Bio Terror ‘Next Threat’ For US

In an exclusive interview, homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff said sources of radioactive and biological materials must be properly secured “at all costs”. Read more

Key senators dispute FBI’s anthrax case against Bruce Ivins

Salon.com | Glenn Greenwald | Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Why People Who Question the Anthrax Attacks Won’t Question 9/11

I think I’ve figured out why many people who question the government’s explanation for the anthrax attacks don’t question the official story about 9/11.

Specifically:

• 9/11 involved much greater loss of life. While 5 people died in the anthrax attacks, close to 3,000 died on 9/11

• None of us have seen gruesome images of the victims of the anthax attacks. But we all watched horrific images of 9/11: planes slamming into buildings, people jumping out of the Twin Towers, the Towers collapsing . . .

• 9/11 was the first attack on the U.S. by “foreign terrorists”. As such, it was the point at which America took the fork in the road away from traditional notions of liberty, justice and the Geneva Convention and towards the “war on terror”

9/11 and the anthrax attacks - and the government’s “investigation” into both - were actually very similar in many ways (as I will show in a later essay).

Many people can see how ridiculous the government’s case against Dr. Bruce Ivins as the “sole culprit” is. With 5 dead and no gruesome images, and occuring after the “war on terror” was already underway, the anthrax attacks are something that people can think about rationally.

But many people are so traumatized by the thousands of deaths, the overwhelming and horrible images, and the unique status of 9/11 as the day when “we were attacked and everything changed”, that they are still in shock and still trying to suppress the fear and pain. They simply will not allow themselves to honestly and fully investigate 9/11, but are still reacting out of primal emotions.

George Washington’s Blog | Monday, August 18, 2008

Scott Horton interviews Glenn Greenwald on FBI’s smear campaign against dead physicist Bruce Ivins

Scott Horton Interviews Glenn Greenwald

August 5th, 2008

Glenn Greenwald, author and legal blogger for Salon.com, discusses his new radio show, new developments in the 2001 anthrax case, the FBI’s smear campaign against dead physicist Bruce Ivins, media trumpeting of government claims, the widespread fear created and power gained by the anthrax attacks and questions about Washington insiders’ taking Cipro before the attacks.

MP3 here. (35:50)

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling books How Would a Patriot Act? and A Tragic Legacy. His brand new one is Great American Hypocrites.

Antiwar | Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Ivins was anthrax killer, US says; shows documents

Army scientist Bruce Ivins “was the only person responsible” for anthrax attacks in 2001 that killed five and rattled the nation, the Justice Department said Wednesday, backing the claim with dozens of documents all pointing to his guilt.

Documents made public alleged that Ivins, who committed suicide last week, had sole custody of highly purified anthrax spores with “certain genetic mutations identical” to the poison used in the attacks. Investigators also said they had traced back to his lab the type of envelopes used to send the deadly spores through the mails.

Ivins killed himself last week as investigators closed in, and U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said, “We regret that we will not have the opportunity to present evidence to the jury.”

The prosecutor’s news conference capped a fast-paced series of events in which the government partially lifted its veil of secrecy in the case that followed closely after the airliner terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The newly released records depict the scientist as deeply troubled, bordering on desperation as he confronted the possibility of being charged.

“He said he was not going to face the death penalty, but instead had a plan to kill co-workers and other individuals who had wronged him,” according to one affidavit.

The affidavits also said Ivins submitted false anthrax samples to the FBI, was unable to give investigators “an adequate explanation for his late laboratory work hours around the time of” the attacks and sought to frame unnamed co-workers.

He was also said to have received immunizations against anthrax and yellow fever in early September 2001, several weeks before the first anthrax-laced envelope was received in the mail.

The documents were released as the FBI held a private briefing for families of the victims of the episode, and officials said the agency was preparing to close the case.

“We are confident that Dr. Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks,” Taylor told a news conference at the Justice Department.

Noting that Ivins would have been entitled to a presumption of innocence, Taylor nevertheless said prosecutors were confident “we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Ivins’ attorney, Paul Kemp, has repeatedly asserted his late client’s innocence.

The events in Washington unfolded as a memorial service was held for Ivins at Fort Detrick, the secret government installation in Frederick, Md., where he worked. Reporters were barred.

More than 200 pages of documents were made public by the FBI, virtually all of them describing the government’s attempts to link Ivins to the crimes.

“It is a very compelling case,” said Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., who attended a briefing for lawmakers and staff.

The government material describes at length painstaking scientific efforts to trace the source of the anthrax that was used in the attacks.

It says that in his lab, Ivins had custody of a flask of anthrax termed “the genetic parent” to the powder involved - a source that investigators say was used to grow spores for the attacks on “at least two separate occasions.”

