Fox News alert: US fears Iraq has transported GPS guided drones to America

Fox News Channel | 02/24/03 | Brett Baird

[Pokey78]

Drones or pieces of drones that have GPS mapping may have been sent to Iraqi agants in US to spray chem or bio weapons over US cities.

[tet68]

Was looking at a copy of RC Modeler the other day,
Gosh they fly big birds nowadays.
A far cry from when we used to FF or single channel.

[FreeTheHostages]

This reads to me like Iraqi Psych Opps.

[The Great Satan]

I wonder if the terrorists who hijacked the planes on 9/11 had GPS devices on them that led them to our cities?

Apparently, the answer to that question is yes .

Source: Records suggest Atta in NYC on Sept. 10

From Susan Candiotti, May 22, 2002
CNN

MIAMI, Florida (CNN) --The FBI has found credit card receipts that appear to place September 11 hijacker Mohamed Atta in Manhattan the day before the attacks, a source close to the investigation told CNN Wednesday.

Atta is one of the men authorities say hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 and crashed it into the World Trade Center.

Officials speculate Atta may have been in New York on September 10 to make a final visit to the World Trade Center to program the towers' location into a global positioning system, the source said.

So far, however, investigators have been unable to prove he was doing that, the source said. Using satellite technology, GPS is able to locate with pinpoint accuracy any location on Earth.

The source would not say what was purchased with Atta's credit card.

Investigators have traced 27 credit cards to the 19 men who hijacked four airliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field, killing thousands, the source said.

The source also said investigators have determined Atta may have been accompanied to Manhattan on September 10 by Abdulaziz Alomari, also identified as one of the hijackers aboard Flight 11.

They were both photographed by an ATM camera in Portland, Maine, and by a surveillance camera at the Portland airport before boarding a flight to Boston the morning of the terrorist attacks.

Authorities have been working for months to build a paper trail of purchases made by the hijackers in the weeks before September 11.

Sources have said that another of the 19 attackers, Ziad Samir Jarrah, purchased a GPS device at a store in Miami. Investigators say Jarrah was aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania.

Investigators believe at least three other GPS devices were purchased, one for each hijacked plane.

In addition, the federal indictment of alleged would-be hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui -- now facing terrorism charges in a federal court in Virginia -- says he purchased flight deck simulator videos for two types of Boeing 747s on June 25, 2000, from Sporty's, an Ohio pilot's store.

On November 5 and December 11, 2000, Atta also purchased flight deck simulator videos for Boeing 747, 757, 767 and Airbus A3-20 aircraft, authorities said. The videos, which show the cockpits of various airplanes, can be used by pilot students for flight training.

Nawaf Alhazmi, a hijacker on American Airlines Flight 77, which slammed into the Pentagon, also bought flight deck videos from the Ohio store, including simulators for the 747 and 777, according to the indictment.

[Mustang]

Like minds....isn't ESP great?

"Got'cha" by a minute... :-D

btw, Great image!

Mustang sends w/Best FReegards.

[Travis McGee]

I don't think it would take a herculean effort to kill thousands and utterly destroy our economy. Ten Islamikazis in ten cities could do it. They each begin their day dropping 100(invisibly) leaky anthrax laden envelopes in mailboxes, and sending a few FedEx and UPS boxes.

Then they move to the subways, and toss glass jars of spores on a couple of the main lines, the subway trains' rushing through pulling a vacuum ensure dispersal to dozens of platforms and up onto the streets. Plus, its a perfect environment for spores to survive.

Finally, they go for their main targets, sports arenas and major office buildings where they break into fan rooms and break anthrax jars against the air intakes.

If they accomplish half of this, our economy will be totally wrecked.

That is just ten jihadis with 20 one kilo glass jars each, taken from just one hidden cache prepositioned by Iraqi agents (who never know what is in the heavy boxes).

[LilRhody]

but, but, Azziz when in Rome and blew off the Israeli journalist but then answered somewhat snappily the German journalist said that Iraq DOESN'T have the means to bomb anyone.

