Ping.
Shortly after the attacks, media reports said the spores contained additives and had been subjected to sophisticated milling — both techniques used in anthrax-based weapons — to make them more lethal. Earlier this month, there were media reports that the FBI belatedly learned that those techniques were not used and the anthrax was not enhanced.
Someone tell this idiot Holt that "media reports" do not neccessarily have anything to do with reality. This goes double for anonymously sourced ones.
Although Holt and other members of Congress got updates and briefings in 2002 and 2003, Kalisch said the FBI and Justice Department decided to stop briefing members of Congress after sensitive investigative information was reported in the media citing congressional sources.
Someone needs to look up a gal named Rosenberg who was holding meetings with Senate staffers on the sly.
In an interview, Holt responded, "The inference that any member of the intelligence committee was the source of previous leaks is outrageous, irresponsible and without foundation."
Someone tell this idiot Holt to google "Rockefeller, Wyden and Durbin."
The case "clearly falls within the purview of the intelligence committee," Holt added. "Our job is to see that the government functions well
Someone please measure Holt's nose... I think it shot out a few inches.
Holt had written Mueller that the FBI's delay in determining what kind of anthrax was used meant that "resources were diverted and countless agents wasted their time investigating a small pool of suspects, instead of the broader search we now know was needed."
Well, they were investigating many more people than the media led us to believe. According to the press there was only one person of interest in spite of repeated assertions by the FBI that there were at minimum 20 persons of interest after many had been eliminated as suspect.
Holt asked Mueller to have Douglas Beecher, a scientist in the FBI's Hazardous Materials Response Unit, testify before the House Intelligence Committee. In April, Beecher wrote an article published in a scientific journal in August saying there was "a widely circulated misconception" that the anthrax spores were made using additives and sophisticated engineering akin to military weapons production.
I hope Beecher doesn't have ties to Cuba like most everyone else the Dems bring up.
bookmark
Two words: Leaky Leahy.
L
Is Michael J. Sniffen Jennifer's Lovett?
ping
>>> In an interview, Holt responded, "The inference that any member of the intelligence committee was the source of previous leaks is outrageous, irresponsible and without foundation." <<<<
Yeah. Sure. The guy's comment is laughable.
"Bureau officials say the early reports of weaponized anthrax were misconceptions, and the more recent reports misunderstood how early the FBI was able to accurately analyze the spores."
This statement that they knew all about the nature of the powder almost right from the beginning doesn't exactly add up. Michael Mason admitted 2 years AFTER the attacks that they had failed to reproduce the spores.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2003-09-29-anthrax_x.htm
FBI fails to re-create anthrax production
By Toni Locy, USA TODAY
WASHINGTON — Two years after the nation's deadly anthrax attacks, the FBI still has not been able to re-create the process the killer used to produce the substance sent through the U.S. mail, a top FBI official said Monday.
Which we subsequently dropped.
By Jim Geraghty
NRO ONLINE.
Periodically, I find myself saying,
“It’s amazing that we haven’t had another attack on our soil
since Sept. 11, 2001.”
And then I stop myself. And I realize I’ve made a mistake that grates on me.
We did have another attack on our soil, not too long after the attacks — the anthrax mailings that killed five and infected 22.
Each time I let it slip, I feel like I’ve disrespected, or simply forgotten, the dead - Robert Stevens in Florida, Kathy Nguyen of New York City; Ottilie Lundgren of Oxford, Connecticut, and Thomas Morris Jr. and Joseph Curseen, employees of the Brentwood mail facility in Washington, D.C..
Once we’re reminded, we remember those days well. White powder being reported in just about every major office building and spurring evacuations. Dr. Sanjay Gupta on CNN, putting white power in an envelope and showing how it could puff out with the slightest of movements. People speculating whether they ought to microwave their mail. Celebrities clamoring for Cipro. Crashing airplanes had traumatized us already; now we had to worry that someone was exposing us to a silent killer we could breathe in, obliviously.
I admit, I take this a bit personally. The path of my life and the path of the anthrax investigations have crossed from time to time. I had a good, close friend in Sen. Tom Daschle’s office who was among the first to be exposed, who had to go on Cipro. I was among the first reporters to reenter the reopened Hart Building, a dusty time capsule of midday October 15, 2001. A close relative ended up working on the decontamination and redesign of the Hamilton, New Jersey postal facility.
And here we are, on the eve of five years later, and the guy who did it remains unknown, and presumably at large, or unmolested. I had figured at some point we would have found some guy in a house outside Trenton, keeled over from accidental exposure to his own poisons.
But the case remains a mystery. I’m reminded of the moniker “Rollo Tamassi” — the name that a cop in L.A. Confidential gives to the unknown, never-caught suspect who killed his father. The Guy Who Gets Away With It.
Read enough true-crime novels and talk to enough cops and law-enforcement folks, and you come to the conclusion that despite what we see in pop culture, there are no criminal masterminds — or they are so exceedingly rare as to be almost nonexistent. Most criminals take up crime because they want something — usually money — and they can’t figure out a legitimate way of getting it. The vast majority of criminals are stupid, greedy, and sloppy. There are no Kaiser Sozes. If you’re really that smart, you figure out how to make money in a way that doesn’t get the cops chasing after you.
There are no unsolvable crimes. It’s just a matter of resources and intellectual capital spent on the case.
Wait long enough, and just about everybody gets caught. Eric Rudolph. The Green River Killer. The Unabomber. Someday, somebody will get James J. “Whitey” Bulger. D. B. Cooper’s bones are probably hanging in some tree in an Oregon forest.
So how did Anthrax Guy manage to terrorize America for weeks, kill several people, and leave no clues?
I can’t help but wonder if this guy had help from powerful friends — maybe a foreign-intelligence service. This is entirely speculation. If somebody wants to offer forth evidence pointing to Joe Scientist with an Axe to Grind, I’ll hear ‘em out (but really, the FBI’s the one who needs to hear it).
But could Joe Scientist with an Axe to Grind to pull off, arguably, the biggest unsolved crime in the last half century? To outwit everybody at the FBI, the intelligence community, every cop, and amateur sleuth?
I’m skeptical. It strikes me as beyond the capacity of an ordinary crook, pulling this stunt for the first time. The 9/11 hijackers, perpetrators of the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, left behind tons of evidence.
But that leaves us wondering out loud if the person had help from a hostile foreign government. There’s no direct evidence of that, but just... it makes a bit more sense than the Lone Nut or Lone Evil Genius theories.
This Theoretical Hostile Foreign Government would only have needed to send one person, if they were trained well enough. In November 2001, after the last mailing, he could fly from Philadelphia or Newark or New York to Islamabad or Tehran or Baghdad or wherever never to be seen again. Or it could be a government’s intelligence service, operating without orders from their leaders.
Who knows? But the unsolved case, the lack of closure, of answers, of even a working theory amongst those who have the duty of protecting us — nags at me, and I’ll bet many other folks as well. This is a wound that won’t quite heal.
I’m glad we remember 9/11, and that we pledge, year after year, to never forget. I just hate the thought that the other horrifying terror attack of that year could disappear down the memory hole.
— Jim Geraghty, who writes the “TKS” blog on National Review Online, is author of Voting to Kill: How 9/11 Launched the Era of Republican Leadership.