A is for Anthrax. Remember that?
(notes to an article...)
The Congress that rushed through the USA PATRIOT Act nearly unread was the same Congress that was packing and rushing out of Washington because the leadership of the opposition Democrats had been subjected to an anthrax attack.
I consider this fact inseparable from any discussion of the PATRIOT Act. The head of the Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, received a letter, as did the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle. This was just as they had complained about the original text of the PATRIOT Act.
Congress was terrorized and broken.
This incident should have put an end to doubt about the "war on terror" and everything else that the regime has been doing. It has been utterly forgotten, although during October 2001 it was trumped up as something even bigger than 9/11.
Unlike the case of 9/11, the facts about the anthrax attacks are simple, clear and close to conclusive:
-The Bush government revived an anthrax program early in 2001 on orders from Cheney and had developed a new milling process just before Sept. 11. Incredibly, this was called "Project Jefferson" (!).
- A week before Sept. 11, NYT reported that the Pentagon was experimenting in the "defensive" development of anthrax milling methods. Scientists were assigned to put together homemade laboratories, using only materials available commercially, on the sparse budget of a mere million of your taxpayer dollars. The Pentagon said they weren't actually taking the final step of milling live spores (although I wonder why, once ready, they would not want to see how well their lab works). The idea was to see what terrorists might be able to do. The French got wind of this program and complained to some UN committee, since the biowarfare convention outlaws all research including "defensive." To allay concerns, the Pentagon invited an NY Times reporter, our old friend Judy Miller, to the Texas base where all this was going on.*
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04GERM.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=allhttp://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04BIOW.html-On Sept. 11th the White House immediately put some of its staff, including Cheney, on Cipro. How did they know to pick this antibiotic, out of the many available? How could they guess that anthrax (or another pathogen against which Cipro can protect) was coming?
-A wave of stories immediately after Sept. 11th announced that anthrax was the likeliest next attack. We were even threatened with a specific sequence of future attacks: anthrax, smallpox, plague. (They've been drumming up the smallpox scare ever since the anthrax attacks stopped.) Of all the hundreds of biowar germs and literally thousands of types of terror attacks, why was this idea circulated so prominently? Who was behind spreading these stories? Why so specific?
-Suspect Hatfill while working biowarfare research at SAIC/Batelle Memorial in 1999 commissioned his colleague in science, William Capers Patrick, the renowned dean of American biowarfare research, to write a report on modalities that terrorists might employ in sending anthrax through the mail.
-The report from that study specified an ideal spore concentration and weight of anthrax sample per envelope. These were the amounts that were then reportedly used in the attacks on Daschle and Leahy. In other words, the anthrax attackers had access to this secret report.
-The anthrax went first to the headquarters of the country's biggest tabloid owner (National Enquirer and Florida Sun-Sentinel). The Enquirer had printed a series of anti-Bush "conspiracy" stories, including one claiming that McVeigh was still breathing after his execution. The Enquirer also published embarrassing pictures of the Bush twins drunk, which had gotten much play on Drudge and similar outlets. Was this an object lesson to the media? (Note: never established how it got to Bob Stevens; no envelope located; theory that it may have been spread from one floor to another by a vacuum cleaner ... or was he directly hit, via keyboard?)
-The wife of the paper's editor had rented an apartment to Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi. Were they going to do a story about this that would not have fit the official 9/11 line?
--At this point, the FBI on a request from Iowa State University allowed the destruction of a stockpile of original Ames strain samples on Oct. 13, days after the attacks became known. Why?! This was a precaution?!
--The FBI immediately called off one-half of the thousands of agents who were working on 9/11 and put them to work on anthrax.
-The next group of attacks hit the New York media. They arrived just as the Afghanistan campaign began and caused maximum coverage of nothing but anthrax. For a vital week or two, the 9/11 investigation dropped out of the media. About one-half of the FBI agents assigned to 9/11 were dispatched to cover anthrax.
-The third wave of attacks, the one that exactly fit the specifications of the secret paper, was sent first to Daschle and Leahy - the leader of the opposition in the Senate and the head of the Judiciary Committee.
-This exceptional piece of constituent mail arrived at around the same time as the USA Patriot Act was also submitted to the Congress. Lehay had initially opposed the Act, and requested clarification of its more extreme provisions from Ashcroft.
-The House chose to immediately run home, casting their votes for this negation of the U.S. Constitution as they went. As Republican Congressman Ron Paul has made clear, most of them did not even receive a text of the 300-page final version before they voted for it, let alone had a chance to read it.
