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Anthrax "Conviction" Falls Apart
Silicon and Tin Added to Weaponize Anthrax
McClatchy noted yesterday:
Buried
in FBI laboratory reports about the anthrax mail attacks that killed
five people in 2001 is data suggesting that a chemical may have been
added to try to heighten the powder's potency, a move that some experts
say exceeded the expertise of the presumed killer.
The lab data, contained in more than 9,000
pages of files that emerged a year after the Justice Department closed
its inquiry and condemned the late Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins as
the perpetrator, shows unusual levels of silicon and tin in anthrax powder from two of the five letters.
Those elements are found in compounds that could be used to weaponize
the anthrax, enabling the lethal spores to float easily so they could
be readily inhaled by the intended victims, scientists say.
The existence of the silicon-tin chemical signature offered
investigators the possibility of tracing purchases of the more than 100
such chemical products available before the attacks, which might have
produced hard evidence against Ivins or led the agency to the real
culprit.
But the FBI lab reports released in late February give
no hint that bureau agents tried to find the buyers of additives such as
tin-catalyzed silicone polymers.
The apparent failure of the
FBI to pursue this avenue of investigation raises the ominous
possibility that the killer is still on the loose.
A
McClatchy analysis of the records also shows that other key scientific
questions were left unresolved and conflicting data wasn't sorted out
when the FBI declared Ivins the killer shortly after his July 29, 2008,
suicide.
One chemist at a national laboratory told McClatchy
that the tin-silicone findings and the contradictory data should prompt
a new round of testing on the anthrax powder.
A senior federal
law enforcement official, who was made available only on the condition
of anonymity, said the FBI had ordered exhaustive tests on the possible
sources of silicon in the anthrax and concluded that it wasn't added.
Instead, the lab found that it's common for anthrax spores to
incorporate environmental silicon and oxygen into their coatings as a
"natural phenomenon" that doesn't affect the spores' behavior, the
official said.
To arrive at that position, however, the FBI had
to discount its own bulk testing results showing that silicon composed
an extraordinary 10.8 percent of a sample from a mailing to the New
York Post and as much as 1.8 percent of the anthrax from a letter sent
to Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, far more than the
occasional trace contamination. Tin — not usually seen in anthrax
powder at all — was measured at 0.65 percent and 0.2 percent,
respectively, in those letters.
***
Several scientists and
former colleagues of Ivins argue that he was a career biologist who
probably lacked the chemistry knowledge and skills to concoct a
silicon-based additive.
"There's no way that an individual
scientist can invent a new way of making anthrax using silicon and
tin," said Stuart Jacobsen, a Texas-based analytical chemist for an
electronics company who's closely studied the FBI lab results. "It
requires an institutional effort to do this, such as at a military
lab."
Martin Hugh-Jones, a world-renowned anthrax expert who
teaches veterinary medicine at Louisiana State University, called it
"just bizarre" that the labs found both tin — which can be toxic to
bacteria such as anthrax during lab culturing — and silicon.
"You
have two elements at abnormally high levels," Hugh-Jones said. "That
reduces your probability to a very small number that it's an accident."
***
The FBI guarded its laboratory's finding of 10.8 percent silicon in
the Post letter for years. New York Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler
asked FBI Director Robert Mueller how much silicon was in the Post and
Leahy letters at a hearing before the House Judiciary Committee in
September 2008. The Justice Department responded seven months later
that silicon made up 1.4 percent of the Leahy powder (without
disclosing the 1.8 percent reading) and that "a reliable quantitative
measurement was not possible" for the Post letter.
***
During the FBI's seven-year hunt, the Department of Homeland Security
commissioned a team of chemists at the Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory in California to grow anthrax-like spores under varying
conditions to see how much silicon would end up naturally in the final
product.
They found little, if any, silicon in most cases, far
less than was in the New York Post letter, said Stephan Velsko, one of
the two researchers. He called the tin readings from the FBI's anthrax
data "baffling."