[babygene]

A drone is nothing more than a large model airplane. Outfiting it with a GPS guidance system would be a cakewalk. My GPS plugs into my laptop, and my laptop can control any number of servos.

For that matter, one would probably just use a small plane with a couple of hundred miles of range. This is a bigger risk than many of you think...

[babygene]

"You can & you can't. Just plugging the GPS into a serial port isn't going to cut it. I mean I can plug our 76S into our laptop to upload and download in waypoints, etc., but in order to control the vehicle (in our case, a boat, but in this case, it's a missle), you'd need the software interface as well, and the software would have to be rewritten, then it'd have to uploaded to the GPS in a format the GPS would accept."

You are wrong about this... All you need is a $150 GPS and a laptop. Hell, you could do it with a palm pilot. The software interface would be trivial...

[Calpernia]

That's if they use anthrax.


The Soviet Smallpox Accident
ew information about an apparent accident in the former Soviet biological weapons testing program three decades ago has raised some troubling questions about our own nation's ability to protect its citizens against a potential terrorist attack. The open-air test of a Soviet smallpox weapon in 1971 caused a small outbreak of the disease in a port on the Aral Sea, in what is now Kazakhstan, even among people who had been vaccinated.

Although Moscow has never acknowledged either the outbreak or the open-air test, researchers at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, with the help of Kazakh officials, have prepared a report on the incident. They conclude that two infants and a young woman, none of whom had been vaccinated, died from a rare hemorrhagic form of smallpox. Seven survivors who had been vaccinated contracted mild to serious cases of the disease. The outbreak was contained by quarantining hundreds of people and vaccinating almost 50,000 residents within two weeks, a demonstration that public health responses can be effective.

The report infers from circumstantial evidence that the outbreak was triggered by airborne viruses from a germ warfare test on an island in the Aral Sea. The viruses infected a crew member on a research vessel that is said to have come within nine miles of the island, and she in turn spread the virus to others in the city of Aralsk. Although some experts think the Aralsk outbreak may have had natural causes, a former general in the Soviet germ warfare program told a Moscow newspaper it had been caused by field-testing of germs.

If that is true, it raises the worrisome possibility that a smallpox attack might be carried out with plumes of germs that could infect large numbers of people simultaneously. The incident also raises the possibility that the Soviet virus was unusually potent and thus able to overcome at least partially the protective effects of vaccination. This makes it imperative that the Bush administration press Russia for full details on what smallpox strain was tested and how it was disseminated. Such knowledge is vital to determine whether new vaccines or drugs might be needed to protect against that strain's falling into the hands of terrorists.

---

One consequence of the end of the U.S. offensive bioweap-ons program in 1969, as a result of the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, was the loss of technical understanding of these weapons. Many scientists believe that such weapons don't work: they are uncontrollable, liable to infect their users, or impractical. A handful of influential scientists also held pas-sionately to the view that the Soviet Union was not violating the Conven-tion-despite intelligence reports that Biopreparat was set up in 1973, the year after the USSR signed the agreement.

Ken Alibek, deputy chief of research and production for Biopreparat before his defection, responded to this view about bioweapons: ``You test them to find out. You learn how to make them work,'' he told Richard Preston. ``I had a meeting yesterday at a defense agency. They knew absolutely nothing about biological weapons. They want to develop protection against them, but all their expertise is in nuclear weapons. I can say I don't believe in nuclear weapons work. Nuclear weapons destroy everything. Biological weapons are more .. beneficial... They don't destroy buildings, they only destroy vital activity.... People'' (New Yorker 3/9/98). The ultimate capitalist weapon?

From the first defector from Biopreparat, Vladimir Pasech-nik, Western intelligence learned that the U.S. was a ``deep target''-far enough away so that the Soviet Union wouldn't be contaminated. Inspectors found the same problem there as in Iraq: denials, evasions, large rooms stripped of equipment. ``These people just sat there and lied to us, and lied, and lied.''

