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In November 2004, Michael Mason, then the Assistant FBI Director in charge of the Washington Field Office and the Amerithrax investigation emailed Mr. Lake (see post above):

“I would tell you that any suggestion that the government is covering up for anyone is absolutely, categorically absurd *** I wouldn’t care if you lined up “experts” from every renowned university on earth.. It simply is not true. ***

I and the Amerithrax team are simply not part of some grand conspiracy, the objective of which is to keep the truth from the public..the mere thought is insulting to me and to all the people who have worked so hard on this case for the past three years. I wish this thing were more sexy, but it is not. It is dedicated public servants, some of the absolute best and brightest in this country, working extremely hard to find the person or persons responsible for the anthrax attacks of 2001. It’s just that simple.”

Conspiracy theories, indeed, factor significantly in the discussion of both 9/11 and anthrax. The same people who believe or argue that 9/11 was an inside job and not Al Qaeda, tend to argue that the 9/18 was an inside job and not Al Qaeda. Atta’s father is a classic example. It was only 4 years after the fact that he agreed his son had been involved — and at that time emphasized he was proud of the act of martyrdom.

So there is a grave risk that we face the same sort of failure in critical thinking that led to 9/11.

An FBI Special Agent in the Minneapolis, MN Field Office, Harry Samit unsuccessfully appealed to his superiors for a FISA warrant that would permit him to view the contents of Moussaoui’s computer in the weeks leading up to 9/11. He wrote an August 18, 2001 email : “What does everyone think of calling in the NSDA Behavioral Assessment quacks? They probably have a psych profile for an Islamic Martyr and could tell us if our 747 guys fit.” Samit’s memo had explained that Moussaoui was connected to a radical fundamentalist group in Chechnya, whose leader Ibn Khattab has ties to Bin Laden. “For this reason, it is imperative that his effects be searched in order to gather intelligence relating to these connections and to any plans for terrorist attacks against the United States or United States Persons to which he may be a party.” He wrote: “I am so desperate to get into his computer, I’ll take anything.” A colleague emailed Samit: “ thanks for the update. Very sorry that this matter was handled the way it was, but you fought the good fight. God Help us all if the next terrorist incident involves the same type of plane. take care Cathy.” The emails were dated September 10, 2001.

Authors John Schwartz and Minnesota University Professor Michael Osterholm in a book Living Terror published in December 2000 explain that bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and William Patrick each believed “he was working to match a threat from a resourceful and brilliant enemy. I keep that in mind when people ask me how anyone could do such a terrible thing: how anyone could contemplating creating chances that you could kill so many. The answer makes me terribly uncomfortable — it could be anyone, even the nicest guy you ever met.” Little did they know that just a couple miles from the UMn authors Zacarias Moussaoui had downloaded cropdusting materials.

The FBI’s stock profile concerning a biological agent was a lone, unstable individual. In October 2001, the profilers pretty much just reached into the filing cabinet. One Special Agent involved in profiling such incidents explained in a conference, at which Dr. Steve Hatfill was also a presenter: “The closest I’ve ever come to biological-chemical issues is when the toilet on the 37th floor gets backed up *** It isn’t the Middle Eastern people. It isn’t white supremacists. It is the lone individual, lone unstable individual. That statistically, from the cases that we have, is the biggest threat right now.”

Surprisingly, the profilers did not adjust their thinking based on 9/11 or the open source intelligence that Zawahiri had obtained anthrax for the purpose of weaponizing it for use against US targets. FBI profiler Fitzgerald, however, can be forgiven his flawed profile in early November 2001— the profile was fine but his expanded comments to the press about the profile missed the mark — because such a profile was far more useful in supporting warrants in the US in connection with a variety of leads that prudently needed to be pursued.

It is unlikely that profiling will be a particularly significant portion of any prosecution. It was not in the Unabom case. Kaczynski fits the profile relied upon by the Task Force in many (if not most) respects — but he differed from the profile in several important respects . Kaczynski was not among the top 200 suspects primarily because of his age. He was 13 years older than the age in the profile being relied upon by the Task Force. At the time of the first bomb in May 1978, he was 36. Significantly, although he may have a meticulous mind, he was very unkempt in appearance. It was thought that the serial bomber would be very neat. The UNABOM profile was then substantially revised based on the writings of the bomber. The most important change was that estimates of the bomber’s intelligence were greatly increased. Based on the content of the manifesto, the FBI profilers should have profiled someone who did not rely on technology — someone living in Wild Nature who had no electricity and a garden for self-sufficiency. Sometimes it seems that profilers have a tendency to say counter-intuitive things lest it seem like ordinary common sense.

