Some Fort Detrick Labs Closed

WJZ ^ | Jul 20, 2004 10:25 am

[maquiladora]

/table>

Some Fort Detrick Labs Closed 10:25 AM

Jul 20, 2004 10:25 am US/Eastern
Frederick, MD (WJZ)

Federal agents are combing a number of laboratory suites at Fort Detrick in Frederick for evidence of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Fort Detrick spokesman Charles Dasey says the labs have been closed since Friday at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, home to the Army's biological warfare defense program.

A law enforcement source tells The Associated Press that the activity is related to the anthrax mailings that killed five people and sickened 17 in October of 2001.

FBI agents have frequently visited Fort Detrick since the
unsolved attacks amid speculation that the deadly spores or the person who sent them may have come from Fort Detrick.

(© 2004 CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report. )

[fightu4it]

ping

[Khan Noonian Singh]

<< The 1993 WTC bombing was on the second anniversary of the Gulf War ceasefire >>

That must have been intentional.

26 February 1991 - US victory in the Gulf War

26 February 1993 - first WTC bombing

26 February ... - ?????

Is there more, may you ask? Yes, one more thing, a second funny 26 February coincidence. But first.....

Bring into mind the earlier monogrammatic coincidence of TGS the Younger and TGS the Elder:

TGS the Younger is banned freeper The Great Satan, who frequently called himself TGS. He posted mostly about his elaborate theory, namely: Iraq was responsible for 09-11, and also for the anthrax letters, which were intended to deter the US from retaliating for 09-11; and Steven Hatfill is a willing participant in an exquisite charade to keep the truth about this from ever seeing day-light.

TGS the Elder was a CIA covert ops specialist of the same initials, Theodore G. Shackley, who started a business called TGS International, and who we know was aware of his initials being the same as those of the Iranian epithet for the US, << The Great Satan >>. Before he died, he made some cryptic remarques on the anthrax letters in a book, as previously discussed in post 43.

I never had the pleasure of a discussion with TGS the Younger before he was banned. A look at back threads tells me that he found himself in trouble for using multiple screen names. People say that the most prominent screen name he used before TGS was << Clinton's a rapist >>. The FR Admin Moderator confirms that they used the same IP address: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/925051/posts/posts?page=121#121
BTW, I've pinged several freepers to this post who were on that strange thread.

..... Now we arrive at the second funny coincidence.

26 February 1999 - << Clinton's a rapist >> signed up at FR. http://web.archive.org/web/20030414083553/http://www.freerepublic.com/~clintonsarapist/.

This was in 1999, yrs before CAR/TGS went all out blaming Iraq for 09-11, the anthrax, et cetera.

What could this mean, I wonder?

[piasa]

The presence of microbiologists on the fringes of the plot. Yazid Sufaat in Malaysia, Abdul Qadoos in Pakistan.

* Yazid Sufaat, a US-trained chemist alleged to have hosted at least one al-Qaeda activist associated with the September 11 attacks during a visit to Kuala Lumpur, was ordered by Hambali to procure four tonnes of ammonium nitrate. He allegedly made the order through his company, Green Laboratory Medicine, and arranged for it to be stored at Muar, a quaint port town on Malaysia's west coast, according to Malaysian officials.
However, Mr Yazid's lawyer, Saiful Izham Ramli denies the Singaporean allegations. "My client has nothing to do with al-Qaeda or any militant group. He was not involved at any level whatsoever in the September 11 attacks or any militant activities," he said. -- "Plot to blow up four embassies revealed on Afghan video: SINGAPORE BOMB CONSPIRACY ," a href="http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/632931/posts

* Yazid Sufaat : According to other reports generated during U.S. interrogations of "Hambali," an Indonesian terrorist leader captured in Thailand last summer [2003], a Malaysian named Yazid Sufaat, who helped organize and host the Kuala Lumpur terror "summit," traveled to Afghanistan in June 2001 for a one-month training course.
Hambali claimed that, after training, Sufaat worked with him "supporting" a Qaeda "anthrax program" in the Afghan city of Kandahar. After 9/11, Hambali says, he again met Sufaat and had discussions about "continuing the anthrax program in Indonesia."-- "Interrogation: Al Qaeda and Anthrax," by Mark Hosenball, Newsweek, 4/8/2004

[apokatastasis]

And for a while, "The Great Satan" was listed as having joined Free Republic on the impossible date of December 15, 1990 - just before the Gulf War. (Discussion here.)

