5 million reward under the Reward for Justice program) The Al Hayat targeting was key to understanding the modus operandi of the Amerithrax mailings. CIA analysts in Fall 2001 would have known that either EIJ/VOC was responsible or someone with access to threat intel who wanted to make it look like EIJ/VOC (Egyptian security, Mossad, CIA, e.g.) Cheney was briefed by the CIA in mid-December 2001 about documents seized in Afghanistan showing Ayman intended to use universities and charities as cover to weaponize anthrax (and his plan to recruit specialists already in the field). Fitzpatrick immediately came down like a ton of bricks on charities /leaders based 1 mile from the nanobiotechnology researchers working on anthrax for DARPA. Bruce Ivins had supplied the researchers with Ames.

If Dr. Ivins did not register any transfer under 1997 regulation then perhaps he had liability as an accessory before the fact (even though innocent of any knowledge that a crime was going to be committed). He would be in the position of being a gun dealer who provided the murder weapon without proper record-keeping. That is why they swabbed him for the DNA. Upon his unexpected suicide, they are doing the best they can — disclosing important science, continuing the investigation, and assuring the due process rights of all concerned.

It is embarrassing to the Administration because not only were they given express warning, but it is the former assistant of then White House Chief of Staff who the FBI suspects of accessing the biochemistry information relating to the concentration of anthrax using silica. See filing of defendant’s defense counsel.

The US Attorney Jeff Taylor was Gonzalez’ national security counsel. The US Attorney before him, Ken Wainstein, is the White House national security person (and former head of the DOJ national security division and the former chief of staff for Mueller). But I’m sure they will want justice done and would not be party to a cover-up just because of the serendipity of Al-Timimi having once been Andrew Card’s assistant.

Barack’s mother didn’t raise any stupid children and so it is best that everyone make sure they scrupulously put this on the right track to the correct solution, whatever it is. Much more will come out after January 20.

Given Al-Timimi’s father worked at the Iraqi embassy — and given for all I know the Salafi-Jihadi mailer actually works for Egyption intelligence/security (like shura member al-Najjar did) — it truly is not over until the fat lady sings. The one thing you can count on in life is to be surprised.

The bail for EIJ / VOC #2 was denied on October 5, 2001. The mailer, who is a nice guy, then literally dropped what he was doing and rushed to mail the anthrax. Whether he had seen the news report regarding Stevens death is unclear. Given there was no mail pick-up on Columbus Day, the letter could have been mailed anywhere from Saturday (after the last pick-up) through Tuesday (and when one is busy with things such as transporting anthrax one may miss a news item). A perp might not feel comfortable googling the word “anthrax” and much of America receive their news late in the morning paper a day or two later.

The fact that the mailer did not intend anthrax to leak out is indicated by the tape.

I think you are ignoring the March 14, 2001 patent application using silica in the culture medium to concentrate anthrax. It was filed by the leading anthrax scientist in the world and the former deputy head of USAMRIID. See FoxNews report regarding what the FBI suspects. They came to be 15 feet away from the man working with the 911 imam and Bin Laden’s sheik. That Salafi-Jihadi (Dr. Al-Timimi) had a high security clearance while working at SRA for the Navy in 1999. The method was not public until long after 9/11.

There are ongoing classified proceedings at which these allegations regarding anthrax are the subject of briefing. I could email the transcript to anyone who wants it.

The FBI WMD head’s remark regarding silica dioxide in the culture medium should not be so lightly regarded.

The people responsible for both the Al Hayat letter bombs and the anthrax mailings subscribe to the teaching under the koran that “innocents” should not be targeted. Women, children, the elderly are innocents. This is shown by their writings. A warning is expressly required under the hadiths. Given that the cell members have long lived in the US, they had no desire to use aerosolized anthrax in a more widespread manner. That would lead to the death of their family, friends and community members.

The anthrax letters were a threat intended to communicate: “We have this anthrax.” The anthrax letters were intended to retaliate for the rendering and mistreatement of senior EIJ leaders, deter the invasion of Afghanistan, and retaliate for appropriations to Egypt, Israel and other countries.

I think Ken D’s suggestion of Jdey mailer — which he first made almost a half decade ago — is an excellent one (but it had not occurred to me). Jdey was part of 911 and had worked with KSM and Hambali. He pulled back but not due to cold feet. He went missing at the time of the mailings.

The factual question of the day relates to the culture medium used by Ivins, and why the FBI did not allege that the recipe of the culture medium he used in the lab supported the searches they did. I infer heme was detected as having been in culture medium used to grow the anthrax.

Strike that last line. It was the start of another thought.

Ed I do value your opinion and responses.
Thank You!

In your last post you stated ” The facts indicated that the culprit didn’t have anthrax ready for a second mailing immediately after the first. The facts also say that the second letter and envelopes were addressed weeks after the first.”

I really didn’t knwo that those facts were available. Could you please explain them to me?

Ed: Also you said that “He would have had no way to know how long it would be before the FBI became involved. No one plans for their first attack to fail.”

The first letters to the media did what the person expected.

October 8th was the day the FBI was clearly involved and that is likely the date the second letters were sent.

How do you know that it is a HE and not a She?

KRolson wrote: “I do believe that the person who mailed the letters planned more than one mailing from the start.”

Yes, I understand that. All I’m saying is that your BELIEF is not supported by ANY facts.

The Washington Post, in an article “Hardball Tactics in an Era of Threats,” dated September 3, 2006 summarized the facts relating to George Mason University computational biology graduate student Ali Al-Timimi:

“In late 2002, the FBI’s Washington field office received two similar tips from local Muslims: Timimi was running ‘an Islamic group known as the Dar al-Arqam’ that had ‘conducted military-style training,’ FBI special agent John Wyman would later write in an affidavit.

Wyman and another agent, Wade Ammerman, pounced on the tips. Searching the Internet, they found a speech by Timimi celebrating the crash of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003, according to the affidavit. The agents also found that Timimi was in contact with Sheikh Safar al-Hawali, a Saudi whose anti-Western speeches in the early 1990s had helped inspire bin Laden.

The agents reached an alarming conclusion: ‘Timimi is an Islamist supporter of Bin Laden’ who was leading a group ‘training for jihad,’ the agent wrote in the affidavit. The FBI even came to speculate that Timimi, a doctoral candidate pursuing cancer gene research, might have been involved in the anthrax attacks.

On a frigid day in February 2003, the FBI searched Timimi’s brick townhouse on Meadow Field Court, a cul-de-sac near Fair Oaks Mall in Fairfax. Among the items they were seeking, according to court testimony: material on weapons of mass destruction.”

Al-Timimi had rock star status in Salafist circles and lectured in July 2001 (in Toronto) and August 2001 (in London) on the coming “end of times” and signs of the coming day of judgment. He spoke alongside officials of a charity, Islamic Assembly of North America (”IANA”) promoting the views of Bin Laden’s sheiks. Another speaker was Ali’s mentor, Bilal Philips, one of the 173 listed as unindicted WTC 1993 conspirators. Bilal Philips worked in the early 1990s to recruit US servicemen according to testimony in that trial and interviews in which Dr. Philips explained the Saudi-funded program. According to Al-Timimi’s attorney, Ali “was referenced in the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (”Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”) as one of seventy individuals regarding whom the FBI is conducting full field investigations on a national basis.”