The FBI profile, according to early reports, concluded that the letter writer is an American but is foreign-born (and not a native english speaker). The emphasis in the press reports, however, has always been on the suggestion that the mailer likely is “domestic” rather than foreign — a lone, male scientist who works in a lab. The profile was issued shortly after the White House meeting where it was agreed that Al Qaeda was the likely culprit, but that the theory and the possibility of a state sponsor would not be discussed. The FBI profile was widely criticized by experts and in editorials in the New York have been made for equipment costing as little as $2,500.

As then Attorney General Ashroft once said, an “either-or matrix” is not useful. “Domestic terrorism” is defined by the Antiterrorism Act of 1991. Judge Harold Baer explained in 2003 in Smith v. Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that in distinguishing “international terrorism,” “[t]he main difference is that domestic terrorism involves acts that “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States,” Here, the anthrax mailings are reasonably understood as involving acts that “occur primarily within the territorial jurisdiction of the United States.” The District Court judge was “mindful that an expansive interpretation of ‘international terrorism’ might render ‘domestic terrorism’ superfluous.” By way of example, was longtime Al Qaeda operative and former US Army sergeant Ali Mohamed “foreign” or “domestic”? Are the young men from Buffalo — most of whom were US citizens and born here — “foreign” or “domestic”? Would a graduate or postdoctoral microbiology student sympathetic to Al Qaeda — living and working in the US — be considered “foreign” or “domestic”? Would an islamist PhD animal geneticist and nutrition researcher living in the US for decades be “foreign” or domestic”? What about an Iraqi-born US citizen Ph.D. expert in bacillus thuringiensis who knew one of the WTC bombers? Or what about the Egyptian who made frequent attempts to obtain maps of the water supply system of Canton, Ohio, and sought books dealing with anthrax? What about a graduate in bioinformatics with access to GMU’s DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense facilities? What about Mohammed Junaid Babar from Queens, whose mother worked at the WTC, who post-9/11 met left the US and met with Al Qaeda’s #3, Zawahiri’s chief aide al-Hadi. And, of course, there is the lovely and pious Aafia Siddiqui from the Brandeis biology department who completed her dissertation in 2001 and remained committed to helping the widows, orphans and refugees of conflicts such as in Bosnia. A hazmat courier who delivered anthrax to Paul Keim’s lab at Northern Arizona was interviewed twice — the first was around March 2002. He says it was in the second interview, around January 2003, that “middle eastern men” became the focus of the FBI’s questions.

An interesting article, “The Knowledge: Biotechnology’s advance could give malefactors the ability to manipulate life processes — and even affect human behavior” in The MIT Technology Review (March/April 2006) is based on interviews with Sergei Popov (an expert at GMU who had worked as a Russian bioweaponeer), University of Maryland researcher Milton Leitenberg, Harvard’s Matthew Meselson, Rutger’s Richard Ebright and others:

“After last year’s bioterrorism conference in DC, I called on Richard Ebright, whose Rutgers laboratory researches transcription initiation (the first step in gene expression), to hear why he so opposes the biodefense boom (in its current form) and why he doesn’t worry about terrorists’ synthesizing biological weapons.

‘There are now more than 300 U.S. institutions with access to live bioweapons agents and 16,500 individuals approved to handle them,” Ebright told me. While all of those people have undergone some form of background check — to verify, for instance, that they aren’t named on a terrorist watch list and aren’t illegal aliens — it’s also true, Ebright noted, that ‘Mohammed Atta would have passed those tests without difficulty.’ “

***

‘That’s the most significant concern,’ Ebright agreed. ‘If al-Qaeda wished to carry out a bioweapons attack in the U.S., their simplest means of acquiring access to the materials and the knowledge would be to send individuals to train within programs involved in biodefense research.’ Ebright paused. ‘And today, every university and corporate press office is trumpeting its success in securing research funding as part of this biodefense expansion, describing exactly what’s available and where.’

The analytical problem is that researchers tend only to focus on their narrow field. So an analyst focused on Al Qaeda may not know anything about US biodefense programs — an analyst knowledgeable about US biodefense programs may not know anything about Egyptian Islamic Jihad. To knowledgeably address the issue of infiltration and the use of universities and charities as cover — which the documentary evidence shows Zawahiri planned to do and did in his anthrax weaponization program — requires a willingness to become knowledgeable and investigate the different substantive areas.

Brian Levin, a domestic terrorism expert at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, once reasoned that “the people committing these acts are foreign-based or have foreign sympathies. It would seem to me to be improbable that a domestic extremist would be able to put together such an attack in such a short period.” Was there something forensically about the anthrax that the FBI was not disclosing relating to the detection of silicon dioxide (silica) that in addition to the strain used, pointed to someone with access to US biodefense information? Was the FBI truly fixated on Hatfill? Or was the media merely fixated on the possible lead they are in the best position to know about? The camera trucks can get to Frederick by the 5 o’clock news and be home in time for dinner. The cooperation of the Pakistan ISI is not required to be able to film the draining of a Maryland pond.

