Re: 9/11 Synthetic Terrorism Made in USA, by Webster Tarpley
Posted: Tue Nov 19, 2013 9:20 am
CHAPTER X: ANTHRAX
The anthrax incidents of October 2001 must be regarded as an integral part of the entire 9/11 operation. The 9/11 terror attacks were highly effective in terrorizing urban populations, since no one knew when another city might be struck, and with what means. But what of the vast suburbs, and what of rural America? Here kamikaze aircraft, poison gas and dirty bombs were hardly likely. But everyone in the country had a mailbox, and now that mailbox could become the delivery system for a deadly disease. Even the most humble and obscure person living in the most remote location could never be sure that a piece of junk mail in the letterbox had not brushed up against an envelope teeming with lethal anthrax spores. The most harmless daily routine, that of checking the mailbox, suddenly became a tense encounter with the world of biological warfare.
The anthrax attacks also provided a most welcome pretext for the Bush administration and the FBI to scale down and to slow down the ongoing probes into 9/11. The anthrax letters provided a reason to re-assign FBI agents to the new danger, before they got anywhere near unearthing the explosive secrets of 9/11. On October 10, FBI assets were shifted away from the 9/11 investigation with the explanation that they were needed for the anthrax emergency.
At the same time the anthrax attacks, if properly regarded, can become the Achilles heel of the entire 9/11 operation, since it is here that the cause and effect relationship reaching into the secure weapons labs and military facilities of the US federal government is the most obvious. Anthrax cannot be synthesized by a bunch of rag-heads in a distant cave. Weaponized anthrax can only be obtained at the US Army's biological weapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and at a very few other centers of the same type controlled by other governments. The existence of weaponized anthrax is ipso facto a strong case for US government collusion in terror attacks on this country.
The anthrax cases also provide a case study in FBI obstruction of justice. After the anthrax letters were used as a pretext for paring down the 9/11 searches, the agents so re- assigned accomplished virtually nothing. For a long time the bureau pretended that any microbiologist could have been the killer. But the pool of potential anthrax suspects was of course much smaller -- it numbered in the dozens, or less. But, in order to define a realistic suspect pool, the FBI would have had to admit that the most likely source of the anthrax attacks was the government labs themselves, and that was something the FBI clearly did not want to do, lest this revelation be projected backwards onto 9/11. After a while Stephen Hatfill, a supposedly disgruntled former biowar researcher with a sinister resume and opinions, and thus a probable diversionary scapegoat, was identified as a person of interest. He was vilified by FBI leakers, but never indicted. The FBI made a Potemkin show of an investigation by draining a pond near Frederick, Maryland, but Hatfill was never charged.
We may also note in passing that the US government response to the anthrax cases pointed up the extent of oligarchical stratification in this society. Bush and the White House staff started taking Cipro, an antidote to anthrax, before the attacks even started. Members of Congress and congressional staffers got Cipro as soon as anthrax letters were found on Capitol Hill, and their offices were shut down instantly. In the case of black postal workers, the Postal Service expected them to keep working in tainted facilities, while at the same time there was a marked reluctance to give out free Cipro to these workers. The head of the USPS, a Bush appointee, said that any criticism o fhow he ran his agency amounted to aid and comfort for terrorists.
We cannot exclude the hypothesis that the anthrax cases were intended to become a much larger epidemic, one that might have claimed thousands of lives rather than just a few. Finally, in the anthrax cases, we have a prima facie case for political targeting. The first recipients of anthrax letters were a tabloid newspaper which had been prominent in publicizing the disorderly and at times illegal conduct of Bush 43's two substance- abusing daughters. Other recipients, like Senators Daschel and Leahy, were possible sources of opposition to the Patriot Act and other liberticide measures demanded by Bush and Ashcroft.
