Posted on 05/22/2002 12:43:18 PM PDT by knak
Why Has the FBI Investigation into the Anthrax Attacks Stalled? The Evidence Points One Way
by George Monbiot
The more a government emphasizes its commitment to defense, the less it seems to care about the survival of its people. Perhaps it is because its attention may be focused on more distant prospects: the establishment and maintenance of empire, for example, or the dynastic succession of its leaders. Whatever the explanation for the neglect of their security may be, the people of America have discovered that casual is the precursor of casualty.
But while we should be asking what George Bush and his cabinet knew and failed to respond to before September 11, we should also be exploring another, related, question: what do they know now and yet still refuse to act upon? Another way of asking the question is this: whatever happened to the anthrax investigation?
After five letters containing anthrax spores had been posted, in the autumn, to addresses in the United States, the Federal Bureau of Investigation promised that it would examine "every bit of information [and] every bit of evidence". But now the investigation appears to have stalled. Microbiologists in the US are beginning to wonder aloud whether the FBI's problem is not that it knows too little, but that it knows too much.
Reducing the number of suspects would not, one might have imagined, have been too much to ask of the biggest domestic detective agency on earth. While some of the anthrax the terrorist sent was spoiled during delivery, one sample appears to have come through intact. The letter received by Senator Tom Daschle contained one trillion anthrax spores per gram: a concentration which only a very few US government scientists, using a secret and strictly controlled technique, know how to achieve. It must, moreover, have been developed in a professional laboratory, containing rare and sophisticated "weaponization" equipment. There is only a tiny number of facilities--all of them in the US--in which it could have been produced.
The anthrax the terrorist sent belongs to the "Ames" strain of the bacterium, which was extracted from an infected cow in Texas in 1981. In December, the Washington Post reported that genetic tests showed that the variety used by the terrorist was a sub-strain cultivated by scientists at the US army's medical research institute for infectious diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. That finding was publicly confirmed two weeks ago, when the test results were published in the journal Science. New Scientist magazine notes that the anthrax the terrorist used appears to have emerged from Fort Detrick only recently, as the researchers found that samples which have been separated from each other for three years acquire "substantial genetic differences".
The Ames strain was distributed by USAMRIID to around 20 other laboratories in the US. Of these, according to research conducted by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, who runs the Federation of American Scientists' biological weapons monitoring program, only four possess the equipment and expertise required for the weaponization of the anthrax sent to Senator Daschle. Three of them are US military laboratories, the fourth is a government contractor. While security in all these places has been lax, the terrorist could not have stolen all the anthrax (around 10 grams) which found its way into the postal system. He must have used the equipment to manufacture it.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has produced a profile of the likely perpetrator. He is an American working within the US biodefense industry, with a doctoral degree in the relevant branch of microbiology. He is skilled and experienced at handling the weapon without contaminating his surroundings. He has full security clearance and access to classified information. He is among the tiny number of Americans who had received anthrax vaccinations before September 2001. Only a handful of people fit this description. Rosenberg has told the internet magazine Salon.com that three senior scientists have identified the same man--a former USAMRIID scientist--as the likely suspect. She, and they, have told the FBI, but it seems that all the bureau has done in response is to denounce her.
Instead, it has launched the 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.
In January, three months after the first anthrax attack and at least a month after it knew that the sub-strain used by the attacker came from Fort Detrick, the FBI announced a reward of $2.5m for information leading to his capture. It circulated 500,000 fliers, and sent letters to all 40,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology, asking them whether they knew someone who might have done it.
Yet, while it trawled the empty waters, the bureau failed to cast its hook into the only ponds in which the perpetrator could have been lurking. In February, the Wall Street Journal revealed that the FBI had yet to subpoena the personnel records of the labs which had been working with the Ames strain. Four months after the investigation began, in other words, it had not bothered to find out who had been working in the places from which the anthrax must have come. It was not until March, after Barbara Hatch Rosenberg had released her findings, that the bureau started asking laboratories for samples of their anthrax and the records relating to them.
To date, it appears to have analyzed only those specimens which already happened to be in the hands of its researchers or which had been offered, without compulsion, by laboratories. A fortnight ago, the New York Times reported that "government experts investigating the anthrax strikes are still at sea". The FBI claimed that the problem "is a lack of advisers skilled in the subtleties of germ weapons".
Last week, I phoned the FBI. 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.
Had he stayed on the line, I would have asked him about a few other offenses the FBI might wish to consider. 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 programs which the US government has secretly funded. Several prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigor 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.
George Monbiot is a columnist for the Guardian. Visit his website at: http://www.monbiot.com
Cool! This means next up is one of the foxy Bush twins, not Chelesa.
He has written some of the most vile and obscene post-Sept. 11 "commentary" on the U.S., Bush and the war on terror. Through his eyes, the sand goblins are simply making a predictable and forgivable attempt to pay back the West for globalism, ignoring Kyoto, building Golden Arches everywhere, starving Iraqi babies, etc., etc.