At the same time the FBI was searching the townhouse of PhD candidate Ali Timimi, searches and arrests moved forward elsewhere. In Moscow, Idaho, FBI agents interviewed Nabil Albaloushi. (The FBI apparently searched his apartment at the same time they searched the apartment of IANA webmaster Sami al-Hussayen, who they had woken from bed at 4:00 a.m.) Albaloushi was a PhD candidate expert in drying foodstuffs. His thesis in 2003 was 350 pages filled with charts of drying coefficients. Interceptions showed a very close link between IANA’s Sami al-Hussayen and Sheikh al-Hawali, to include the setting up of websites, the providing of vehicles for extended communication, and telephone contact with intermediaries of Sheikh al-Hawali. Al-Hussayen had al-Hawali’s phone number upon the search of his belongings upon his arrest. Former Washington State University animal geneticist and nutrition researcher Ismail Diab, who had moved to Syracuse to work for an IANA-spin-off, also was charged in Syracuse and released as a material witness to a financial investigation of the IANA affiliate “Help The Needy.” After the government failed to ask Dr. Diab any questions for nearly 3 months, the magistrate bail restrictions and removed the electronic monitoring and curfew requirements.

In Moscow, Idaho, the activities by IANA webmaster Sami al-Hussayen that drew scrutiny involved these same two radical sheiks. U.S. officials say the two sheiks influenced al Qaeda’s belief that Muslims should wage holy war against the U.S. until it ceases to support Israel and withdraws from the Middle East. Sami Hussayen, who was acquitted, made numerous calls and wrote many e-mails to the two clerics, sometimes giving advice to them about running Arabic-language websites on which they espoused their anti-Western views.

According to witness testimony in the prosecution of the Virginia Paintball Defendants, after September 11, 2001, “Al-Timimi stated that the attacks may not be Islamically permissible, but that they were not a tragedy, because they were brought on by American foreign policy.” The FBI first contacted Timimi shortly after 9/11. He met with FBI agents 7 or 8 times in the months leading up to his arrest. Al-Timimi is a US citizen born in Washington DC. His house was searched, his passport taken and his telephone monitored. Ali Al Timimi defended his PhD thesis in computational biology shortly after his indictment for recruiting young men to fight the US in defending against an invasion of Afghanistan.

Some of his communications in 2002 with dissident Saudi sheik Safar al-Hawali, one of the two fundamentalist sheikhs who were friends and mentors of Bin Laden, were intercepted. The two radical sheiks had been imprisoned from September 1994 to June 1999. Al-Hawali’s detention was expressly the subject of Bin Laden’s 1996 Declaration of War against the United States and the claim of responsibility for the 1998 embassy bombings.

ABC reported in July 2004 that FBI Director Mueller had imposed an October 1, 2004 deadline for a case that would stand up in court. The date passed with no anthrax indictment. Al-Timimi was not indicted for anthrax. He was indicted for sedition. Upon his indictment, on September 23, 2004, al-Timimi explained he had been offered a plea bargain of 14 years, but he declined. He quoted Sayyid Qutb. He said he remembered “reading his books and loving his teaching” as a child, and that Qutb’s teaching was prevented from signing something that was false by “the finger that bears witness.” He noted that he and his lawyers asked that authorities hold off the indictment until he had received his PhD, but said that unfortunately they did not wait. On October 6, 2004, the webmaster of the azzam.com website Babar Ahmad was indicted. It was not until 2007 that the North Brunswick, NJ imam who mirrored the azzam.com website was indicted (on the grounds of income tax evasion).

The indictment against the paintball defendants alleged that at an Alexandria, Virginia residence, in the presence of a representative of Benevolence International Foundation (”BIF”), the defendants watched videos depicting Mujahadeen engaged in Jihad and discussed a training camp in Bosnia. His defense lawyer says that the FBI searched the townhouse of “to connect him to the 9/11 attacks or to schemes to unleash a biological or nuclear attack.” Famed head of the former Russian bioweaponeering program Ken Alibek told me that he would occasionally see Al-Timimi in the hallways at George Mason, where they both were in the microbiology department, and was vaguely aware that he was an islamic hardliner. When what his defense counsel claims was an FBI attempt to link Al-Timimi to a planned biological attack failed, defense counsel says that investigators focused on his connections to the men who attended his lectures at the local Falls Church, Va. In the end, he was indicted for inciting them to go to Afghanistan to defend the Taliban against the United States’ invasion of Afghanistan. During deliberations, he reportedly was very calm, reading Genome Technology and other scientific journals. He was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment plus 70 years.

KRolson wrote: “The projector was further from the envelopes.”

Further proof that the letters were NOT written at the same time.

KRolson also wrote: “It is a fact!”

It is NOT a fact. Here are the addresses overlaid on top of each other. http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/Overlay.jpg

The 4 looks like a good match because I overlaid one atop the other. I created the match. But the two addresses get farther and farther away from being a match as they get farther from the 4.

And you evidently picked the one argument you thought would work in your favor. What about the punctuation? What about the doodling? What about the location of the date? What about the improvement in writing ability between the first mailing and the second?

It’s a common tactic to pick just one point and ignore all the others in an attempt to win a point. But, the one you picked doesn’t work. What about the others?

Ed:

Regarding your question, “If you were planning to do two attacks, what logical reason would there be to use two different powders?”

I believe we have already covered that.

The first letters contained the less lethal anthrax and was sent to get the medias attention.

The Senator letters were mailed on the date the media gave their full attention to anthrax by mail. The same day they taped off the building in Florida and we started seeing pictures of people in Bio-hazard suits. Also the same day that Tommy Thompson and John Ashcroft held news confrencess stating the the investigation was being turned over to the FBI.

You could not turn on tv or radio without hearing about it. Every paper printed the story.

The Senator letters held the more lethal anthrax and the only way the person could know the date that the investigation had turn toward the mail was by watching the media for their response.

I believe that we both agree that the person took steps to try and prevent anyone from dying.

Sending the dumb-downed anthrax to the media was just one of those steps.

By sending letters to the media and to the senators it is clear that the person wanted them both to be involved and to follow the investigation.

It is clear the person knew that the anthrax would be tested and that it would be found to be Ames Strain.

That is why the person said “We have this anthrax” and not we have anthrax.

Ed it is possible that the person used a childs homework assignment of printing capital letters to make the template.

The Al Qaeda operations manual, the most recent version on CD-ROM, had a chapter on “Poisonous Letter.” As with the insertion of biologicals into food, the key is mass panic, not mass casualty. Thus, commentators who say it was not their modus operandi are uninformed. The documentary evidence confirms it was their modus operandi.

The Belgian Prime Minister and the US, British and Saudi Arabian embassies have been sent letters containing hydrazine and an arsenic derivative used in nerve gas in May 2003. Some mistakenly argue that islamists would never merely send lethal substances through the mail (though the risk of significant casualty is low) to send a message or warning. One of the ingredients is hard to obtain, suggesting one Health Ministry spokesman to remark that “We’re not dealing with a small-time joker.” A trial of 23 suspected al-Qaeda members was in its third week. “Set our brothers free. Bastards.” Couldn’t be a threat by islamists because they only go for mass casualties — not threats. Right? One of the defendants in that trial allegedly sought hydrazine for use in producing a bomb.

A similar modus operandi was followed in New Zealand with cyanide in early 2002 and early 2003 by a sender purporting to be islamist.

A December 2004 report on terrorism in the European Union noted that in July 2004, eight letters arrived at several official locations in Brussels that contained an ochre-coloured chemical substance that caused itchy eyes and breathing problems. Tests indicated that the substance was adamsite (phenarsasine). Some of the letters included “a threat letter written in (very poor) English, demanding that two recently convicted Islamic extremists are released within that month.”

