A.k.a., if you can't address the facts, bury them in bulls**t.
The Washington Post in September 2006 says that the FBI came to suspect Ali Al-Timimi of involvement in the anthrax mailings. He was a very pious and well-spoken imam who worked in the same department of former Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID Charles Bailey.
Al-Timimi’s colleagues, Dr. Ailbek and Dr. Bailey co-invented a patent in mid-March a process by which hydrophobic silica would be used so as to permit greater concentration. The former Russian bioweaponeer who inherited Al-Timimi’s telephone number then co-invented the process with Dr. Bailey for removing the silica through repeated centrifugation. That is why Dr. Alibek and Dr. Meselson apparently did not see silica in the images they were shown. This is why FBI Director Mueller was upset at the leak about silica — because it pointed to this method and the line of investigation they have been aggressively pursuing all along. The FBI is travelling to Afghanistan, Asia and the Middle East in Amerithrax precisely because unlike Ed, they credit an Al Qaeda theory. The Hatfill Theory was abandoned in late 2003 when “extremely virulent” anthrax — treated in a way that made it readily weaponizable — was found in Kandahar, where the hijacker with the lesion had come.
An example of Ed’s treating his assumptions as what he pedantically calls “FACTS” is when he says that militant islamists would not warn in connection with the use of nonconventional weapons. To the contrary, all the experts (e.g., Michael Scheuer), who have studied the militant islamists for years based on documentary evidence seized and sigint and humint intelligence, argue that they WOULD warn — and indeed, it is required by the hadiths. The violence is religiously motivated — to not give warning, would cause them to go to hell. Indeed, Dr. Timimi and others have given entire lectures on the importance of following the hadiths and written about the rules governing warfare (to include Ramzi Binalshibh).
Ed argues it is not their modus operandi — when in fact Ayman’s group sent lethal letters to newspapers in DC and New York to protest the detention of the blind sheik in 1997 and WTC 1993 detainees, along with people in symbolic positions. Indeed, Ayman’s group the Vanguards of Conquest warned they would use anthrax in a letter protesting the detention of an Egyptian Islamic Jihad shura leader in January 2001.
Leahy — through his “Leahy Law” — has the greatest symbolic role of all in the rendering of islamists. Under the “Leahy Law” security forces do not have appropriations cut off if they torture detainees if there are “extraordinary circumstances” (i.e., we support them in the war on terror). Daschle had the paramount role in appropriations.
Ed’s central argument against an Al Qaeda theory has always been that the hijackers were “dead, dead, dead.” That’s correct. They did not mail the anthrax — nor did they process the anthrax. Instead, isotopes show it was processed in the Northeastern United States (according to an NBC report).
Amerithrax consists of a complex web of prosecutions and the Attorney General has said FBI Director Mueller expects some sort of resolution that can be publicly announced in the near future. Dr.Alibek has told me that although the FBI has suspected Al-Timimi all along, he is just a “numbers guy.” They know what Al-Timimi had for dinner on September 16, 2001. So the investigation has focused on finding the processor and mailer and they appear to be coming close to some sort of resolution. Everyone should support the FBI and CIA in their efforts on this as we are not in a position to second-guess them (particularly given people’s tendency to expect to resolve one of the most criminal complex investigations in history in a 600-word OpEd).