Between October 10 and October 11, just one week after the first case of anthrax had been reported, the FBI contacted the University of Iowa in Ames, Iowa. For seventy years this university had maintained a comprehensive repository of samples of every known strain of anthrax pathogen. This university was furthermore the source which provided samples of anthrax pathogen to researchers seeking cures, and also to labs seeking to weaponize the pathogen. Immediately after this phone call by the FBI, the University of Iowa destroyed the Ames anthrax repository. While it is not difficult to imagine the cover stories the FBI might have used to obtain this result, it is also clear that the Ames repository could have been the key to definitively solving the anthrax letters case. Analysis of the anthrax spores in the letters by chemical and DNA techniques identified these spores as belonging to the Ames strain. With the help of the samples collected in the repository, it would have been possible to identify with great precision the specific batch from which the anthrax letters had been filled, along with a paper trail leading to the agency to which the sample had been transferred. As the New York Times reported:
No matter how scientifically illiterate they might be, the reflex response of any real detective would be to veto the destruction of anything remotely resembling evidence, or even of a key to interpreting evidence. But this time around, the FBI was pleading ignorance. According to Bill Tobin, a former forensic metallurgist who had worked at the infamous and scandal-ridden FBI crime laboratory in Washington DC, "The bureau was caught almost as unaware and unprepared as the public was for these events. It's just not realistic to ask 7,000 agents to overnight become sufficiently knowledgeable about bioterrorist agents [sic] and possible means of theft of those items and how they might be disseminated lethally to an American public."
Dr. Martin Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University, commented: "If those cultures were still alive they could have helped in clearing up the muddied history" of the spores found in the letters. Ronald M. Atlas, the president-elect of the American Society of Microbiology, the world's largest group of "germ professionals," saw large legal implications in the destruction of evidence. "Potentially," he said, "it loses evidence that would have been useful" in the legal investigation. (New York Times, "Experts See FBI Missteps Hampering Anthrax Inquiry," November 11, 2002) The FBI was obviously out to sabotage its own investigation. Here is yet another case of manifest obstruction of justice by the FBI molehill. The 9/11 commission ignores both the anthrax affair overall and the obstruction of justice by the FBI.
Starting about a week after 9/11, anthrax letters began to arrive at the offices of The Sun, a supermarket tabloid based in Florida, of Senators Daschle and Leahy, NBC News, and the New York Post. On October 5, Bob Stevens, photo editor of The Sun, died of anthrax. A number of postal workers in Washington DC also succumbed. A total of five people died. The anthrax spores found in the letters were the product of very sophisticated milling, and were coated with a chemical, silica, that is unique to US laboratories, Iraqi anthrax, by contrast, is coated with bentonite, a mixture of silica and aluminum.
A great deal of publicity was given to a series of reports by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a former government official and microbiologist at the State University of New York who was also working for the Federation of American Scientists. Rosenberg's work was enthusiastically supported by the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), and the radical ecologists of Greenpeace. The FBI orchestrated a series of derogatory leaks about Rosenberg, suggesting that a gang/counter-gang operation might be in progress. Rosenberg's basic thesis was that the anthrax attacks were the work of a disgruntled lone assassin who had once worked for the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, but had subsequently been laid off. Naturally, the lone assassin approach tended to rule out an action by a more extensive network of moles in the federal government, which seems much more probable. Whenever extremely complicated and demanding operations are attributed to a disgruntled loner, we should be on guard against disinformation fabricated by the intelligence community. For example, the terrorizing impact of the anthrax letters was vastly increased by their synchronization with the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Was this a mere coincidence, or did the authors of the anthrax operation have advance knowledge that 9/11 was coming? How could Hatfill have been able to coordinate his supposed actions with 9/11? Once again, the rogue networks of the invisible government, and not any disgruntled loner, emerge as the prime suspects.
And there were other disinformation operations. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a neocon who worked for a law firm representing Achmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, began a vigorous campaign to blame the anthrax attacks on Iraq. In addition, an anonymous letter was sent to police, apparently in September, accusing an Egyptian- born American scientist who had been laid off by USAMRIID of being a terrorist. The FBI questioned him and said that he was innocent. Details of the letter have not been released. Rosenberg thought it likely that this letter had been sent by the perpetrator.