Anthrax culled from the letters was quickly discovered to be the so-called Ames strain of bacteria, but with genetic mutations that made it distinct. Scientists developed more sophisticated tests for four of those mutations, and concluded that all the samples that matched came from a single batch, code-named RMR-1029, stored at Fort Detrick.

Ivins “has been the sole custodian of RMR-1029 since it was first grown in 1997,” said one affidavit.

Powder from anthrax-laden letters sent to the New York Post and Tom Brokaw of NBC contained a bacterial contaminant not found in the anthrax-containing envelopes mailed to Sens. Patrick Leahy or Tom Daschle, the affidavit said.

Investigators concluded that “the contaminant must have been introduced during the production of the Post and Brokaw spores,” the affidavit said.

The documents disclosed that authorities searched Ivins’ home on Nov. 2, 2007, taking 22 swabs of vacuum filters and radiators and seizing dozens of items. Among them were video cassettes, family photos, information about guns and a copy of “The Plague” by Albert Camus.

Investigators also reported seizing three cardboard boxes labeled “Paul Kemp … attorney client privilege.”

Ivins’ cars and his safe deposit box also were searched as investigators closed in on the respected government scientist who had been troubled by mental health problems for years.

According to an affidavit filed by Charles B. Wickersham, a postal inspector, the scientist told an unnamed co-worker “that he had `incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times’ and ‘feared that he might not be able to control his behavior.’”

A mental health worker who was involved in treating Ivins disclosed last week that she was so concerned about his behavior that she recently sought a court order to keep him away from her.

Allegations that Ivins sought to mislead investigators ran through the material made public.

One FBI document said Ivins “repeatedly named other researchers as possible mailers and claimed that the anthrax used in the attacks resembled that of another researcher” at the same facility.

The name of the other researcher was not disclosed.

Stephen A. Hatfill’s career as a bioscientist was ruined after then-Attorney General John Ashcroft named him a “person of interest” in the probe. The government recently paid $6 million to settle a lawsuit by Hatfill, who worked in the same lab.

The documents made public painted a picture of Ivins seeking to mislead investigators beginning in 2002, when he allegedly submitted the wrong samples to FBI investigators.

It wasn’t until more than two years later, in March 2005, that he was confronted with the alleged switch, according to U.S. Postal Inspector Thomas Dellafera, who added that Ivins insisted he had not sought to deceive.

The documents, which were expected to shed light on many of the mysteries surrounding the case, were released following an order from U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. Among them were more than a dozen search warrants issued as the government closed in on Ivins in an investigation into the terrifying mail poisonings a few weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Lamberth ordered the release after consultation with Amy Jeffress, a national security prosecutor at the Department of Justice.

The investigation dates to 2001, when anthrax-laced mail turned up in two Senate offices as well as news media offices and elsewhere. At the time, the events were widely viewed as the work of terrorists, and delivery of mail was crippled when anthrax spores were discovered in mailing equipment that had processed the contaminated envelopes.

The FBI’s investigation had dragged on for years, tarnishing the reputation of the agency in the process.

AP | LARA JAKES JORDAN and MATT APUZZO | Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Bruce Ivins: The Movie; Anthrax mystery: the FBI/media narrative is laughable - and sinister

It sounds like a very bad made-for-television movie: a mad scientist – a violent sociopath, a “nerd with a dark side,” who had already tried to kill several people, is obsessed with pornography, and is fixated on a particular college sorority – unleashes a strain of deadly anthrax through the U.S. mail, killing five, infecting 17 others, and terrorizing the country. His motive, aside from sheer antisocial vindictiveness: he holds the patent for an anthrax vaccine, and he also wants to direct the nation’s attention to the supposedly overlooked and underfunded problem of bio-terrorism. That’ll teach ‘em!

It reads like some pretty execrable fiction, yet the FBI is peddling this farrago of shopworn clichés as the facts surrounding the alleged guilt of Bruce E. Ivins, whose suicide the other day ostensibly closes the 7-year-old anthrax terrorism case that has baffled investigators and shone a cruel light on the Bureau’s methods and standards of conduct.

The real topper has got to be the “sorority obsession” supposedly nursed by Ivins – a mild-mannered family man universally liked by his co-workers and neighbors. This is the sort of B-movie script beloved by Hollywood, wherein the upstanding bourgeois father of two and devoted husband is really a psychopathic slime-ball just beneath the surface, seething with resentment and even hatred of women who rejected his advances in the past – a male version of Carrie, who rises up in his true garb as the virtual incarnation of misanthropy to wreak vengeance on the female sex, and the world.