William Patrick, one of a handful of living American scientists with a hands-on understanding of bioweapons, had doubts about whether bioweapons work-until the summer of 1968. At that time, a long series of open-air tests was conducted downwind from Johnston Atoll, as elaborate as the first tests of the hydrogen bomb, involving enough ships to constitute the world's fifth largest navy. The method: a line-source laydown. A Marine Phantom jet flew low, releasing dust from a single pod under its wing.

U.N. inspectors found a videotape of an Iraqi Phantom jet doing a line-source laydown over the desert.

Though the agent used was susceptible to antibiotics, Dr. Patrick pointed out that to treat 30,000 infections in, say, Frederick, MD, would require more than 2 tons of antibiotics, delivered overnight. ``There isn't that much antibiotic stored anywhere in the United States'' (Preston, ibid.).

Then there's the problem of bioengineered smallpox or other agents, also discussed in Preston's article (available at http:// cryptome.org/bioweap.htm).

[sport]

Amen and Amen!

[spodefly]

Kill the source of the drones.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

You can & you can't. Just plugging the GPS into a serial port isn't going to cut it. I mean I can plug our 76S into our laptop to upload and download in waypoints, etc., but in order to control the vehicle (in our case, a boat, but in this case, it's a missle), you'd need the software interface as well, and the software would have to be rewritten, then it'd have to uploaded to the GPS in a format the GPS would accept. They'd have to using more than a commercial GPS--it'd have to be specialized, as well as the guidance software. They'd have to have a military grade GPS that'd survive the degradation of the GPS signals to commercial GPS units.

If they are just going to dumb a biological or chem payload in a populated area, then it doesn't need military-grade accuracy. I would imagine that there are any number of Iraqis who were send over to the US to get their engineering degrees who might be able to make this work.

[Amerigomag]

Astute post.

Keep looking into the Pakistani programs and get back to us. There is a wealth of foreign sourced snippets on the net (in English).

[saminfl]

I suspect that model would probably have a range of 2 or 3 miles.

[af_vet_rr]

Right, like strapping some dynamite to your chest and walking into a public place...I find the whole gps drone thing ridiculous...K.I.S.S.

Exactly. Some of the people in this thread who are going off on these pie-in-the-sky ideas need to sit back and use their heads. Sure, some of these ideas are possible, but let's face it - life is cheap to the terrorists - they can spend a lot of time, money, and risk exposure on building something that may or may not work such as these "drones", or they can do the whole paradise/70 virgin bit, which is guaranteed to spread fear and choas, is simple, hard to trace, and has a proven track record (just ask the Israelis).

[Myrddin]

Even a Loran C based system would be accurate enough for something like this.

I worked with lobster fisheren in the late 70's that claimed Loran C was so good that if they simply matched the values on the display where they originally dropped their lobster pots, they could toss the hook over the side and retrieve the pots reliably. It was much easier with the digital displays vs the old Loran A CRTs where you had to mess with matching rep rates and analog waveforms.

[Myrddin]

IIRC, don't commercial GPSs cut out if the receiver is moving too quickly (built in to prevent the use of commercial GPS for this very thing?

Most commercial GPS units contain 12 parallel receivers. Units intended for use by terrestrial vehicles are usually rated to about 93 knots. You can purchase more expensive units with faster processors for use in an aircraft. Part of the reason for the encrypted channel on the GPS service is the provision of data at 10 times the rate of the C/A channel that is available to civilians. The higher data rate is required to support fast moving vehicles.

[Bob Ireland]

Gosh, Ol' Timer, you must be nearly as decrepit as me! ;-D

Howdy! How's by yoooo?

[Myrddin]

Okay im following part of your explanation here. If the C/A channel is required to make use of the encypted channel then what can be done?

As mentioned by many other posters, the output of any commercial GPS would be adequate to provide the necessary guidance to an R/C controlled model. Saddam has more than enough $$$ to buy good stuff. Vigilance is our weapon. Don't let them fly.