According to Rosenberg's January 2002 statement,
As for the anthrax, Rosenberg agreed that there was no doubt that the spores came from a US government lab:
Rosenberg based these conclusions on a technical analysis of the anthrax spores:
Rosenberg's thesis was that the sender of the anthrax letters had been familiar with a study about using a scenario of this type for a terror attack which had been conducted by anthrax weaponization expert Bill Patrick of USAMRID a couple of years earlier:
Rosenberg offered the following portrait of the anthrax killer: "Insider in US biodefense, doctoral degree in a relevant branch of biology; Middle-aged American; Experienced and skilled in working with hazardous pathogens, including anthrax, and avoiding contamination; Works for a CIA contractor in Washington, DC area; Has up-to-date vaccination with anthrax vaccine; Has clearance for access to classified information; Worked in USAMRIID laboratory in the past, in some capacity, and has access now; Knows Bill Patrick and has probably learned a thing or two about weaponization from him, informally; Has had training or experience in covering evidence; May have had an UNSCOM connection; Has had a dispute with a government agency; Has a private location where the materials for the attack were accumulated and prepared; Worked on the letters alone or with peripheral encouragement and assistance; Fits FBI profile; Has the necessary expertise, access and a past history indicating appropriate capabilities and temperament; Has been questioned by FBI." (Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, "Analysis of the Source of the Anthrax Attacks," January 17-31, 2002)
During the autumn of 2001, the FBI blanketed central New Jersey with leaflets showing a sample of the anthrax killer's handwriting. The FBI also sent questionnaires to 32,000 US microbiologists, most of whom worked in fields that had nothing to do with the government's anthrax labs. This was clearly busy work designed to avoid making the government the prime suspects in the attacks. George Monbiot of The Guardian mocked this farce as "kind of 'investigation' which might have been appropriate for the unwitnessed hit and run killing of a person with no known enemies. Rather than homing in on the likely suspects, in other words, it appears to have cast a net full of holes over the entire population." Monbiot reported that he had telephoned an FBI spokesman about this issue. "Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? 'The investigation is continuing,' the spokesman replied. 'Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government office?' I asked. He put down the phone." Monbiot speculated that the reticence had to do with covering up US violations of international biowarfare treaties, since "the army's development of weaponized anthrax, for example, directly contravenes both the biological weapons convention and domestic law. So does its plan to test live microbes in 'aerosol chambers' at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research programmes which the US government has secretly funded. Several prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigour we might have expected because the federal authorities have something to hide. The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure." (The Guardian, May 21, 2002)
This would appear to have been Barbara Hatch Rosenberg's line as well. In a sympathetic profile in the March 18, 2002 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann reported that Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may be in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons convention. If the anthrax attacks were the work of a lone, disgruntled, mad scientist, the case for strengthening international safeguards would be enhanced. Rosenberg's basic demand was that this program be monitored. Fair enough, but not the whole story.
Towards the end of June, 2002 the FBI obtained a search warrant to examine the Maryland home of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 48, a bio-defence researcher who had worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Hatfill said at once that he was the victim of a witch-hunt. When he lived in Rhodesia, Hatfill once studied close to a school which bears the same name as the bogus address on the envelopes containing the fatal doses of anthrax. (The Guardian, June 28, 2002)
On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as "Mr. Z" and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist. "If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. It's time for the FBI to make a move: Either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion." In essence, the FBI did neither.
Kristof and the other journalists hostile to Hatfill claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these attacks. Hatfill held a press conference on August 12, 2002 in which he once again denied everything. In late August 2002, a paid two-page advertisement in the Washington Times argued that the anthrax killer had to be a member of the US military, probably someone with access to the U.S. off-budget, secret biological-warfare laboratories, or else someone with access to the Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) report on anthrax-mailing. The author of the ad was a certain Pete Yelis. Yelis asserted that Steven Hatfill was not the perpetrator. Yelis maintained that the evidence indicated that the mailings were probably prepared beginning two years earlier, and that the purpose was political -- to scare the U.S. into a domestic security/wartime response -- and not to kill a lot of people. He noted that the targets were among the strongest potential opponents of "Executive Branch/Homeland Security Wartime Powers expansions," citing, for example, the mailing to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The SAIC report, which Yelis says contained "the exact specifications of the anthrax mailed" would suggest that the mailers came from a group of military officers with access to the SAIC report. (Washington Times, August 26,2002) A day earlier Hatfill and his lawyer held a second press conference, which received exceptionally broad media coverage, denouncing the FBI and Attorney General John Ashcroft for the tactics used in their investigation.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, after having been interviewed by the FBI, said that the agents had asked repeatedly whether a team of government scientists could be trying to frame Hatfill. "They kept asking me did I think there might be a group in the biodefense community that was trying to land the blame on Hatfill," she told the press. (Washington Times, August 3, 2002)
Whatever the gyrations of the FBI, it was clear that the anthrax came from the US government, and that the FBI had deliberately flubbed the investigation. The pond draining of 2003 changed nothing in this picture. By the summer of 2004, it was evident that the FBI would never solve the anthrax case because it did not want to awaken the US population to the reality that terrorism can come, and indeed does come, not out of a distant cave, but out of a US government lab on a military base. As for Hatfill, he was most probably a fall guy. If the FBI was incompetent before 9/11, and incompetent in its first major test thereafter, what then is the likely truth value of the statements made by the FBI about 9/11 itself?
