Posted on 07/20/2004 1:43:56 PM PDT by maquiladora
The Bush administration may not have a stated position - but the FBI does. According to the FBI they believe the source of the anthrax was domestic. When you think about it, they must be very confident that this is true. Imagine the consequences for the FBI if there had been massive follow-up attacks and that Al-Qaeda took reponsibility. It would, on the face of it, have been unthinkable of the FBI to have made such an error early on - lulling the country into a false sense of security that an Al-Qaeda type group did not possess anthrax.
So what really led the FBI to make such a bold assertion in the first place? Was it the handwriting analysis? Doubtful.
It must have been something else. Perhaps the weaponization signature really does have a US lab written all over it. But if that's true, why are they still sniffing around Detrick? Detrick haven't handled any dry powders for decades. The only two labs that may have manufactured dry powders in recent years are Dugway and Battelle. If these labs ever shipped any samples to Detrick they were always converted into wet slurries.
Even if Dugway or Battelle had made live anthrax spores with silica and polymerized glass - how on earth could such a weapon walk out of these places?
None of this makes much sense. The anthrax mystery will likely continue for many years. However, unlike other mysteries like the Kennedy assassination or TWA 500, the anthrax mystery does have solid evidence that could solve it. That is, the forensic analysis of the spore coatings.
So why has that forensic analysis never been released? The usual excuse is that this is an ongoing investigation, but when will this excuse no longer be a valid one? After 3 years? 5 years? 10 years?
Some people, including the attorneys for Maureen Stevens, are attempting to use the power of the courts to force the FBI to reveal the nature of the evidence. The FBI have fiercely resisted - citing an ongoing investigation. For how much longer will they get away with this?
..........??.........'source'..........?
? ....the SOURCE as in the original strains, $$$$$$$$, planning,.....actual mailings....?
IMO.......the terrorist 'networks' are 'bonded' in their mutual worldviews and intelligence operations by their very 'histories'.
IMO...........therefore they all were/are involved whether they individually/operationally really 'knew' it or not.
(birds of a feather rage together)
:-(
How "official" is this? They certainly don't say this at the Amerithrax website. Let's dig up the exact words of Ashcroft, FBI spokespersons, etc., and see just how strongly they've endorsed this view.
??
storage.......shipping.......and,.......'domestic' (foreigners).......processing equipment.......
(If your going to make a cake you have to go to the kitchen)
:-(
So you rule out al Qaeda entirely?
I wouldn't go that far. I was referring to the specific options you enumerated.
I think option 1 ("The anthrax letters were a collaboration of Iraq and al Qaeda, but the USA still can't prove it") is unlikely because of the complete lack of supporting evidence from Iraq, whether from on-the-ground discoveries or from Iraqi scientists.
Option 3 ("The anthrax letters were the work of al Qaeda...") seems unlikely because it requires al-Qaeda to behave out of character. Why didn't al-Qaeda use the anthrax for a mass attack? One might hypothesize that they thought (incorrectly) that the letters would be an effective vehicle, but, if they really know the weaponization secret, why haven't they simply processed some more and staged a mass attack since? As time goes by, this argument becomes more and more persuasive.
Option 2 I discussed earlier. (I don't think it's reasonable to think that a secret held by disparate and opposing groups, among which is a country that the U.S. has successfully invaded, could really be kept a secret.)
In any case, I don't think al-Qaeda is ultimately responsible for the letters, in the sense that they don't have the expertise or hidden infrastructure to have developed the weaponization method, nor to use such a method without the acquiescence of a government. And, again, the lack of mass attacks and further attacks demonstrates that al-Qaeda does not have that capability. (I will leave open the possibility that somebody gave them a small amount of weaponized anthrax, which, luckily for us, they squandered. This still seems unlikely to me, unless somebody can come up with a reason that they chose to use such a relatively ineffective dispersal method. Needless to say, I do not minimize the deaths that occurred, nor the economic damage, but it could have been far, far worse.)
Pakistan (or Pakistanis, as in ISI) would be another natural candidate.
I've always been surprised that China is almost never speculated about as a possible source for the anthrax letters. Although I've never read about it and have no documented proof, common sense suggests that China almost certainly has an anthrax program. So they'd be in a position to take fast advantage of 9/11, and they'd have the motivation to do so. In fact, they'd have a number of motivations:
There's also the possibility of a domestic U.S. source, of course. This would most likely be some small internal group acting without official sanction or knowledge. (In fact, a similar sort of rogue group could have operated in any of the foreign countries mentioned above also, acting under the protective cover of a secret defense or intelligence establishment.)
