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If the US government intended to safely lock them away forever, do you think it would keep them in Iraq itself? The Iraqi legal basis for these releases was created while CIA favorite Allawi was interim PM, just a month before the elections which first put the Iranian-backed parties into office. The releases themselves, or at least the news thereof, have come just after another round of elections, in which the religious parties again look to be the winners. Events as reported are consistent with the idea that our two bioscientists will be spending the rest of their lives somewhere in the West, under FBI or MI5 protection.

Well, Porton Down labelled at least one Ames culture as "10-32", which the American researcher Martin Hugh-Jones managed to interpret as "October 1932", the month of Iraq's independence from Britain. In August 1988, there was an "International Workshop on Anthrax" in England, attended by Rihab Taha's supervisor, Nasser Hindawi, after which he started procuring large quantities of biological growth medium from a British company; and that was the month in which Iran agreed to a ceasefire with Iraq. David Kelly appears to have been Porton Down's head of microbiology at the time of the conference, he led UNSCOM's subsequent efforts to expose the existence of an Iraqi biowarfare program, and he ended up "dead in the woods" just after the British media started hounding him for the inside story of the 2003 war. I suspect he knew too much for someone's liking.

Well, our old pal "The Great Satan" says it's because the anthrax threat is still in play, rendering Saddam untouchable even in captivity. I have a dreadful suspicion that Ames-strain anthrax was covertly supplied to Iraq in 1988 by David Kelly at Porton Down, in order to stop Iran. Definitively linking Iraq to the 2001 anthrax must also risk exposing the "egregious deceptions" to which I referred (e.g. TWA800). I see a variety of reasons not to talk about it, but unfortunately they are highly scenario-dependent and information is scarce.

I do actually think that "Islamists" at least determined the timing of 9/11 and the initial anthrax mailing. The conventional story is that Atta chose the date and then phoned Hamburg to keep them in the loop, and I've noted before that 9/11 is the Egyptian Christian new year, while 9/18 (when the first anthrax letter was mailed) was the Jewish new year in 2001. It seems like a variation on the abortive "millennium plot" of January 2000.

Here is how I read this situation. My hypothesis remains: 9/11 was Iraq, the anthrax was Iraq, al Qaeda were just proxies. Even before the 1991 war for Kuwait, the US government planned for an Iraqi terrorist counteroffensive, and that threat did indeed slowly materialize, once Saddam reconsolidated his regime after withdrawing from Kuwait. After the 1993 WTC bombing, Clinton tried to intimidate him back (bombing the Baghdad intelligence HQ in mid-year); after Bojinka was discovered, a Chalabi-led revolt in the north was hastily assembled, then abandoned (see Robert Baer's See No Evil), probably out of fear of Iranian strategic gains, and the CIA tried instead to organize a coup via Allawi, which failed (see, e.g. the Cockburns' Out of the Ashes); and finally, after comprehensive regime change in Iraq became official US policy (late 1998, after the African embassy bombings), Saddam would have activated his Samson Option, the threat of WMD terrorism using anthrax. Bush 43 came to office preparing to overthrow Saddam, probably on the model subsequently employed in Afghanistan (US special forces working with indigenous allies, rather than an occupation by the regular army), but 9/11 happened first, and the anthrax threat was explicitly tabled. Everything that happened afterwards revolved around removing Saddam from power (i) without triggering an anthrax attack (ii) without exposing the increasingly egregious deceptions which accompanied the covert war with Saddam in the 1990s. That second constraint is what's behind the "release" of Taha and Ammash, on my view. Despite the restoration of Iraqi sovereignty, they, like Saddam, have been in the custody of US forces, because they know too much; and they are being shuffled out of Iraq, probably to a closely monitored exile in a US-friendly country, lest the truth should come out in court. Since the full truth is presumably only known to a small circle of people (at the apex of the US government, or intimately involved with the pre-9/11 conflict), the people in Iraq immediately responsible for Taha and Ammash's fate would need to be given other reasons for their release (such as this line about pacifying the Sunni insurgents).

The recent be-headings are the result of an attempt to get our two little scientists (Dr.Germ and Dr. Anthrax) out of jail. Why do they need these people now??? ... What do these two women have that is needed? Knowledge of how to weaponize anthrax.

The Iraqi Justice Ministry has announced that one of them will be released on bail. Debka has its version of events here.

What are the odds that Ammash and Taha are "Alpha" and "Charlie", mentioned by David Kay a year ago?