THE WASHINGTON DC AREA SNIPER
In the fall of 2002, a series of sniper murders once again immersed the Washington DC area in fear and terror. These started in Montgomery County, Maryland, and soon spread south into Virginia. Here again the suspect pool was defined as snipers, and snipers are trained by the military services and certain police units. Any competent investigation would have started with lists of snipers trained by the government, especially recently retired or disgruntled ones. But this would once again have made the government into the prime suspect, and again the FBI refused to do this. The investigation was supposedly placed under the control of Montgomery County police chief Charles Ramsey, who ignored the imperative of sifting through the sniper pool, and instead acted as if the shooters could have been any casual passerby. Ramsey announced that telephone tip lines were being set up, and that he would rely on information from the citizenry to catch the felons. Weeks went by. After every sniper attack, road blocks were set up to encircle the entire surrounding area, but nothing was ever found. Local radio stations featured interviews with trained snipers who argued that real snipers were humanitarians who would never fire on unarmed civilians. Finally information arrived which permitted the identification of the vehicle used by the shooters, who were caught while sleeping at a rest stop on I-270. Sure enough, the older of the two shooters had been trained as a sharpshooter by the US Army. He and his younger partner were quickly categorized as lone itinerant psychopaths. This affair served to terrorize the national capital area, including Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive departments, for the best part of two months. It refreshed and revived the horror generated by 9/11, and provided the immediate backdrop for the November 2002 election. That time around, al Qaeda and its mythical apparatus were not needed.
The anthrax incidents of October 2001 must be regarded as an integral part of the entire 9/11 operation. The 9/11 terror attacks were highly effective in terrorizing urban populations, since no one knew when another city might be struck, and with what means. But what of the vast suburbs, and what of rural America? Here kamikaze aircraft, poison gas and dirty bombs were hardly likely. But everyone in the country had a mailbox, and now that mailbox could become the delivery system for a deadly disease. Even the most humble and obscure person living in the most remote location could never be sure that a piece of junk mail in the letterbox had not brushed up against an envelope teeming with lethal anthrax spores. The most harmless daily routine, that of checking the mailbox, suddenly became a tense encounter with the world of biological warfare.
The anthrax attacks also provided a most welcome pretext for the Bush administration and the FBI to scale down and to slow down the ongoing probes into 9/11. The anthrax letters provided a reason to re-assign FBI agents to the new danger, before they got anywhere near unearthing the explosive secrets of 9/11. On October 10, FBI assets were shifted away from the 9/11 investigation with the explanation that they were needed for the anthrax emergency.
At the same time the anthrax attacks, if properly regarded, can become the Achilles heel of the entire 9/11 operation, since it is here that the cause and effect relationship reaching into the secure weapons labs and military facilities of the US federal government is the most obvious. Anthrax cannot be synthesized by a bunch of rag-heads in a distant cave. Weaponized anthrax can only be obtained at the US Army's biological weapons facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and at a very few other centers of the same type controlled by other governments. The existence of weaponized anthrax is ipso facto a strong case for US government collusion in terror attacks on this country.