Zawahiri feels that in the usual case, the best way to get a lot of people watching is to kill the maximum number of people. But he wouldn’t disagree with the comment by Brian Jenkins that “Terrorism is theater.” Just those 10 grams cost an estimated $6 billion and have been the subject of thousands of news stories and the focus of widespread bioterrorism preparations. They were fully adequate to do the job even within the constraints of small batch production.

The anthrax sender may not have intended to harm anyone. Stevens’ death was reported late on October 5. Whether the mailer knew of the death might depend on whether the mailing was made Saturday, October 6 — or whether it was made as late as Tuesday, October 9, the day it was postmarked after a long holiday weekend.

Al Qaeda’s shura or policy-making council is concerned with handling its efforts in such a way as to develop and maintain the Arab hatred of the US and Israel. That requires a delicate balance and choice of suitable targets and methods. For example, as explained by the spokesperson in mid-February, Abu al Bara’a Al-Qarshy, Al Qaeda will not use WMD in a muslim country, particularly the home of Mecca and Medina. Terrorism involves public relations. Zawahiri divines from his religious texts that it is moral to kill American civilians on the grounds that they stood silent as taxpayers while US-bought weapons were used on Palestinians. In 1998, in an interview that appeared in TIME Magazine, Bin Laden himself explained that it was Al Qaeda’s “religious duty” to obtain chemical and biological weapons, but it was up to them how to use them.

As Dr. Jane A. Alexander of DARPA once explained at DARPA Tech, 1999:

“Small scale attacks may be adequate to immobilize national will with panic unless reasonable defenses are available. Terrorists do not need the technological sophistication of a military offensive biological warfare program. A military offensive BW program strives for predictable effect so that military operations can be planned. Terrorists could actually benefit from the variation of the onset and outcome of the illnesses creating added panic in the public.”

The Ann Arbor NanoBio researchers thanked Dr. Alexander for her support of the DARPA research they were doing involving the Ames strain supplied by USAMRIID’s Bruce Ivins.

CNN LIVE THIS MORNING
Target: Terrorism: Look at Al Qaeda’s Dreadful Recipe Book
Aired November 15, 2001
http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0111/14/tpt.00.html

The poisonous letter is the title of one section no poison inks. “Write a letter to the victim mentioning very exciting and very interesting news,” it reads. “Wipe the envelope from the inside with silicone sealant,” it goes on, “so it would not kill the mailman.”

KRolson wrote: “Ed if you would like a copy please let know.”

Yes, send it to me at the email address that is on my web site: detect@newsguy.com

KRolson also wrote: “Ed it is possible that the person used a childs homework assignment of printing capital letters to make the template.”

Any time anyone asks “is it possible” they already know that it IS possible, even though it may be totally ridiculous.

Tracing someone else’s writing leaves clear indications of tracing. The writing on the anthrax letters and envelopes definitely did NOT involve tracing.

FBI experts have stated that the handwriting is the writer’s natural style. That’s why the FBI sent samples around to everyone in Central New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania to see if the handwriting was familiar to anyone. (It’s also one reason why I thought the FBI had a good suspect in New Jersey.)

In their “linquistic assessment” of the letters, they said,

“It is highly probable, bordering on certainty, that all three letters were authored by the same person.”

And

“While the text in these letters is limited, there are certain distinctive characteristics in the author’s writing style. These same characteristics may be evident in other letters, greeting cards, or envelopes this person has written.”

Source: http://www.fbi.gov/anthrax/amerithrax.htm

Prunetacos wrote: “Ed - and more importantly, the hand writing’s no match.”

No match to whom? KRolson is arguing that the handwriting was disguised. I’m arguing that Ivins used a six-year-old to write the letters. The FBI stated that the handwriting analysis was “inconclusive.”

If you are arguing that the fact that the handwriting doesn’t look like Ivins’ style somehow proves that Ivins didn’t do it, that would be totally ridiculous.

Ed - So why is it you refuse my email to your website ? What are you afraid of - viruses or bacteria ?

Kenneth J. Dillon : There is no reward for the foolish. Pass it on to Ross.

Ed:

Just sent you a copy. It would be nice to see you post it.

Also ed the state I made: ” “Ed it is possible that the person used a childs homework assignment of printing capital letters to make the template.”

It was a comment and not a question.

PruneTacos,

If you read his earlier post on the subject he made the statement:

“KRolson also wrote: “Ed it is possible that the person used a childs homework assignment of printing capital letters to make the template.”

Any time anyone asks “is it possible” they already know that it IS possible, even though it may be totally ridiculous.”

I just wanted to make it clear that it was a statement that I had made and not a “totally ridiculous” question.

KRolson wrote: “I just wanted to make it clear that it was a statement that I had made and not a “totally ridiculous” question.”

Okay, but it’s a meaningless statement. To say that something is “possible” says nothing about whether or not it is also ridiculous.

It’s “possible” that invisible aliens from outer space came down and sent the anthrax letters. Does that also make is likely?

KRolson - and by the way, Ed never gives credit to anyone from whom he gleaned a gem.

Thank You PruneTacos.

I appreciate your thoughts on Ed.

I know that Ed has learned a lot about the case and that he has formed a number of opinions based on what he has learned.

Ed: when a person traces something they hold the pen in one hand and the paper or envelope in the other.

If tracing a projected image the person has to prevent anything from blocking the projection.
On a envelope with a flap on the back the person needs to hold the the envelope flat without blocking the projection with thier hand or body.

Please note that the only time that the person wrote in a slanted downward fashion was when they wrote on the envelopes.

The only reason I made the statement about it could have been traced from a childs homework is because I knew you have a theory that suggest that the person used a child to write the letters and address the envelopes.

I believe the photos shows that all of the letters are prefect matches. Granted you need to move the top layer to see that, but remember the person had to hold the envelope flat without blocking the projected image.

That meant they needed to reposition their hand that was holding the evelope. Notice how the letters line up in groups of two to three.

KRolson wrote: “I believe the photos shows that all of the letters are prefect matches”

That is absolutely NOT TRUE. There are numerous examples of differences. The #1 example showing that the handwriting is that of a 6 year old just entering first grade are the R’s on the media letter and the R’s on the media envelopes. On the letter, the writer wrote kindergarten style (the top is a circle). On the envelopes he wrote first grade style (the top is an arc). Someone taught him (or her) the proper way to draw an R between writing the letter and addressing the envelope.

Kindergarten style: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/R-01.jpg

First grade style: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/R-02.jpg

KRolson wrote: “Please note that the only time that the person wrote in a slanted downward fashion was when they wrote on the envelopes.”

That’s because, like all children, the writer had a hard time judging how much room he needs. His writing of the return address droops downward because he doesn’t want to run into the stamp. His writing of the address droops downward, because he’s aiming for the farthest corner.

The letters all had plenty of room, so he wasn’t concerned about running out of room.

If you have a template, why do you need to project the image? A template is one method of tracing, an projection is another method of tracing. With a template, you follow holes cut in a piece of plastic or metal. With projection, you trace over what is projected onto a piece of paper.

Your idea is so bizarre it is hard to imagine anyone doing such a thing. You need to describe the process in more detail.

Let’s simplify things. KRolson, why don’t you explain to us why there are so many differences in the letter R in these samples if the writer was using a template and/or projection?

Kindergarten style: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/R-01.jpg

First grade style: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/R-02.jpg

KRoslon wrote: “scan them into your computer and try and line up each of the letters, like I did in the photo I sent you.”