"Spies close in on Saddam's ailing terror mastermind"
Richard Miniter, Baghdad
The Sunday Times, 16 November 2003

AMERICAN and British intelligence are in secret negotiations to seize Saddam Hussein's right-hand man. General Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, Saddam's former deputy, is believed to be at the pinnacle of a pyramid of terrorists, mercenaries and supporters of the old regime waging war on allied forces in Iraq.

Exclusive interviews with Paul Bremer, who runs the US-led coalition provisional authority, Dr David Kay, head of the Iraqi survey group that is searching for Saddam's weapons, and senior military and intelligence officers in Iraq have revealed that the Americans have stepped up their efforts to seize al-Douri and stem the flow of terrorist attacks.

The hunt for al-Douri, number six on the list of America's 55 most wanted and who is reported to have suffered from leukaemia and heart problems, has intensified as the insurgency has grown in the past two weeks. The number of attacks has grown to 33 a day, compared with 15 daily in September. The Americans believe they have leverage.

"Al-Douri is about to die. His supporters are begging us for treatment," said Colonel Steven Boltz, a senior US army intelligence officer in Baghdad.

The Iraqi general has announced his terms: medical treatment, a full pardon for any crimes against humanity committed in Iraq or Kuwait and a firm promise that he will not be extradited to Kuwait.

The Americans were not willing to arrange a deal that would favour him, but discussions were opened through a Kurdish member of the Iraqi governing council and are now being pursued directly with US and British intelligence officers.

"Al-Douri would be a major get," said Kay. "He would know where the weapons of mass destruction are hidden, where Saddam is."

Asked if the coalition had current credible intelligence that Saddam was still in Iraq, Boltz looked at his commanding officer and then said simply: "Yes."

Following the capture or killing of most of Saddam's senior officials, including his sons, Qusay and Uday, the loss of al-Douri would not only further isolate the ousted dictator but would also remove his key link with the financiers of the attacks on allied forces in Iraq.

Bremer said the mounting attacks on allied forces and Iraqi police were motivated by money, not ideology. More than three-quarters of direct and indirect attacks on allied forces were paid for, he said.

Al-Douri is likely to be using cash from more than $1billion looted by Saddam loyalists from the Iraqi Central Bank. According to an intelligence source, he is believed to be in charge of those funds and therefore of a network of about 2,500 local militants, plus perhaps 1,000 foreign fighters, drawn from the ranks of Al-Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam, an Islamist terror group operating in Kurdish territory.

In the wider hunt, Kay insisted that the search for weapons of mass destruction was going well. "Contrary to what you read in the press, senior detainees are talking," Kay said -and they are providing leads on terrorists, foreign fighters, future attacks and chemical weapons. He revealed that America had built a state-of-the-art base to interrogate prisoners near Baquba, north of Baghdad.

Two top Iraqi scientists, codenamed Charlie and Alpha, are helping the coalition to learn more about Iraq's anthrax programme, Kay said. The Iraqis had made shocking innovations in the milling and drying processes needed to weaponise anthrax. "Almost every week there is a new discovery that boggles your mind," Kay said.

He had recently learnt that Saddam had paid the North Koreans a $10m deposit for long-range missiles that could be adapted to carry chemical or biological weapons. Apparently the missiles were never delivered but North Korea kept the money.

Sabotage by Iraqi intelligence agents during the fall of Baghdad and a shortage of translators with intelligence clearance have slowed the search for Saddam's weapons. The Iraqi survey group has uncovered "more than 9A miles of documents" relating to weapons of mass destruction and most still have not been translated, Kay explained. A lack of translators also hampers some interrogations with Iraqi scientists.

Some of the best weapons sources appear to have been the casualties of war. The head of Saddam's nuclear enrichment programme was accidentally shot dead at a US military checkpoint last spring, Kay said.

Bremer blamed Syria for acting as a conduit for foreign terrorists, mostly Al-Qaeda, to attack allied forces: "We've got rat lines running from Sudan and Yemen through Damascus and across the Syrian border into Iraq. It is pretty hard to imagine that Syrian intelligence doesn't know this is going on."

Closing the Iraq-Syria border is proving difficult, even though America has deployed more troops and unmanned aerial vehicles. "We're sitting down pretty hard on the Syrian border," Bremer said, adding that foreign fighters still slipped across the desert frontier. "We will have open borders for a long time. It is just a fact."