Peter Weber, Velsko's co-researcher, said the
academy panel's focus on the conflicting data "raises a big question,"
and "it'd be really helpful for closure of this case if that was
resolved."
***
In a chapter in a recently updated book,
"Microbial Forensics," Velsko wrote that the anthrax "must have indeed
been produced under an unusual set of conditions" to create such high
silicon counts. That scenario, he cautioned, might not be "consistent
with the prosecution narrative in this case."
***
Mike
Wilson, a chemist for another silicone products maker, SiVance, in
Gainesville, Fla., said that numerous silicon products could be used to
make spores or other particles water-repellent. He also said that the
ratios of silicon to tin found in the Post and Leahy samples would be
"about right" if a tin-catalyzed silicone had been added to the spores.
Jacobsen, a Scottish-born and -educated chemist who once experimented
with silicon coatings on dust particles, said he got interested in the
spore chemistry after hearing rumors in late 2001 that a U.S. military
facility had made the killer potions. He called it "outrageous" that
the scientific issues haven't been addressed.
"America, the
most advanced country in the world, and the FBI have every resource
available to them," he said. "And yet they have no compelling
explanation for not properly analyzing the biggest forensic clue in the
most important investigation the FBI labs had ever gotten in their
history."
As a result of Ivins' death and the unanswered
scientific issues, Congress' investigative arm, the Government
Accountability Office, is investigating the FBI's handling of the
anthrax inquiry.
By way of background, I pointed out in 2008 that some of the top anthrax experts in the world say that the killer anthrax was weaponized.
I reported in 2008:
McClatchy notes:
"Some
of Ivins' former colleagues also dispute the FBI's assertion that he
had the capability to mill tiny anthrax spores and then bind them to silicon particles, the form of anthrax that was mailed to the office of then-senator Tom Daschle, D-S.D."And as New Scientist writes, FBI agents "mention a 'silicon signature' for the anthrax in the envelopes with no further comment. Silica may be used to weaponise spore powders."
Evidence for the theory that the anthrax used in the attacks was coated with anti-clumping agents also comes from a a 2001 CBS article:
"When
technicians at the Army biodefense lab in Fort Detrick, Md., tried to
examine a sample from the Daschle letter under a microscope, it floated
off the glass slide and was lost. "Anthrax would normally
clump, so the fact that it "floated off the glass slide" points to the
anthrax being treated with anti-clumping and anti-static agents.Why is this important?
It takes very sophisticated equipment and processes to coat something as small as an anthrax spore with anti-clumping agents:
"Only
a sophisticated lab could have produced the material used in the
Senate attack. This was the consensus among biodefense specialists
working for the government and the military. In May 2002, 16 of these
scientists and physicians published a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association, describing the Senate anthrax powder as “weapons-grade” and exceptional: “high spore concentration, uniform particle size, low electrostatic charge, treated to reduce clumping” (JAMA, 1 May 2002, p. 2237)."***
But
Dr. Ivins was a vaccine researcher, not a weapons maker. Moreover,
Ivins was working in a lab where - according to his co-workers and
supervisors - people went in and out all night checking on experiments
(so they presumably would have seen suspicious activity by Ivins, had
there been any), and Ivins did not have access to the extremely
high-tech equipment which would have been necessary to produce the
weaponized anthrax. He wasn't one of the count-on-one-hand group of
people who knew how to coat anthrax spores with anti-clumping agents
I wrote in 2009:
The publisher of the prestigious scientific journal Nature writes:
At
a biodefence meeting on 24 February, Joseph Michael, a materials
scientist at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico,
presented analyses of three letters sent to the New York Post and to the
offices of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Spores from two of
those show a distinct chemical signature that includes silicon, oxygen, iron, and tin; the third letter had silicon, oxygen, iron and possibly also tin, says Michael. Bacteria from Ivins' RMR-1029 flask did not contain any of those four elements.
Two
cultures of the same anthrax strain grown using similar processes —
one from Ivins' lab, the other from a US Army facility in Utah — showed
the silicon-oxygen signature but did not contain tin or iron. Michael
presented the analyses at the American Society for Microbiology's
Biodefense and Emerging Diseases Research Meeting in Baltimore,
Maryland.