The anthrax cases also provide a case study in FBI obstruction of justice. After the anthrax letters were used as a pretext for paring down the 9/11 searches, the agents so re- assigned accomplished virtually nothing. For a long time the bureau pretended that any microbiologist could have been the killer. But the pool of potential anthrax suspects was of course much smaller -- it numbered in the dozens, or less. But, in order to define a realistic suspect pool, the FBI would have had to admit that the most likely source of the anthrax attacks was the government labs themselves, and that was something the FBI clearly did not want to do, lest this revelation be projected backwards onto 9/11. After a while Stephen Hatfill, a supposedly disgruntled former biowar researcher with a sinister resume and opinions, and thus a probable diversionary scapegoat, was identified as a person of interest. He was vilified by FBI leakers, but never indicted. The FBI made a Potemkin show of an investigation by draining a pond near Frederick, Maryland, but Hatfill was never charged.
We may also note in passing that the US government response to the anthrax cases pointed up the extent of oligarchical stratification in this society. Bush and the White House staff started taking Cipro, an antidote to anthrax, before the attacks even started. Members of Congress and congressional staffers got Cipro as soon as anthrax letters were found on Capitol Hill, and their offices were shut down instantly. In the case of black postal workers, the Postal Service expected them to keep working in tainted facilities, while at the same time there was a marked reluctance to give out free Cipro to these workers. The head of the USPS, a Bush appointee, said that any criticism o fhow he ran his agency amounted to aid and comfort for terrorists.
We cannot exclude the hypothesis that the anthrax cases were intended to become a much larger epidemic, one that might have claimed thousands of lives rather than just a few. Finally, in the anthrax cases, we have a prima facie case for political targeting. The first recipients of anthrax letters were a tabloid newspaper which had been prominent in publicizing the disorderly and at times illegal conduct of Bush 43's two substance- abusing daughters. Other recipients, like Senators Daschel and Leahy, were possible sources of opposition to the Patriot Act and other liberticide measures demanded by Bush and Ashcroft.
Between October 10 and October 11, just one week after the first case of anthrax had been reported, the FBI contacted the University of Iowa in Ames, Iowa. For seventy years this university had maintained a comprehensive repository of samples of every known strain of anthrax pathogen. This university was furthermore the source which provided samples of anthrax pathogen to researchers seeking cures, and also to labs seeking to weaponize the pathogen. Immediately after this phone call by the FBI, the University of Iowa destroyed the Ames anthrax repository. While it is not difficult to imagine the cover stories the FBI might have used to obtain this result, it is also clear that the Ames repository could have been the key to definitively solving the anthrax letters case. Analysis of the anthrax spores in the letters by chemical and DNA techniques identified these spores as belonging to the Ames strain. With the help of the samples collected in the repository, it would have been possible to identify with great precision the specific batch from which the anthrax letters had been filled, along with a paper trail leading to the agency to which the sample had been transferred. As the New York Times reported:
Shortly after the first case of anthrax arose, the FBI said it had no objection to the destruction of a collection of anthrax samples at Iowa State University, but some scientists involved in the investigation now say that collection may have contained genetic clues valuable to the inquiry.
Criminal investigators have not visited many of the companies, laboratories, and scientific institutions with the equipment or capability to make the kind of highly potent anthrax sent in a letter to Senator Tom Daschle, the majority leader. Where investigators have conducted interviews, they often seemed to ask general questions unlikely to elicit new evidence, several laboratory directors said.
Evidence Disappears
Last month, after consulting with the FBI, Iowa State University in Ames destroyed anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept in more than 100 vials. A variant of the so-called Ames strain had been implicated in the death of a Florida man from inhalation anthrax, and the university was nervous about security. Now, a dispute has arisen, with scientists in and out of government saying the rush to destroy the spores may have eliminated crucial evidence about the anthrax in the letters sent to Congress and the news media.
If the archive still existed, it would by no means solve the mystery. But scientists said a precise match between the anthrax that killed four people and a particular strain in the collection might have offered hints as to when the bacteria had been isolated and, perhaps, how widely it had been distributed to researchers. And that, in turn, might have given investigators important clues to the killer's identity.