Bremer said that his personal goal was to transfer authority to an elected sovereign government by the end of 2004.

Meanwhile, terrorist attacks are expected to continue. US intelligence believes that last month's bombing of the Red Cross headquarters was unintentional and that the actual target was an Iraqi police station some 100 yards down the road.

(C) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2003

Various developments...

People are talking about a forthcoming report from Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, on Iraq's WMD programs. The message appears to be: no stockpiles, most R&D programs frozen, but ready to be reactivated. Of course, I will be waiting to see what the report specifically says about anthrax. Before Saddam was captured, there was this peculiar report in a British paper:

"Two top Iraqi scientists, codenamed Charlie and Alpha, are helping the coalition to learn more about Iraq's anthrax programme, Kay said. The Iraqis had made shocking innovations in the milling and drying processes needed to weaponise anthrax. Almost every week there is a new discovery that boggles your mind, Kay said."

That's David Kay, Duelfer's predecessor. Are we ever going to hear more about these two scientists?

Follow that link and you will see another story about attempts to assassinate or intimidate Iraqi scientists who thought of cooperating with the coalition. And this was all just months after David Kelly was found "dead in the woods" on Iraq's Revolution Day. (According to a British diplomat, Kelly predicted this might happen to him if the war went ahead, and the diplomat "had thought Dr Kelly was talking about possible Iraqi vengeance".)

I've said repeatedly that I think Iraq was al Qaeda's chief sponsor, that this was known or suspected from the beginning, but that it's all supposed to be a big secret. Circumstantial evidence of Iraqi sponsorship can be found in the timing of attacks, in the background of the masterminds, and in the multitude of Iraq/AQ connections that have been reported. The evidence that the US government believed in a connection, under Clinton as well as under Bush, lies in the way that AQ attacks were invariably followed by attacks on Iraq. The evidence that the connection is supposed to be a secret? Those attacks on Iraq were never linked to AQ - usually WMD was the issue. The dodgy way in which some of the alleged Iraq/AQ connections have been rebutted might also count.

There was always the possibility that Duelfer's report would link the 2001 anthrax to Iraq - which would surely link Iraq to everything else, win the election, and discredit the Democrats on national security for a long time. But it looks like that won't happen. So, maybe it's my theorized cover-up in action. Or maybe they just don't have the proof, and never did.

In other news, I've learnt that there's a book out there which does touch on the 9/11-Coptic connection. It's by two "alternative historians", one of whom was born in Egypt. The big idea seems to be that the architecture and layout of many major Western cities contains Hermetic symbolism, due to the centuries-long political influence of Freemasonry. 9/11 turns out to be esoteric warfare, the attack of one secret society on another. My view is that "history as warfare between secret societies" overestimates the historical continuity of conspiratorial politics, and underestimates the significance of everything else. There are conspiratorial cliques in every age, and every civilization has recurring cultural motifs in its history, but I don't believe in secret societies with a stable ideology which last for centuries. Those institutions which do last for centuries undergo major shifts in character and direction.

Despite my misgivings about the book's general worldview, it does contain some useful information about the Egyptian and Jewish calendars, and about 9/11 anniversaries. Notably, it points out that the Wye II memorandum, signed on September 4, 1999 in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, was supposed to come into force a week later, on September 11, which happened to be both the Coptic and the Jewish New Year. (Remember that the date of Rosh Hashanah moves around, and fell on September 18 in 2001, the date on which the first anthrax letters were mailed.)

Wye II is therefore one in a string of events including: the ratification of Sadat's constitution for Egypt on September 11, 1971; the Camp David accords of September 17, 1978; the sectarian discord in Egypt of September 1981, which culminated in Sadat's assassination in October; and the Arafat-Rabin peace accord of September 13, 1993, 15 years after Camp David, negotiated at a time when Sadat's foreign minister, an Egyptian Christian, was UN Secretary-General.

So I find it quite plausible that in the course of the peace process, from the death of Nasser through to the present day, Egyptian Christians have played a major role in building a bridge between Arabs and Israelis, that peace initiatives have been scheduled for September because of the symbolism of the new year, and that the Islamists have interpreted all this as a Judeo-Christian conspiracy against Islam. Since the date of September 11 actually derives from the pagan pharaonic calendar, they could argue with some logic that the peace process is actually satanic paganism triumphant, even if the Coptics now use the date to celebrate the Christian martyrs of Diocletian, rather than the dawn rising of Sirius.