More fundamentally, all the really interesting stuff is classified. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (”FISA”) unit in the Department of Justice has traditionally been known as the “Dark Side.” Everything coming from Khalid Mohammed, according to Agent Van Harp, is classified. To understand the matter, journalists would have to have the cooperation of someone coming over from the Dark Side — which would be a felony. The solution to the Amerithrax case does not likely lie at the intersection of Bin Laden and Saddam streets among those cubicles at Langley with desktop PCs, not unlike any other office. Instead, it lies with the Zawahiri Task Force at Langley which hopefully has an intersection of Ayman Avenue and Rahman Road. If not, we might be looking at a different crossroads altogether.

The Report of the Joint Inquiry Into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001— by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. addresses strategic analysis, training and staffing. Did the agents and analysts in the basement of Quantico who came up with the FBI’s profile have relevant training or input from analysts expert in Al Qaeda? Assuming they did, did an investigative bias creep into their approach to the anthrax mailings that should instead have been informed by a strategic understanding of Zawahiri’s Vanguards of Conquest and its modus operandi? Did the profilers know of the al Hayat letter bombs (related to the imprisonment of the blind sheik) and KSM’s threat to use biochemical weapons in retaliation for the detention of the blind sheik and other militant islamists? Just as with 9/11, the correct understanding of the anthrax mailings begins with a trail that leads back to Malaysia, Khalid Mohammed, Hambali, Yazid Sufaat, Rauf Ahmad, Zacarias Moussaoui, various charities, the Albanian returnees trial, Bojinka, and even the assassination of Anwar Sadat. As George Santayana said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”

Vice-president Cheney explained in mid-October 2001:

“What we do know - we know a number of things. We know that Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda Organization clearly have already launched an attack that killed thousands of Americans. We know that for years he’s been the source of terrorist attacks against the United States overseas, our embassies in East Africa in ‘98 — the USS Cole last year, probably, in Yemen. We know that he has over the years tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical weapons. We know that he’s trained people in his camps in Afghanistan, for example; we have copies of the manuals that they’ve actually used to train people with respect to how to deploy and use these kinds of substances. So, you start to piece it altogether. Again, we have not completed the investigation and maybe it’s coincidence, but I must say I’m a skeptic.”

“I think the only responsible thing for us to do is proceed on the basis that they could be linked. And obviously that means you’ve got to spend time as well, as we’ve known now for some time, focusing on other types of attacks besides the one that we experienced on September 11.”

Critics and supporters alike should check out the new biography on Cheney by Steve Hadley.

In late October 2001, top Administration officials — including CIA Director Tenet — surmised that Al Qaeda was responsible for the anthrax mailings, according to Woodward’s Bush at War: Tenet said, “I think it’s AQ — meaning Al Qaeda. “I think there’s a state sponsor involved. It’s too well thought-out, the powder’s too well refined. It might be Iraq, it might be Russia, it might be a renegade scientist, perhaps from Iraq or Russia.”

One intelligence official has suggested that one reason that the FBI has not emphasized the possibility of a foreign source is that it might require UN involvement in the investigation pursuant to certain biological weapons protocols. The US specifically rejected France’s suggestion in October 2001 that there be a UN resolution condemning the attacks on the grounds that the Security Council had no role to play unless there was clear proof that the perpetrator was foreign. Bob Woodward quotes Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, in explaining why the administration did not acknowledge an al Qaeda link, even though it thought there was one: “If we say it’s al Qaeda, a state sponsor may feel safe and then hit us, thinking they will have a bye, because we’ll blame it on al Qaeda.”

In its March 31, 2005 Report to the President, the Commission on Intelligence Capabilities said: “competing analysis is of no use, even counterproductive, if there is no attempt at constructive dialogue and collaboration.”

In September 2005, Debbie Weierman, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office said that this “globe-spanning investigation remains intensely active and broadly focused.” According to one recent letter to a Congressman rejecting the request for a briefing, the investigation has spanned six out of seven continents. The FBI has conducted 9,100 witness interviews, 67 searches and issued 6,000 grand jury subpoenas.

In a press conference in October 2005, Director Mueller said that the FBI was pursuing all domestic and international leads. He told the public to remember Oklahoma City. Remember 9/11. He declined to say if they had a suspect. That year, FBI agents visited Asia, Africa and Afghanistan in the course of the Amerithrax investigation. You can reach a partial video of FBI Director Mueller’s October 2005 Briefing on the Amerithrax Probe by clicking here.

Attorney General Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18, 2007:

” Senator, Director Mueller, I believe, has offered to get the chairman a briefing. And we’re waiting to try to accommodate the chairman’s schedule to make that happen.

We understand the frustration and the concern that exists with respect to the length of time. This is a very complicated investigation. I know that the director is very committed to seeing it to some kind of conclusion in the relatively near future.”