All you’re saying is that we never write anything identically the same way twice. We know that. The addresses on the letters do NOT totally line up as exact matches.

But that doesn’t mean that you can’t FORCE things to look very similar the way you did and the way I demonstrated with the Goldman Sachs letter.

If I were to do as you suggest, there would be groups of letters that would line up perfectly. I’d have to have palsy for them not to.

I purposely used someone else’s handwriting to show you that strings of letters WILL always line up, because if I did it with my own handwriting you’d claim I traced something.

Prunetacos asked: “Ed - So what about the return address?”

What about the return address? It’s clear from Kirk’s images that the return addresses do NOT line up in total. And when you shift things around, you can only get a few characters at a time to align. And, even then, they do not perfectly align. I already wrote this about Kirk’s six supposed matchings:

“The 4 in the first one is blurred, indicating that they don’t exactly overlay. In #2 the A is blurred. In #3 the G is blurred. In #4 the D and A are blurred. In #5 the E is blurred. In #6 the H is blurred.”

I can do the same thing with other people’s writing. I did it with one of the Goldman Sachs letters. If that wasn’t clear enough (I just overlaid specific words, not the entire letter), I can make a better version showing how you can align certain combinations of letters and they look like a near perfect match.

What this proves is that the addresses were NOT traced. A person writes in a very similar way every time. THAT’S WHY HANDWRITING EXPERTS CAN TELL ONE PERSON’S HANDWRITING FROM ANOTHER’S.

What Kirk needs to explain is: If the individual characters were traced from some “template” of a single version of each letter in the alphabet (if that’s what he’s saying), then why are there so many differences in the ways the letter R is drawn in these examples:

The Brokaw letter. Kindergarten style: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/R-01.jpg

The Brokaw envelope. First grade style: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/R-02.jpg

KRolson wrote: “there is not just six places that the letters line up like that.”

We’ve already gone over this. I’ve stated that I can match groups of letters on other people’s writing that way. All it proves is that the same person did all the writing.

Everyone knows that writing the same thing twice will NOT result in EXACT duplication of everything. And there is no EXACT duplication of everything on the anthrax letters. There are just similarities that you would see when comparing two samples of ANYONE’S handwriting.

If you want anyone to even consider the idea that a “template” was used to do the writing, you need to explain why the R’s are so different in these examples:

The Brokaw letter. Kindergarten style: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/R-01.jpg

The Brokaw envelope. First grade style: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/R-02.jpg

If you would just explain that, maybe you would see what “the truth” is.

Like I said in another post.

If you choose to believe theories based on sororities fantasies, a few 750 mile trips in the middle of the night, and claims that the Florida anthrax letters were from some other anthrax mailer, more power to you.

Also lets add the six year olds writing to the list.

Believe what ever you want to beleive Ed.

The Florida letters started and stopped at about the same time as the Trenton letters.

I guess the other anthrax mailer from florida desided to only send two sets of anthrax laced letters and quit shortly after the Trenton mailer sent their two sets of letters and quit.

Of course they both desided to send anthrax laced letters during the same two month period and there are no reports of letters being sent before or after that period.

How totally logical of me to assume that it was the same person.

As for the sorority fantsies, the chapter of Kappa Kappa Gamma in Philadelphia must have been not good enough to mail the letters by their mailbox, so he drove a few extra hundred miles.

Or maybe it was just that he had a fetish for Princeton Kappa Kappa Gamma girls.

Of course you first need to believe that the Trenton anthrax mailer expected the mailbox to be found.

If you choose to believe theories based on sororities fantasies, a few 750 mile trips in the middle of the night, claims that the Florida anthrax letters were from some other anthrax mailer, and a six year old wrote the letters & addressed the envelopes, more power to you.

Reader:

Here are a couple of links to one of the letters. I will research and find a few more in a bit then post them.

http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/r011128p.htm

http://edition.cnn.com/2001/HEALTH/conditions/11/23/anthrax.chile/index.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/chile-says-letter-contained-anthrax-747766.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1671544.stm

Here is another one on Buenos Aires

http://www.promedmail.com/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1202:7906865921653694::NO::F2400_P1202_CHECK_DISPLAY,F2400_P1202_PUB_MAIL_ID:X,14753

Reader I do see a timeline in the mailings.

September 18 postmark

October 9 postmark

October 19 receit of letter in Buenos Aires

November 13 receit of letter in Chile

All mailed within a 55 day time period.

No other mailings prior to that 55 days and no other mailings after that period.

The first two postmarked from Trenton NJ and the last two both bulk post marked on the same machine in Florida.

U.S. Believes Lab Contamination Was Source of Anthrax in Chile

By Mark Schoofs
Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal
29 November 2001
The Wall Street Journal B15 English
(Copyright (c) 2001, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

Federal health officials said that laboratory contamination appears responsible for the mysterious positive anthrax test of a letter sent to a Chilean pediatrician

–
Officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta analyzed the strain of the Chilean letter, sent by a private mail service from a medical publisher in Orlando, Fla., and concluded that it was different from the anthrax that has killed five people in the U.S. and “similar to strains outside the U.S.,” said Mitchell Cohen, director of the CDC’s division of bacterial and mycotic diseases.

Dr. Cohen said that when the Chilean scientists tried to culture anthrax from the envelope, “only a few colonies grew on the culture plate. If you were dealing with large concentrations of organisms, you would expect to get your plate covered with microorganisms.”

By contrast, the “light culture growth” obtained in the Chilean lab “is more consistent with contamination from a laboratory source.” He said that the CDC is working with the Chilean lab, which will send to the CDC other samples of anthrax it had in its possession. The CDC will then determine if they are the same. The anthrax strain also occurs in nature, Dr. Cohen said.

KRolson wrote: “If you choose to believe theories …”

It’s not a matter of believing theories. It’s a matter of looking at the facts.

The facts say the Chile letters were NOT related to the anthrax attacks. You argue that they MUST be related because you cannot believe otherwise.

The facts say the letters were written by a child of six, but you argue that some silly copying method was used - even though the facts say otherwise.

The facts say that Ivins routinely drove long distances at night, and he even talked about setting back his odometer to fool his wife. But you simply cannot accept these facts because you believe otherwise and have a conflicting THEORY that is not supported by any facts.

Like I said ed:

If you choose to believe theories based on sororities fantasies, a few 750 mile trips in the middle of the night, claims that the Florida anthrax letters were from some other anthrax mailer, and a six year old wrote the letters & addressed the envelopes, more power to you.

what ever Ed.

BugMaster wrote: “Maybe this statement and possibly others was him “just blowing smoke”.”

Could be. But it still shows that he was thinking of ways to deceive his wife about what he was doing at night.

BugMaster wrote: “An odometer is a component that the car makers have had a serious incentive to make tamperproof for decades now. You certainly can’t tamper with any of the newer digital ones”

Check this out: http://blogs.thecarconnection.com/blogs/marty_blog/2008/carfax-warns-odometer-rollbacks-on-the-rise/

Whereas the old mechanical odometers had lockouts to prevent such hijinks, your average 13-year-old iPhone programmer can probably hack into the OBDII port on modern-day vehicles and electronically turn back the clock. With used car sales on the verge of an increase as new car sales nosedive, Bob’s Shady Corner Used Car Lot is probably hiring young hackers in droves.

“Odometer fraud is alive and well,” says Larry Gamache, communications director at Carfax, pointing out that their research indicates a 57 percent increase in the con in the last four years.

Let’s consider the issue of the lyophilizer.