As I said, I don't want to overemphasize the idea of esoteric warfare. Basically, Jews and Egyptian Christians tried to make peace on September 11, and Egyptian Islamists like Atta and Zawahiri chose to make war in response. But I think the basic issues were political (Iraq, Palestine) and exoteric (whose God shall prevail) - it's not occult psychological warfare which only an adept can fathom. But these facts about Wye II and 1999 I think support the theory that 9/11 and the anthrax letters were, from al Qaeda's point-of-view, a symbolic attack on Judeo-Christian civilization, even while they also served the quite earthly strategic goals of al Qaeda's sponsors.

First, let's get the phenomenon of anthrax hoaxes in some perspective. The first "major" anthrax hoax occurred in April 1997, with the "anthrachs" package sent to B'nai B'rith in Washington. Subsequently, "from 1998 to September 2001, more than 400 anthrax hoaxes occurred in the United States". In October and November that year, an anti-abortion group called Army of God sent out "more than 550" (!) anthrax hoax letters, and there were about 200 other such letters worldwide in the same period. So while there may be hoax letters from the real anthrax mailer somewhere in there, there's also just an enormous amount of noise.

Now, onto the Hector Carreon case. Hector is a columnist for the Nation of Aztlan, a group whose nominal goal is the re-creation of Greater Mexico, but half of whose screeds are about Jews and Israel. Obviously Aztlan.net has hostile relations with mainstream Jewish organizations, and may have been targeted by the Jewish Defense League, who do have a history of criminal and terrorist actions. The JDL is also entwined in the larger history of the war on terror. It was founded by Meir Kahane, whose assassination in 1990 is treated by several authors as the first action of the al Qaeda cell behind the 1993 WTC bombing. Two months after 9/11, two JDL members were charged with plotting to blow up a mosque and/or the offices of California Republican Darrell Issa. One of them, Irv Rubin, supposedly committed suicide in December 2002 while awaiting trial, and the other pleaded guilty early in 2003. (I say "supposedly" because he is said to have cut his own throat and then jumped off a balcony, which for me is up there with Abu Nidal's four-bullet "suicide".) Finally, a one-man JDL splinter, the Jewish Defense Organization (JDO), has a minor place in the Hatfill saga, having been the channel through which some of the accusations against Steve Hatfill were disseminated.

If they are willing to blow up a mosque, they are surely willing to send an anthrax hoax letter. However, several things about Hector Carreon's story make me doubtful. By his own account, Carreon got the letter in early July, actually fell sick, but didn't approach police until early October, when he simultaneously wrote a column, "Anthrax Terrorists may be Zionists", which was reproduced as far away as Syria. Why did he wait so long? Why didn't he mention it in his columns? What sort of biological agent looks like white powder and gives you flu symptoms? Carreon appears to be a propagandist who for tactical reasons has allied his cause (the secession of Aztlan from the USA) with the anti-Zionist cause of his best prospective allies (anti-American states from the Islamic world), and perhaps he's just holding up his end of the deal by propagating this story. If anyone takes it seriously, I suggest they contact Detective Rivera of the Whittier Police Department, and ask about the status of the case.

Concerning the Quantico letter (about Ayaad Assaad), the St Petersburg hoax letters (to Troxler and Miller), etc., I previously dismissed them as red herrings - part of the background noise, and not directly relevant to Amerithrax. The content of the letter to Troxler has made me rethink that. However, my interpretation would be along the lines of post #194 - they were sent by an al Qaeda operative like Iyman Faris.

Okay, I think I get it now. "Oklahoma-Ryder Truck! Skyway bridge-18 wheels." It's a threat to blow up an 18-wheel truck on the Skyway bridge in Troxler's hometown of St Petersburg. Not so cryptic then - just another threat.

The letter to Judith Miller reportedly threatened an attack on the Sears Tower. I can't find the text of it anywhere.

This is the best theory about the ricin letters that I've seen: They're from a drug-making ring who sell speed (methamphetamine) to truck drivers, and don't want to lose their market! (The new regulations mandate longer rest periods for drivers.)

How about looking at the 19 hijackers as a model for the anthrax perps. Rather than saying it is Iran or Iraq. And everyone always leaves out Pakistan. There certainly a lot of AQ picked up in Pakistan... It doesn't seem to me to be a specific country, rather a collection of those religious fanatics.

