Posted on 08/18/2002 7:54:58 AM PDT by aculeus
An FBI forensic linguistics expert believes the US anthrax attacks were carried out by a senior scientist from within America's biological-defence community. Professor Don Foster - who helped convict Unabomber Ted Kaczynski and unveiled Joe Klein as the author of the novel Primary Colors - says the evidence points to someone with high-ranking military and intelligence connections.
Speaking about the investigation for the first time, Prof Foster told the BBC he had identified two suspects who had both worked for the CIA, the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) and other classified military operations.
Controversially, Prof Foster says the killer is likely to be highly patriotic individual who wanted to demonstrate that the US was badly prepared for an act of biological terrorism.
The weapons-grade anthrax was posted in letters just days after the 11 September terror attacks, leaving five people dead, 18 injured and 35,000 forced to take precautionary antibiotics.
The professor says he does not believe the killer will strike again as he has achieved his goal.
He explained: "To that end his misplaced patriotism has worked. Today millions of government dollars have gone into research and anthrax antibiotics are now available to the public."
Agency rivalry?
However, he fears the investigation is now being hampered in its gathering of vital documents that could lead to the killer.
Prof Foster says investigators need examples of the suspects writing to analyse their style and use of language - which the professor believes is as unique as DNA and could unveil the perpetrator.
He said: "It's very frustrating. Ordinarily with the FBI if there's some documents needed - known writings - boom, they're on my desk the next day.
"My two suspects both appear to have CIA connections. These two agencies, the CIA and the FBI, are sometimes seen as rivals.
"My anxiety is that the FBI agents assigned to this case are not getting full and complete co-operation from the US military, CIA and witnesses who might have information about this case."
Killer 'diverting suspicion'
Prof Foster was given four letters recovered by investigators to analyse for clues to the killer's identity. "As I worked through these documents it became apparent that USAMRIID was ultimately the best place for the FBI to begin looking for a suspect," he said.
All of the letters contain the following messages "Death to America" and "Death to Israel". All were dated 11 September, a clear reference to the terror attacks.
But while investigators searched for links between the anthrax attacks and al-Qaeda, Prof Foster immediately suspected that dating the letters 11 September was merely a ruse to throw the authorities off the scent.
He says: "When an offender gives you some piece of information that's just completely unnecessary and that, in this case, is inaccurate, it becomes immediately suspect.
"It becomes a statement of 'Here's what I want you to believe about this document'."
Prof Foster also says the killer seems to have tried implicating two former USAMRIID scientists who had left the laboratory in unhappy circumstances by posting the letters from near their homes in New Jersey.
He says only someone in contact with a senior insider at USAMRIID would have known how the two scientists left the lab and that they would then be likely targets for the FBI investigation.
He says: "They are looking at someone who's a little bit higher up the food chain, who would have to have access to personnel information."
Deliberate mistakes
The professor also identified a number of mistakes and misspellings in the letters which he suspects are a deliberate ploy to confuse investigators.
The author of the anthrax letters tells his victims to take penicillin. Not only is penicillin the wrong antibiotic to take, the killer also misspells the word.
Prof Foster says: "You mean to tell me this guy is dealing with anthrax, a trillion spores a gram, and he thinks penicillin is going to be the antibiotic of choice?
"There's something very fishy about that misspelling there, that this particular word should be misspelled and it should be misspelled in such an unconvincing way.
"It looks like an attempt on the offender to say 'Hey, don't think I'm a scientist, don't think I know anything about antibiotics'."
The FBI have placed a number of scientists under intense scrutiny and recently questioned US scientist Dr Steven Hatfill in connection with the attacks.
Dr Hatfill strenuously denies any involvement in the attacks saying: "I have never worked with anthrax; I know nothing about this matter."
The FBI's investigation continues. -
My thesis also accommodates the relationships among all the individuals in Florida who were involved in either the airplane attacks or the anthrax attack.
Dr. Foster cannot deal with the Florida situation.
He should be ignored because his apparant inability to understand postal operations is dangerous to the rest of us. If he is as influential as this article suggests, then he, by himself, may be considered to have been instrumental in allowing three additional people to die from the attack. His contribution has done nothing but delay the investigation.
I had previously ascribed the blame to the FBI, possibly the Counterterrorism chief, and he has just retired. Now, I'd like to blame Dr. Foster. Hopefully this change in the top ranks of the FBI will cut this guy off and folks can move ahead solving the case.