The DARPA-funded work involving use of the lyophilizer by Dr. Ivins apparently involved the DARPA-funded Ann Arbor researchers who thanked him in numerous patents for supplying the Ames and referenced his 1995 Vaccines article describing preparation of the spores. (The lead researcher had been a colleague of Ayman Zawahiri’s sisters who were on the Cairo Medical School faculty — Ayman’s father was a Professor of Pharmacology there until his passing in 1995.)

Salon.com blogger Glen Greenwald explains:

“The leaked ’scientific’ evidence is no better. If anything, it’s worse. The Washington Post today reports — all based on anonymous leaks — that “key to the probe” is the fact that Ivins “borrowed from a bioweapons lab that fall freeze-drying equipment that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores.”

Throughout the period 1999-2008, the Ann Arbor researchers would explain: “B. anthracis spores, Ames and Vollum 1 B strains, were kindly supplied by Dr. Bruce Ivins (USAMRIID, Fort Detrick, Frederick, Md.), and prepared as previously described (Ivins et al., Vaccine 13:1779 [1995]).”

In an exclusive in early November 2008, the New York Post reported:

“The lyophilizer, located in a hallway surrounded by four labs, did not have a protective hood. A hood is necessary to circulate and filter air and make it possible to use the lyophilizer to work with harmful bacteria without the bacteria becoming airborne. Co-workers say the hoodless lyophilizer would have spewed poisonous aerosols, infecting co-workers. But no colleagues of Ivins experienced any symptoms.

Co-workers also point out that the machine would have to be fully decontaminated after use - a 24-hour process called paraformaldehyde decontamination that involves locking down the lab.

Without a full decontamination, the machine would have contaminated other bacteria or liquids used on the machine at a later date. And if it had not been decontaminated, the FBI should have been able to find traces of the dry anthrax on the machine. Yet they swabbed Ivins’ machinery numerous times and were unable to find traces of dry anthrax spores in his lab, Kemp said.”

“Even if Ivins did have access to a freeze-drying machine and a protective hood, sources who worked closely with Ivins estimate it would take a minimum of 40 days of continuous work without detection to create the volume of spores used in the attacks.” “If he was working eight hours a day on spore prep every day, it would be noticed,” said Gerry Andrews, Ivins’ supervisor between 2000 and 2003. “It’s ridiculous.” Ivins’ lab - just 200 square feet - was in “highly trafficked areas, and Bruce had colleagues that worked with him every day,” Andrews said.

Meanwhile, in September and October of 2001, Ivins was involved in 19 research projects, including working on the Department of Defense-funded anthrax vaccine that is now in clinical trials, anthrax vaccine testing on rabbits and monkeys, and an outside project with a government-contracted lab, the Battelle Memorial Institute in Ohio.”

Gerry Andrews told the Baltimore Examiner “The only lyophylizer available was a speed vac,” he says. “That’s a low-volume instrument that you can’t even fit under a hood” used to contain pathogens. “The only opinions that I would place any confidence in would have to come from individuals who have made the stuff, in the same quantity of the letters,” said infectious disease specialist W. Russell Byrne. “And then I would ask them to go into B3 in building 1425, work there for a couple of weeks and reproduce what they say Bruce did. That’s the only way I could, in good conscience and in the spirit of objective scientific inquiry, believe them.”

An FBI Special Agent in the Minneapolis, MN Field Office, Harry Samit unsuccessfully appealed to his superiors for a FISA warrant that would permit him to view the contents of Moussaoui’s computer in the weeks leading up to 9/11. Samit’s memo had explained that Moussaoui was connected to a radical fundamentalist group in Chechnya, whose leader Ibn Khattab had ties to Bin Laden. “For this reason, it is imperative that his effects be searched in order to gather intelligence relating to these connections and to any plans for terrorist attacks against the United States or United States Persons to which he may be a party.” He wrote: “I am so desperate to get into his computer, I’ll take anything.” A colleague emailed Samit: “ thanks for the update. Very sorry that this matter was handled the way it was, but you fought the good fight. God Help us all if the next terrorist incident involves the same type of plane. take care Cathy.”

The emails were dated September 10, 2001. If we don’t learn from history, we are bound to repeat it.

Quoted in a June 2002 Wall Street Journal column titled “The “lone wolf” theory is evidence of the Bureau’s ineptitude,” FBI Special Agent Rowley was highly critical of the FBI in “chalking this all up to the ‘20-20 hindsight is perfect’ problem.” The Minneapolis agents who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui before September 11 had quickly identified him as a terrorist threat and identified the legal grounds on which he has since been indicted. Agents in Phoenix had sounded an alarm about suspicious Arabs taking flight training. So she argues that “this is not a case of everyone in the FBI failing to appreciate the potential consequences.”

The FBI’s stock profile concerning a biological agent was a lone, unstable individual. In October 2001, the profilers pretty much just reached into the filing cabinet. One Special Agent involved in profiling such incidents explained in a conference, at which Dr. Steve Hatfill was also a presenter: “The closest I’ve ever come to biological-chemical issues is when the toilet on the 37th floor gets backed up *** It isn’t the Middle Eastern people. It isn’t white supremacists. It is the lone individual, lone unstable individual. That statistically, from the cases that we have, is the biggest threat right now.”

FBI Special Agent Fitzgerald, who had some early involvement in Amerithrax in issuing the “profile,” years earlier had special responsibility for scrutinizing the language of the manifesto in UNABOM. In late September 2001, his colleague from UNABOM, Kathleen Puckett turned in her study of “lone wolves” to include Kaczynski and others. Dr. Puckett sees “howling loneliness” as the key characteristic of a “lone wolf.” Before turning to work on domestic terror cases of the 1990s, her counterintelligence work typically involved Soviet spies. She would go and kibbitz the local agents on what she perceived as the personality of the subject. She retired on September 30, 2001 and handed in her study on lone wolves on her way out the door. By October, her colleague Fitzgerald was turning in a “lone wolf” profile for his assignment in Amerithrax. Judging from his comments to the media, he was one of those who was swayed that Daschle and Leahy were Democrats.

Hunting the American Terrorist (2007), by History Publishing is dedicated in part to the victims of the anthrax mailings. Dr. Terry Turchie and Dr. Kathleen Purkett appear to agree with the Special Agent Fitzgerald’s profile from October 2001. (Fitzgerald was their former team member) They write:

“Then, right on the heels of 9/11, another wave of attacks paralyzed the east cost of the United States. During the week of September 18, 2001, five letters containing micronized anthrax were mailed to addresses between New York and Florida. They targeted journalists, U.S. Senators, and news magazines. As in the case of Kaczynski and Rudolph cases, the envelopes had fictional return addresses.

Notes accompanying the mailings were supposedly from Islamic fundamentalists, and almost everyone in the government and the media quickly cast blame in that direction.

For those of us who were involved in the domestic terror campaigns of the 1990s, however, the anthrax mailings had all the earmarks of a lone wolf.”

One person’s lonely lone wolf is another man’s US-based dedicated islamist operating under strict principles of cell security. It seems that the FBI was making the same mistake it made in the case of the assassination of Rabbi Kahane 10 years earlier by the blind sheik’s bodyguard Nosair.