If you read a book like Rohan Gunaratna's Inside al Qaeda, it certainly looks like al Qaeda had contacts in dozens of countries, at many different social levels. So al Qaeda in its full breadth is definitely a complicated organism. What I think is most important is to figure out what was behind the string of attacks on the USA associated with Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who are nominally Pakistanis but who grew up in Kuwait.

On the question of whether Saudi or Pakistani intelligence was complicit in 9/11... the head of Saudi intelligence was fired three weeks before, and the head of Pakistani intelligence was in Washington on the day itself. I think they knew something was coming and failed to stop it. How hard they tried, I couldn't say.

Here's a connection you might like. "The only confessed al Qaeda sleeper caught on U.S. soil", Iyman Faris, is from Kashmir. He worked as a truck driver and plotted to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge by cutting the suspension cables. He was exposed in April 2003, after KSM was captured in Pakistan the previous month. As I just mentioned (post #192), there's a truck-and-bridge theme running through one of the anthrax hoax letters sent just after news broke of the first anthrax case, a letter which arguably displays knowledge of the anthrax properties ("blow... this dust" - the fake powder - "so you can see how the real thing flys").

He was sentenced late in October 2003, just a few days after a ricin scare in South Carolina. The ricin was accompanied by a note expressing "anger over legislation regulating the trucking industry", and signed "Fallen Angel". Another was found in November at a White House mail processing facility.

Just to close the circle - another letter from October 2001, sometimes assumed to be the work of the anthrax mailer, fingered a former USAMRIID scientist, Ayaad Assaad, as a potential bioterrorist. Assaad's specialty is ricin. (And he's a Coptic Christian - and 9/11 was the Coptic New Year, yes, I know no-one wants to follow me in that direction...)

Most of the connections in the circle of associations I just constructed are probably spurious. But maybe one or two of them mean something.

In 1980, St Petersburg's Skyway Bridge was rammed and badly damaged by a freighter. A number of vehicles fell off the bridge, and "of the victims who made the fall there was only one survivor, whose truck had luckily landed on the deck" of the freighter.

Perhaps this is what "Skyway bridge-18 wheels" refers to?

"Oklahoma-Ryder Truck" - I assumed that was about John Doe #2 (and therefore ambiguous, since some people think he was an agent of the state, others a foreign collaborator).

My feeling is that the person who sent this letter thought that 9/11 was an inside job, and the moment that anthrax hit the news (October 4), they assumed it was more of the same. "Blow away this dust so you can see how the real thing flys"... I hate to admit it, but it does sound like a reference to the aerosol properties of the real anthrax, doesn't it? My head hurts!

Here is the Sunday Express article from 9/9/2001. Gordon Thomas is an intelligence journalist of long standing whose stories have a very Debka-like flavor.

ASYLUM SEEKER BOMB ALERT.

SUNDAY EXPRESS INVESTIGATION By Gordon Thomas and Gareth Crickmer.

9 September 2001

The Express on Sunday

(c) Copyright Express Newspapers 2001

SECRET SERVICE chiefs fear Iraqi spies posing as asylum seekers are entering Britain carrying deadly chemical weapons, we can reveal today.

Customs officers, concerned at the growing number of Iraqis they have to deal with, have called for MI5 agents to monitor terror suspects closely.

The threat emerged after an international spy operation found that Saddam Hussein is producing large amounts of anthrax which he is actively trying to market to terrorists.

During an eight-month intelligence mission by MI5 and the CIA, officers tracked the dictator's agents to meetings in the Balkans with members of the Basque group ETA and equally fanatical terror groups in Kosovo and Macedonia.

Further evidence has come from Israel's Mossad secret service, renowned for gathering information on Saddam's regime. The defence experts believe that the Butcher of Baghdad's police are coercing Iraqis fleeing the despotic regime to carry the weapons into the UK under threat of death.

They are being warned that family and friends they leave behind will be targeted unless they do as they are told.

French police say about 500 Iraqis a week are turning up near the Eurotunnel terminal outside Calais trying to cross the Channel.

A high ranking officer last week highlighted the scale of the problem, admitting it was "impossible" to stop all the Iraqis reaching England.

There are also concerns that aid agencies may be encouraging the Iraqis after claims by refugees that they have been offered help.

Surgeon Diary Raoof, 29, an Iraqi Kurd who claims he worked for the Save the Children Fund, told the Sunday Express that British agencies promised him a "warm welcome" in England and put him in touch with experts who could guide him here. Last night a senior intelligence officer said: "Our fear is that some of these asylum seekers are being pressured by Saddam's secret police to act as couriers.