No matter how scientifically illiterate they might be, the reflex response of any real detective would be to veto the destruction of anything remotely resembling evidence, or even of a key to interpreting evidence. But this time around, the FBI was pleading ignorance. According to Bill Tobin, a former forensic metallurgist who had worked at the infamous and scandal-ridden FBI crime laboratory in Washington DC, "The bureau was caught almost as unaware and unprepared as the public was for these events. It's just not realistic to ask 7,000 agents to overnight become sufficiently knowledgeable about bioterrorist agents [sic] and possible means of theft of those items and how they might be disseminated lethally to an American public."
Dr. Martin Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University, commented: "If those cultures were still alive they could have helped in clearing up the muddied history" of the spores found in the letters. Ronald M. Atlas, the president-elect of the American Society of Microbiology, the world's largest group of "germ professionals," saw large legal implications in the destruction of evidence. "Potentially," he said, "it loses evidence that would have been useful" in the legal investigation. (New York Times, "Experts See FBI Missteps Hampering Anthrax Inquiry," November 11, 2002) The FBI was obviously out to sabotage its own investigation. Here is yet another case of manifest obstruction of justice by the FBI molehill. The 9/11 commission ignores both the anthrax affair overall and the obstruction of justice by the FBI.
Starting about a week after 9/11, anthrax letters began to arrive at the offices of The Sun, a supermarket tabloid based in Florida, of Senators Daschle and Leahy, NBC News, and the New York Post. On October 5, Bob Stevens, photo editor of The Sun, died of anthrax. A number of postal workers in Washington DC also succumbed. A total of five people died. The anthrax spores found in the letters were the product of very sophisticated milling, and were coated with a chemical, silica, that is unique to US laboratories, Iraqi anthrax, by contrast, is coated with bentonite, a mixture of silica and aluminum.
A great deal of publicity was given to a series of reports by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a former government official and microbiologist at the State University of New York who was also working for the Federation of American Scientists. Rosenberg's work was enthusiastically supported by the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), and the radical ecologists of Greenpeace. The FBI orchestrated a series of derogatory leaks about Rosenberg, suggesting that a gang/counter-gang operation might be in progress. Rosenberg's basic thesis was that the anthrax attacks were the work of a disgruntled lone assassin who had once worked for the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, but had subsequently been laid off. Naturally, the lone assassin approach tended to rule out an action by a more extensive network of moles in the federal government, which seems much more probable. Whenever extremely complicated and demanding operations are attributed to a disgruntled loner, we should be on guard against disinformation fabricated by the intelligence community. For example, the terrorizing impact of the anthrax letters was vastly increased by their synchronization with the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Was this a mere coincidence, or did the authors of the anthrax operation have advance knowledge that 9/11 was coming? How could Hatfill have been able to coordinate his supposed actions with 9/11? Once again, the rogue networks of the invisible government, and not any disgruntled loner, emerge as the prime suspects.
And there were other disinformation operations. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a neocon who worked for a law firm representing Achmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, began a vigorous campaign to blame the anthrax attacks on Iraq. In addition, an anonymous letter was sent to police, apparently in September, accusing an Egyptian- born American scientist who had been laid off by USAMRIID of being a terrorist. The FBI questioned him and said that he was innocent. Details of the letter have not been released. Rosenberg thought it likely that this letter had been sent by the perpetrator.
According to Rosenberg's January 2002 statement,
The FBI has surely known for several months that the anthrax attack was an inside job. A government estimate for the number of scientists involved in the US anthrax program over the last five years is 200 people. According to a former defense scientist the number of defense scientists with hands-on anthrax experience and the necessary access is smaller, under 50. The FBI has received short lists of specific suspects with credible motives from a number of knowledgeable inside sources, and has found or been given clues (beyond those presented below) that could lead to incriminating evidence. By now the FBI must have a good idea of who the perpetrator is. There may be two factors accounting for the lack of public acknowledgement and the paucity of information being released: a fear that embarrassing details might become public, and a need for secrecy in order to acquire sufficient hard evidence to convict the perpetrator.
As for the anthrax, Rosenberg agreed that there was no doubt that the spores came from a US government lab:
All letter samples contain the same strain of anthrax, corresponding to the AMES strain in the Northern Arizona University database (which has been used for identification) Contrary to early speculation, there are no more than about 20 laboratories known to have the Ames strain. The names of 15 of these have been found in the open literature. Of these, probably only about four in the US might possibly have the capability for weaponizing anthrax. Those four include both US military laboratories and a government contractor.