I noted last year:
Edward Epstein writes in a must-read article in Wall Street Journal's Opinion section:
Silicon
was used in the 1960s to weaponize anthrax. Through an elaborate
process, anthrax spores were coated with the substance to prevent them
from clinging together so as to create a lethal aerosol. But since
weaponization was banned by international treaties, research anthrax no
longer contains silicon, and the flask at Fort Detrick contained none.
***
Yet the anthrax grown from it had silicon,
according to the U.S. Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. This
silicon explained why, when the letters to Sens. Leahy and Daschle were
opened, the anthrax vaporized into an aerosol. If so, then somehow
silicon was added to the anthrax. But Ivins, no matter how weird he may
have been, had neither the set of skills nor the means to attach
silicon to anthrax spores.
At a minimum, such a process would
require highly specialized equipment that did not exist in Ivins's
lab—or, for that matter, anywhere at the Fort Detrick facility. As
Richard Spertzel, a former biodefense scientist who worked with Ivins,
explained in a private briefing on Jan. 7, 2009, the lab didn't even
deal with anthrax in powdered form, adding, "I don't think there's
anyone there who would have the foggiest idea how to do it." So while
Ivins's death provided a convenient fall guy, the silicon content still
needed to be explained.
The FBI's answer was that the anthrax
contained only traces of silicon, and those, it theorized, could have
been accidently absorbed by the spores from the water and nutrient in
which they were grown. No such nutrients were ever found in Ivins's
lab, nor, for that matter, did anyone ever see Ivins attempt to produce
any unauthorized anthrax (a process which would have involved him
using scores of flasks.) But since no one knew what nutrients had been
used to grow the attack anthrax, it was at least possible that they had
traces of silicon in them that accidently contaminated the anthrax.
Natural
contamination was an elegant theory that ran into problems after
Congressman Jerry Nadler pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller in
September 2008 to provide the House Judiciary Committee with a missing
piece of data: the precise percentage of silicon contained in the
anthrax used in the attacks.
The answer came seven months later
on April 17, 2009. According to the FBI lab, 1.4% of the powder in the
Leahy letter was silicon. "This is a shockingly high proportion,"
explained Stuart Jacobson, an expert in small particle chemistry. "It is
a number one would expect from the deliberate weaponization of
anthrax, but not from any conceivable accidental contamination."
Nevertheless,
in an attempt to back up its theory, the FBI contracted scientists at
the Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California to conduct
experiments in which anthrax is accidently absorbed from a media heavily
laced with silicon. When the results were revealed to the National
Academy Of Science in September 2009, they effectively blew the FBI's
theory out of the water.
The
Livermore scientists had tried 56 times to replicate the high silicon
content without any success. Even though they added increasingly high
amounts of silicon to the media, they never even came close to the 1.4%
in the attack anthrax. Most results were an order of magnitude lower,
with some as low as .001%.
What these tests inadvertently
demonstrated is that the anthrax spores could not have been accidently
contaminated by the nutrients in the media. "If there is that much
silicon, it had to have been added," Jeffrey Adamovicz, who supervised
Ivins's work at Fort Detrick, wrote to me last month. He added that the
silicon in the attack anthrax could have been added via a large
fermentor—which Battelle and other labs use" but "we did not use a
fermentor to grow anthrax at USAMRIID . . . [and] We did not have the
capability to add silicon compounds to anthrax spores"...
When I
asked a FBI spokesman this month about the Livermore findings, he said
the FBI was not commenting on any specifics of the case, other than
those discussed in the 2008 briefing (which was about a year before
Livermore disclosed its results). He stated: "The Justice Department and
the FBI continue working to conclude the investigation into the 2001
anthrax attacks. We anticipate closing the case in the near future."
So,
even though the public may be under the impression that the anthrax
case had been closed in 2008, the FBI investigation is still open—and,
unless it can refute the Livermore findings on the silicon, it is back
to square one.