Inexplicably, the profilers do not seem to have been persuaded after 9/11 by the open source intelligence that Zawahiri had obtained anthrax for the purpose of weaponizing it for use against US targets. If intelligence analysis is an art, criminal profiling is drawing with crayons. A “profile” in connection to a person’s facial features might refer to what they look like in the dark. But, here, war had been declared. A weapon had been used by the enemy it had previously said it would use that specific weapon. Intelligence analysis, not profiling, was what was needed. The profilers apparently did not take to heart or learn the lesson of the al Hayat letter bombs in December 1996. James R. Fitzgerald, head of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, told an interviewer: “The attacker appears to be an opportunist [who] took advantage [of the terrorist attacks].” He continued “The rhetoric [in the letters] is made to sound like what a nonterrorist thinks a terrorist sounds like. The perpetrator was probably a right-winger with an ax to grind. It’s no secret that they [the intended recipients] are Democrats. People, including the Unabomber, have used representational targets for years.” Alluding to the mistaken notion that security guard Richard Jewell was responsible for the Olympic Park bombing, Vincent Cannistraro, formerly of the CIA, explained of the profile that the FBI are “intellectually convinced they’re on the right track, but they don’t want to come up with a janitor theory that’s wrong again.” The vague profile was fine but Agent Fitzgerald’s expanded comments to the press about the profile missed the mark. FBI profiler Fitzgerald, however, can be forgiven his early miscalculations. Such a profile likely was useful in supporting warrants in the US in connection with a variety of leads that prudently needed to be pursued. The forensics, without more, tended to point to a “domestic” source.

Victims and targets were highly skeptical of the FBI’s profile. David Pecker, the AMI publisher commented:

“I don’t believe in coincidences. I still think it was tied to al-Qaida. I don’t believe it was domestic.”

The emphasis in the press reports has always, however, been on the suggestion that the mailer likely is “domestic” rather than foreign — a lone, male scientist who works in a lab. The profile was issued shortly after the White House meeting where it was agreed that Al Qaeda was the likely culprit, but that the theory and the possibility of a state sponsor would not be discussed. Vice President Cheney was not at all impressed by the FBI’s profile and went on television to express his skepticism. Although the FBI profile was widely criticized by experts and in editorials in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and other newspapers and magazines, it was more flexible than its critics imagined. The Amerithrax profile of a loner with a grudge permits a variety of motivations. The FBI uses the word “domestic” to include Americans sympathetic with an extremist islamic cause. The Washington Post explained in late October: “The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are considering a wide range of domestic possibilities, including associates of right-wing hate groups and U.S. residents sympathetic to the causes of Islamic extremists.” FBI profiler James R. Fitzgerald, head of FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, argued that the product could have been made for equipment costing as little as $2,500. Profilers were not actually part of Amerithrax Task Force and it is not clear how steeped they were in the historical evidence of Zawahiri’s intent to use weaponized anthrax, relying on the cover of charities and universities. Fitzgerald testified at civil deposition that on first hearing term “person of interest” had never heard Hatfill’s name.

An interesting article in MIT Technology Review in March/April 2006 is based on interviews with Sergei Popov (an expert at GMU who had worked as a Russian bioweaponeer), University of Maryland researcher Milton Leitenberg, Harvard’s Matthew Meselson, Rutger’s Richard Ebright and others:

“’There are now more than 300 U.S. institutions with access to live bioweapons agents and 16,500 individuals approved to handle them,” Ebright told me. While all of those people have undergone some form of background check — to verify, for instance, that they aren’t named on a terrorist watch list and aren’t illegal aliens — it’s also true, Ebright noted, that ‘Mohammed Atta would have passed those tests without difficulty.’ “
***
‘That’s the most significant concern,’ Ebright agreed. ‘If al-Qaeda wished to carry out a bioweapons attack in the U.S., their simplest means of acquiring access to the materials and the knowledge would be to send individuals to train within programs involved in biodefense research.’ Ebright paused. ‘And today, every university and corporate press office is trumpeting its success in securing research funding as part of this biodefense expansion, describing exactly what’s available and where.’”

The analytical problem is that researchers tend only to focus on their narrow field. So an analyst focused on Al Qaeda may not know anything about US biodefense programs. An analyst knowledgeable about US biodefense programs may not know anything about Egyptian Islamic Jihad. To knowledgeably address the issue of infiltration and the use of universities and charities as cover — which the documentary evidence shows Zawahiri planned to do and did in his anthrax weaponization program — requires a willingness to become knowledgeable and investigate the different substantive areas.

More fundamentally, all the really interesting stuff is classified. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (”FISA”) unit in the Department of Justice has traditionally been known as the “Dark Side.” Everything coming from Khalid Mohammed, according to Agent Van Harp, is classified. To understand the matter, journalists would have to have the cooperation of someone coming over from the Dark Side — which would be a felony. The solution to the Amerithrax case did not likely lie at the intersection of Bin Laden and Saddam streets among those cubicles at Langley with desktop PCs, not unlike any other office. Instead, it likely lies with the Zawahiri Task Force at Langley (if it still exists) which hopefully has an intersection of Ayman Avenue and Rahman Road. If not, we might be looking at a different crossroads altogether.

The Report of the Joint Inquiry Into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001— by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, addresses strategic analysis, training and staffing. Did the agents and analysts in the basement of Quantico who came up with the FBI’s profile have relevant training or input from analysts expert in Al Qaeda? Assuming they did, did an investigative bias creep into their approach to the anthrax mailings that should instead have been informed by a strategic understanding of Zawahiri’s Vanguards of Conquest and its modus operandi? Did the profilers know of the al Hayat letter bombs (related to the imprisonment of the blind sheik) and KSM’s threat to use biochemical weapons in retaliation for the detention of the blind sheik and other militant islamists? Did the profilers know of the role of Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s assassin, in working with KSM in planning the attacks on the United States? Just as with 9/11, the correct understanding of the anthrax mailings begins with a trail that leads back to Malaysia, Khalid Mohammed, Hambali, Yazid Sufaat, Rauf Ahmad, Zacarias Moussaoui, various charities, the Albanian returnees trial, Bojinka, and even the assassination of Anwar Sadat. As George Santayana said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

One intelligence official has suggested that one reason that the FBI has not emphasized the possibility of a foreign source is that it might require UN involvement in the investigation pursuant to certain biological weapons protocols. The US specifically rejected France’s suggestion in October 2001 that there be a UN resolution condemning the attacks on the grounds that the Security Council had no role to play unless there was clear proof that the perpetrator was foreign. Bob Woodward quotes Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, in explaining why the administration did not acknowledge an al Qaeda link, even though it thought there was one: “If we say it’s al Qaeda, a state sponsor may feel safe and then hit us, thinking they will have a bye, because we’ll blame it on al Qaeda.”

Whatever your political persuasion, and whatever disagreements about individual issues relating to due process and civil liberties, the FBI and CIA deserve some latitude on this issue. We are, after all, facing this threat together. First, the nature of such an investigation is that we lack sufficient information to second-guess (or even know) what the FBI and Postal Inspectors on the Amerithrax Task Force are doing. Media reports — and even the FBI’s claims they have “solved the case” and expect to close it — are a poor substitute for any sort of evidencing establishing someone’s guilt. Indeed, there has been compartmentalization and divergent views even within the Task Force. Second, hindsight is 20/20. Third, now that the leaks relating to US scientist Dr. Steve Hatfill seem to have long since been plugged, it is not likely we could do better in striking the appropriate balance between due process and national security. The FBI’s profile includes a US-based supporter of the militant islamists. Attorney General Ashcroft once explained that an “either-or” approach is not useful. The media has tended to overlook the fact that when the FBI uses the word “domestic” the word includes a US-based, highly-educated supporter of the militant islamists. As Ali Al-Timimi’s counsel notes in a late 2007 court filing unsealed (except for certain redacted passages) in April 2008, Al-Timimi “was considered an anthrax weapons suspect.”