"Biological weapons are very easy to carry. A small bottle of water could contain sufficient anthrax to create havoc." He added: "Short of checking every bottle coming through every air or sea port, there is no real way to intercept." British anti-terror experts have secretly been stationed at Calais to check the danger The Government claims they are there only to stop asylum seekers entering the country illegally.

But the Sunday Express has learned their real mission is to deal with the far greater threat posed by Saddam. Apart from anthrax, Saddam's scientists also produce the lethal nerve agents Soman and Tabun.

Iraq is known to have quantities of these weapons stockpiled deep underground.

Saddam believes the sites are beyond the reach of America's biggest conventional bombs.

Only a nuclear weapon would be certain to destroy the bunkers.

So alarmed is President Bush that he is considering launching a pre-emptive air attack. US Air Force crews in Saudi Arabia have already been given target details of the sites.

A Pentagon source said: "If we cannot penetrate deep enough to actually destroy the biochemicals, we can bury the bunkers with our earthquake bombs." Last week the Pentagon took the unusual step of publicly confirming that eight more Iraqi factories have begun manufacturing bio-chemical weapons.

Israeli sources claim that in a chemical warfare training exercise last month about 20 Iraqi soldiers were killed and more than 200 severely injured.

Last week Saddam scored a propaganda success, shooting down a pilotless US spy plane. It is the first time that the Iraqis have downed an Allied aircraft since the Gulf war in 1991.

Experts say he is now determined to provoke a civil war inside Iraqi Kurdistan to lure in more Allied aircraft.

Attacks on planes patrolling over Iraq have become increasingly aggressive.

Our revelations come just days after the High Court ruled that four Iraqi Kurds detained at Cambridgeshire's Oakington centre were held illegally.

The decision could leave taxpayers with a (pound sign)110 million compensation bill if 11,000 other refugees make similar claims.

I checked a news media archive (factiva.com) for anthrax stories in the months before 9/11, just to put that Judith Miller article in perspective. Here's what I found:

• Reports of minor natural anthrax outbreaks around the world. There's one every few weeks.
• Stories about the Pentagon's anthrax vaccination program.
• Stories about the breakdown in talks at the Biological Weapons Convention.
• Stories about human experiments conducted during Japan's wartime biowarfare research.
• Stories about the bioterror threat, often coupled to criticism of missile defense.
• Stories about Iraq often mentioned Saddam's proclivity for anthrax. No-one seemed in any doubt that he had it.

Now, some more interesting stories:

• Tampa Tribune, 16 July 2001: "Central Florida is developing a reputation for phony anthrax threats, and some of them are sophisticated. A sample recently tested by the lab contained a toxin used against mosquito larvae that has a biological signature similar to anthrax. It could have thrown off less-refined tests." (from an article on an early warning system that operated during the Super Bowl in January)
• The Times, 24 July 2001: "During the trial [of Dr Wouter Basson], which has revealed astonishing details of the lengths to which apartheid South Africa was prepared to go to protect white minority rule, witnesses have disclosed details of secret programmes to manufacture poisoned chocolates and clothes, attempts to lace letters with anthrax [my emphasis], and a scheme to release cholera into the water supply of a refugee camp." And: "He said that his job as head of the secret operation to kill the black enemies of the apartheid state brought him into contact with an 'international chemical and biological warfare mafia' made up of sinister experts from Britain, America, Russia and North Korea." (from "Apartheid era's 'Dr Death' tells of boundless power")
• New Scientist, 1 September 2001, carried a story on how Aum Shinrikyo tried spraying a Tokyo neighborhood with anthrax. "This scenario will be played out in the drama Gas Attack, to be screened on Britain's Channel 4 this month. It shows racial extremists killing Kurdish asylum seekers in Glasgow with lethal anthrax taken from animal carcasses."
• New York Times, 4 September 2001, carries the article by Judith Miller et al, which reveals secret CIA and Pentagon projects involving (i) bombs loaded with anthrax simulants (ii) genetic engineering of new anthrax strains to be tested against existing vaccines. The latter work is said to be motivated by the recent creation in Russia of a new GM (genetically modified) strain of anthrax. The need to keep these projects secret is said to be behind the US refusal to ratify the BW Convention. The article prompts a flurry of punditry and international comment, mostly disapproving. The article is to be followed by a book by Miller and her coauthors, "Germs", slated for release on October 2.
• Aberdeen Press & Journal, 21 August 2001: A hoax anthrax threat was made against St Andrews University, where Prince William was about to start a degree, supposedly in conjunction with threats from the "Scottish National Liberation Army" to kill him.
• Sunday Express (UK), 9 September 2001. This story has to be read to be believed, but here are the highlights: MI5 and Mossad have established that Saddam Hussein is trying to "market" anthrax to terrorists. His agents have met with Basque, Kosovar, and Macedonian groups, among others. Iraqi intelligence may also be compelling asylum seekers (at that time trying to enter the UK from France, through the Channel Tunnel, in large numbers) to carry chemical and biological weapons on their bodies. Iraq has large quantities of WMD stored underground, and President Bush is considering a preemptive strike.
• Guardian (UK), 10 September 2001: During the 1940s and 1950s, the UK carried out a program of offensive biowarfare research, codenamed "Red Admiral", which included the design of anthrax bomblets.

