Posted on 09/22/2007 6:16:47 PM PDT by ZacandPook
Our Own Worst Enemy: Asking the Right Questions About Security to Protect You, Your Family, and America
Randall Larsen: ... The press actually missed the real story, as I saw it, with “the person of interest”, insofar as that “Dr. H” had spent two years working in a bio-safe level 4 facility– working with some of the most dangerous pathogens in the world– with a bogus resume! *** [re Atta's roommate had cutaneous anthrax]
Five times a year, I brief top officers of the government and military, and only 1 or 2, if that, ever know! ...
And had one young field agent not faxed that memo about Atta’s roomate to my colleague Tom Inglesby, we wouldn’t have known either! But you add this to the Robb-Silverman Commission’s findings, that Al Qaeda was in the early stages of experimentation with these kind of bio-agents– and you can see how they could have made at least a small quantity. ... Later on, I brought this to the CIA… and while waiting to enter, I made sure the guard (holding the machine gun) saw it as I moved it from one pocket into another. ...
On September 20th, when the Secret Service searched my brief case prior to meeting with the VP, one compartment had an N-95 mask (similar to a surgical mask) and the test tube. The agent asked why I was carrying a mask. He asked the wrong question. He should have asked about the test tube. That story has become the metaphor for the entire book. Too many people are asking the wrong questions.
(Excerpt) Read more at themoderatevoice.com ...
Has anyone read this new book by Randall Larsen discussing the anthrax mailings at some length?
As for the interview mention of the lesion, here are the details that lesion the hijacker had upon his arrival from Kandahar. One of the hijackers, Ahmed Al-Haznawi, went to the ER on June 25, 2001 with what now appears to have been cutaneous anthrax, according to Dr. Tsonas, the doctor who treated him, and other experts. “No one is dismissing this,” said CIA Director Tenet. Alhaznawi had just arrived in the country on June 8. His exposure perhaps related to a camp he had been in Afghanistan. He said he got the blackened gash-like lesion when he bumped his leg on a suitcase two months earlier. Two months earlier he had been in camp near Kandahar (according to a videotape he later made serving as his last Will and Testament). His last will and testament is mixed in with the footage by the al-Qaeda’s Sahab Institute for Media Production that includes Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and Sulaiman Abu Ghaith. There are some spiders that on rare occasions bite and cause such a blackened eschar (notably the Brown Recluse Spider found in some parts of the United States)
Dr. Tara O’Toole of the Biodefense Center at John Hopkins concluded it was anthrax. The former head of that group, Dr. Henderson, now director of the office of public health preparedness at the Department of Health and Human Services, explained: “The probability of someone this age having such an ulcer, if he’s not an addict and doesn’t have diabetes or something like that, is very low. It certainly makes one awfully suspicious.” The FBI says no anthrax was found where the hijackers were. (The FBI tested the crash sites where the planes came down and found no traces of anthrax). Although no doubt there are some other diseases that lead to similar sores, it is reasonable to credit that it was cutaneous anthrax considering all the circumstances, to include the finding by the 9/11 Commission that “ in 2001, Sufaat would spend several months attempting to cultivate anthrax for al Qaeda in a laboratory he set up near the Kandahar airport.” Now that we know Kandahar is where the extremely virulent anthrax was located, it makes it more likely that the John Hopkins people are correct that the lesion was cutanous anthrax.
At the time, CBS reported that “U.S. troops are said to have found another biological weapons research lab near Kandahar, one that that was eyeing anthrax.” But CBS and FBI spokesman further noted that “Those searches found extensive evidence that al-Qaida wanted to develop biological weapons, but came up with no evidence the terrorist group actually had anthrax or other deadly germs, they said.” Only years later did we learn that there was in fact extremely virulent anthrax at Kandahar. (Though some senior officials at the CIA and FBI knew this in Autumn 2003) Thus, a factual predicate important to assessment of the John Hopkins report on the leg lesion needed to be reevaluated.
I always thought it was the Terrorists. I couldn’t imagine an American doing that sort of thing. Maybe I am too old fashioned in my thinking.
bump
I did too. You had the one hijacker who was on antibiotics for a lesion and the other who had been treated for dermatitis on his hands. The hand dermatitis described read much like latex sensitivity.