***
A manufacturer of specialized anthrax equipment said:
"You
would need [a] chemist who is familiar with colloidal [fumed] silica,
and a material science person to put it all together, and then some
mechanical engineers to make this work . . . probably some containment
people, if you don't want to kill anybody. You need half a dozen, I
think, really smart people."
The U.N. biologist mentioned above also said that the equipment to make such high-tech anthrax does not exist at Fort Detrick, where Ivins worked.
People who work at Fort Detrick have confirmed this. In other words, a
lone scientist couldn't have done it without the support of a whole
government laboratory. And Fort Detrick was not one such potential
laboratory.
Vaccine expert Dr. Meryl Nass has also criticized the FBI's case against Bruce Ivins:
The letter spores contained a Bacillus subtilis contaminant, and silicon to
enhance dispersal. FBI has never found the Bacillus subtilis strain
at USAMRIID, and it has never acknowledged finding silicon there,
either. If the letters anthrax was made at USAMRIID, at least small
amounts of both would be there.***
Does the FBI stand for the Federal Bureau of Invention?
Yesterday's McClatchy post also points out:
The
silicon-tin connection wasn't the only lead left open in one of the
biggest investigations in FBI history, an inquiry that took the bureau
to the cutting edge of laboratory science. In April, McClatchy reported
that after locking in on Ivins in 2007, the bureau stopped searching
for a match to a unique genetic bacterial strain scientists had found
in the anthrax that was mailed to the Post and to NBC News anchor Tom
Brokaw, although a senior bureau official had characterized it as the
hottest clue to date.
Ivins' Bosses Say Under Oath that He Couldn't Have Done It
And as AP notes, two of Bruce Ivins' bosses have - under oath - said that Ivins couldn't have done it:
The
widow of a Florida tabloid photo editor who died in the 2001 anthrax
mailings is casting fresh doubt on the FBI's conclusion that a lone
federal scientist staged the attacks, according to new documents filed
in her lawsuit against the government.
***
Sworn
statements made by two of the scientist's superiors who said they don't
believe Bruce Ivins was solely to blame for the attacks ...
The
statements raising questions about the FBI's conclusions were made in
depositions earlier this year by W. Russell Byrne and Gerard Andrews,
who oversaw Ivins' work at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md. Byrne was chief of
bacteriology at the biodefense lab from 1998 to early 2000 and Andrews
held the post from 2000 to 2003.
According to court documents,
Byrne told Stevens' attorneys that Ivins "did not have the lab skills
to make the fine powdered anthrax used in the letters" and that it
would have been difficult for Ivins to do the work at night undetected.
Byrne said others would have noticed the unusual use of equipment and
supplies because of the hazardous microbes involved in their work.
"They
pay attention to things because your lack of observation could cost
you your life," Byrne said, according to the documents.
In a telephone interview Thursday, Byrne said he knew Ivins for 15 years and remains unconvinced he was capable of such crimes.
"It just wasn't the Bruce Ivins that I knew," said Byrne, who retired in 2003 and still lives in Frederick.
Andrews, the other superior, told lawyers it
would have taken Ivins six months to a year to refine the anthrax
spores used in the deadly mailings, instead of the roughly 20 hours the
FBI found he spent at night in the lab. [One of the handful of people who actually can produce the kind of high-tech weaponized anthrax used in the attacks previously said, "Even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good."]
Andrews
also said Ivins did not have the expertise to do the work and some of
the necessary equipment wasn't available at Fort Detrick at the time.
Andrews
added that in the 16 years he knew Ivins, there was no indication
"that he understood the weaponization technology of anthrax spores, nor
did any of his colleagues ever talk to me about his interest or
understanding" of the processes required.
"Dr. Andrews stated in
his opinion, it would take more than one person to achieve this attack
because of the unusual physical characteristics of the powders," the
court document said.
He's Guilty Because He Was Odd
So what evidence does the FBI have against Ivins?
As Anthrax expert Dr. Nass notes, all of the FBI's "circumstantial" evidence falls apart the minute it is looked at closely.
