Posted on 07/20/2004 1:43:56 PM PDT by maquiladora
/table>
Some Fort Detrick Labs Closed 10:25 AM
Jul 20, 2004 10:25 am US/Eastern
Frederick, MD (WJZ)
Federal agents are combing a number of laboratory suites at Fort Detrick in Frederick for evidence of the 2001 anthrax attacks.
Fort Detrick spokesman Charles Dasey says the labs have been closed since Friday at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, home to the Army's biological warfare defense program.
A law enforcement source tells The Associated Press that the activity is related to the anthrax mailings that killed five people and sickened 17 in October of 2001.
FBI agents have frequently visited Fort Detrick since the
unsolved attacks amid speculation that the deadly spores or the person who sent them may have come from Fort Detrick.
(© 2004 CBS Worldwide Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report. )
So the source is a personal communication. That suggests one of three things:
(1) a simple misunderstanding;
(2) a correct statement, made by someone who knows, in spite of the apparent contradiction to the Texas story;
or, (3) intentional disinformation.
I don't know how to distinguish which of these possibilities is the case.
These are both reasonable examples. The millennium plot in particular is close in spirit to your New Year's Day theory.
As for the WTC bombing on Feb. 26, 1993, being on the anniversary of the U.S. victory in the Gulf War, on Feb. 26, 1991, it's interesting that the WTC bombers themselves did not state the connection. Moreover, it's the kind of thing that is easily staged so as to generate suspicion if you want to get somebody else blamed for an attack. I don't know if that's the case here or not.
Very interesting.....Hmmmm!!!
Good point.
The only evidence that I have is that I saw two lesions in 1990
Which could have been anthrax, but unfortunately there's no way of telling whether it was Ames or not (or even if it really was anthrax rather than something else).
and the University destroyed something that never should have been destroyed.
Yes, definitely true, and a strong indication that somebody may have had something to hide. It's possible that what they were hiding wasn't something related to the anthrax mailings though, but something else (or even something that they thought might have been related to the mailings but in fact wasn't).
I'm not trying to be argumentative. I just want to cover all the bases systematically so that we don't jump to a conclusion that might be wrong.
I wonder if there might have been two different strains both of which were, coincidentally, dubbed "Ames"? There doesn't seem to have been any standardization in the naming process, nor any central clearinghouse of names.
I do not believe that Leahy et cetera were taking sides between Iran and Iraq. Their agenda was to blindside US covert operations, whether officially approved or on the side.
I take it that the "narrative of the state" (as Edward Jay Epstein calls it) is embodied most authoritatively in the reports being produced by all the various commissions. The 9/11 Commission has produced an account of al Qaeda's history and of the 9/11 plot specifically. The Senate Intelligence Commission has produced a report on the Iraq WMD intelligence. The Iraq Survey Group is due to report next month on Iraq's actual WMD programs, including its intentions on the eve of the war. So far, there's no "Anthrax Commission"; it's an ongoing FBI investigation, and although all the talk has been of domestic terrorism, they still haven't officially said "We know it wasn't al Qaeda."
To make the case for position 2, one has to show how the (hypothesized) truth about "Iraq, 9/11, and Anthrax" could have been kept out of all those reports. I can think of half a dozen reasons why the government might want to keep it out - but is it really within their means to do so? This is the next question I'm going after.
Feb. 26, 1991, and Feb. 26, 1993.
There's one small problem with this theory. You phrase Feb. 26, 1991, very delicately as the date of the "Gulf War ceasefire." Far more than just the date of a ceasefire, it was the date of US victory in the Gulf War, the date Iraq lost. Do you think the losers in the war would really celebrate or commemorate the date that they lost?
Suppose you're a terrorist avenger. You aim to undo American supremacy in the Middle East, to prove that the US hasn't won. What sweeter day to strike back than on the day of the illusory American victory?
If the 1993 bomb had worked properly, the destruction of 9/11 would have occurred in Clinton's second month on the job. Who knows what would have happened then! I think the American recovery and counterattack would have been much slower. And despite the damage from the 1991 war, Iraq was still quite strong at that point - the sanctions had only been in place for a few years. Saddam would have had another shot at asserting regional hegemony, while Clinton was picking up the pieces at home.
What is Peter Bergen's position on the anthrax mailings? I know that he derides Laurie Mylroie as a conspiracy theorist and discounts the possibility of Iraq having worked closely with al-Qaeda, but I didn't know that he had said anything specific about the source of the anthrax letters.
Bump
By now all 4 possibilities are clearly very unlikely.
I am an advocate of possibility #5.
#5. It wasn't the work of AlQaeda, or Iraq and the Bush administration never thought it was.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.