This passes muster in Hollywood, of course, since it embodies all the social prejudices so beloved by that temple of cultural corruption, yet in the real world one looks at it askance and wonders: are these guys kidding? Because this scenario has very little if anything to do with the known facts. The only connection the anthrax letters have to the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority is the fact that the New Jersey letters were mailed from a post office box not far from where the Princeton chapter keeps a storage locker. No kidding: that is the connection, in toto. So even if Ivins did indeed have an unusual interest in this sorority – supposedly because one of its members once rejected him back when he was a student at the University of Cincinnati – what this storage locker has to do with anything, including his alleged motives, is known only to those geniuses over at the FBI.

Clearly, the whole purpose of bringing this sorority angle up is to smear a dead man as a pervert and cast him in the sinister light suitable for the villain in this crude media narrative. The pornography angle serves the same purpose: Ivins apparently rented a mail box under another name, which he used to receive photos of blindfolded women, presumably in suggestive poses.

No, not very pretty – but so what? How does this make him the anthrax murderer?

Another element of this grade-B thriller is the “scientific” faux-Sherlock Holmes aspect of Ivins’ unmasking as the alleged killer. According to all those anonymous FBI and other government officials, who are leaking faster than they ever moved on this case, new scientific techniques that weren’t available during the Steven Hatfill fiasco have definitively traced the particular strain of anthrax used in the attacks back to a single flask in Ivins’ lab. We’re given all sorts of scientific-sounding gobbledygook to make the “evidence” sound convincing, but the fact remains that at least 12 other people at Ft. Detrick, not to mention other labs around the country, had access to the contents of that flask. For all the “genome tracing” and scientific detective work conducted by the FBI over a period of years, the reality is that they can trace the anthrax to a particular lab – but not, as several experts have pointed out, to a particular person. That would require real detective work of the gumshoe variety, as opposed to farming it out to scientists, many of whom are (or were) on the FBI’s suspect list. (Ivins himself was recruited to this task.)

Yet the FBI is not that concerned with the facts: what they’re after is a good story, one that the media – and therefore, they think, the public – will swallow without thinking about it too much. Oh yeah, that obsessive nut with the fixation on blindfolded sorority babes – obviously the sort to go a on rampage, and, unfortunately, he just happened to have access to the most horrific toxins known to mankind, courtesy of the U.S. government. They aren’t trying to convince a jury; after all, the guy is dead. The FBI and those in the administration who used the anthrax attacks to stoke up a war just want to convince the American public, a group they obviously hold in such low regard that they don’t bother with such niceties as logic and real evidence. Just tell them a story, and make it a good one – oh, and be sure to spice it up with sex. That’ll do the trick.

Except it won’t. The deceased scientist’s colleagues and friends are rising to his defense, and the truth about how the FBI persecuted Ivins – and effectively drove him to suicide, in my view quite deliberately – is now coming out. They gave Ivins the full Hatfill treatment: agents followed him everywhere, abusing him, giving him the finger, and intruding on his private space to an extent that seems almost inconceivable. Yet apparently it’s all perfectly legal in this era of the PATRIOT Act, a brazen assault on the constitutional rights of all Americans made possible in large part by the anthrax attacks and the atmosphere of hysterical fear they engendered.

Now I want to venture into some territory that is wild, to be sure, but no wilder than the anthrax letters themselves. I want to emphasize that this is just pure speculation on my part, or, more accurately, an interesting angle that could have significance – yet I hope not.

A number of the recent articles on the anthrax attacks have remarked on how the various targets seem curiously unrelated: the phrase “little in common” is often employed. And yet – and yet…

To begin with, targets Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy aren’t just any old U.S. senators. They’re Democrats, and, what’s more, they are – or, in Daschle’s case, were – leaders of the congressional Democratic caucus. Daschle was leader of the Democratic majority in the Senate, and Leahy was – and is – head of the powerful Senate Judiciary Committee, a post he used to his party’s maximum advantage.

Both of these men, in addition, were major obstacles to the passage of the PATRIOT Act, with Daschle refusing to grant the administration the unlimited power it sought. Together with Leahy, Daschle led the opposition to the original version of the bill, which had no expiration date. The Democrats, particularly Daschle and Leahy, argued in favor of a two-year expiration date, but after their Senate offices were targeted by the anthrax killer, both thought better of it and compromised on a four-year extension.

Far from having “little in common,” as the conventional media spinmeisters would have it, these two men shared their staunch opposition to the Bush administration’s brazen attempt to trample the Constitution underfoot and seize power for themselves.

Yes, but what about the anthrax killers’ media targets? NBC one could arguably describe as either centrist, or mildly liberal, but what about the New York Post and the National Enquirer, one a rightist daily owned by Rupert Murdoch and the other an iconic gossip sheet whose name is a synonym for journalism of the yellowest sort? These two targets seem to have nothing in common, aside from a certain tabloid flair.