I try to give every possibility due consideration, and so I did ponder whether (for example) TGS himself might be from a three-letter agency, but it was fundamentally an arbitrary conjecture, that could be made of any participant in these discussions. Since he was banned and moved out into the world of blogs, I've had some lengthy discussions with him, and have no reason to think him anything more than a guy with a theory. In fact, the real question is whether he's on a snark hunt with his Hatfill theory; whether the harassment he gets just comes from people he's pissed off, or from somewhere deeper; etc. I agree with him on certain basics (position 2 in my earlier list of possibilities), but we certainly have our differences.

[apokatastasis]

I said: To make the case for position 2, one has to show how the (hypothesized) truth about "Iraq, 9/11, and Anthrax" could have been kept out of all those reports.

I agree with TrebleRebel that conspiracy theory has its limits. What I want to do is to see whether position 2 necessarily falls outside the bounds of plausibility. If it does, then I will have to revert to position 1, or some other theory entirely.

First, let's ask ourselves how many people would have to be in on the plot, if 9/11 and the anthrax letters were a joint effort between Iraq and al Qaeda. On the Iraqi side, there would be anthrax technicians, their handlers in intelligence, and their political bosses. On al Qaeda's side, there would be the 9/11 team, leaders like bin Laden, and their intermediaries with Iraq. Just as a concrete scenario, let's suppose that an Iraqi intelligence officer and a biotechnician went to Kandahar with Ames-strain anthrax, showed Yazid Sufaat and the future mailer how to culture and prepare it, and then went home; and then a few kilos of the stuff was transported to the USA by someone on the 9/11 team, who gave it to the mailer.

Not that many people are required! The Iraqi government and the al Qaeda network are (were) both large organizations, but it might require only half a dozen people on either side to put this together. Word would spread, and after the attacks their colleagues might suspect, but they wouldn't necessarily know.

On the American side, suspicions that the anthrax came from Iraq were there from the beginning, but they were just suspicions. The first chance to get hold of actual evidence would have come after the fall of the Taliban. So far as I know, the only public evidence of biological or even chemical weapons development in Afghanistan is the tape of a dog being gassed, found I think by Keith Idema. Supposedly there was a CBW training camp in Herat in 2000, run by Zarqawi, and (as piasa posted above) supposedly Yazid Sufaat ran an anthrax program in Kandahar, but so far this is just hearsay - I don't think either of these claims features in any official, on-the-record statement.

It seems that al Qaeda's leadership dispersed into Iran and Pakistan, and that they did destroy some of their records before leaving. So, continuing our scenario, the evidence left in Afghanistan might have been grabbed up by Special Forces and shipped back to the USA for forensic analysis by CIA WMD specialists, only to be found circumstantial and equivocal. However, the picture would have to change as al Qaeda's operatives were chased down around the globe, and especially once Iraq was occupied and the Ace of Spades tracked down.

Let's ask who, among the US forces that entered Iraq, would be in charge of looking for evidence of an Iraqi connection to 9/11 and the anthrax letters. The immediate job was to defeat the Iraqi army and occupy the country. Locating and neutralizing battlefield WMDs was certainly part of the planning, but that's not what this scenario is about. As we all know, the regime just melted away - they went underground in order to organize a guerrilla war. There was a Baathist directive to destroy records in the event that the invasion was successful - I imagine that this was part of the looting and general destruction which followed April 9th. Once the country was occupied, the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction took over the civil government, and the intelligence people could start trying to figure out what had happened to Saddam. That is the first point at which the search for evidence of a link to 9/11 could begin. One would look for a paper trail, for physical evidence of anthrax labs or training camps, for scientists and intelligence officers who played a part or who heard about the scheme, and ultimately one would start to capture the former Iraqi leadership, interrogate them, and combine that with the intelligence coming from the global war against al Qaeda. That's the context in which to judge the plausibility of position 2 (or even of position 1). I hope to get a handle on this in a future post...

[apokatastasis]

What is Peter Bergen's position on the anthrax mailings?

I'm not sure. In some early (post-9/11) interviews, he is agnostic as to whether they came from al Qaeda. But in "Armchair Provocateur", he apparently defers to the FBI's opinion, as reported by Marilyn Thompson, who says they have "essentially dismissed" that scenario.

[maestro]

UR# 108

I wonder if there might have been two different strains both of which were, coincidentally, dubbed "Ames"? There doesn't seem to have been any standardization in the naming process, nor any central clearinghouse of names.

IMO.............Correct conclusion.....