So what does it all mean?

Some of these events are clearly connected. For example, the secret anthrax biodefense program described by Judith Miller turns out to be the reason why the BW Convention failed just the month before. The US failure to ratify the convention might in turn be the reason why the facts got out - some of the diplomats would have demanded answers from their friends in biodefense, and perhaps the truth just trickled out to the journalists shortly thereafter.

The reports from the UK are an intriguing muddle. Was the "Scottish National Liberation Army" one of the groups that the Iraqis supposedly liaised with? Was the idea for this TV drama about anthrax attacks on Kurdish refugees derived from the alleged MI5/Mossad report, after it was run through a politically correct filter like the one which produced the movie version of The Sum of All Fears? Was the Guardian's story an indirect response to the Sunday Express story? Perhaps some defense historian read this balderdash about Iraqi anthrax terrorism, rang up a journalist and said "We were the ones researching this stuff..."

Back to Judith Miller. Allan says:

It should be pointed out that Judith Miller was the recipient of a well-publicized 'hoax' anthrax letter at the time of the attacks.

I would be interested to know whether the Iraqi/Iranian/Pakistani/al-Qaeda advocates on this thread really believe this was a hoax by a third party or if not why did they target Judith Miller?

Was it likely they even knew who she was or cared?

I think it was a third-party hoax. As I understand it, the letter Judith Miller received was one of several sent out from Florida, another of which went to St Petersburg Times journalist Howard Troxler. Here's what it said: "Howard Toxler...1st case of disease now blow away this dust so you can see how the real thing flys. Oklahoma-Ryder Truck! Skyway bridge-18 wheels." Rosenberg says the printing of Troxler's letter resembled that of the real anthrax letters. I will reserve judgement until I see a picture. But certainly the content is very different. The real anthrax letters contain straightforward threats. The letter to Troxler is somewhere between cryptic and schizophrenic. (It might bear comparison to the ricin letter that was sent to Bill Frist last year.)

Judith Miller has multiple connections to our themes of anthrax, Iraq, and radical Islam. Actually, she's written books on all three subjects - Germs (2001), Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (1990, with Laurie Mylroie), and God Has Ninety-Nine Names (1996). Before and during the war, she obtained many exclusives for the New York Times on the topic of Iraqi WMD, which proved to come from Chalabi and which the paper subsequently disowned. You can see a change in the reviews of Germs at Amazon - mostly they're high, then after the Times published its correction, there's a string of one-star reviews, saying that she's been discredited as a journalist. So she's also a key player in the "information war" over the status and origin of pre-war intelligence on Iraq.

I've just re-read this thread, in yet another attempt to approach the anthrax question afresh. I think I made a reasonable case (in posts #129 and #175) that on the basis of the previous decade's events, the most straightforward interpretation of the anthrax letters is that they were the work of Iraq, acting through al Qaeda, and that they were part of 9/11. I say something in posts #139 and #175 about why I doubt the 'domestic terrorist' or 'evil insider' theories.

But now I want to tackle the Iranian question more directly. While the appearance of anthrax is suggestive of Iraq (post #175), as Mitchell points out (post #147), the rhetoric in the letters is characteristic of Iran. "Death to America, death to Israel" - those are Hezbollah slogans.