This is not so strategically illogical if you think of a cabal of rogues in any of those states, rather than thinking in terms of official sponsorship.
As for the idea that the letters were sent to frame Iraq: How do the anthrax letters frame Iraq anyway? They don't mention Iraq, they don't allude to Iraq. In context, they would seem to frame al-Qaeda if anybody. The text:
"Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is Great."
makes me think of Iran, if anybody.
So how could the perpetrators have known that Iraq would be blamed? And, if they had wanted to get Iraq blamed, wouldn't they have pointed more directly to Iraq in some way?
Another point: It is said that Iraq used the Vollum strain in its anthrax production. If one wanted to frame Iraq, that strain would have been a better choice than Ames.
And how did any of these foreign candidates get virulent Ames anyway? Whether it was a domestic job or a foreign job, you can't get away from some U.S. connection.
Does the FBI really say that? I agree that they act like it's true, but have they come out and said so?
When you think about it, they must be very confident that this is true. Imagine the consequences for the FBI if there had been massive follow-up attacks and that Al-Qaeda took reponsibility.
This point is very well taken. It almost says that the FBI knows that it's domestic.
But if that's true, it leaves certain other people in the administration in a very awkward position. They must have been aware of any such definitive evidence the FBI had, yet they were willing to make statements during the run-up to the war that hinted that it might have been Iraq that was behind the anthrax. I don't know if this is the case, but if it's true and if it emerges, it would not be a very convenient position to be in.
What statements?
I don't remember any such statements.
I was thinking of Dick Cheney alluding to the mystery of the anthrax source on Meet the Press (or one of those news interview shows), or Colin Powell showing the vial of faux anthrax at the UN. Now, those statements admittedly had other purposes (Cheney was showing the need for pre-emptive strikes because you couldn't tell who the perpetrator of an attack was any more, and Powell was trying to demonstrate graphically what Saddam Hussein could do with the anthrax that he was thought to have stockpiled). But they must have known that those following the anthrax affair would wonder if those statements were hints. Cheney in particular left an impression with me like the Cheshire Cat.
Moreover, the whole WMD argument was bolstered psychologically by the fact that the anthrax mailer had not yet been discovered and could have been Iraq.
Anyway, this was a minor comment. I thought Treble Rebel's observation was quite interesting -- that the FBI would have looked very bad if there had been a large follow-up attack that al-Qaeda took responsibility for, and that therefore the FBI must have been quite confident that such an attack wasn't going to happen.
You're right, somebody who was interesting in pursuing this could email him. I wouldn't expect a very straight answer from somebody claiming to know the truth of the Ngo Dinh Diem coup, though! <LOL>
Even if it was a << workplace rumor rather than something he was directly told >>, that barely matters. Let's just say that his co-workers must have been interesting fellows.
Either he has connexions, or it was a white lie and he wants us to think he has connexions.
I posted this a while ago, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1165194/posts?page=47#47.
OTOH what if they're actually investigating domestic perps or highly placed domestic perps in collusion with foreign ones?
They are. You can take it to the bank.
The 2002 Science article demonstrated that the anthrax that killed Bob Stevens was very closely related to a known sample from USAMRIID, Ft Detrick.
Rumours floating around are that the anthrax utilised in 2001 was not directly from Ft Detrick. The line had passed through Battelle after twas at USAMRIID.
What could make them so confident, nearly certain? What indeed?
Maybe a private message from the perps warning them not to investigate a certain angle, or they'd be sorry?
What else could do it?
Iran-contra is the most wellknown modell, once again.
Howsoever, it was handy for them to leave the possibility ambiguously open, by the expedient of not ruling it out.
What if they got it from US stockpilers? Something very like it was at Ft Detrick. It was mailed from NJ. The shortest distance between these two pts doesn't go through N Korea. Ohio is OK, but Occam's razor doesn't like Pyongyang for this.
Why would someone plan to smuggle it out of the US and then back into the US? Doesn't that sound like a risky plan, a plan to go awry?
It is pretty well clear
that early in the investigation
the FBI ruled out a foreign origin for the anthrax.
Is there a reason for this that they are not telling us?
So many ponds (to drain), so little time...
Isn't that the sort of mutation that one would expect to occur naturally every so often? That would suggest that it was allowed to grow for a while, through multiple generations.
This could also have something to do with the observed mixture of two genotypes. Maybe the batch was split in two at one point, with the two parts allowed to grow separately. (This makes sense to me as insurance against something going wrong in one of them. If you have just one batch growing, all your eggs are in one basket. The two samples might even have been in different physical locations, and might have been subject to different stresses.)
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