More than twenty years ago I was involved in COMINT for the U.S.Navy. So naturally when the anthrax attack occurred I followed what was going on and paid close attention to details that would occasionally appear. I will share what I have found with all of you.
1. The first person to receive an anthrax laced letter (he later died of the anthrax) was a Photo Editor at the National Enguirer’s Florida headquarter’s. (Everyone else was a liberal Democrat in the Washington D.C. area.)
This puzzled me. Then later this came out: his wife was a landlady to two of the 9-11 terrorists.
Any homocide detective would have been all over this connection. I wonder about the FBI, if they ever looked into it.
2. All the envelopes containing anthrax were mailed from Newark, New Jersey, home to many of the attackers of the first terror strike agaisnt the World Trade Towers.
Ramzi Yousef, the bomb maker, was a cousin to Khalid Sheik Muhammed, number three guy in Al Qaeda. Yousef was carrying a forged Kuwaiti passport later identified as having been made by Iraqi intelligence. Saddam Hussein is known to have supplied funds for the first World Trade Towers attack (something most people don’t know).
3. The German government, in its attempts to forge closer ties to Iraq, gave Iraq’s Department of Agriculture a kilo of the Ames type agricultural anthrax. This was to help Iraq control the disease among its cattle herds. (This was revealed publicly about 2 years ago. Whether the gift was the result of a request by Saddam’s government wasn’t revealed.)
When the then Minister of Agriculture was later interviewed by our American military (maybe DIA?) he told the intriguing story of how the anthrax never made it through the front doors of his building. Saddam Hussein’s personal guards intercepted the package on the steps outside.
4. Prague. Everybody has heard the story about Mohammed Atta meeting with the head of Iraqi Intelligence and being handed a package.
What most people don’t know is that the Al Qaeda member who disputes this wasn’t even it Europe when it happened! He was in Afghanistan, where he was captured on a battlefield.
So who would you believe? Czech Intelligence or some Al Qaeda puke!
This is the info I’ve gleaned from the news these past six years. I’ve made up my mind and have a pretty good idea why President Bush mentioned WMD.
Of course, the perp very well may be an American and a supporter the of terrorists. Many supporters of the militants are US citizens. For example, Ali Al-Timimi, sentenced to life plus 70 years for sedition, was a US citizen. He worked with Bin Laden’s sheik al-Hawali. As a microbiologist, he worked just feet away from famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey.
For this author to think the FBI doesn’t know what’s its doing overlooks a mountain of evidence to the contrary. I think the CIA and FBI are kicking butt!
Let ‘s consider this intriguing potential lead concerned a report about Atta’s red hands. I had never considered a latex allergy which is as good an explanation as I’ve heard proposed.
Shortly before 9/11, Atta went to a pharmacy with red hands, as if he had been working with bleach or detergent. Delray Beach, Florida pharmacist Greg Chadderton explained:
“There are two fellows, well dressed, and I asked if there was anything I could do to help them. And the one fellow, Otto, turned over to me showed me his hands, and he said “They’re itching and they’re burning, do you have a cream for this?” His hands were red from this area down (indicating from wrist down) on both of his hands, they were red. Not the normal colour you and
I would have from just being like this, but they were red. They weren’t blistering - they were simply red. They were red as if you had taken your hands and dunked them in a bucket of bleach or something. But they weren’t red on this side (backs of hands) where you would think, that’s what puzzled me, it was very perplexing that this side (palms?) was all red, it was almost as if he had touched something like this.”
He was given a cream called acid mantle.
Maybe his red hands related to a gas or spray later used to subdue passengers such as the red pepper spray introduced as an exhibit in the Moussaoui trial. This is the interpretation I favor after seeing the Moussaoui trial exhibit.
There is another disturbing possibility that has been suggested. The late Midhat Mursi aka Abu Khabab, the chemist helping Zawahiri with his Zabadi, or Curdled Milk, project, worked with a chemical additive for his pesticide/nerve agent. It increased absorption into the skin. Saponin, a natural detergent, is used for that purpose in a variety of commercial contexts. In late 2002, a plot was foiled when an attempt to purchase 1100 pounds of saponin was noticed by a chemical company and stopped. Authorities are not talking.