The origin of the anthrax is likely ATCC in Manassas, Va and I might be able to prove it if the FBI was in a wondering mood. Aledgedly the ATCC shipped 70 shipments of anthrax to Iraq when they were a friendly nation in about 1985 when Reagan was president. And then Saddam likely either gave the anthrax to Al Qaeda or they stole it. But it can be genotyped with the stuff in my mouth if the FBI and the CIA and the president want to know. Read below:

To. Congressman Bob Goodlatte
From: Andrew David Taylor, 789 North Augusta Avenue, Waynesboro, Va 22980, 540-942-2190

I would like to be compensated by the United States Federal Government for their failure and liability to carefully screen the national borders from terrorists. The United States Government is supposed to protect its borders from foreign agents. The United States Government did compensate the loved ones of the victims of the 911 tragedy but the scope of the document that compensated them didn’t take into account those who got in the way of the terrorists as the terrorists were preparing to take the four airplanes. I would like to be compensated for the loss of my mother Mary Ann Taylor, my friend Gene E. Blair and the attempt on my life as well. My residence at the time at 4501 West Ox Road had to be destroyed because of the anthrax that was used. Can you initiate a bill in the House of Representatives to see that I am compensated for the losses? Below is a witness statement that I have constructed that recounts the deadly events of 1992 that greatly influenced me. I have searched for an attorney or a lawyer that will address the facts and take a deposition.

Witness Statement

I don’t work for the Federal Government. I’m a private citizen. I’ve never been trained by the military. I was in the employ of Mounir Murad in 1992 at a place that is known as The Publisher’s Service Bureau. About 2 or 3 Islamic Jihadists (Al Qaeda) came in to our offices and printed out 50 copies of an airport security map that was designed in a desktop publishing package called Illustrator. The terrorists made a mistake and tried to spool the (native) Postscript® file from their removable Syquest drive and ran out of disk space on that drive. They had to move the Illustrator file over to the native (resident) Macintosh IIci hard disk drive. As they left they tried to kill me with anthrax and they left a computer virus on the Mac IIci. My employer Mr. Murad is very knowledgeable about computers and he saw the virus eating away the bits and pixels on the screen so he automatically reached for his Norton Utilities and killed the computer virus. He was able to extract the file that was thrown in the trashcan of the Mac’s Graphical User Interface and the file revealed the map of airport security. He imaged a map on a Canon 500 copier and then noticed a terrible smell. The Jihadists had not only thrown anthrax in my face, but they had laced the rollers of his Canon 500 with anthrax. Mr. Murad was very disappointed but he said that the copier was insured and that it would be easily replaced. I noticed that he was still under their psychological control and I asked him a few technical questions to wake him up and then I asked him if he was ok. He stated to me that he did what he did in protecting them while they were in his establishment since they had ‘drafted him’ to be their cousin. He said he knew that they were Jihadists because they were reading the book (The Koran) wrong and they were going to kill the people in New York at the World Trade Center. I went home, but I took the issue seriously and called for help from the police. I called 911. The call was eventually transferred to the Central Intelligence Agency only because I had noticed that I could not understand the conversation between Mr. Murad and the Jihadists clients and it was derived that they were foreign agents on a mission to bring down the World Trade Center. I became very sick from the anthrax and I couldn’t go back to work for a few days. My roommate Gene Elwood Blair became sick as well and died. It was a very slow process. We had to unplug the phone from the wall because we were getting really strange calls from the mental health wards that are located in Fairfax, Virginia. When I tried to report the death of Reverend Doctor Gene Elwood Blair the 911 operator kept transferring my calls to the mental health wards suicide hotlines until I finally had to state to the 911 operated that she MUST NOT transfer me to them again that in fact I had a dead body to report and that it was a murder (homicide) and that the police need to take a statement about the death. The authorities sent someone from the Virginia Department of Health that is behind the Commonwealth of Virginia Police Station on Braddock road. The CSI fellow took biological samples of the top of Gene’s upper plate that revealed a grayish mold. I told him that I had been assaulted by anthrax, and I was given permission to take care of the body for burial. I’m mildly speech impaired and there were not enough funds in Mr. Blair’s account, so I had an unknown and new friend help me sell his car and those funds were used to bury his body in Ashland, Kentucky using Laser Funeral Home. Gene’s son Michael and Gene’s grandson Jason showed up at his funeral. I was listed as Mr. Blair’s caretaker with the Veterans Administration and I thought that meant that I was responsible for his person (to watch him in his blind condition) and that I was to show interest in his homicide case but the police informed me that I was allegedly only responsible for his burial. They essentially redefined my position from being his caretaking in life and guarding his condition of visual impairment or blindness with Pars Plantitis to limit my ability to sue the Commonwealth of Virginia State Police or the Federal Bureau of Investigation for their failure to take a written report and prosecute the homicide by redefining the word ‘caretaker’. Mr. Bair was a guest in my mother’s home because he was providing the essential services of caring for my mother in her diabetic (Type I) condition. Mr. Blair was Type 2 diabetic. I also had my sister Monica (who is mentally retarded) to worry about. Mary (my mother) was apparently stricken by the anthrax as well because Gene didn’t know how contagious it was. The effects appear as a cold and he identified it as something that they call ‘The Croup’ that you get in the countryside working on a farm with animals. I believe Mary Ann Taylor was euthanized by the state but the family is saying that she didn’t die at home, but instead died at INOVA Fairfax Hospital under the supervision of Dr. Cleary her cardio-pulmonary specialist. After burying the bodies I tried to go back to work only because the Virginia Employment Commission instructed me that I had to be standing on the ground at my place of work rather than being fired over the phone. Mr. Murad was afraid of a courthouse hearing where he would be called to testify. The real problem is the County of Fairfax and the way that they don’t like you to report wrongful death. I even got an attorney called Candice McCall because I was receiving so much static from everyone. She wouldn’t address the issue of the ‘wrongful death’ in civil court explaining to me that you have to be immediate kinship to the deceased to file a suit.

An NSA employee now tells Keith Olbermann of MSNBC that the agency was intercepting all US communications and targeting media. He says metadata and filters are used to hone in on calls of interest (as under the old ECHELON program in Europe). In considering whether the story is supported by the facts, Eric Lichtblau’s BUSH’S LAW (2008) is important background reading.

“In one of the operations that I was in, we looked at organizations, just supposedly so that we would not target them,” Tice told Olbermann. “What I was finding out, though, is that the collection on those organizations was 24/7 and 365 days a year — and it made no sense. … I started to investigate that. That’s about the time when they came after me to fire me.”

When Olbermann pressed him for specifics, Tice offered, “An organization that was collected on were US news organizations and reporters and journalists.”

“To what purpose?” Olbermann asked. “I mean, is there a file somewhere full of every email sent by all the reporters at the New York Times? Is there a recording somewhere of every conversation I had with my little nephew in upstate New York?”

NSA wiretapping is being briefed currently in the case of the other “anthrax weapons suspect.”