At the end of the day, the FBI literally hinges its case on the fact
that Ivins was "odd". Based on that criteria, the FBI could convict
anyone it chose based on mere character assassination.
- advertisements -
Wait - they're painting the food now?
What a reeking crock of shit.
More alarmist conspiracy nonsense about the evil government. If the FBI had a live video of the guy making and delivering the anthrax, you'd be saying it was fake. There is no conceivable explanation that would convince you or the other kooks that the government caught the right person.
Nobody's going to pull anything over on you. You're too smart to fall for that. You are a master sleuth.
Over the line, Smokey! Mark it a zero - next frame.
Please note the total absence of coherent argument. Just an ad hominem attack or two wrapped around empty rhetoric accompanied by the usual straw man.
amazing content in that retort
Ridicule of Conspiracy Theories Focuses On Diffusing Criticism of the Powerful
#5 with a bullet of the 25 Rules of Disinformation
5. Sidetrack opponents with name calling and ridicule.
http://www.proparanoid.net/truth.htm
Let's read the other comments and see how many of the 25 are being used here against this post.
It's fun. Let's collect all 25.
"raises the ominous possibility that the killer is still on the loose"
raises the ominous possibility that the terrorist and his state sponsor is still on the loose.
Atta's red hands.
Raises the ominous possibility that the US government is still on the loose.
Uhhhh,
I hate to be a pill, but if WE are being told about tin & silicon, what are the chances the an Ivins, an Army anthrax weapons expert, had NO access to that information. Even if he never worked on the weaponization, he obviously worked around that information, and probably had access to it, one way or another.
Were there papers describing this work in the lab where he worked? He was there at night a lot, is that so he could read these papers and duplicated their results without being seen? Was he incapable of duplicating weaponization technology given access to the information? Did the lab have the required forms of tin & silicon on hand? Finally, the fact that the samples are so different shows it wasn't high quality weaponized anthrax, but someone still fiddling with his formula.
I'm not convinced this is so out of the ordinary. There is a book coming out soon detailing facts that link him to the mailboxes that were used to mail the samples. Very obscure locations, he was well aware of. This guy was a full blown nut case, long before the anthrax.
Chemistry and Biology are completely different disciplines and use different equipment. In addition to the access to the requisite PP&E, the knowledge required can't simply be obtained by reading by book.
The use of words like "aerosol" and "vaporize" to describe the weaponization of Anthrax is misleading, as they are incorrect in terms of conventional usage of the words in popular (non-scientific) discourse. The chemistry goal is to minimize the weaponized particle's mass, reduce the particles' COFs, eliminate the particles' electric charge (and attraction to other charged particles), and to all this without negatively impacting the biological action of the base organism.
To say that one guy can do all this weaponization is like saying one guy who works at an LCD factory in China can make an complete functioning iPhone out of just the otherwise-complex LCD touchscreen he has access to and responsibility for. The cellular radio is a complex instrument in its own right that requires another factory. Once you have the two specialized parts and a whole bunch of computer code is required to to make the two parts usable. The computer code cannot be written and finished product produced without significant coordination between the LCD guy and the Cellular guy.
The fact that much of the actual scientific knowledge and processes upon which "weaponization" is based originated in the private sector beginning in the 40's-60's with advancements in fertilizer and insecticide research turns the search for a suspect into a search for a needle in a haystack. The FBI may have correctly identified the "anthrax" source as a lab stock that over a hundred people had access to. However, the fact that the "weaponization" can be done could be done at literally hundreds of facilities by thousands of people in either the public or private sector, would make me very suspicious of any FBI allegation without substantial direct evidence.
The problem with the FBI is they are government bureaucrats (often overpaid and under skilled) who like to move paper from the inbox to the outbox, especially when receiving pressure from higher ranking bureaucrats (regardless of the political or Machiavellian intentions of the higher-ups).
DID YOU READ THE ARTICLE? It answers all, that's a-l-l your feeble questions.
How long have you worked for the Fun Bunch Internationale?
