People are talking about a forthcoming report from Charles Duelfer's Iraq Survey Group, on Iraq's WMD programs. The message appears to be: no stockpiles, most R&D programs frozen, but ready to be reactivated. Of course, I will be waiting to see what the report specifically says about anthrax. Before Saddam was captured, there was this peculiar report in a British paper:
"Two top Iraqi scientists, codenamed Charlie and Alpha, are helping the coalition to learn more about Iraq's anthrax programme, Kay said. The Iraqis had made shocking innovations in the milling and drying processes needed to weaponise anthrax. Almost every week there is a new discovery that boggles your mind, Kay said."
That's David Kay, Duelfer's predecessor. Are we ever going to hear more about these two scientists?
Follow that link and you will see another story about attempts to assassinate or intimidate Iraqi scientists who thought of cooperating with the coalition. And this was all just months after David Kelly was found "dead in the woods" on Iraq's Revolution Day. (According to a British diplomat, Kelly predicted this might happen to him if the war went ahead, and the diplomat "had thought Dr Kelly was talking about possible Iraqi vengeance".)
I've said repeatedly that I think Iraq was al Qaeda's chief sponsor, that this was known or suspected from the beginning, but that it's all supposed to be a big secret. Circumstantial evidence of Iraqi sponsorship can be found in the timing of attacks, in the background of the masterminds, and in the multitude of Iraq/AQ connections that have been reported. The evidence that the US government believed in a connection, under Clinton as well as under Bush, lies in the way that AQ attacks were invariably followed by attacks on Iraq. The evidence that the connection is supposed to be a secret? Those attacks on Iraq were never linked to AQ - usually WMD was the issue. The dodgy way in which some of the alleged Iraq/AQ connections have been rebutted might also count.
There was always the possibility that Duelfer's report would link the 2001 anthrax to Iraq - which would surely link Iraq to everything else, win the election, and discredit the Democrats on national security for a long time. But it looks like that won't happen. So, maybe it's my theorized cover-up in action. Or maybe they just don't have the proof, and never did.
In other news, I've learnt that there's a book out there which does touch on the 9/11-Coptic connection. It's by two "alternative historians", one of whom was born in Egypt. The big idea seems to be that the architecture and layout of many major Western cities contains Hermetic symbolism, due to the centuries-long political influence of Freemasonry. 9/11 turns out to be esoteric warfare, the attack of one secret society on another. My view is that "history as warfare between secret societies" overestimates the historical continuity of conspiratorial politics, and underestimates the significance of everything else. There are conspiratorial cliques in every age, and every civilization has recurring cultural motifs in its history, but I don't believe in secret societies with a stable ideology which last for centuries. Those institutions which do last for centuries undergo major shifts in character and direction.
Despite my misgivings about the book's general worldview, it does contain some useful information about the Egyptian and Jewish calendars, and about 9/11 anniversaries. Notably, it points out that the Wye II memorandum, signed on September 4, 1999 in the Egyptian city of Sharm el-Sheikh, was supposed to come into force a week later, on September 11, which happened to be both the Coptic and the Jewish New Year. (Remember that the date of Rosh Hashanah moves around, and fell on September 18 in 2001, the date on which the first anthrax letters were mailed.)
Wye II is therefore one in a string of events including: the ratification of Sadat's constitution for Egypt on September 11, 1971; the Camp David accords of September 17, 1978; the sectarian discord in Egypt of September 1981, which culminated in Sadat's assassination in October; and the Arafat-Rabin peace accord of September 13, 1993, 15 years after Camp David, negotiated at a time when Sadat's foreign minister, an Egyptian Christian, was UN Secretary-General.
So I find it quite plausible that in the course of the peace process, from the death of Nasser through to the present day, Egyptian Christians have played a major role in building a bridge between Arabs and Israelis, that peace initiatives have been scheduled for September because of the symbolism of the new year, and that the Islamists have interpreted all this as a Judeo-Christian conspiracy against Islam. Since the date of September 11 actually derives from the pagan pharaonic calendar, they could argue with some logic that the peace process is actually satanic paganism triumphant, even if the Coptics now use the date to celebrate the Christian martyrs of Diocletian, rather than the dawn rising of Sirius.
As I said, I don't want to overemphasize the idea of esoteric warfare. Basically, Jews and Egyptian Christians tried to make peace on September 11, and Egyptian Islamists like Atta and Zawahiri chose to make war in response. But I think the basic issues were political (Iraq, Palestine) and exoteric (whose God shall prevail) - it's not occult psychological warfare which only an adept can fathom. But these facts about Wye II and 1999 I think support the theory that 9/11 and the anthrax letters were, from al Qaeda's point-of-view, a symbolic attack on Judeo-Christian civilization, even while they also served the quite earthly strategic goals of al Qaeda's sponsors.