Posted on 05/04/2011 1:36:24 PM PDT by The Magical Mischief Tour
In the fall of 2001, a nation reeling from the horror of 9/11 was rocked by a series of deadly anthrax attacks. As the pressure to find a culprit mounted, the FBI, abetted by the media, found one. The wrong one. This is the story of how federal authorities blew the biggest anti-terror investigation of the past decade—and nearly destroyed an innocent man. Here, for the first time, the falsely accused, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, speaks out about his ordeal.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
I will always believe that Saddam supplied the anthrax to the terrorist and that we knew it but did not publish it. If we did, our old policy would have been to nuke the hell out of Iraq, but we didn’t want to do that. So, we denied the facts.
Of course, I also believe that Obama was killed at Tora Bora and I don’t know what the real results of last weekends raid was.
Call me a skeptic.
bump
That’s an interesting thought, but it would seem to me that the anthrax attacks would have been far more devastating if they had the support of a government behind them, no?
Saddam was a blowhard and a nut with grandiose fantasies. Claiming he had set Israel ablaze, he actually managed to hit Israeli buildings with poison gas with a Scud or two out of the hundreds of Scuds wildly hurled during Gulf War I. God only knows if Saddam managed to get some anthrax letters mailed, but the feeble results vs. the braggadocio would have been characteristic of him.
When all this was going on, there was a lot of talk about how it would have taken a biological scientist with specialized equipment to produce the fine powder. I was personally thinking “hogwash” but didn’t elaborate at the time because I did not want to give eager mad scientists ideas. But it’s probably safe now to say that anybody who has handled clay cat litter or Oil-Dri, and who has used an ordinary kitchen blender to turn granulated sugar into powdered sugar in a pinch for a recipe, would be able to figure out how to produce such a powder given access to a strain of deadly bacteria. It wouldn’t be as concentrated as the lab kind, but it would probably suffice to infect somebody’s skin or lungs sans antibiotic treatment. And no, it would not need someone with the skill of a Hatfield or Ivins.
“When all this was going on, there was a lot of talk about how it would have taken a biological scientist with specialized equipment to produce the fine powder.” “And no, it would not need someone with the skill of a Hatfield or Ivins.”
Any Ph.D. in microbiology can produce a crude prep that would infect someone. This material was very refined and pure. It was NOT produced by some yahoo with a blender. Everyone who is familiar with this case will tell you this stuff was professional grade.
That only raises another question, of how the anthrax mailer managed to get his or her envelopes sealed well enough that the fine powder didn’t get beaten out through the flap corners by ordinary mail handling equipment, and infect far more people than it actually did. I don’t remember seeing the marks of something like Scotch tape on the published images of the envelopes, do you?
Interesting article.
I’ve always been a bit concerned about the fact that the same agency that was so eager to put this on Hatfill is the one assuring us that it was Ivins. Ivins makes a heck of a lot more sense as a suspect, but how can we ever know?
Based on everything said...Irvins had to know Hatfield and some curious odd things in his background...to point the FBI at him. No one ever has talked much about that connection, and I’ve wondered if the two ever met or even had a conversation between themselves.
Ivins seems to have actually had the stuff in his possession at one point, and was more infamous than Hatfill for being off his rocker. If he didn’t do it personally, he might have passed the stuff on to someone in the jihad business who did do it personally. But the secret was interred with his bones.
“That only raises another question, of how the anthrax mailer managed to get his or her envelopes sealed well enough that the fine powder didn’t get beaten out through the flap corners by ordinary mail handling equipment, and infect far more people than it actually did. I don’t remember seeing the marks of something like Scotch tape on the published images of the envelopes, do you?”
I didn’t see the back of the envelopes but spores were released both in the mailbox and by passing through the mail handling machines. Early reports said the spores were so fine that they passed through the envelope themselves but I don’t know if that’s true. Interestingly, the people who died received mail from the box where the letters were mailed and in the Post office where they were processed. None of the targets were infected, likely because they were immediately given antibiotics.
IIRC, there was a victim at a tabloid in Florida who got mailed an envelope of the stuff. It killed him. Later would be victims would have been forewarned in the event they found a cloud of powder drifting out of an envelope they had just opened.
rats, I had tried to be careful to double check. How did we ever elect this goober on even that alone?
this is a year old article...
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