Rosenberg based these conclusions on a technical analysis of the anthrax spores:
The extraordinary concentration (one trillion spores per gram) and purity of the letter anthrax is believed to be characteristic of material made by the optimal US process. The optimal US weaponization process is secret -- Bill Patrick, its inventor, holds five secret patents on the process and says it involves a combination of chemicals. There is no evidence that any other country possesses the formula. Under the microscope, the letter anthrax appears to be unmilled. Milled anthrax spores are identifiable because they contain debris. The optimal US process does not use milling. The Daschle sample contains a special form of silica used in the US process. It does not contain bentonite (used by the Iraqis). A "coating" on the spores in the letter sample, indicative of the secret US process, has been observed.
Rosenberg's thesis was that the sender of the anthrax letters had been familiar with a study about using a scenario of this type for a terror attack which had been conducted by anthrax weaponization expert Bill Patrick of USAMRID a couple of years earlier:
A classified report dated February, 1999 discusses responses to an anthrax attack through the mail. The report, precipitated by a series of false anthrax mailings, was written by William Patrick, inventor of the US weaponization process, under a CIA contract to SAIC. The report describes what the US military could do and what a terrorist might be able to achieve ... the report predicted about 2.5g of anthrax per envelope (the Daschle letter contained 2g) and assumed a poorer quality of anthrax than that found in the Daschle letter. If the perpetrator had access to the materials and information necessary for the attack, he must have had security clearance or other means for accessing classified information, and may therefore have seen the report and used it as a model for the attack.
Rosenberg offered the following portrait of the anthrax killer: "Insider in US biodefense, doctoral degree in a relevant branch of biology; Middle-aged American; Experienced and skilled in working with hazardous pathogens, including anthrax, and avoiding contamination; Works for a CIA contractor in Washington, DC area; Has up-to-date vaccination with anthrax vaccine; Has clearance for access to classified information; Worked in USAMRIID laboratory in the past, in some capacity, and has access now; Knows Bill Patrick and has probably learned a thing or two about weaponization from him, informally; Has had training or experience in covering evidence; May have had an UNSCOM connection; Has had a dispute with a government agency; Has a private location where the materials for the attack were accumulated and prepared; Worked on the letters alone or with peripheral encouragement and assistance; Fits FBI profile; Has the necessary expertise, access and a past history indicating appropriate capabilities and temperament; Has been questioned by FBI." (Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, "Analysis of the Source of the Anthrax Attacks," January 17-31, 2002)
During the autumn of 2001, the FBI blanketed central New Jersey with leaflets showing a sample of the anthrax killer's handwriting. The FBI also sent questionnaires to 32,000 US microbiologists, most of whom worked in fields that had nothing to do with the government's anthrax labs. This was clearly busy work designed to avoid making the government the prime suspects in the attacks. George Monbiot of The Guardian mocked this farce as "kind of 'investigation' which might have been appropriate for the unwitnessed hit and run killing of a person with no known enemies. Rather than homing in on the likely suspects, in other words, it appears to have cast a net full of holes over the entire population." Monbiot reported that he had telephoned an FBI spokesman about this issue. "Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? 'The investigation is continuing,' the spokesman replied. 'Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government office?' I asked. He put down the phone." Monbiot speculated that the reticence had to do with covering up US violations of international biowarfare treaties, since "the army's development of weaponized anthrax, for example, directly contravenes both the biological weapons convention and domestic law. So does its plan to test live microbes in 'aerosol chambers' at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research programmes which the US government has secretly funded. Several prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigour we might have expected because the federal authorities have something to hide. The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure." (The Guardian, May 21, 2002)
This would appear to have been Barbara Hatch Rosenberg's line as well. In a sympathetic profile in the March 18, 2002 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann reported that Rosenberg believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be monitored, may be in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons convention. If the anthrax attacks were the work of a lone, disgruntled, mad scientist, the case for strengthening international safeguards would be enhanced. Rosenberg's basic demand was that this program be monitored. Fair enough, but not the whole story.