Anyone with half a brain in their head knew that Ivins was the fall guy. The Anthrax attacks were too useful, too timely, too sophisticated to have been the work of this one little guy. This was an intelligence operation from day one. A shot across the bow of what can be done to critics, or anyone, who doesn't stay in line, or who questions what happened on 9-11. A test run of the ability to ratchet up fear.
exactly, the targets were ridiculously telling
9/11 was a jewish stock-taking.
9/11 and its aftermath were an organized crime neighborhood protection racket writ large...
Not another mistake and death thanks to the Farcical Bureau of Investigation mandated or at least facilitated by DC (Demons running the Country).
Yes, the US government regularly kills its own citizens to forward the agenda of its elite owners... these are the unfortunately facts of the reality we inhabit. And unless you plan on doing something to change that, go back to bed, tomorrow will be a fresh new day of this sickening never-ending nightmare.
No, remember tomorrow is the rapture.
Anthrax and Weaponized Anthrax are not the same thing.
Weaponized Anthrax will end the world.
Anyone toying with biologicals needs to die in nuclear fire, yesterday.
The risk really is that great.
Weaponized Anthrax wil not end the world. Yeah, it's nasty stuff, but it's not Ebola - It is not transmissble from person to person, so only persons exposed directly to the spores can be infected. Makes a huge difference.
Weaponized anthrax was designed not to be very dangerous. No army would use a weapon that would likely kill everyone on their side as well. There are 10-20,000 people in the world today who could design a weapon that would kill civilization. A couple thousand more graduate each year. Our saving grace is the designer would have to be suicidal and sociopathic as well which cuts the number down a lot. The first fully lab-created virus, a copy of the rabies virus, was created as a grad student project using commercially synthesized DNA ordered online under a false name and sent to a PO box. Hopefully things have tightened up since then but the first response of the FBI when the results (including the part about the PO Box) were published was to come down hard on the researchers. They were embarrassed. They should have been thankful but alarmed.
You are underestimating the risk by a long shot. GW is erring in the other direction though. FBI stands for Federal Bureau of Incompetence. Ask people working in the other Federal acronyms what they think and you'll hear incredible stories. Many of the points in this posting assume the FBI as an organization has its head somewhere the sun shines. That's often not the case. I don't doubt that naming Ivins as the culprit was bogus but the reason was likely no more sinsister than lazy, incompetent, CYA political gamesmanship. Don't assume the people calling the shots in the FBI even know what silicon and tin are other than things used to make big boobs and tin cans. There was a lot of attention on this case, the FBI was taking heat over not investigating the WTC hijackers and a bad guy was needed, facts be damned. The potential threat from bio-agents is mind boggling to those in the field and it scares me that the FBI is our main line of defence. God help us. Repeatedly when threats have been exposed in the media the FBI response has been to go after those who embarrassed them. This is a massive government agency and it exhibits all the negative traits common to such entities.
The "incompetence" theory? I don't buy it. Not with the stakes this high.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/new-anthrax-letter-sent...
Can you say "Patriot Act"?
Anthrax, other bacteria, or viruses will not end the world or even the human race. Some of us most likely carry natural resistance to such things, similar to survivors of the black death and other plagues
It would be disastrous no doubt but the human race and he animal kingdom are more resilient than you might think.
Anthrax is pretty hard to make. Kind of like explosives. You should probably buy them instead but watch out it could be a trap. You never know these days.
Weaponized Anthrax is to bacteria, as a thermonuclear warhead is to explosives. Very difficult to make properly and especially without killing yourself in the process.
so if Ivins didn't do it, who did?
The only nation to have significantly benefited from 9/11 is Israel, home to many a secret laboratory in both nuclear and bioweapons... War on terror = war on natural enemies of Israel.
Iraq was a huge natural enemy, now utterly decimated. Iraq almost overpowered Iran in their mutual war, a nation over twice its size. Israel is just 1/5 of Iraq.
The angrier americans become, the more Israel benefits. How's about destabilizing the currency and destroying the middle class, that will surely raise anger and at least double enlistment...
