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 This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.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. )
The use of monograms/initials may have been common among intelligence operativs at that time. Shackley's close companion Thomas Clines, who was convicted on income tax charges related to Iran-contra, used (at least) two secret Swiss accounts, one in the name T.C. and the other in the name C. Tea.
Found in Chapter 11 of the Walsh report, the special prosecutor's report on Iran-contra.
Or to have anticipated the appearance
out of nowhere
of anthrax
many times more pure
more concentrated
and more refined
than any ever known to have been produced
previously
by U.S. authorities.
The most bizarre
and improbable event
of all.
The explanation
of how this came about
no doubt requires an explanation
far more bizarre
than any
that can be imagined
by any tin-foil people here.
It is unlikely
however
that it ever will be made known.
The implications of that statement alone are kind of scary.
What do FR's resident Dogs have to say about this?
Well, the US program stopped in 1969, but the Soviet program continued at least until 1991. We know this because the deputy director, Ken Alibek, defected. They did absolutely crazy things, like loading ICBMs with the Black Death. So if I had to guess where the recipe for the 2001 anthrax was discovered, I'd say it was in the Soviet program or its post-Soviet successor.
Using
of course
the virulent Ames strain.
No doubt you have learned
from TGS
(the younger)
*everybody*
just *everybody*
possesses the virulent Ames strain.
From a counterproliferation perspective, I imagine it's much safer to talk about the strain than to talk about the recipe. Far better to have al Qaeda trudging around Texas with a shovel, digging up cowpats in search of Ames, than to have them digging through industrial catalogs in search of suppliers of [REDACTED]. So we hear all this stuff about using genetic lineages to reconstruct the spread of Ames between labs, but the spread of weaponization know-how is equally key, albeit a little harder to trace.
I have this notion of my own that the world has experienced four (and maybe now five) great outbursts of this symbiosis between conspiracism and counter-conspiracy in the past century: 1920s Russia, 1940s Germany, 1960s China, 1980s Iran, and, just maybe, 2000s USA. One might hope that this latest iteration is a little gentler in its outcome, being based more on DIY Internet theorizing than on demagogic mass media.
For a country to be on your list, as I understand it, that country's government must make its major policy decisions based on indefensible conspiracy theories. Is that what you meant?
The list itself is of interest. Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge would seem to fall squarely with the others, and perhaps even to be the epitome of this human failure.
Didn't Clines get prison time on those charges?
For the first four, maybe, but not for the fifth (one reason why I stumbled over its inclusion). What these "great outbursts" are supposed to have in common is world-historical significance, which in every case except 1980s Iran means that a great power is involved. As for the Khmer Rouge, if I were to write a history of the past century organized around these five outbreaks, I'd make them a postscript to "1960s China".
When we get to the present day, I'm not convinced that my fifth item warrants inclusion. Both sides of American politics on occasion accuse the other of conspiracy and of baseless conspiracy theorizing, but this is a chronic condition of politics in all societies. I think what has happened is that a certain type of conspiracy - stealth WMD attacks by an invisible enemy - has become the threat around which the world is reorganizing, and so the conspiracist dimension of politics has become central in a way that it wasn't before. Thus people argue about whether Iraq sponsored al Qaeda, whether Iraq sent the anthrax, whether the Bush administration cynically promoted these ideas in order to engineer the war, whether they fell prey to conspiracist thinking and fought the wrong war, whether the anthrax was meant to frame Iraq or to stimulate biodefense research, etc. Perhaps one can similarly find a structural reason why conspiracism became prevalent and relevant on those earlier occasions too.
Alibek cannot keep a secret. Wasn't it the author Richard Preston who said that Alibek told him the secret of cheap and easy anthrax weaponization? Whatever impelled Alibek to blab even part of such a secret, and to an *author*? Would it be surprising if Alibek had given hints to everybody and his kid sister?
So Alibek gave hints to people, maybe enough people that somebody picked up on the clues and was able to figure out the missing parts.
So, even if the 2001 recipe *was* derived from a Soviet recipe, that doesn't mean that Russians were behind the letters.
Aside from the recipe, whoever mailed the letters had physical access to something very close to the Fort Detrick substrain of virulent Ames.
Yes.
And more recently he has been sued by the SEC for stock fraud
involved in come computer technology company he was involved with.
http://www.thepittsburghchannel.com/news/3664548/detail.html
PITTSBURGH -- Dr. Kenneth Berry, whose homes were recently searched by federal agents probing the unsolved 2001 anthrax attacks, has lost his job at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center.
"His employment ends on Nov. 8 and he will be on leave until then," UPMC spokesman Frank Raczkiewicz said Wednesday. Raczkiewicz would not elaborate.
The Rev. Richard Helms, a friend of Berry's in his hometown of Wellsville, N.Y., said Berry told him earlier this week he was disappointed at being let go from his position as an emergency room doctor.
"They made up all kinds of reasons for it, but you know as well as I do why they let him go," Helms said, referring to the anthrax investigation.
On Aug. 5, agents descended on Berry's home and a former apartment in rural western New York, as well as his parents' summer home on the New Jersey shore. An FBI spokesman said the searches were part of the anthrax investigation. The FBI has not commented on Berry's status.
That same day, Berry, who founded an organization in 1997 that trains medical professionals to respond to chemical and biological attacks, was arrested after a domestic dispute at a motel in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., authorities said. He is free on bail. The charges were unrelated to anthrax.
Several attempts to reach Berry by phone and in person have been unsuccessful. Helms said he remains out of town.
"He's being harmed tremendously and there's no reason for it," Helms said.