A final alternative for Atta’s red hands concerns the use of chlorine bleach to decontaminate anthrax. (which I doubt because forensic analysis shows the anthrax was grown in the Northeastern United States). Was Atta in Northeast US or Canada shortly before he visited the pharmacist? (I don’t know). I know he was in Toronto in the Spring but would have to check a timeline beyond that.
Under a latex allergy theory — or any theory — why would they only be red on the palm?
I recently used a spray can to paint a bird house and got green on my fingertips where it was in contact with the nozzle. Maybe practicing with pepper spray caused contact and the redness (just on his palm where there was contact). (I don’t know anything about pepper spray to know if it would have this effect).
But it seems the key clue is that the redness was only on his palm. And a key thing to consider would be his whereabouts shortly before he visited the pharmacist.
The interview seems to be on the political side of how to protect the populace from a future attack.
Not necessarily about solving the one in 2001.
If anyone out there has read it.....does he address the destruction at ISU???
bookmarking for later read
I can answer that from my own problems with latex gloves.The first time I got a rash it was the most intense where my hands perspired the most. My own hands get red on palms first then the knuckles and wrists.
1. Note that it was the publisher’s wife, not the photo editor’s wife, who was the realtor for the hijackers. I agree that it very interesting. As for whether the FBI ever considered the connection, absolutely.
2. The letters weren’t mailed from Newark, but were mailed from Trenton... New Brunswick. Which coincidentally was the where Al Qaeda’s website was maintained. Azzam.com was mirrored by a guy 6 miles from the mailbox. He was recently indicted for tax evasion. I know of no basis for the points you make about Iraqi intelligence or Saddam. I would think that Laurie M might have backed off a bit when her theory that KSM was not KSM was shown to be wrong. That was the main predicate of her theory. As for Saddam funding WTC 1993, that sounds dubious and unsupported — heck, the idiot bomber returned to Ryder for his deposit on the truck they were so hard up for cash. Ramzi on this flight home complained of the lack of cash. Saddam had hundreds of millions just in his compound collecting dust.
3. Your suggestion Germany gave Iraq Ames would require a URL. I highly doubt it and have exhaustively researched the narrow issue of access to Ames. ATCC, now at GMU (where Ali-Al Timimi) gave Iraq 5 strains of anthrax, including Vollum, in the mid-1980s. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. If you say Germany gave Iraq Ames, do you have a URL or citation? The best you can say is something like “Spertzel says they would have had it given the determined efforts they made to get it, such as after one UK conference.”
4. Prague has been been pretty roundly debunked. The short of the press you mention in the past years is that CIA Director has said it came to appear that it increasingly was unlikely and is not credited. The only thing supporting the suggestion was a waiter’s recollection from quite a while before. Against it were things such as Atta’s phone records. But it is a somewhat complicated matter and I can post what is known separately. The CIA believes that it never happened. Certainly the guy who Atta says he met stridently denies it. :0) In support of your position, Edward Jay Epstein has done good work, and gone to Prague for interviews.
5. There is no evidence Saddam’s regime had anything to do with the anthrax mailings. It is interesting that last year Scheuer says he is 100 percent certain Ansar Al-Islam was experimenting with anthrax in 2002. That is not corroborated by anything else in the public record but he was saying he knows for sure (based on intelligence that included humint and sigint). Now this is interesting because Ali-Al Timimi’s charity and friend gave money each year to the group that was renamed Ansar Al-Islam. That group was formed in December 2002 by several EIJ and IG operatives sent by Ayman Zawahiri who joined together several groups who had splintered. An Albany, NY imam who had worked for Mullah Krekar, the Ansar head, reportedly was contacted with a message from Bin Laden asking about flight schools and how close he could get to an [redacted] aircraft. So while Iraqi connections are interesting, they go to Salafists associated with Iraq and not Saddam.
Admittedly, answers don’t come easy given Ayman’s contacts with Iraqi intelligence over the years.