:-(

[apokatastasis]

Or, to put it another way:

US fights war with Iraq. Troops are supposed to leave Saudi Arabia once Saddam Hussein is defanged, but they stay on while UN weapons inspectors and Iraqi intelligence have an endless fencing match over a hidden WMD program. Concurrently, an unprecedentedly ambitious form of terrorism begins to strike at the USA. An undeniable attack in 1998 leads to a pro-forma response against the terrorists, and then the adoption of regime change as official policy towards Iraq for the first time. The WMD inspectors are withdrawn entirely. There are rumors of WMD cooperation between Iraq and the terrorists. A new president comes to office, who intends to make regime change in Iraq the centerpiece of his Middle East policy. The terrorists plot their biggest attack ever, they pull it off, and a WMD shows up in the aftermath. Immediately there is a small war in Afghanistan against the terrorists, followed by 18 months of material and rhetorical preparation for war against Iraq. The chief terrorist (KSM) is captured, and then the war goes ahead.

All that is missing, to round out this picture, is vindication of the war in Iraq, in the form of proof that Iraq was behind the terrorism and the WMD threat. Apparently it's been so long that most people have given up on that idea. But, as my previous post indicated, it was never going to be easy to prove; and since no-one in either administration ever publicly blamed Iraq for al Qaeda terrorism, there must be a strong temptation to leave the past alone, especially now that Saddam himself is safely in captivity, and focus on postwar crisis management...

[apokatastasis]

I have no real idea yet. But I'd want to distinguish between secrets in the hands of an informal or extralegal group like the Iran-contra conspirators, and official state secrets. Unofficial secrets are guarded only by the wiles of those who keep them, whereas official secrets in theory are kept that way by all the resources of the state. Also, there are degrees of secrecy - known unknowns and unknown unknowns, basically! An example of a "known unknown" would be nuclear targeting plans or anthrax weaponization recipes. We know they exist, we know they're on file somewhere, but we just don't know the details. An example of an "unknown unknown" might be the secret truth about the Kennedy assassination - the CIA might have a secret file containing proof that Oswald did not alone, or it might not. I suppose that some of the higher degrees of secrecy are all about keeping something in the "unknown unknown" category.

So let's distinguish two forms of position 2 in my list, 2A and 2B. According to 2A, the proof of the Iraqi connection remains outside official channels entirely, in the hands of a cabal. According to 2B, it is already in the keeping of the official guardians of secrecy, whoever they are; filed away as something above top secret.

[maestro]

#5. It wasn't the work of AlQaeda, or Iraq and the Bush administration never thought it was.

It wasn't the 'work' of.................or...............

?

....the work as in $$$$$$$$, planning,.....actual mailings....?

IMO.......the terrorist 'networks' are 'bonded' in their mutual worldviews and intelligence operations by their very 'histories'.

IMO...........therefore they all were/are involved whether they individually/operationally really 'knew' it or not.

(birds of a feather rage together)

[Khan Noonian Singh]

<< I did ponder whether (for example) TGS [the younger] himself might be from a three-letter agency >>

You don't have to ponder this if you're willing to believe his own words. He himself claimed to have a very close association with covert operatives, to the point of being at least a confidante with all that implies, as you can see in this quote from http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/834651/posts?page=128#128:

<<
A late friend of mine participated in the 1963 US-backed coup which culminated in the assassination of Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Only twelve men knew about that mission, including the participants. All twelve died without the US role in the coup becoming public knowledge....

posted on 02/03/2003 9:13:51 PM EST by The Great Satan (Revenge, Terror and Extortion: A Guide for the Perplexed)
>>

[Mitchell]

:-(

If there are two different strains that were coincidentally named Ames, that really would complicate things, as if the story weren't hard enough to unravel already.

[Mitchell]

1. The anthrax letters were a collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda, but the USA still can't prove it.

2. The anthrax letters were a collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda, and the proof exists, but they're not sharing it with us yet (not now, and maybe not ever).

3. The anthrax letters were the work of al Qaeda. Iraq was not involved, but the Bush administration thought they were, and that's why they fought the war in Iraq.

4. The anthrax letters were not even the work of al Qaeda, let alone Iraq. But the Bush administration thought it was the work of Iraq, etc.

Your option 2 doesn't appear to me to be a tenable position. Even if only a few people in the U.S. knew it, there would also be Iraqis and al-Qaeda terrorists who would know it. Leaks could come from anywhere. There would also be the scientists (Iraqi?) who would have carried out the weaponization; even if they didn't have direct evidence about the letters, they would know about the weaponization program.

It's not just the sheer number of people who would have to keep quiet, it's the variety of loyalties they'd have. Somebody would have revealed something.

Options 1 and 3 are almost as unlikely. All that's left is 4 or (from a different post) 5.

Considering that the Bush administration doesn't have a stated position on the source of the anthrax, it probably doesn't isn't meaningful to ask where the administration thought it was from, as if the people in the Bush administration had to have a uniform opinion. I presume that some people in the administration thought Iraq the likely culprit, some thought al-Qaeda, and some thought neither.

