C-SPAN this week interviewed Jane Mayer on the Dark Side and she mentions Vice-President Cheney’s understanding in October 2001 that he had been exposed to a fatal anthrax exposure. The pertinent excerpt from the book is at NPR “Fresh Air.”
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (”FISA”) unit in the Department of Justice has traditionally been known as the “Dark Side.” Everything coming from Khalid Mohammed’s laptop, for example, as Agent Van Harp, the former (now retired) Amerithrax head, once explained, is classified. To understand the matter, journalists would have to have the cooperation of someone coming over from the Dark Side — which would be a felony. The FBI and CIA counterterrorism analysts working on the Dark Side in trying to avoid the next 9/11 are not even allowed to tell their spouses about their work. Based, however, only on the “open source” material readily available through databases such as “google news” and the CIA’s “Foreign Broadcast Information Service” (”FBIS”), it appears that the solution to the Amerithrax case does not likely lie at the intersection of Bin Laden and Saddam streets among those cubicles at Langley with desktop PCs. Instead, it lies with the Zawahiri Task Force at Langley which hopefully has an intersection of Ayman Avenue and Rahman Road. If not, we might be looking at a different crossroads altogether.
Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, told a conference in early 2007: “One of my biggest worries is a terrorist group attacking the computer network serving the United States’ financial services industry and simultaneously mailing anthrax-laced letters.” He said: “If someone were to have a sophisticated attack on our financial services system, let’s just say cyber network broadly, at the same time that they mailed, through the US mail, FedEx and UPS, the equivalent of letters sprinkled with anthrax, it would have a devastating impact.”
Whatever your political persuasion, and whatever disagreements about individual issues relating to due process and civil liberties, the FBI and CIA deserve our support on this issue. We are, after all, facing this threat together. First, the nature of such an investigation is that we lack sufficient information to second-guess (or even know) what the FBI and Postal Inspectors on the Amerithrax Task Force are doing. Media reports are a poor approximation of reality because of the lack of good sources. Indeed, there has been compartmentalization and divergent views even within the Task Force. Second, hindsight is 20/20. Third, now that the leaks relating to US scientist Dr. Steve Hatfill seem to have long since been plugged and the US has entered into a settlement for $5.8 million, it is not likely we could do better in striking the appropriate balance between due process and national security. The FBI’s profile includes a US-based supporter of the militant islamists. Attorney General Ashcroft once explained that an “either-or” approach is not useful. The media has tended to overlook the fact that when the FBI uses the word “domestic” the word includes a US-based, highly-educated supporter of the militant islamists. In November 2007, in a speech, FBI Director Robert Mueller pointed specifically to the problem of spies at universities and access to pre-patent, pre-classification biochemistry information.
Although investigation was moving forward, the press remained seriously misdirected because of propaganda by those inside and outside of the investigation. Professor Francis Boyle was the first to raise a US “bioevangelist” theory of the anthrax mailings in the press. Law Professor Boyle represented Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1993 and over the years continued to serve as its counsel. Boyle has worked closely with one of the lawyers for blind sheik Abdel-Rahman in seeking the impeachment of President Bush. He has acted as legal advisor to the PLO. He wrote a book advancing the theory and continued to press the theory in the press over the next half decade using a paid public relations person. In 2002 and 2003, the theory was fueled by leaks by the lead criminal prosecutor, whose law firm’s online biography indicates he was born in Haifa in 1948. He was head of the criminal division at the US Attorney’s Office in the District of Columbia. The attorney moved over from the CIA in late September 2001. He received regular briefings on the investigation and was the one who would have supervised presentment of any indictment in Amerithrax to a grand jury.
During the course of a speech marking the sixth anniversary after 9/11, bin Laden referenced the 62nd anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which occurred on August 6, 1945), as occurring only a few days prior to his speech. It’s another example supporting the significance of the mailing dates of the anthrax to the senior Egyptian militant, Mohammed Islambouli, who the CIA reports was in the cell with KSM planning the attacks on the US. Islambouli was the brother of Sadat’s assassin. The letters were mailed on the anniversary of the Sadat assassination and Camp David Accord in conveying a message — “we have this anthrax.” It was if the sender was asking the same scripted and approved question the assassin posed to Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, just before the bomb hidden in his camera detonated. The interviewer asked: “How will you deal with the Osama bin Laden issue when you are in power and what do you see as the solution to this issue?”
