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The anthrax killings: A troubled mind
LA Times ^ | 29 May 2011 | David Willman

Posted on 05/28/2011 10:49:31 PM PDT by smokingfrog

He roamed the University of Cincinnati campus with a loaded gun. When his rage overflowed, the brainy microbiology major would open fire inside empty buildings, visualizing a wall clock or other object as a person who had done him wrong.

By the mid-1970s, Bruce Ivins had earned his doctorate and was a promising researcher at the University of North Carolina. By outward appearances, he was a charming eccentric, odd but disarming. Inside, he still smoldered with resentment, and he saw a new outlet for it.

Several years earlier, a Cincinnati student had turned him down for a date. He had projected his anger onto the young woman's sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma. There was a Kappa house in Chapel Hill, N.C., and Ivins cased the building. One night when it was empty, he slipped in through a bathroom window and roamed the darkened floors with a penlight.

Upstairs, he found something that fascinated him: a glass-enclosed sheaf of documents, called a cipher, necessary for decoding the sorority's secrets. The cipher would help him wage a personal war against Kappa Kappa Gamma into the sixth decade of his life.

This was the side of himself that Ivins kept carefully hidden. He devised sneaky ways to strike anonymously at people or institutions he imagined had offended him. He harbored murderous fantasies about women who did not reciprocate his overtures. He bought bomb-making ingredients and kept firearms, ammunition and body armor in his basement.

Yet Ivins managed to work his way into the heart of the American biodefense establishment, becoming a respected Army scientist and an authority on the laboratory use of anthrax. When a series of anonymous, anthrax-laced letters killed five people, disrupted mail delivery and briefly paralyzed parts of the federal government in fall 2001, the FBI sought him out for advice.

(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...


TOPICS: Anthrax Scare; Crime/Corruption; Government; US: Maryland; US: North Carolina; US: Ohio
KEYWORDS: 2001; 201105; alialtamimi; aliatimimi; alitimimi; alqaeda; altamimi; altimimi; amerithrax; anthrax; anthraxscare; bcw; biodefense; bodyarmor; bruceivins; buckeyejihad; chapelhill; cincinnati; cincinnaticell; cipher; davewillman; davidwillman; drugcompanies; hatfill; iraqi; ivins; kappakappagamma; kkg; latimes; microbiologist; nccell; paintballcell; pharmceuticals; sorority; suicide; timimi; unc; uofcincinnati; uofnorthcarolina; vaccine; vajihad; willman; wmd
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I'm not sure why someone would be resurrecting this old story now. I guess maybe they want to convince us that we should be more afraid of our neighbors than some al-Qaida terrorists?
1 posted on 05/28/2011 10:49:35 PM PDT by smokingfrog
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To: smokingfrog
I guess maybe they want to convince us that we should be more afraid of our neighbors white people than some al-Qaida terrorists? Fixed it for ya.
2 posted on 05/28/2011 10:59:24 PM PDT by sthguard (The DNC theme song: "All You Need is Guv")
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To: smokingfrog

Perhaps to point up that the Hatfill snafu took place under Bush’s watch, as a swipe at the GOP?


3 posted on 05/28/2011 11:02:51 PM PDT by HiTech RedNeck (Hawk)
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To: HiTech RedNeck

It is easy to pin a crime on a dead guy. He cannot defend himself.

The question I have is this: how and why did the government ever give him a security clearance?

I had to take a battery of psychological tests in 1980 to get mine. Surely he had to have taken similar, if not the same, array of tests.

If he slipped through, how many others have done so, as well?


4 posted on 05/28/2011 11:11:30 PM PDT by SatinDoll (NO FOREIGN NATIONALS AS OUR PRESIDENT!)
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To: SatinDoll

The psychological quizzes are only as good as the honesty of the responder. A psychopath would simply parrot back the “right” answers, cool as a cucumber.


5 posted on 05/28/2011 11:14:21 PM PDT by HiTech RedNeck (Hawk)
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To: smokingfrog

Bruce Ivins was a nice guy, who would say hello whenever I saw him. Although I don’t think I ever had a conversation with him, whenever I saw him, he would usually be talking with people, and nothing ever struck me as odd about him or the snippets of conversation I overheard.

It’s really high class to be running smear pieces on people, without any real evidence to corroborate the smears. It’s that much more classy to be attacking someone who can no longer defend himself. He still has a wife and children—do the writers of these hit pieces ever think how families must feel to see that kind of stuff written?

Very recently, a panel of scientists reviewed the scientific evidence and found that it did not constitute a smoking gun with which to blame Dr. Ivins for the anthrax attacks. This was published in Science.


6 posted on 05/28/2011 11:30:38 PM PDT by exDemMom (Now that I've finally accepted that I'm living a bad hair life, I'm more at peace with the world.)
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To: SatinDoll
"I had to take a battery of psychological tests in 1980 to get mine. Surely he had to have taken similar.. If he slipped through, how many others have done so, as well?"

Um..

!! JUST KIDDING !!

:)


7 posted on 05/28/2011 11:53:08 PM PDT by I see my hands (Embrace misanthropy)
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To: HiTech RedNeck

You’re giving too much credit to psychopaths, or you’re watching too much TV.

I don’t agree with the government’s pinning the crime on this man. It prevents them from doing the politically incorrect thing and closely examining the Muslims working with him.


8 posted on 05/28/2011 11:58:11 PM PDT by SatinDoll (NO FOREIGN NATIONALS AS OUR PRESIDENT!)
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To: I see my hands

Come out and say it without trying to be cute. The pink doesn’t read well.