TRANSLATION: I really WANT the attacks to have been perpetrated by the 9/11 attackers, even though I don't have any actual evidence of that, so I'll simply invent some story that accounts for the fact that none of the letters were postmarked before 9/18.
Uhhh, no it doesn't.
The CDC and the Postal Employees union did not have much of a clue about how the postal system works either. I hold them responsible at least for the two deaths of the Brentwood workers
My thesis begins with a collection action of some kind BEFORE 9/11, with cancelation occuring later due to ordinary misroutings and mishandling normally incurred by single-piece rate First-Class Mail entered on Friday or Saturday.
When do you think the letter to American Media in Florida was actually sent? My memory of the dates is fuzzy but that first case seemed to come quickly after Sept 11.
I agree entirely. Not only possibly a graduate student, but perhaps a post-doctoral researcher: someone who already has a PhD and who works on a year-by-year basis as a laboratory researcher in a university *or* in industry. Many biology grad students *and* post-docs are foreigners. Of course, looking into this means pulling the covers off the national scandal: most of our scientists and engineers are from suspect Middle Eastern countries or from India.
Sigh. For the hundredth time, THE ABOVE IS COMPLETELY UNTRUE!
The WIFE of the BOSS of the first person to die was a landlord for a couple of the hijackers.
The first person to die didn't have the slightest direct connection to any of the hijackers. Some may say that's a trivial distinction, but in terms of coincidence there's a big difference between that and the constantly-repeated lie that the first guy that died was landlord to several of the 9/11 attackers. Simply not true, and an example of how bad information, as long as it fits what people want to believe, will constantly get repeated.
Bob Stevens didn't get sick until September 30th, and he wasn't confirmed to have anthrax till October 3rd; I knew it was far longer after 9/11 than people thought, but even I was surprised at how long it was.
Of course, the letter that gave him anthrax was never found, but based on the timing of his illness, and the known first batch of mailings, it's likely ALL were mailed on 9/18 and NONE of the anthrax letters were mailed before then.
So the killer is an individual. Grammarians will be pleased.
... and Patriotic too. I guess that rules out patriots to every country but the US of any of its allies.
There's a 100 percent chance that the culprit(s) never thought their choice of words would come under such close scrutiny.
/semi-sarcasm
This is bullshirt. I am sure it is a right wing conservative militia member, right...
This forensic "expert" is ignoring the primary clue as to where this anthrax came from. The anthrax was prepared with betonite clay as the dispersal agent and also ground to a precision that was something that could not be done in your average lab. In short, it showed a level of sophistication that was equal to our own but on a different path of invention. It takes tens of millions of dollars to invent these processes, you just do not buy the equiptment out of edmund scientific catalogs.
I could give some credence to his theroy if the material had been prepared American style, but this was Iraq's direction of research, and we don't quite know how to do it their way.
Looks like the liberals have taken over the FBI to me.
Even under Foster's premises (wrong premises), there is no way that the person posting that letter knew from public information that particular statement, as it was not released immediately.
Here's what happened: Atta was given the anthrax by the Iraqhi agent in the meeting in Prague. Atta flew some 10-plus hours to meet someone IN THE AIRPORT (!!) and then turned around and flew back to the US (landing at Newark, by the way) without even spending the night in Prague. If it was a message that needed to be passed, surely it could have been done by encrypted e-mail -- which means that some physical object was passed. This explains the rash, the "american Media" as a test target (testing the 'home-grown' anthrax for lethality), the presence of both military-grade pure (given by the Iraqi agent) and homegrown batches (cultured in a home lab from the pure batch, hence the rash and the infection noted by the doctor in Florida).Add to that the voluminous evidence of a 'plan B' attack plan by the terrorists that involved crop dusters -- and what, pray tell, were they planning to "dust" over American cities? The answer is obvious.
The US media, as Ann Coulter has so thoroughly proved, is so reflexively anti-war and pacifist-leftist that they have lept upon the suggestion of a 'right-wing white-male" perpetrator as a proxy way of causing pause in the preparation for war.
If I had addressed a letter, I would have put the "bldg" on the same line where it belonged.
It's just that it made me think that whomever addressed the envelopes, slavishly copied them from somewhere because they didn't know differently. Maybe that was something else to throw the investigation off.
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