Any confirmation of the very dubious assertion that it really was a renegade scientist who mailed out the anthrax would be Monbiot's fondest wet dream.
This is just more of the shmuck's wishful thinking.
Most of the article is just a rehash of old claims. One statement is curious, however:
While some of the anthrax the terrorist sent was spoiled during delivery, one sample appears to have come through intact. The letter received by Senator Tom Daschle....
I know that one of the envelopes appears to have gotten wet, but is there really any documentation for the claim that any of the anthrax was "spoiled" during delivery? (The Leahy sample wasn't, and people were infected at AMI, NBC, CBS, ABC, and the New York Post, so the anthrax sent to those places couldn't have been very spoiled.) So does this claim mean anything at all, or is it nothing but more smoke (like the rest of the article)?
Interesting that a reporter from the Guardian would omit this particular morsel.
I was interested last night to see a brief interview
with a government health official
(I forgot her name,
but she's on TV all the time)
who was asked point-blank
whether the anthrax came from the USA.
She said yes,
but very hesitantly,
and immediately qualified her statement
saying there were many labs in the world
that could have produced it.
Do I detect a change of tone in official statements?
There are two explanations for this "oversight", not just one.
One being the FBI already knows the anthrax came from those places. Or, two, they already know it came from somewhere else.
Monbiot and Rosenberg prefer the one conspiracy theory, which has no credible evidence supporting it, as opposed to the other, which is supported by a substantial body of circumstantial evidence.
"While some of the anthrax the terrorist sent was spoiled during delivery, one sample appears to have come through intact."
"Spoiled", in this case, may be nothing more than a anomalous predicate adjective. The writer heard (or thought he heard) that some of the samples were spoiled (perhaps by water, as you described) and believed it was a fact that somehow belonged in the article...somewhere. The complementary need for complete clauses and the need to convey as much information as possible within the constraints of space sometimes results in "weddings of convenience", arrived at almost sub-consciously. And which make enough sense, at least superficially, to survive the editing process.
I'm a writer, thus familiar with the phenomenon. And this particular case has the look of it. Accordingly, I wouldn't attach much weight to it.
I agree. I just thought I'd mention it.
Remember, that's not the whole question, or even the most important question. The airplanes that crashed into buildings on 9/11 came from the U.S. The boxcutters were presumably purchased in the U.S. That's of some interest, but it's not really the main point, of course.
Even if the anthrax can be traced to a U.S. lab, all that means is that there's a mole in the lab, or there's a traitor in the lab who sold out for money, or there's extraordinarily lax security in some fashion. While that's of interest, once again it's not the main point. The real question is who obtained the anthrax (after the putative theft) and then mailed it. The fact that the anthrax may be American (even if this is true) is not much more important than the fact that the airplanes and boxcutters were American.
With that said, I'll agree that the possible infiltration of U.S. bioweapons labs by foreign agents would be of great concern. But that's different from saying that some U.S. scientist did it just because he was a nut.
We have the Trenton postmarks. The envelopes we have were mailed in a U.S. post office. In that sense, they came from the USA. [But that's clearly not what people really mean when they ask this question.]
These letters would be tossed in the reject bin of the first BCS they went through. The clerks would throw them back to 010 in the Hamilton facility for cull/face/cancel.
Alternatively, they were all entered in the mail at Boca Raton, where there was, in fact, a discovery of anthrax contamination at the main office mail drop (inside the lobby). The Washington Post published a building layout showing the sites of contamination.
Most of the pieces then got "lost in the mail", a common happenstance for single-piece rate First-Class letter mail! These pieces were transported to Philadelphia BMC in otherwise empty equipment, and then to a mailer in the Trenton area. As the mailer worked down the trays, the letters were discovered and dropped into trays sent there for distribution. That's where they ended up in a BCS reject bin, and from there went to 010 for cull/face/cancel.
Several weeks ago a letter carrier at Staten Island post office was arrested for providing aid to convicted terrorists, and for serving as a major hub of communication for AlQeada.
The FBI sidetracked itself into digging up thousands of mailboxes in New Jersey. They seem to have also done some searches of some Middle-Easterners' homes in the area.
Boca Raton was abandoned by them long ago. I think that decision was made at the time the Fibbies thought the anthrax strains were biologically distinct. To compensate they dug up even more mailboxes, and in their mad dash to find the Right Wing Middleaged Male Rogue Scientist, they unaccountably had half the Pakistani origin physicians on the East Coast in a front leaning rest!
The Fibbies are simply not capable of building my confidence in their abilities.
Yet why is it that the "lone scientist" theory still seems to be the preferred story of the US authorities. They have always totally discounted foreign links, or that it is part of Sept 11 terrorism. Is this a strategy, while they continue their investigation? Or do they just not know what is going on?
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