Yes, I just got back from the book store and was disappointed to see that only 5 pages were about the attacks. But they were bulleted points in favor of an Al Qaeda theory. He said the facts supporting an Al Qaeda theory would fill a book and he would just offer some highlights.
No.
The biggest flaw in his treatment is he assumes he knows what the FBI did as part of its confidential investigation.
Except for one allusion to Suskind’s reference to “extremely virulent” anthrax allegedly being found in fall 2003 in Kandahar, the five pages could have been written in 2002.
Fascinating.
I now favor a latex allergy theory, then.
But I think they made home-made pepper spray so perhaps the gloves related to that work.
I read that when realtor Gloria Irish went to see the apartment, they had torn out the toilet. I have no idea why they would do that.
SatinDoll,
I think we can agree Prague is unconfirmed, but I would be very interested in the very best support for such a connection.
Here is why I think it can be tentatively considered debunked:
According to some reports encouraged by Vice-President Cheney’s aide “Scooter” Libby Atta met in Prague with an Iraqi case handler and obtained the anthrax from Iraq then. The reported transfer of a vial of anthrax, however, is totally unproven. The origin of the story seems to have been based simply on speculation of what might have occurred (at a meeting never established to have occurred). For his part, al-Ani denies meeting with Atta. In a statement submitted for the record to the Armed Services Committee and released in July 2004, the CIA concluded that there was an “absence of any credible evidence” that a meeting occurred in 2001 between Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague. A declassified portions of classified June 21, 2002 CIA report, “Iraq and al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship” states: “Reporting is contradictory on hijacker’s Mohammad Atta’s alleged trip to Prague and meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer, and we have not verified his travels. A declassified portion of “CTC Iraqi Support for Terrorism” dated January 29, 2003 similarly concludes “the most reliable reporting to date casts doubt on this possibility.”
In contrast to what most of the senior Czech officials have said, the Prague Post quoted the director general of the Czech foreign intelligence service UZSI (Office of Foreign Relations and Information), Frantisek Bublan, denying the much-touted meeting. He also now may (or perhaps not) have been joined by the Czech President. But never let it be said the White House has been consistent on the issue either. Apparently the report is based on a waiter’s recollection of customers several months earlier. Even the Czech intelligence officials who support the report only cite a 70 percent probability that it was Atta. The bottom-line is that Al Qaeda did not necessarily need Iraq to commit this crime. It is more prudent to limit the conclusion to Al Qaeda’s involvement absent additional evidence. Even if there was a meeting, maybe it related just to taking action against Radio Free Europe.
Even if there was a meeting, maybe it related just to taking action against Radio Free Europe.
Some hawks advising the Administration, both in the government and in private business (to include Richard Perle and James Woolsey), argued that there was powerful evidence showing Iraq is giving biological and chemical weapons and training to Al Qaeda. Rumsfeld, whose comments of course should not be taken lightly, describes the evidence as “bulletproof.” CIA intelligence assessments such as the declassified portions of classified June 21, 2002 CIA report, “Iraq and al-Qa’ida: Interpreting a Murky Relationship” noted the involvement of Iraqi nationals in al-Qa’ida CBRN efforts, but concluded “we cannot determine, which, if any, of these Iraqi national Baghdad directed.” There are, indeed, some reports by defectors concerning Al Qaeda’s coordination with Saddam on biological and chemical weapons but those reports all depend on the reliability and detail of those reports by defectors. And now Scheuer doesn’t even stand behind his comments about Iraq and Sudan and his 2002 book about knowing your enemy. We now know, for example, that the son of a Chalabi aide made up info about mobile biolabs. Similarly, someone else forged documents relating to uranium. Shouldn’t there be criminal prosecutions? Classified CIA and DIA reports to the White House expressly questioned and doubted the reliability of senior Al Qaeda Al-Liby — who Secretary of State Powell would later expressly rely upon in his speech before the UN in which he held up a vial of anthrax.