Towards the end of June, 2002 the FBI obtained a search warrant to examine the Maryland home of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 48, a bio-defence researcher who had worked at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Hatfill said at once that he was the victim of a witch-hunt. When he lived in Rhodesia, Hatfill once studied close to a school which bears the same name as the bogus address on the envelopes containing the fatal doses of anthrax. (The Guardian, June 28, 2002)
On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as "Mr. Z" and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist. "If Mr. Z were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. It's time for the FBI to make a move: Either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this cloud of suspicion." In essence, the FBI did neither.
Kristof and the other journalists hostile to Hatfill claimed that in the late 1970s, Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link Hatfill to these attacks. Hatfill held a press conference on August 12, 2002 in which he once again denied everything. In late August 2002, a paid two-page advertisement in the Washington Times argued that the anthrax killer had to be a member of the US military, probably someone with access to the U.S. off-budget, secret biological-warfare laboratories, or else someone with access to the Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC) report on anthrax-mailing. The author of the ad was a certain Pete Yelis. Yelis asserted that Steven Hatfill was not the perpetrator. Yelis maintained that the evidence indicated that the mailings were probably prepared beginning two years earlier, and that the purpose was political -- to scare the U.S. into a domestic security/wartime response -- and not to kill a lot of people. He noted that the targets were among the strongest potential opponents of "Executive Branch/Homeland Security Wartime Powers expansions," citing, for example, the mailing to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The SAIC report, which Yelis says contained "the exact specifications of the anthrax mailed" would suggest that the mailers came from a group of military officers with access to the SAIC report. (Washington Times, August 26,2002) A day earlier Hatfill and his lawyer held a second press conference, which received exceptionally broad media coverage, denouncing the FBI and Attorney General John Ashcroft for the tactics used in their investigation.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, after having been interviewed by the FBI, said that the agents had asked repeatedly whether a team of government scientists could be trying to frame Hatfill. "They kept asking me did I think there might be a group in the biodefense community that was trying to land the blame on Hatfill," she told the press. (Washington Times, August 3, 2002)
Whatever the gyrations of the FBI, it was clear that the anthrax came from the US government, and that the FBI had deliberately flubbed the investigation. The pond draining of 2003 changed nothing in this picture. By the summer of 2004, it was evident that the FBI would never solve the anthrax case because it did not want to awaken the US population to the reality that terrorism can come, and indeed does come, not out of a distant cave, but out of a US government lab on a military base. As for Hatfill, he was most probably a fall guy. If the FBI was incompetent before 9/11, and incompetent in its first major test thereafter, what then is the likely truth value of the statements made by the FBI about 9/11 itself?
THE WASHINGTON DC AREA SNIPER
In the fall of 2002, a series of sniper murders once again immersed the Washington DC area in fear and terror. These started in Montgomery County, Maryland, and soon spread south into Virginia. Here again the suspect pool was defined as snipers, and snipers are trained by the military services and certain police units. Any competent investigation would have started with lists of snipers trained by the government, especially recently retired or disgruntled ones. But this would once again have made the government into the prime suspect, and again the FBI refused to do this. The investigation was supposedly placed under the control of Montgomery County police chief Charles Ramsey, who ignored the imperative of sifting through the sniper pool, and instead acted as if the shooters could have been any casual passerby. Ramsey announced that telephone tip lines were being set up, and that he would rely on information from the citizenry to catch the felons. Weeks went by. After every sniper attack, road blocks were set up to encircle the entire surrounding area, but nothing was ever found. Local radio stations featured interviews with trained snipers who argued that real snipers were humanitarians who would never fire on unarmed civilians. Finally information arrived which permitted the identification of the vehicle used by the shooters, who were caught while sleeping at a rest stop on I-270. Sure enough, the older of the two shooters had been trained as a sharpshooter by the US Army. He and his younger partner were quickly categorized as lone itinerant psychopaths. This affair served to terrorize the national capital area, including Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive departments, for the best part of two months. It refreshed and revived the horror generated by 9/11, and provided the immediate backdrop for the November 2002 election. That time around, al Qaeda and its mythical apparatus were not needed.