9 posted on 05/29/2011 12:00:26 AM PDT by SatinDoll (NO FOREIGN NATIONALS AS OUR PRESIDENT!)
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To: SatinDoll; I see my hands
Come out and say it without trying to be cute. The pink doesn’t read well.

Um..

!! JUST KIDDING !!

:)

Now you see his post, too.

10 posted on 05/29/2011 12:07:31 AM PDT by cynwoody
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To: smokingfrog
There is at least one other interesting dude in this case. Check out the biography of Ali al-Tamimi.

http://www.scientiapress.com/findings/anthraxmailer.htm

11 posted on 05/29/2011 12:22:13 AM PDT by cynwoody
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To: SatinDoll

Good golly, yes. When I got my Secret they interviewed my elementary school teachers! I will never understand the government mind...


12 posted on 05/29/2011 12:30:48 AM PDT by Oculus III
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To: cynwoody

LOLOLOLOL!!!


13 posted on 05/29/2011 12:35:20 AM PDT by SatinDoll (NO FOREIGN NATIONALS AS OUR PRESIDENT!)
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To: cynwoody

Thank you, cynwoody. That is exactly the fellow I had in mind.


14 posted on 05/29/2011 12:36:19 AM PDT by SatinDoll (NO FOREIGN NATIONALS AS OUR PRESIDENT!)
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To: cynwoody

Ali al-Timimi, to my mind, is the true culprit.

Try reading:

http://www.scientiapress.com/findings/anthraxmailer.htm

(The following is an excerpt)

Assuming that al-Timimi indeed stole the anthrax and the instructions, here is what then seems to have happened.

Al-Timimi provided the anthrax to Mohamed Atta. Atta and his group of intending hijackers in Florida unsuccessfully sought to obtain a crop duster, and they evidently handled the anthrax themselves, infecting themselves in the process.

As September 11 neared, Atta contacted Abderraouf Jdey in Montreal. Jdey, a Canadian citizen of Tunisian origin who had trained in Afghanistan, had been designated first as an alternate hijacker, then as a part of the second wave of attacks. He returned to Canada in the summer of 2001 and was detained by FBI and INS together with intending pilot Zacarias Moussaoui. Jdey was carrying biology textbooks. FBI evidently released Jdey.

Atta appears to have handed over the vials of anthrax to Jdey in Portland, Maine on September 10, which powerfully explains Atta’s otherwise anomalous trip to Portland on the day before the September 11 terrorist attacks. Jdey, whose modus operandi involved traveling to sites in the northeastern U.S., wrote and mailed the anthrax letters in September and October. In November he left his apartment in Montreal, drove to New York, boarded American Airlines Flight #587 on November 12, and brought it down with a shoe bomb. His role as shoe bomber was subsequently related to interrogators by al Qaeda detainee Mohammed Mansour Jabarah and leaked in a 2004 Canadian news report.

************

Has anyone heard of this shoe bomber, Abderraouf Jdey? Is this the flight that crashed in Jamaica Bay after takeoff?


15 posted on 05/29/2011 12:47:58 AM PDT by SatinDoll (NO FOREIGN NATIONALS AS OUR PRESIDENT!)
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To: HiTech RedNeck

Ali al-Timimi, to my mind, is the true culprit.

See my post at #15 - it is a corker of a story.


16 posted on 05/29/2011 12:50:10 AM PDT by SatinDoll (NO FOREIGN NATIONALS AS OUR PRESIDENT!)
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To: cynwoody

I’m really sorry; I thought I sent that to the red neck!

And I do appreciate you pointing it out to me.

The story about Ivins didn’t make any sense. No one goes through life exhibiting that kind of behavior without causing alarm. It even sounds like a blurb for a Hollywood movie.


17 posted on 05/29/2011 1:03:30 AM PDT by SatinDoll (NO FOREIGN NATIONALS AS OUR PRESIDENT!)
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To: smokingfrog

Last week there was another article in the news pointing out that few of those working with him thought he was guilty, because his area of expertise didn’t include grinding up the spores and adding silicon to make them weapons grade.

So I guess this is another hit job to insist he was guilty.

He had access to a common form of anthrax, not the super resistant strain, but the common strain used to make vaccines (which is why Saddam Hussein’s scientists also had the strain).

But you can find anthrax all over, but “weaponizing” it means to get it small enough to enter the lung without killing yourself. That takes some expertise.

I myself wonder how he could have gotten hired if he was this crazy...but his crazyness doesn’t seem to make sense here...it would take a bit of time to pull this stunt, which came too soon after 911, and of course there was the anthrax to the National Enquirer and maybe skin anthrax on one of the friends of some terrorists in Florida.


18 posted on 05/29/2011 1:33:31 AM PDT by LadyDoc (liberals only love politically correct poor people)
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To: smokingfrog

lots of interesting comments that agree with you...some point out that his vaccine is now being manufactured and making someone a lot of money.


19 posted on 05/29/2011 1:47:07 AM PDT by LadyDoc (liberals only love politically correct poor people)
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To: SatinDoll; LadyDoc

Ali al-Timimi, to my mind, is the true culprit.
See my post at #15 - it is a corker of a story.
///
i agree

...and LadyDoc in #18 is correct. Irvins may have been nuts, but he wasn’t capable of weaponizing it by himself.
He didn’t have the expertise in that area, and he didn’t have access to the necessary equipment.
and if he was in on it at all (which i personally doubt, for many reasons), he certainly wasn’t alone, and didn’t actually mail any of it.

...and even if i didn’t know anything about it, if the LA Times is pushing it, i’d know it wasn’t true.


20 posted on 05/29/2011 2:09:54 AM PDT by Elendur (the hope and change i need: Sarah / Colonel West in 2012)
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