Anthrax deaths remain a mystery - Feds devoting 1,000 man-hours per week to the investigation

THE WASHINGTON TIMES ^ | Guy Taylor

[Gene Vidocq]

Monday's false alarm anthrax scare at three Pentagon letter-processing centers served as a reminder of the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five persons and remain unsolved.

Investigators have made no arrests and have named no suspects in the 31/2-year-old probe into who sent the anthrax letters to senate offices on Capitol Hill and media outlets in Florida and New York.

But authorities, who say they are still devoting more than 1,000 man-hours per week to the investigation, said there's no statute of limitations on murder so it's unlikely the probe will end because of a lack of leads.

"We will proceed with this investigation to its end," said Debbie Weierman, spokeswoman at the FBI's Washington field office, which is leading the still "intensely active" probe called "Amerithrax."

[FairOpinion]

How much of that time was spent following Hatfill around?

[Gene Vidocq]

Ping

[Jabba the Nutt]

Didn't one of the 9/11 hijackers get treated for an anthrax infection? If Steven Hatfill did this, he deserves the Oscar for Best Actor. I saw his press conferences, that was the greatest imitation of an innocent man, I've ever seen (if he did it, which I don't believe).

[Peach]

I wish the article had reminded viewers that after 9/11, two doctors came forward to say they had treated two of the 9/11 hijackers with what they now recognized as cutaneous anthrax.

And the 9/11 hijackers rented an apartment from the boss of the man who died of anthrax in Florida.

[Semper Paratus]

Wake me up for caring what the FBI does when they arrest Whitey Bulger.

[genefromjersey]

I'd like to "re-visit" that statement: Which 2 hijackers were treated for (possible) cutaneous anthrax,and when were they treated ??

[IamConservative]

Given all the time that has passed without further incident, it does tend to lead one in the direction of thinking those letters originated from a source other than an Islamic Terrorist.

[Peach]

Here are links to the hijackers being linked to anthrax:

http://www.sptimes.com/News/101501/Worldandnation/Hijackers_linked_to_t.shtml

- The letters all mention standard Islamic catch-phrases.

- Florida Dr. Tsonas treated Ahmed al-Haznawi for a severe leg lesion in late June.
Dr. Tsonas is now convinced it was cutaneous anthrax.

- Two Johns Hopkins biodefense experts (Dr. Thomas Inglesby, Dr. Tara O'Toole) agree with Tsonas.

- FL hijackers inquire about crop-dusters and dispersal characteristics of chemical loads.

- Atta attempted to obtain a loan to buy a plane and convert it into a chemical transport.

- Moussaoui, the "20th hijacker", had tech info on airliners, crop-dusters, and wind patterns.

- Mohamed Atta went to a drugstore with red, chemical-burned hands mid-2001.
Druggist thought Atta was suffering from exposure to a chemical with basic pH, possibly bleach (used to kill anthrax).

- Allah Rakah, detained by FBI, for placing suspicious bag of letters in his car with FL license plates

- Atta met twice with Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, a "very senior" Iraqi 'Special Ops' agent.
(one report says the Czechs confirmed they had video...spycraft SOP)
(another report claims that a vacumm bottle was passed to Atta during the meeting)

- Ziad Jarrah also met with an Iraqi agent in 2001 in the UAE.

- Marwan al-Shehhi also met with an Iraqi agent in 2001 in the UAE.

- Iraq is the ONLY hostile country known to have succeeded in weaponizing anthrax

- Iraq conducted military exercises simulating the dispersal of anthrax spores from crop-dusters

- The anthrax coating is silica, a material used by Iraq on biological agents.
- Chemical and biological weapons are effectively dispersed from crop-dusters

- The terrorists had two operational hubs: Hamilton, New Jersey and Delray, Florida. Anthrax was found in both areas.

JUST COINCIDENCES??

- The wife of the Sun tabloid's editor rented two apartments to two hijackers In Florida.

- The intials of the ringleader, A-T-T-A, are highlighted in letter 3a (Brokaw).

- Marwan al-Shehhi went to Huber Drugs (with Atta) with severe chest congestion.
The pharmacist sold him a bottle of Robitussin initially, and later antibiotics.

http://observer.guardian.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,591514,00.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A28334-2002Oct27&notFound=true

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/546116/posts

Iraq possible foreign source behind anthrax:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A28334-2002Oct27&notFound=true

[genefromjersey]

Ahmed Alhaznawi ( Ahmad Ibrahim al-Haznawi)-entered US on June 8,01-Miami,in company of Wail al-Shehri.Both came in from Dubai,UAE,with 6 month tourist visas.Both were "muscle men". I seriously doubt either of them brought anything with them.