- The Senate soon followed suit, also approving Patriot. The next reports were that Kennedy and Levin, two other liberals, had also received an anthrax letter.
-The notes included with the anthrax letters tried to point the blame at Arab perpetrators, but these were clumsy and transparent ("Allah is Great" instead of "God Is Great" or "Allah Akhbar.")
-The news at first wanted to blame it on Arabs, or Iraq. Why does that damned Osama bin Laden hate the Democratic leadership, as opposed to Republican leaders?
-Only days later did reports arrive of anthrax being found in mail to the White House, Pentagon, Federal Reserve, CIA, etc., all of which had by then been very safely isolated on military bases. No details about these alleged attacks have been released. We have not seen copies of the letters, as was the case with the letters to Daschle, Leahy and Brokaw. There have to my knowledge been no follow up reports on the provenance of the anthrax employed.
How strange how the first attacks, which were the only ones that had a chance to get through, went to the Democratic leadership!
-Suddenly, the anthrax wave was dropped as quickly as it had begun. The biggest U.S. media story of October 2001 was effectively swept away. The media obediently switched to the taking of Kabul and spent November 2001 preparing us for a thoughtful Thanksgiving with endless soul-searching stories asking how our country could have ever produced Johnny Taliban Walker.
- Anthrax has since been mentioned only rarely and out of context, as when Powell had the gall to hold up a vial of white powder at the UN and ask where Saddam is hiding his anthrax. Well, Colin, where are you keeping yours?
-All the foreign anthrax letters reported at various times in 2001 have been dismissed as white-powder hoaxes.
-It was established quickly that the anthrax to Leahy and Daschle was of recent production, with high-quality, weaponized spores such as can be produced only by a specialist at an advanced facility; and that the lineage goes back to Fort Detrick, Maryland and the Ames strain used by American biowarfare programs.
-For all this, an obvious effort was made to minimize casualties and target the letters very specifically to individuals. The same amount of anthrax could have been spread in a fashion causing many more deaths.
-Having gotten as far as Stephen Hatfill, the FBI investigation has now stalled for nearly two years. Could it be that the "lone perpetrator" thesis is not sustainable, and they don't want to deal with the implications?
What does that add up to?
As a selective wave of terror, the attacks were perfectly designed and timed to cow the opposition, force through the Patriot Act, make an exampe of deviant journalists, divert the 9/11 investigation, and frighten and occupy the media during the first phase of the Afghanistan war. The attacks provided important reinforcement in keeping these various actors from deviating in any way from the official post-Sept. 11th atmosphere of terror and panic. They were the key step in initiating the post-Sept. 11 transformation of American society and law.
In other words, the anthrax attacks look exactly as though they were planned and executed by a black-ops or damage control team working on behalf of the Bush regime's goals, either as rogues or as appointed hitmen. We might compare them to Nixon's Plumbers, except that they were much more sophisticated and effective in their choice of methods.
That is the only thesis forwarded so far that credibly covers all of the above facts. In this case, there is no doubt which way Occam's razor cuts.
In fact, this is the thesis that many people subscribe to when speaking off the record in the the world capital of paranoia itself, Washington, DC.
And what has Daschle done or said about these facts? Are Brokaw and Rather really unaware of all this? They do not even defend themselves against an assassination attempt on himself and his staff.
This is the context in which we should view the Jan. 2002 call from Cheney, the premature Cipro-taker, to Daschle, the anthrax recipient, threatening the other of dire consequences if he should push too hard for a 9/11 investigation in the Congress. This touched off a series delays in the joint investigation, which first opened in June.
Daschle - and Leahy, and all the other Senators including Kerry and Edwards - are so scared, or so compromised, or otherwise being blackmailed with other threats, that they have not risen to this challenge. I don't envy or accuse them, but how can you expect these guy to ever confront the Bush mob?
(*NOTE: What justification is there for programs like "Jefferson"? This program not only finds out what terrorists might do, it no doubt discovers ways to do it that they might not have thought of themselves. The government scientists gain the astonishing insight that there's fuck-all they can do to stop evil biology students from engaging in such activities if they so wish. And the program's results will be written up in a little "defensive" manual on how to make your own anthrax lab. One day, probably soon, that will end up in the hands of one of our freedom fighters somewhere... and a years down the line he or his successor will use it against the U.S., thus setting off the next round of "defensive" activity on our part. At least it's lucrative!)
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