The briefs made by President Bush and Tony Blair lacked a “smoking gun” in this regard. The information released by Powell similarly contained no “smoking gun” on the question of an Iraq/ Al Qaeda connection. It may turn out that there was merely a tolerance of Al Qaeda and Ansar al-Islam by the Iraqi regime. The nature of any cooperation between Al Qaeda and Iraq is still an open (at least disputed) question though criticism of the Administration’s distortion of intelligence has grown sharply. As in the game Monopoly, sometimes practical alliances can be formed for tactical purposes against a common enemy. A detailed argument relating to the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda can be found online in the trillion dollar complaint against Iraq filed by the law firm Kreindler & Kreindler in connection with 9/11. There also is a lengthy Spring 2003 article by PhD microbiologist Dany Shoham who had been with the Israeli military intelligence and now is at an Israeli university. More recently, the illustrious Freeper TrebleRebel has written in an intelligence journal that the anthrax was Iraqi though it was AQ operationally.
As United States District Judge Harold Baer noted, and as Director Tenet has acknowledged, some of the early high-level contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq related to a non-aggression pact. Judge Baer, upon the default of all the opposing parties and their failure to defend the lawsuit brought by the law firm Kreindler & Kreindler, found that CIA Director Woolsey and Laurie Mylroie had not presented any facts supporting their position, but that a jury could find in their favor by crediting their opinion. He described the evidence relied upon as consisting of layers of hearsay and therefore inadmissible.
Mylroie’s theory requires that Khalid Mohammed was an Iraqi intelligence agent — along with his nephew Ramzi Yousef. She even posits that Murad, a participant in the Bojinka operation, is necessarily an Iraqi agent. It is odd, then, that Murad did not disclose the fact in “tactical interrogation” (i.e., torture) by Philippine authorities and that his statement to US officials recount the names and location and details of his many family members. It is odder still that KSM did not disclose the fact in his months of interrogation. Yousef also failed to admit the fact — even in the course of extensive operations by the FBI involving a mafiosa defendant who had a nearby cell. In June 2004, yet another nephew of KSM was captured. No clear evidence emerged even after Iraq was invaded.
When a mid-level of aide of Jordanian poison expert Zarqawi captured in Iraq was a member of Zawahiri’s Egyptian Islamic Jihad, that sort of development points to Al Qaeda’s presence in Iraq — not a connection with the regime.
At most, I’d tend to agree that Wael, a senior Ansar member, was Iraqi intelligence.
Dr. Richard Spertzel, the former UN inspector in Iraq, says that the product here was well within Iraq’s capability. UNSCOM determined that the Iraqi weapons program produced dried anthrax as well as the more primitive wet form. Dr. Spertzel states: “Iraq certainly knows how to produce 100 percent pure spores. That is a technique that they developed .. which is capable of giving them the kind of concentrations that we are seeing in the Daschle letter.”
Given that at the time we knew where Saddam lived, and he was a survivalist, he would have wanted to maintain deniability in the event he had assisted in the anthrax mailing. A terrorist state sponsor would want to use a strain that was not associated with it. Thus, Iraq as a source of the Ames is entirely possible. It’s just not yet indicated by any of the evidence. Two top Iraqi scientists, codenamed Charlie and Alpha, helped the coalition to learn more about Iraq’s anthrax program according to Dr. David Kay, head of the Iraq survey group in charge of the hunt for WMD, said. He has said that the Iraqis had made surprising innovations in the milling and drying processes needed to weaponize anthrax.
One source, Ghorbanifar, who dates back to the Iran-contra days — and at times has been stridently discredited by the CIA as unreliable — has said that Iran was the source of the anthrax.
In February 2003, in a much anticipated presentation about Iraq and its weapons, Secretary of State Colin Powell reported that a senior al Qaeda operative in custody has said that a terrorist operative was sent to Iraq several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring biological and chemical weapons. He was sent after Bin Laden determined that Al Qaeda labs were not sophisticated enough. In a document found on his computer, Zawahiri had indicated that experts would have to be recruited, particularly using universities as a cover, because using unsophisticated talent had not proved successful. Accordingly, based on what Ayman has written, the FBI should be giving priority to connections with researchers at universities and NGOs.