The meeting of Atta with somebody in Prague is still unconfirmed-in fact,available evidence suggests it probably never happened.

The FBI went around and checked every plave they could find where any of the hijackers lived,stayed,or visited.They checked cars known to be associated with them.All were negative for anthrax.

So far, interrogations of captured AQ leaders have produced piles of information-but nothing relating to an anthrax-9/11 link.

I seriously doubt the 2 operations were closely linked-if only because it would have been extremely poor tradecraft to have done so-and AQ has never been overly stupid in that area. Their operations have been exhaustively planned. (9/11 for example,was 6 years in the making.)

[Peach]

That seems to ignore the fact that two 9/11 hijackers had cutaneous anthrax. And that they rented an apartment from the boss of the man who died of anthrax in Florida.

[genefromjersey]

1. It is not a fact that 2 hijackers had anthrax: it is a speculation - and there is a world of difference between the two.

2. The hijackers moved around a lot .

I think it more likely al-Hazawi had a spider bite,or an infection from sandfly bites (quite common in the Middle East).

As to Atta's reddened hands,I'd be more likely to think he had been making up explosives.(There is some indication the hijackers on all 3 planes carried explosives aboard.)

[genefromjersey]

Let me add a little something: weaponized anthrax was NOT peculiar to Iraq. It could be found in almost any of the "former" Iron Curtain countries,in Pakistan,India,N.Korea,China,Iran,and here and there in Africa. They all maintain biopreparat facilities.

Iraq DID have access to the Ames strain of anthrax during a conference at a Saudi-controlled biolab at Porton Down in Britain in the 90's.The characteristics of the letter anthrax suggest-to some,anyway-the material was made in a spray dryer (Russian method,by the way)with a late 1990's addition called "nanoglass",which was first noticed in Iraq.

The material seems to have been a mix of "properly made" and crudely made. Bill Patrick and Ken Alibek noticed bits of vegetable matter in the samples they saw.

This might be consistent with the use of a spray dryer normally used to make other pharmaceutical products,and/or with manufacture in a "Biopreparat"-style lab (convertible from pharmaceuticals to biowarfare in a matter of hours.)

The "crudeness" might actually have been a refinement of sorts: Pure,properly made aerosol anthrax is almost impossible to stuff into an envelope,because it keeps floating away !

[Peach]

#1. The hijackers moved around a lot. And what do you think the odds are that they happened to rent an apartment from the boss of the first man to die of anthrax in October 2001? Slim to none.

#2. I saw the two doctors (different practices) on the network news in October 2001. They were certain the terrorists they treated had cutaneous anthrax. Since they'd never seen it previously, and treated them before 9/11, no one was thinking about something like anthrax.

And Floridian doctors are well aware of what spider bites look like, believe me. LOL

Maybe you missed this from one of the links. It's from a NYT article:

The possibility of a connection between the Sept. 11 attacks and the subsequent anthrax-laced letters has been explored by officials since the first anthrax cases emerged in October. But a recent memorandum, prepared by experts at the Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense Strategies, and circulated among top government officials, has renewed a debate about the evidence.

The group, which interviewed Dr. Tsonas, concluded that the diagnosis of cutaneous anthrax, which causes skin lesions, was "the most probable and coherent interpretation of the data available." The memorandum added, "Such a conclusion of course raises the possibility that the hijackers were handling anthrax and were the perpetrators of the anthrax letter attacks."

[Shermy]

Draining ponds and chasing nutty employee disputes.

La di da.

[WL-law]

I've found your discussion riveting: I, like Peach, have strongly believed all along that the 9/11 hijackers were responsible, in conspiracy with unidentified others likely based in New Jersey, for the anthrax attacks.

On the other hand, genefromnewjersey has provided some new facts to consider, although I tend to summarize gene's position as follows: gene is simply not willing to draw a conclusion based on the available evidence, including what seems to be additional non-public evidence that might be available to gene.

I think the circumstantial evidence chain is compelling, and logical, that points to the 9/11 hijackers. I think the initial resistance to drawing that conclusion drew together some strange bedfellows:
the MSM and the lefty peace-niks like Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, and the FBI and the Bush administration.

The resistance of the lib MSM and the left is predictable, in that they are not engaged in any honest search for truth.

