Posted on 04/07/2002 8:49:09 AM PDT by Brian Mosely
Edited on 09/03/2002 4:50:15 AM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Last fall FBI profilers announced that the person who sent deadly anthrax-laced letters to news organizations and Capitol Hill was probably a grudge-bearing, sociopathic male laboratory nerd with knowledge of the geography of Trenton, N.J. But a new scientific analysis sent to top government officials suggests the anthrax attacker may be a scientific whiz so smart that he succeeded in making a
(Excerpt) Read more at msnbc.com ...
The anthrax attacks had the effect of providing:
The Ames strain is from Texas, isn't it (in spite of the name)?
You mostly had senior citizens getting killed by this.
Is anthrax just not as big a threat as they're making out?
I don't think it was Iraq, or it would have come out sooner. They have been looking only for Pakistanis so far for the perps. They looked at a house where 4 Pakistanis lived in Trenton, and went into two Pakistani doctors' homes in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Australian newspapers reported they were looking for Pakistanis and only Pakistanis. I think it is quite possible that the I.S.I. created this for bin Laden, and they didn't want that fact coming out while Musharraf was co-operating. So they floated the lone nut right-winger story, because it worked so well in the Okalhoma City bombing.
It could also have been China (among other possibilities). Notice that there's other news today also: The leader of the Liberal Party in Japan stated that Japan could easily and quickly build thousands of nuclear warheads; he made it clear that this was a threat against China.
When all is said and done, I think we will find that Bush's "axis of evil" wasn't just a figure of speech; it was based on his knowledge that we are up against an alliance of other countries.
I've been wondering for some time if, in the end, Japan will save us much as we saved the U.K. in World War II. (The rearmament of Japan, which is inevitable at some point, will change the whole balance of power in the world. Their disarmament was forced on them by the U.S., but it's no longer to our advantage for Japan to be disarmed. Therefore....)
Assessment: An Anthrax Attack on Washington D.C.I remind you that the gist of the article we are discussing is that the sample of anthrax sent to Daschle is of the highest grade of weaponization ever seen, exceeding anything ever developed by the US military.A 1993 report by the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment outlines a possible biological terrorism attack on Washington D.C. The imaginary perpetrators used a small airplane to deliver 100 kg (about 220 pounds) of anthrax spores upwind of the city. The number of fatalities would, according to the estimates, vary greatly depending on the weather conditions. The best-case scenario calculates the number of deaths to somewhere between 130,000 and 460,000. A medium estimation counts 420,000 to 1,400,000. The worst-case scenario recognizes that between 1 million to 3 million persons could die as the result of the attack. A fatality rate similar to, or even higher than, that of a hydrogen bomb.
Don't bother here w/ monkeys, Iraq would easily use humans.
Also let us not forget that at least one of the bombers was treated for anthrax exposure.
No surprise that they went after the media outlets they did.
What did they accompish?
When two sides are in a standoff, both armed with weapons of annihilation, they can bluster and posture all they like. But that's all they do. That's where we are right now, in a nuclear-biological standoff with Iraq.
Or kitchen. This is exactly my thinking. It's one thing for a supposedly brilliant, rogue, mad-scientist type to dream something like this up; it's quite another to actually produce it without sophisticated equipment and chemical compounds and processes that are available only in a pretty high-level lab.
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