282 UNDER SEAL Government’s Motion for Treatment of Certain Defense Filings as Classified, filed by USA as to Ali Al-Timimi (original w/ Court Security). (tbul, ) (Entered: 01/13/2009)

281 ORDERED that pleadings 277 and 278 be and are removed from the public file and placed under seal with the Court Security Officer until further order of the Court; and, it is further ORDERED that [MSNBC legal commentator Turley] defense counsel scrupulously adhere to the Protective Order of December 3, 2004, as further violations of the Order could result in counsel losing his clearance; and, it is further ORDERED that any half sheets prepared for the public file be presented to the Court Security Officer before being tendered to the Clerk’s Office to avoid any inadvertent disclosure of classified information as to Ali Al-Timimi. Signed by District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema on 12/23/2008. (jlan, ) (Entered: 12/24/2008)

271 ORDER: For the reasons stated in open court, the defendant’s Motion to Compel Discovery 269 is GRANTED IN PART; and it is hereby ORDERED that the government provide a response to the five specific inquiries in the accompanying memorandum 270 . The response must include what, if any, relevant information was generated by, or is in the possession of, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the National Security Agency; and it is further ORDERED that the defendant’s Sealed Motion to De-Classify and Unseal the Government’s Ex-Parte Filing and the Instant Motion 264 and his Motion to Compel Discovery of Undisclosed Surveillance Evidence 268 be and are DENIED; ***”

Not only was the anthrax weapons suspect the White House Chief of Staff’s former assistant (for 2 months in 1996), had received a letter of commendation from the White House, and had been granted a high security clearance for mathematical support work for the Navy, but an NSA employee alleges that the Administration targeted communications of US media, including strictly domestic communications.

On September 18, 1998, Dr. Ivins wrote a meeting concerning the 2001 Anthrax meeting he was helping to plan in his role as liaison with the ASM. He wrote: “security - we want to start a dialogue early on with the experts to benefit from their wisdom and knowledge so we can say we’ve done everything possible to ensure a safe meeting.” Ironically, it appears that Dr. Ivins was taking the lead in ensuring that the conference was not infiltrated.

Some key facts in Nova’s SPY FACTORY last night were summarized in an earlier interview by James Bamford. Those watching SPY FACTORY — and it is important you watch it — need to then pick up the Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi thread and connect the dots to Amerithrax. Nawaf Al-Hazmi was one of the two hijackers who had been at the meeting at anthrax lab director Yazid Sufaat’s Malaysian condominium in January 2000.

http://www.radiodujour.com/people/bamford_james/

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the very first clue to the 9/11 attack occurred in late December 1999, when the NSA picked up a message from a house in Yemen. The house was being used by bin Laden as his operations center. He didn’t have much capability to operate out of Afghanistan, so all the phone calls, all the messages, email and all that would go to this house in the city of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. NSA had been eavesdropping on that house for a number of years, and in late December 1999, it picked up a particular intercept, picked up a particular phone conversation.

And the phone conversation said that-send Khalid and Nawaf to Kuala Lumpur for a meeting. So, NSA picked that up, and they-first of all, they figured that Nawaf and Khalid had to be very important potential terrorists, because they were being assigned by bin Laden out in Afghanistan to go to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. That seemed like a terrorist summit meeting. NSA gave that information to the other intelligence agencies, and the CIA set up a surveillance in Kuala Lumpur, and then they lost them in Kuala Lumpur.

After they lost them, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi went to California. They got in without any problem. NSA, even though they had the last name of Nawaf al-Hazmi in their computers, they never bothered to check, so they both got in without any problem into the United States. They went down, and they lived in San Diego. And they began calling back and forth to that house in Yemen, the house that NSA was eavesdropping on. So NSA is picking up their conversations to the house in Yemen, translating them and then sending out the conversations to-or summaries of the conversations to the CIA without ever telling anybody that they were in the United States. And they were in the United States for almost two years. Al-Hazmi was there from January 2000 to September 2001. And again, they’re communicating back and forth; NSA is picking up but not telling anybody that they’re in the US.”

The intelligence failure that led to 9/11 is being repeated with Amerithrax. It helps to think of Hani and Nawaf as on “the Straight Path” — and it is critical to connect the Kuala Lumpur, San Diego, Falls Church and New Jersey dots.

http://mysite.verizon.net/vze43v8m/anthraxandalqaed.html#HaniandNawaf

Nawaf Hazmi and a colleague had arrived the previous year in San Diego, where they had been unsuccessful in learning to fly. Upon arriving in San Diego in 2000, he met with Imam named Aulaqi — perhaps even the same day as arriving. The 911 Commission Report said that Nawaf and his fellow hijacker and “developed a close relationship with him.” Aulaqi in early 2001 moved to Falls Church. Several months later, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, who by then had joined them in San Diego in December 2000, also moved to Falls Church, Virginia.

On September 10, 2001, Hanjour, al-Mihdhar, and al-Hazmi checked into the Marriott Residence Inn in Herndon, Virginia where Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen, a prominent Saudi government official — who later was appointed to head the mosques at Mecca and Medina — was staying. He was the uncle of Sami al-Hussayen, the webmaster of the Islamic Assembly of North America (”IANA”). The uncle had met with officials from Ann Arbor, Michigan charity, IANA, for which his nephew raised funds and was the webmaster. Microbiologist Ali Al-Timimi — the Falls Church iman who was 15 feet from the leading anthrax scientist in the world and former deputy USAMRIID commander — was the IANA’s leading speaker. NSA intercepts allegedly show, and his counsel admits, he was coordinating with the 911 imam and Bin Laden’s sheik. IANA had a spin-off and dba in Syracuse, NY. KSM was captured (two weeks earlier than publicly reported). The government then moved forward in the US. The day and minute Al-Timimi’s townhouse was searched, 100 agents came to Syracuse and simultaneously interviewed 150 people.

Al-Timimi had received a letter of commendation from the White House for his work. He had a high security clearance while at SRA in 1999 for doing mathematical support work for the Navy. For 2 months in 1996, his defense committee said, he had been the assistant to former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card (who would have been at the automobile association at the time). As White House Chief of Staff, Mr. Card sought to influence the 911 Commission’s investigation.

If we do not understand history, we are bound to repeat it.

http://www.anthraxandalqaeda.com

GHOST WARS
Foreign Spies Are Serious. Are We?
Sunday, February 8, 2009; Page B03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/06/AR2009020603498.html

In June 2001, in addition to the conference at Annapolis organized by Bruce Ivins, a conference was held at Aberdeen Proving Ground (Edgewood) for small businesses that might contribute to the biodefense effort. It it showcased APG’s world class facillities that had the full range of relevant equipment, as well as the range of activities and research featured by presenters at such conferences. It was called “Team APG Showcase 2001″ APG built a Biolevel-3 facility and, according to a Baltimore Sun report, by October 2002 had 19 virulent strains of anthrax, including Ames.

Here is a 1996 report on a study done at Edgewood involving irradiated virulent Ames provided by John Ezzell that was used in a soil suspension.

http://aem.asm.org/cgi/reprint/62/9/3474.pdf

This article discusses Ames supplied by the Battelle-managed Dugway, subtilus, and use of sheep blood agar.

Bacillus Spore Inactivation Methods Affect Detection Assays, Received 12 January 2001/Accepted 25 May 2001
http://aem.asm.org/cgi/content/full/67/8/3665

Did Battelle have virulent Ames across I-95?

Edgewood tested nanoemulsion biocidal agents at Edgewood during this time period, according to a national nanobiotechnology initiative report issued June 2002.

Isn’t all advocacy futile? For example, why doesn’t McDonalds pick up the litter surrounding its stores? They sweep up litter in the parking lot ignoring the litter that has blown to the adjacent grass. Litter is bad for business.

If you can’t get McDonalds to pick up its litter, then don’t expect to have people connect the dots with respect to an existential threat.

If everyone took a picture of the litter outside their local franchise, such fast food corporations might get the job done and stop dragging down their neighborhood.