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0708/Obama_press_told_to_cover_up_not_wear_green.html
Politico’s Carrie Budoff Brown, accompanying Obama on his trip to the Middle East and Europe, emails: Reporters traveling overseas with Sen. Barack Obama were thrown a bit of curve last week when the campaign emailed a “dress code” for Israel and Jordan. Aides had passed along as a courtesy the list that they had distributed to their staff to follow. But some of the tips raised a few eyebrows, particularly among the female reporters. “Do not wear green.” (Explained later as the color of Hamas)
Comment:
“Greendale” School is the return address of the anthrax letters to Senators Daschle and Leahy — two Senators who played key roles in both appropriations to Israel and Arab secular regimes and the rendering of senior Egyptian Islamic Jihad leaders. In December 2002, the Arabic paper London Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported that correspondence on Zawahiri’s computer (which was obtained by the Wall Street Journal) shows Zawahiri uses “school” as code for Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The letter was found on Al Zawahiri’s computer. The letter was designed to look innocent. It was dated 3 May 2001 and signed “Dr. Nour, Chairman of the Company.”
Green dale refers to green “river valley” — Egypt, Cairo, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and/or Egyptian Islamic Group. Put it all together and you have their new official name (though the American press does not use it) — Qaeda al Jihad. For what it is worth, at the Darunta complex where jihadis trained, recruits would wear green uniforms, except for Friday when they would be washed.
It was widely published among the militant islamists that martyrs go to paradise “in the hearts of green birds.” The stamp used in the anthrax mailings was designed by artist Michael Doret. Mr. Doret advises me that the color of the eagle is a “teal” or greenish-blue.
In the very interview in which they admitted 9/11, and described the codes used for the four targets for the planes, KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh admitted to the Jenny code, the code for representing the date 9/11, and used the symbolism of the “Green Birds.” Osama Bin Laden later invoked the symbolism in his video “The 19 Martyrs”, describing a hijacker as “A man of worship who enjoined good and forbade evil. His body was on earth but his heart roamed with the green birds that perch beneath the Throne of the Most Merciful.”
9-11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh a few months earlier in his interview with al-Jazeera, in a lengthy and articulate essay “The Nineteen Lions” published by Azzam Publications on December 2002, explained:
“One of the explanations of the Quranic verse [3:169] in which Allah says that the shuhadaa (martyrs) are not dead, is that as well as their souls being inside the hearts of green birds, they are alive because the shaheed (martyr) gives life to those around him. Indeed evidence of this is apparent throughout the Ummah today.”
Peter Finn of the Washington Post explains the symbolism:
“Around 7 one evening during Ramadan in 1998, the believers filed down a long corridor leading to the prayer room of the Al Muhadjirin mosque here, placing their shoes on the dark brown shelves before stepping onto a carpet the color of turquoise, a mixture of green for Islam and blue for heaven. Among the worshipers was a small group of men who clustered around a severe, slight Egyptian named Mohamed Atta. ..
In the [9/11/2002] interview with al-Jazeera, Binalshibh, said that Al-Shehhi, even before he learned of the operation, used to have beautiful visions that he flies in the sky with huge green birds and crashes into things.”
A FAQ on Al Qaeda’s website, the Azzam Publications website, explained that “In the Hearts of Green Birds” refers to what is inside: “The actual Arabic word used in the Hadith is not Qalb (heart) but it is Jowf which can mean any of interior, inside, or heart (as in center).” There was a video based on the hadith with the title “In The Hearts of Green Birds” about foreign mujahideen that had been martyred in Bosnia. The audiocasette was created in August 1996 and its 3rd edition was released in January 1997. The azzam.org website selling the “In the Hearts of Green Birds” audiocassette was shut down after 9/11 because authorities thought it might contain codes and instructions to militants.