The resistance of the FBI and the Bush administration can only be explained, in my mind, by the fact that since we consider anthrax to be a WMD, to admit that it WAS deployed against us by another country would REQUIRE the Bush administration to deploy its threatened response -- and to NOT deploy would be a show of weakness, inviting further attacks. So the better path is to pretend to be confused as to the origin of the attack, taking the question of responding/not responding off the table.

By the way, I was always struck by one bit of evidence, not the strongest or most compelling, but strangely fascinating to me:
one of the anthrax letters stated "We have this anthrax." A statement found on a voice recorder from one of the 9/11 planes had the hijacker stating over the intercom, "We have these planes." Strikingly similar speaker with the identical lack of fluency and choice of syntax. I think it's the same person speaking in both messages.

[WL-law]

ping

[Peach]

Why did 9/11 hijackers want cropdusters if not to spread anthrax or other form of chemical? One of dozens of articles:

A suspected ringleader in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on America repeatedly visited a crop dusting airfield in Florida, asking lots of questions on topics including how many chemicals a crop dusting plane could hold, according to a witness.

Federal authorities fear the suspect's presence at the airfield is another indication the terrorists may have planned, or still may plan, to use crop dusters to launch a chemical or biological attack.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/531023/posts

We don't know that the Ames strain of anthrax was used in 10/01 and this article did the best job of any I've seen describing what various aspects of the anthrax investigation actually means.

Also, top Iraqi scientists Nassir Hindawi and Abdul Rahman Thamer first tried to acquire a sample of the Ames strain from Porton Down in 1988. They were turned down, but over the next two years they did manage to purchase an enormous quantity of anthrax-ready biological growth medium from a British commercial supplier. And nine other strains of anthracis from the Institut Pasteur and an American company now located in Manassas, Virginia. And at least two variants of the intensely pathogenic Vollum strain from...who knows where, and in addition to who knows what else.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/669487/posts

In 1998, Iraq reported to the United Nations that it had conducted an artillery test of a live biological agent that used silica as a dispersant. And U.N. and U.S. intelligence documents reviewed by The Post show that Iraq had bought all the essential equipment and ingredients needed to weaponize anthrax bacteria with silica to a grade consistent with the Daschle and Leahy letters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A28334-2002Oct27&notFound=true

9/11 hijackers met with Iraqi intelligence officers. This is on link but even the 911 Commission and Senate Intelligence Committee Reports make mention of the fact that Iraqi intel met with AQ leadership numerous times between the early 1990's and 2003.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/waronterrorism/story/0,1373,591514,00.html

Also, I have trouble with assuming that because the FBI did not find anthrax in a car used by the terrorists, that we can safely assume the terrorists didn't commit the anthrax attacks. There is no way we can be assured that the FBI found all the cars that the hijackers used or rented.

Also, Gene, although many countries have weaponized anthrax, you'll notice in some of the links I've provided that scientists say that there is only one place they can think of that has the knowledge to provide anthrax that disperses when opening an envelope. Iraq.

[Peach]

Also, I meant to add in my previous link but just found it now, Cheney didn't want to lay the blame of anthrax on a state sponsor because they weren't ready to do anything about it yet (as you suspected WL-law).

This is the link:
http://nwcitizen.com/wic/Quickly/AboutthatAnthrax.html

[genefromjersey]

Peach,there was another factor: When CDC examined the anthrax-which was unlike anything they had previously seen-they were pretty sure it was NOT from Iraq,because Iraq,as far as they knew,was still using the older Russian formulation.

Nonetheless,everyone has brought up good ideas here,which I hope we will be able to continue.

One of the big problems I've noticed is "pre-conceptions".
( We WANT the answer to come out a certain way: Iraq,al-Qaeda,a right-wing/left-wing loner,etc.,so we MIGHT ignore information that points us in a different direction.)

For example, I was startled to learn that the Aum Shinrikyo cult is still very much alive ( I believe it calls itself "Aum Shinrikyo Aleph" these days)and well,and has a presence in NY.

Although the MSM treats it as "ancient history",it is worldwide,with training grounds in Australia,Germany,Taiwan,and Yugoslavia.It has produced anthrax spores,experimented with aerosol release devices,and with radio-controlled planes. Back in its heyday,it sent 40 of its members to Zaire in an effort to obtain Ebola cultures.

I don't think this "doomsday" cult had anything to do with
the 2001 attacks (Idea: Let's call them A-2001),but know we can't rule them out altogether.

Hope we can keep the thread alive-AND-keep it from becoming a crazy quilt that winds up going nowhere.