Five people died and 17 were sickened in the fall of 2001 in the anthrax mailings that targeted government and media officials. The attacks unsettled a nation already reeling from the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
Berry is the second doctor connected to the anthrax probe to lose his job.
Dr. Steven Hatfill, who was called a "person of interest" in the anthrax probe, was placed on administrative leave from his job at Louisiana State University the day after the Justice Department's Office for Domestic Preparedness e-mailed instructions to "immediately cease and desist" from using Hatfill on any DOJ contract.
LSU fired him Sept. 3, saying it had to fulfill its obligations to funding agencies and maintain its academic integrity. The university said it was not making any judgment as to Hatfill's guilt or innocence regarding the FBI's anthrax probe.
In a lawsuit filed last August, Hatfill said Attorney General John Ashcroft and others identified him as a person of interest to detract attention from their inability to find the person responsible for sending anthrax-laced envelopes to government and media offices in October 2001. He was the only person identified that way by government officials.
I looked him up; this was quite a while ago. Clines appears to be the only person who was sent to prison on charges related to Iran-Contra.
You replied: For the first four, maybe, but not for the fifth (one reason why I stumbled over its inclusion).
That was why I asked. The present-day U.S. didn't seem to fit the pattern (unless you were to propose one of those bizarre 9/11 conspiracy theories).
What these "great outbursts" are supposed to have in common is world-historical significance, which in every case except 1980s Iran means that a great power is involved. As for the Khmer Rouge, if I were to write a history of the past century organized around these five outbreaks, I'd make them a postscript to "1960s China".
I think the Khmer Rouge's devastation of their own country resonated with the world in a way out of proportion with Cambodia's actual influence on world affairs. But you're probably right in grouping it with China's so-called Cultural Revolution.
In the same way, Iran really is part of a larger conspiracy-theory phenomenon that extends through much of the Muslim world, just as Pipes pointed out. Moreover, to the extent that this is based in anti-Semitism, there is an overlap with Nazi Germany (witness the re-emergence of the "blood libel" claims or the popularity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in places like Saudi Arabia and Egypt).
You are right. Iran-contra was so long ago I had to look it up too.
Imagine that you're Clines, then read this:
Elliott Abrams. Pardoned by the President. Had been sentenced to 2 yrs probation and 100 hrs community service.
Alan Fiers, Jr. Pardoned by the President. Had been sentenced to 1 yr probation and 100 hrs community service.
Robert MacFarlane. Pardoned by the President. Had been sentenced to 2 yrs probation, $20,000 in fines, and 200 hrs community service.
Clair George. Pardoned by the President. Convicted on 2 counts, pardoned before sentencing. Maximum penalty for each count was 5 yrs in prison and $250,000 in fines.
Duane Clarridge. Pardoned by the President. Charged with 7 counts, pardoned before trial. Maximum penalty for each count was 5 yrs in prison and $250,000 in fines.
Caspar Weinberger. Pardoned by the President. Charged with 4 counts, pardoned before trial. Maximum penalty for each count was 5 yrs in prison and $250,000 in fines.
John Poindexter. Conviction vacated on legal technicality - possible effect of immunized Congressional testimony on trial witnesses. Poindexter had been sentenced to 6 months in prison on each of 5 counts, to be served concurrently. Indep Counsel declined to prosecute a 2nd time.
Oliver North. Conviction vacated on legal technicality - possible effect of immunized Congressional testimony on trial witnesses. North had been sentenced to a 3-yr suspended prison term, 2 yrs probation, $150,000 in fines, and 1,200 hrs community service. Indep Counsel declined to prosecute a 2nd time.
Joseph Fernandez. Case dismissed due to the G.H.W. Bush administration's decision not to declassify material needed for the trial.
Richard Secord. 2 yrs probation.
Carl Channell. 2 yrs probation.
Albert Hakim. 2 yrs probation, $5,000 in fines.
Richard Miller. 2 yrs probation, 120 hrs community service.
Thomas Clines. 16 months in prison, $40,000 in fines, plus the cost of his prosecution.
These are all 14 people indicted for Iran-contra related crimes, together with the disposition of their cases, from the Summary of Prosecutions in Indep Counsel Walsh's report. All the pardons were issued by Pres. G.H.W. Bush in 1992, less than a month before he left office.
wow. This Clines must have been rankled up at the way he was treated. He would have felt he was abandoned by his fellow cabalists and left out to dry by the first Pres Bush. Everybody was well taken care of but him.
He was ruined, but the others were not. Many of them have even since held high posts of trust in govt and business.
This is all very interesting, I suppose, but it looks like you've gone far afield.
What is the connection, if any, with the anthrax mailings?
I do not know. May be nothing. But just.... maybe....
Here is the chaine of thought:
Common sense says to look more closely at those events to see who might have unfinished business to take care of.
The anwser may be - a lot of people. Leahy and the network news media played an influential rôle in the institutional dismantling of US covert activities. This was resented widely among covert operatives and their supporters, and was thought by them to be very bad policy too. This was the perspectivo among the Iran-contra cabalists and among other operatives also. There's this Thomas Clines, who, wrongly or rightly, was singled out alone for prison time, and may bear resentment against his erstwhile colleagues and Pres GHW Bush. There was Clines' close friend, the elder TGS, who had risen in the CIA since the early days and who thought he was to follow GHW Bush eventually as DCI, but who was thrown overboard instead. His peculiarly phrased remarques about the anthrax case I quoted above in Post 43.
There are others one could look at too - this doesn't even delve into the Achille Lauro leak or the Libya leak.
Is there a connexion to the 2001 anthrax letters? I don't know..... but there is more substance here than there was in that Greendale School business that garnerred so much attention.
A synopsis:
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