A week after 9/11, janes.com floated the theory, attributed to Israeli military intelligence, that it was the work of Iraq, acting through Hezbollah's Imad Mughniyeh and al Qaeda's Ayman al-Zawahiri. (The report prompted a response in the Jerusalem Post a few days later - "IDF: Iraq Not Involved in Attacks, Iran Maybe".) Curiously, there is a document out there, purporting to be a memo from Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei to the senior official Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, saying that Iran should expand its secret cooperation with Mughniyeh and Zawahiri, in preparation for attacks on the USA. The document was apparently supplied by Hamid Reza Zakeri, an Iranian defector.

In the letters, then, we have something suggestive of Iraq, and something suggestive of Iran; and we even have two theories which agree that 9/11 was the work of Mughniyeh and Zawahiri, but disagree on whether the state sponsor was Iraq or Iran.

So once again we have several possibilities. It could be Iraq trying to make it look like Iran, or Iran trying to make it look like Iraq. It could be Iraq or Iran acting without the intention to frame the other. It could be both Iran and Iraq. It could be neither Iran nor Iraq.

Luigi Warren pointed out to me that Iraq would appear to have a much stronger motive than Iran. Iraq was engaged in a ten-year hot and cold war with the USA which involved punishing sanctions and regular bombardment. The US campaign against Iran during that period, if such a thing existed at all, was tepid by comparison. However, this lack of pragmatic motivation has to be weighed against Iran's anti-American ideology ("death to America", remember).

Somewhere in Bob Woodward's Bush at War, George Tenet says he thinks that investigators will discover that Iranian and Iraqi "mood music" surrounded the 9/11 plot. J.K. Idema, the former Green Beret who was recently arrested in Afghanistan for his counterterrorist freelancing, said as much in his interviews.

According to Laurie Mylroie's Study of Revenge, Wafiq al-Samarrai, Iraq's former chief of military intelligence, said that Saddam hoped to attack the USA and make it look like the work of Iran. Meanwhile, former intelligence officials Patrick Lang and Larry Johnson have promoted the idea that INC leader Ahmed Chalabi is an Iranian agent fabricating evidence about Iraq's WMD programs and terrorist connections. Both Iraq and Iran were active in Sudan while al Qaeda was hosted there...

So, at least superficially, you can make a case for any of the possibilities I listed. How does this relate to the anthrax letters? Well, I am assuming that they were part of the 9/11 plot, and these possibilities all correspond to different theories of the mechanisms and intentions behind 9/11. If the anthrax letters are part of the plot as well, we have to find room for them in the story of 9/11's genesis, planning, and execution. Or rather, 9/11 itself becomes a subplot in a larger, as yet untold story, "9/11 + Anthrax".

This is not so strategically illogical if you think of a cabal of rogues in any of those states, rather than thinking in terms of official sponsorship.

Think about it. The idea here is that the anthrax conspirators were a completely separate group to the 9/11 conspirators, but that they wanted their work to be perceived as of a piece with 9/11. In other words, after a shadowy terrorist group had just killed thousands of people very publicly and gruesomely, the anthrax conspirators immediately set out to create the impression that the same group also had access to a weapon of mass destruction. It's an action which seems more likely to flat out deter war against the terrorists, than to channel the war in a particular direction, which is the intent usually ascribed by the 'insider' theories.

How do the anthrax letters frame Iraq anyway? They don't mention Iraq, they don't allude to Iraq.

Just three years before, the USA had intensively bombed Iraqi WMD facilities, and had adopted an official policy of regime change in Iraq, out of fear that weapons like anthrax might be passed to terrorists. The Secretary of Defense went on TV and specifically said that a small bag of anthrax could kill half of Washington DC. The Iraqi biological weapons program was the greatest source of concern for UNSCOM. Iraq admitted that it had managed to weaponize anthrax, albeit in liquid form.

So it's the mere presence of weaponized anthrax in the letters which was guaranteed to make people think of Iraq. As you say, the text in the letters ("DEATH TO AMERICA") is more reminiscent of Iranian sloganeering.

The question of Iran, Iraq, and al Qaeda sponsorship reminds me of one of those logic puzzles, where you have (say) two giants at a fork in the road, one of whom always lies and one of whom always tells the truth, and you have to figure out which road leads to your destination by asking just one question.

According to the FBI they believe the source of the anthrax was domestic.

How "official" is this? They certainly don't say this at the Amerithrax website. Let's dig up the exact words of Ashcroft, FBI spokespersons, etc., and see just how strongly they've endorsed this view.

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.

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!)

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.

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...