There’s every reason to think Zawahiri succeeded in recruiting the necessary expertise — just no compelling reason to think he obtained the expertise from Iraq. The papers found at headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Iraq’s feared secret police, show that an entourage from Al Qaeda group was sent to the Iraqi capital in March 1998 from Sudan. The talks are thought to have ended badly for Iraq. According to some reports, Bin Laden rejected the suggestion of an alliance — preferring to pursue his own concept of jihad. According to other information, it was Saddam who wanted to distance himself from Al Qaeda. He reportedly never responded to an Al Qaeda request that it be allowed to establish training camps. He viewed Al Qaeda as a threat to his regime.
Ramadan, former Iraqi Vice-President who hosted Ayman in Baghdad in 1998, was arrested by Kurdish forces. Saddam, of course, was also captured.
Some have pointed to reports that a leader, the late Abu Musab Zarqawi, thought to be involved in the planned ricin attacks, was a clear link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Zarqawi reportedly was at the safe house in Afghanistan where traces of ricin and other poisons were found. According to an article that appeared in the conservative National Review, Iraq’s embassy in Islamabad hosted some Iraqi biochemical scientists, who trained Zarqawi and his lab technicians under the cover of the Taliban embassy. No further details ever emerged or were corroborated and the speculation arose that Al-LIbi had merely misled US interrogators after his capture in December 2001. He recanted his claims in 2004.
There were reports of an Al Qaeda facility in northern Iraq where there was testing of chemical and biological weapons (such as ricin) on barnyard animals and a human. The area, however, was in an area not controlled by Saddam Hussein. Al Qaeda had sent four of its senior leaders, including Abu Yasir (Taha), the former head of the Egyptian Islamic Group, to northern Iraq. Taha, 51, with a degree in commerce from Assiut University, served a five-year sentence for terrorist activities. Following his release, he left the country and settled in Afghanistan. He is credited with planning the massacre of tourists in Luxor in 1997.
Taha and his colleagues formed a fighting group of 600 men — known as Ansar al-Islam — out of an amalgamation of existing groups. ABCNEWS reported that there is evidence the terrorists tested ricin in water, as a powder and as an aerosol. (Some experts dispute that ricin can effectively be used as an aerosol or water contaminant.) The militants used it to kill donkeys and chickens, and at one point, allegedly exposed a man to the toxin in an Iraqi market and followed him home and watched him die several days later. In a television interview in January 2006, Michael Scheuer said he was 100% sure that in 2002, Ansar al-Islam was also experimenting with anthrax.
The senior Al Qaeda leader (and successor to the blind sheik) Abu Yasir, (Taha) before being extradited to Egypt, had lived in a suburb of the capital of Iran. Under the Administration’s logic, does that mean there is also state sponsorship by Iran? (Before anyone bombs Iran, let me hasten to add that the answer is no.)
The “bomb Iraq” crowd relied on only wisps of hearsay evidence and glimmers of ambiguous facts. In other contexts, the evidence was fabricated (such as related to the purchase of enriched uranium from Niger or the mobile bio labs). No hijacker was shown to have trained at Salman Pak, alleged to be a terrorist training facility (where a 747 was located), rather than a counterterrorist training facility.
On the other hand, while Bin Laden has declared Saddam’s party apostate and infidel, he has urged that there is a religious duty to cooperate with a secular ruler if it furthers jihad. The Iraqi intelligence chief Hijazi, who according to the Iraqi National Congress allegedly met with Osama in Afghanistan a few years ago was captured. In August 2003, former Iraqi Vice-President Ramadan, who met Zawahiri in 1998, was also captured. Saddam seemed to enjoy the debate with interrogators and at trial was defiant towards the court.
Polls show that most Americans think that the invasion of Iraq has led to an increase in the likelihood of terrorism rather than a decrease. Richard Clarke’s book, Against All Enemies, presented powerful support for the view, from an insider’s perspective. He was not merely “in the loop” — he as much as anyone was or should have been the loop. The same applies to the threatened use of biological weapons. William Patrick, former UN arms inspector and anthrax expert has said:
“I think they’ve buried this stuff in 10 to 12 feet of sand, and when the heat is off, and we’re no longer looking for weapons of mass destruction, they’ll go in the night, dig it up and give it to their friends in al-Qaeda and elsewhere. My scenario is that all hell’s going to break loose because that material’s going to be in the hands of terrorists who have no qualms about using it. I think it’s quite likely.”