USA is the big dumb behemoth, Israel the small smart guy egging him onto his enemies.
+1
Wag the Dog.
As mentioned the Anon August project should be more fun than most can handle. Since the asshole that couldn't put a mole to together. I guess Saturday is the end of the world.
You'll shit yourself and vomit on my understanding....weird thing is it's the CDC dropping the bomb. Some dumb shit emailed another asshole while the raid on the PS3 network was going on. If anyone feels up to it, $5k gets the whole shit bit, Armenian, own it, buy it back...they aren't that complex and they honour first bid.
Ivins did it, this is just filler. Wired Mag did an exhaustive and much more convincincing piece on this a month or two ago... next conspiracy please.
Horse-shit,the Wired article very much left open the idea that Ivins was not the one, but didnt go on to point the finger at arms of the Government. Clearly you dont have an interest in an objective analysis, and therefore YOU should be considered suspect ( in all forms ) . When the complex doesnt yield answers, how come the "simple" answers still get ignored? How fucking imbecilic are you to not assume that parties with maximum incentive at THAT time to ensure a particular outcome, had a guiding hand in this? Wake up and look at what your country has become!
Who gained?
When Congress was originally asked to pass the Patriot Act in late 2001, the anthrax attacks which occurred only weeks earlier were falsely blamed on spooky Arabs as a way to scare Congress members into approving the bill. Specifically:
Indeed, many people have questioned whether or not the anthrax was intentionally sent to scare people. For example:
the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-92) and represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court, and who "advised the FBI in its initial investigation of the anthrax letters", is convinced that the anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the Patriot Act and the later Military Commissions Act. He has said:
Remember, the government now admits that the anthrax was made in a government lab by government personnel (although the government's theory about who did it doesn't match the facts).
Whether or not the anthrax was actually mailed as a false flag attack, it is clear that it was used to drum up fear.
The bottom line is that fear of terrorism makes people stupid, and so we should at least question whether the government is selling fear for political purposes.
@GW: OK thanks for the response. Great work. A timely resurrection of the topic.
DHS
The Unabomber, he's taking the heat for a lot of things lately.
Don't ask. You can't handle the truth. Aberdeen has the know-how as do several military installations around the world. Detrick does the biological work, Aberdeen puts weapons systems and defenses together as well as another military installation in Virginia, not far from the Green Gable.
I wish the government would let me know when the next false flag attack is...
Could have made a shitload of money shorting, Tylenol, United Airlines, American Airlines....
USA, USA, USA!!!!
[From 2008]
According to the New York Times:
(this is the flask containing RMR-1029 concerning which Dr. Ivins was the "custodian").
Sounds bad for Dr. Ivins, right?
Well, the Times article continues:
As Dr. Nass points out, "Having received a sample, or obtained it surreptitiously, they would be "custodians" of it too."
So concluding that the anthrax used in the attack to RMR-1029 narrows down the list of suspects to:
That's a pretty big list of suspects. The New York Times has confirmed in a subsequent August 6 article:
Ivins' attorney puts the number at "hundreds of people".
The August 6 Times' article also notes:
Ivins' attorney also states that Ivins never denied to the FBI that the anthrax could have come from Ivins' batch.
Its not so clear that Ivins is guilty after all, is it?
Moreover, the sample of RMR-1029 possessed by Dr. Ivins was not weaponized. Many of Ivins' colleagues say that he simply did not have the knowledge to weaponize it into the dry form used in the attacks, while scientists at such facilities as the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah did.
Note: As of December 2001, the following labs worked with the Ames strain of anthrax:
It is unclear how many of the above labs worked with RMR-1029, but it is possible that the New York Times missed some labs in its list.
Yes, Dr. 'Z' . Not a whisper of his name in most of the articles.
Nice job you're doing, GW.
Thanks.
i
Wait, don't tell me the punch line, let me see if I can figure it out...
I got it: this was another false flag from the US government and they decided to pin it on a dead guy? To discredit scientists everywhere?
Ding ding, what do I win? Irradiated seafood?