[Mitchell]

Keep in mind that, unless all the perpetrators are dead, somebody (and almost certainly a group of people) is, in fact, keeping a secret. (This is true no matter who sent the anthrax.)

So your distinction between a cabal and an official group of some government could apply to any of the possibilities 1-5. And, of course, there isn't really a sharp line between the informal cabal and the official government organization, at least if many members of the cabal are government officials. Iran-Contra is a good example of this.

[Mitchell]

Note that your repost on Ngo Dinh Diem comes from a much earlier discussion of the same topic, namely: "How many people can keep a secret?"

[apokatastasis]

A late friend of mine participated in the 1963 US-backed coup which culminated in the assassination of Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem.

I did ask him about that. I gather that this was a workplace rumor rather than something he was directly told. (You know, he has an email address at his blog. You could always ask him about this stuff yourself!)

[maestro]

If there are two different strains that were coincidentally named Ames, that really would complicate things, as if the story weren't hard enough to unravel already.

Yep.

Two different strains and .......two different sources......from two different site times......for two different purposes...

IMO.......there are 'many' different 'Ames' strains.....only two are presently causing 'fog'....

IMO.......these two current strains are/were from two different sub-sites ('projects').....

Only 'WHO' knows all the answers?

/sarcasm

[apokatastasis]

Options 1 and 3 are almost as unlikely. All that's left is 4 or (from a different post) 5.

So you rule out al Qaeda entirely?

Lately, the idea that the anthrax mailer was an opportunist acting in the wake of 9/11 seems exceptionally unlikely to me. The motives and the circumstances don't add up. What motives, after all, have been suggested? The main suggestions I've seen are: (i) it was a warning about the bioterror threat, by someone who had no foreknowledge of 9/11; (ii) it was an attempt to frame Iraq, by someone who knew 9/11 was coming. (Partisans of 'none of the above' are herewith invited to post their ideas about motive.)

For (i), we have to imagine someone sitting on a stash of weaponized anthrax, so worried about the bioterror threat that they're thinking of faking an incident. Then boom, out of the blue 9/11 happens; and a week later, they think, "Gee, I'd better mail out those letters, just in case we get complacent about terrorism!"

Suggestion (ii) - who would want to frame Iraq? People mention Iran, Israel, and the Bush administration. But if Iran was behind the anthrax, it makes much more sense to suppose that they were behind 9/11 as well, which would make this a position-3 theory. (I'll come back to this possibility...) As for the other two, well, I'll debate those possibilities if anyone cares to defend them, but in brief I think it would be a strategically illogical way to proceed, and also supposes powerful yet sociopathic cabals of a sort that I think simply doesn't exist in those societies.

I have more time for the idea that it was al Qaeda acting alone, or that someone other than Iraq was the state sponsor. The former option apparently requires that the potency of the anthrax has been overstated, a path I won't explore here. In the latter case, let's specifically consider Iran for a moment. You might suppose that Iran has been working through al Qaeda all these years, trying to make it look like Iraq by carrying out attacks on days of Iraqi significance. The aim might be to get the USA to support a Shiite uprising, which Iran could later control; but Bush outwitted Tehran by invading Iraq with a massive American force, rather than attempting regime change on the cheap, as was advocated by the Iraq hawks circa 1999.

Where this theory initially founders, in my opinion, is on the Kuwaiti connection. Abdul Basit Karim (aka Ramzi Yousef) grew up in Kuwait, was there when Iraq invaded, was described as a collaborator by the Kuwaiti interior minister, and his itinerary beyond Kuwait was added to his file by Iraqi intelligence during the occupation, suggesting a cooperative relationship. He does not seem a very likely candidate for a plot meant to injure Iraq.

There are some other "what ifs" that I haven't mentioned, e.g. what if al Qaeda got the anthrax from North Korea, what if they got it from freelance Biopreparat scientists, etc. I guess we'll get around to those in due course!

I presume that some people in the administration thought Iraq the likely culprit, some thought al-Qaeda, and some thought neither.

In Woodward's NSC scene, they consider Iraq and Russia. I've also been told that Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia are the three candidates for state sponsor of al Qaeda which are seriously considered in Washington.

[maestro]

There are some other "what ifs" that I haven't mentioned, e.g. what if al Qaeda got the anthrax from North Korea, what if they got it from freelance Biopreparat scientists, etc. I guess we'll get around to those in due course!

'What ifs'.......got........North Korea,China,Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pac brothers, India, Egypt, Cuba, Canada,.....more...

:-(