Azzam.com posted an exclusive interview with Ayman al-Zawahiri and stressed the importance of cash donations and gas masks and chemical-resistant suits. Ibn Khattab, the Arab Chechnyan fighter who was Bin Laden’s good friend, had told his public that azzam.com was highly recommended and that only the two charities identified by the website should be used to route donations — announcing in 2000 that Benevolence International Foundation was one of the charities that should be used. The other was the Islamic Assembly of North America (”IANA”). Ibu al-Khattab, the late Arab-Afghan commander of foreign mujahideen in Chechnya (who in March 2002 was killed by a poison letter), expressly endorsed Azzam Publications.
Azzam.org had “no bricks and mortar address, but operates a post office box in London, and bill[ed] itself as “an independent media organisation providing authentic news and information about jihad and the Foreign Mujahideen everywhere.” One posting datelined from the southern Afghan city of Kandahar and was a message to Muslim youth from top terror suspect Bin Laden. A farewell message from Azzam Publications .. exhorts “Muslims all over the World (to) render as much financial, physical, medical, media and moral support to the Taliban as they can.” Azzam also urged those with computer expertise to mirror the website so as to keep it up after authorities took it down. One can access old websites as they existed on past dates through www.archives.org and its wonderful Wayback Machine.
British and US intelligence sources suspected that some of Azzam.com’s jihad photos and graphics contain messages embedded with a technology known as steganography. The code instead perhaps was there separately for all to see on the stamps of the lethal missives being sent.
A man formerly known as Paul Hall, was arrested in Phoenix on a federal criminal complaint in March 2007 and agreed to be removed to District of Connecticut for further prosecution where there has been investigation of Azzam Publications website located on a server there He is alleged to have provided classified information to the London-based Azzam Publications about a U.S. Navy battle group as it traveled from California to the Persian Gulf region in 2001. He allegedly “described a recent force protection briefing given aboard his ship, voiced enmity toward America, praised Osama bin Laden and the mujahedeen [and] praised the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole.”
Even Zarqawi invoked the imagery in a 60-minute audio message:
“The martyrs rejoice in the bounty provided by God. Their souls are inside the bodies of green birds that fly in heaven.”
In Fall 2004, the federal authorities indicted the fellow behind Azzam Publications selling “Green Birds,” Babar Ahmad, pointing, in part, to the “distribution of videotapes and compact discs depicting fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya and elsewhere, and the eulogizing of dead fighters, for the purpose of recruiting individuals and soliciting donations to support the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Chechnya.” Of Pakistani descent, Ahmad is a British computer specialist. He is associated with KSM, who had anthrax production documents on his laptop and admits to having headed the cell (after Atef’s death) planning to use weaponized anthrax against the United States. Ahmad is also the cousin of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, who was arrested mid-2004 in Pakistan. Khan’s computers carried detailed surveillance of five financial buildings in New York, Newark and Washington and once prompted the Department of Homeland Security to elevate the threat alert level to orange.
In an affidavit, an FBI special agent and computer investigative specialist, alleged that a New Brunswick, NJ man, Mazen Mokhtar, assisted Babar in maintaining the continued operation of the Azzam sites, through the use of mirror sites, when the administrators of Azzam sites shut down the Azzam.com site down after 9/11. The mirror sites, www.qoqaz.net and www.waaqiah.com, allegedly routed people trying to access www.azzam.com. The affidavit alleges that Mr. Mokhtar is listed as the administrative contact for the mirror sites. He also operated minna.com. A friend reports: “He said he used to run a hosting service four or five years ago that used to resell Web hosting services to people. He said he didn’t know those guys (mentioned in court papers) and he is not involved in anything like that.” An Egyptian-born imam and political activist, he is a supporter of Palestinian cause and frequent speaker before groups in Brooklyn and the Bronx. He is said to be nice and seems a man of peace.
Of course, given that the symbolism used in this regard in the anthrax mailings had an origin in religious writing, there is no direct tie with the website — the tie could be with the hadith. The webmaster has said that the FBI allowed it to remain up (while it moved from server to server) for another year hoping to get leads on supporters.
Bin Laden was using “Green Birds” in the same way he used the repeated phrase “Looming Tower” to hint of what was to come with the planes attack on the World Trade Center. He would say:
“Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.”
On October 7, 2001 in a prerecorded tape aired October 7, Bin Laden said “The winds of faith have come.” This would be enough to keep Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and VP Dick Cheney up at night — or when they do sleep, keep them dreaming about green birds.