Posted on 03/28/2002 9:10:04 PM PST by knak
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:11 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
March 29
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
....also posted here - mad scientist, aryan hate group, "conservative" extremists etc stc. (sarcasm) - I agree with you though, this seems the most plausible. We just need to ask ourselves why the others were put forth - any ideas
Those envelopes were not filled in someone's garage in south Florida.
Anyone disagree?????????
They were filled in a lab somewhere,
and the paper size indicates,
(along with a million other things)
the lab was not in the USA.
Looks as if poor old Haznawi, and maybe Atta,
got a cutaneous infection from some of the anthrax
that leaked out of the envelopes
while they carried them back to the USA.
The letters were dated 09-11. One thought is that the envelopes probably wouldn't have been prepared as far in advance of Sept. 11 as this suggests, since the date of the WTC/Pentagon attack could always have been changed, for a variety of reasons. (On the other hand, we do have the Bin Ladin Group domain name expiring on 9/11/2001, having been registered on 9/11/2000, so maybe that planned date was considered absolutely definitive and not to be changed.)
If the envelopes had been filled in Florida, the argument goes, there might have been unintended infections of people there, and we don't see that. Or do we? What about the AMI infections? I'm not sure this really makes sense (I can't imagine them filling the envelopes in, say, a room at the AMI Building, after all), but maybe there's something here which would explain the AMI contamination?
Where was Al Haznawi before his arrival in the U.S. on June 8th?
They don't have the low-resolution appearance typically seen in faxes.
What means was there to transport photocopies made in Europe to the U.S. days before 9/11? (Remember, in one of his videotapes last year, bin Laden said he learned about the date of the planned attacks the Thursday before, i.e., Sept. 6th, which just happens to be the day the short selling of the stocks started.) Could they have been transported by Iraqi diplomatic pouch?
I've never read anything that definitive on the short selling. The last article on this I saw said that authorities had been unable to trace down any such transactions and basically relegated the whole thing to the status of rumor. Do you recall the source for the stock market transaction information?
Could they have been transported by Iraqi diplomatic pouch?
As I understand it, diplomatic pouches aren't subject to any kind of customs search, security inspection, or the like. If that's true, it's a natural way to have brought in anthrax (as well as potentially other types of contraband).
I believe I read that selling in put options in United and American Airlines on a suspiciously large scale occurred on the Thursday and Friday before 9/11 on the Web site of Der Spiegel, www.spiegel.de, a week or two after 9/11.
I don't see why the date couldn't have been chosen months in advance, and probably was.
When I am planning a trip abroad, I make my airline reservations first before I make other detailed plans.
If this perp managed to infect himself with anthrax, which anthrax was it? I don't see coming in contact with anthrax of the potentcy and purity of that sent to DC and contracting cutaneous anthrax.
This is far more complicated than what we were led to believe, even laying aside the idea of domestic terrorism.
when and where were the envelopes filled with anthrax?
Many weeks ago I argued on this forum
that the envelopes must have been prepared
long in advance.
If the letters were xeroxed outside the USA,
why would the anthrax be added inside the USA??
Why give the dangerous
(suicidal?)
job of filling the envelopes
to unskilled people without a proper lab
when the envelopes much more easily could be filled
by experts in Baghdad, or wherever?
It seems much more likely
(certain?)
that a control freak like Saddam
(or whoever)
would want to keep tight control over this operation
leaving to Atta only the choice of targets.
Speculation, I know, but reasonable speculation.
Yes, but not strongly. It's possible you're right, and the envelopes were prepared in a lab. However, don't dismiss the garage theory. You don't need something like a lab-grade laminar flow hood to work with anthrax. You can build a glove box out of stuff from Home Depot—a HEPA filter, a pair of chemical gloves, some caulk and a sheet of plywood and some plexiglass—that will be perfectly effective in containing the spores and won't attract the slightest attention on purchase. After the work is done, you burn the plywood and filter cartridge and wash the gloves and plexiglass in bleach, then throw away everything.
That may be true of the letters to Daschle, Leahy, the network news anchors and the New York Post, but I doubt it is true of the letter to American Media. That seems much more likely to have been an ad hoc thing, given the proximity of AMI to the hijacker nest, and the connection to AMI through their landlord. The hijackers' inquiries into the availability of crop-dusters, which so far don't seem to have born any fruit, also hint that the operation may not have been completely choreographed beforehand. I wouldn't read too much into that, however. The 9-11 attacks themselves exhibit extraordinary premeditation and discipline, along with touches of sloppiness. That's probably just real world noise. The first criterion used in selecting the operatives for the mission was that they be willing to die. That cuts down the talent pool quite a bit, right there.
The information I've seen is that Atta went to Spain in July, and that that was the last known trip to Europe by any of the hijackers. I don't know if al-Shehhi accompanied him.
There's some confusion over this trip, though. Atta flew to Spain on July 7, 2001. He rented a car and visited Salou, a resort town in northeastern Spain, on the Mediterranean. Atta is said to have returned to the U.S. on July 19. But, on July 21, somebody by the name of Mohamed Atta tried to visit a prisoner in Tarragona Prison (which is near Salou, at least going by its name).
So, first of all, can the dates be reconciled? Secondly, what was Atta doing at this prison?
One report suggested that false identities are involved, that, in fact, the people whose names we know (Atta, etc.) were using assumed identities. This could explain the date discrepancy perhaps, but it seems like a far-fetched explanation of that. I think the major argument for assumed identities is that so many of the hijackers appear to have been not very Islamic -- many drank alcohol, Jarrah had lived with his girlfriend in Germany, etc. Some have argued that this means that the people whose histories we've read about aren't the same people as the hijackers who went under their names. However, this isn't believable given some of their well-documented un-Islamic activities in the period immediately preceding 9/11. Several of the hijackers were also in touch with their families and friends in the days before 9/11. I think this is more likely to mean that the hijackers weren't so much Islamic extremists as agents of Iraq or Iran or some alliance (which may include al-Qaeda as one member, but which is a loose political alliance, not a tightly-knit group with a monolitihic fundamentalist ideology). (One might even refer to this alliance as an "axis of evil," if one were so inclined.)
In any case, the Spanish prison connection may be of interest.
Hostage or prisoner, it's certainly something like that. But it looks like Israel is doing this more or less on its own. The U.S. is acquiescing in it (and maybe even approves privately), but that's all. (Or maybe this really is the preferred policy of the U.S. at this point, as you seem to be thinking. It's hard to tell. I'm just surprised that it's taken Israel this long, when you think about what they've been living with lately.)
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