A lawsuit by former FBI counterterrorism official, John O’Neill, filed in August 2003 alleges connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq, based in part on statements by Iraqi defectors, information from Iraq and al-Qaeda prisoners, and documents uncovered in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Complaint alleges that Iraqi intelligence provided al-Qaeda with training in document forgery and chemical and biological weapons in a series of contacts that spiked in 1996, and again after 1998.
For example, the Complaint, In re Estate of John P. O’Neill, Sr. et al. v. Republic of Iraq et al, D.D.C. 8/20/03 ^ alleges that -Zawahiri met with Iraqi intelligence in 1992 and 1998, and that contact between Iraq and al-Qaeda increased in 1998, when Al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa. According to a report by the Department of Defense to the Senate Intelligence committee, in the early 1990s, the main intermediary between Al Qaeda and Iraq was Sudanese strongman Hassan al-Turabi, a leader of the Al Qaeda-affiliated National Islamic Front.
A memo by Undersecretary of Defense Feith is even more dramatic. Not credited by the CIA or Richard Clarke, the memo does not represent an analysis of the relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda, as much as a laundry list of possible data points, many of which are not confirmed.
The 9/11 Commission, in contrast, concluded that Atta did not visit Prague in April 2001. On April 4, 2001, there is a picture of him at a Virginia ATM. On April 6, 9, and 10, 2001, there were calls made to his cell phone from within Florida to Florida. Then on April 11, 2001 he is known to have been in Florida. Moreover, “Newsweek has also learned that Czech investigators and U.S. intelligence have now obtained corroborated evidence which they believe shows that the Iraqi spy who allegedly met Atta was away from Prague on that day.”
In late November 2004, Iraqi troops in Fallujah, Iraq discovered a site with lab manuals on manufacturing explosives and toxins — including anthrax — according to Iraq’s national security adviser. When seeking to resolve such issues, people need to put politics aside and pull together to get conclusive objective proof, one way or the other.
It was suggested that the red hands were a result of bleach on his hands.
I’m not sure a latex allergy would be so localized. Anyone with such an allergy, please advise.
For you newbies out there....AQ did it, using the mail to steal a totally unique mutant of genotype 62. No where has this been found except for the envelopes.
Five days after Bob Stevens died, ISU destroyed the historical collection kept in the vet school.
ZacandPook is right that Epstein has done some good work. He also has a suspicious mind.
“No where has this been found except for the envelopes.”
Wasn’t a mixed genotype used by the Navy Medical Research Center, in its mice vaccine challenge studies, as reported in the proceedings of the 4th conference on anthrax (the meeting was in Annapolis in June 2001).
You’ll recall that Dr. Knudson sent the ISU professor the mailing label that I uploaded. It had the NRMC fax number for the lab there.
It involves development of a DNA vaccine involving a mutated plasmid. I describe it in the thread with “Alibek” in the title a day or two ago.
There is no evidence that historical collection had Ames. USDA lab magager’s Thomas Bunn is quoted at the time saying it didn’t.
I have a suspicious mind which is why I called all the professors involved in the destruction and contacted the USDA.
I came away with no citable evidence that any Ames was destroyed. Instead, the historical strains involved 5 or 6 strains from locals cows. Bessie, Angie, Coral, Monroe, and Clarabelle.
Folks talking about the destruction of the ISU inventory routinely fail to distinguish between ISU and the USDA lab.
Question: Did the USDA lab assist the UNMC in the vaccine research I mention? Was Dr. Bunn previously at USAMRIID doing vaccine research at the time Dr. Knudson was at USAMRIID doing vaccine research? Is that why Dr. Knudson routed the request to USDA Iowa? If a mutated strain was used in developing the UNMC strain with the mutated plasmid, and there was an Iowa destruction that was countenanced by USAMRIID (which was advising the FBI), now that would be very notable.
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