Yet they do, indeed, share a certain focus, at least when it comes to one very particular subject, and I owe this insight to the anonymous “Allie,” posting on the Newsgarden.org Web site. The Enquirer has published a lot of photos of celebrities caught-in-the-act, so to speak, and one of these was of Jenna Bush, falling-down drunk and rolling around on the floor with another female for the delectation of the attending fraternity boys. The New York Post was another source for this specialized genre. As “Allie” puts it: “If you go to their search page and do a search for Jenna what you come up with is a plethora of articles on the Boozing Bush Twins. More and worse than anything published in The National Enquirer.”

“Allie” then goes on to list the Post’s prolific output of bad-girl-Jenna pieces, with such lurid titles as “Busted Bush Babes Make Different Booze Pleas,” “Double Shot: Bush Twins Both Nailed,” “Jenna Comes ‘Clean’: Beer Bush Babe Faces Garbage Duty,” and a little editorial comment to stick the knife in all the way: “Reign in These Bush Leaguers,” by Linda Stasi.

As “Allie” shows, all of the intended targets of the anthrax attacks did indeed have one thing in common: in some manner or other, they had crossed the Bush family, either in a very personal way (the first victims at the Enquirer and the Post), or else politically, in the cases of Daschle and Leahy. As far as the latter two are concerned, it wasn’t just their status as Democratic Party leaders, but their active opposition to the Bush agenda during the PATRIOT Act debate, that mattered.

As for Tom Brokaw, “Allie” points out that, prior to receiving the deadly anthrax-laden missive, and as the country was still reeling from the impact of 9/11, Brokaw had been approached by administration insiders not to run an interview with Bill Clinton, but he went ahead and did it anyway, thus incurring the Bushies’ wrath.

Yes, there were many more victims of the anthrax attacks, with five killed and 17 injured. Leahy and Daschle were unharmed, as was Brokaw, but the Enquirer was hit hard, and – given “Allie’s” thesis – right on target.

In any case, a certain pattern of the intended targets emerges. I can’t paraphrase the passion behind Allie’s analysis, so I’ll let him speak for himself:

“Who had a motive? Who had a grudge against The Enquirer and the New York Post? Who had a grudge against Brokaw? Who wanted to frighten or manipulate Congress? First to get it to adjourn indefinitely, leaving Bush with the power of the purse. Second to get the PATRIOT Act passed in all its fascist glory, without even being read. Who?

“It’s as plain as the nose on your face. Why is the major media pussyfooting around it? Are they still terrified?”

I have to say I don’t see any real evidence for any of this, beyond the wildly circumstantial – and, in that respect, the basis of “Allie’s” thesis is no different from the “evidence” marshaled by the FBI against Dr. Ivins. Except that, of the two narratives, the FBI’s tale of a porn-obsessed sorority-house lurker and mad scientist is a lot less believable.

What is all too believable, however, is the abuse endured by Ivins and his family, as related by the New York Times:

“They had even intensively questioned his adopted children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24, with the authorities telling his son that he might be able to collect the $2.5 million reward for solving the case and buy a sports car, and showing his daughter gruesome photographs of victims of the anthrax letters and telling her, ‘Your father did this,’ according to the account Dr. Ivins gave a close friend.

“As the investigation wore on, some colleagues thought the FBI’s methods were increasingly coercive, as the agency tried to turn Army scientists against one another and reinterviewed family members.

“One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Dr. Ivins’ daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

‘”It was not an interview,’ Dr. Byrne said. ‘It was a frank attempt at intimidation.’

“Dr. Byrne said he believed Dr. Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. ‘They figured he was the weakest link,’ Dr. Byrne said. ‘If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?’”

Well, they didn’t arrest him because there wasn’t enough evidence. So they drove him to suicide, as the only alternative to confessing to a crime he didn’t commit. The kind of treatment Ivins had to endure at the hands of the FBI and other government agencies would have broken anyone, and, by all accounts, he was truly broken at the end, crying at his desk, suffering at least two breakdowns, and finally giving up the life that, in his view, had become hardly worth living. Why they wanted him dead, or in jail, is the core of the mystery at the center of this horrific episode in the annals of “law enforcement.” It’s hard to believe this would be done merely to show that the FBI is on the job, protecting the nation from terrorists and other evildoers: their monumental incompetence, which some have interpreted as having more sinister implications, had practically ruined their reputation. Yet why pick on Ivins? It had to be more than just the “weak link” thesis put forward by his friend Dr. Byrne.

As I wrote on Monday, the longevity of Ivins’ career at Ft. Detrick – 36 years – gave him a bird’s-eye view of that troubled facility’s deepest and darkest secrets, including the series of events that took place in the 1990s, when all sorts of pathogens were apparently spirited out of the place and unauthorized experiments were carried out by freelancers employed by USAMRIID.

Did they drive Ivins to suicide because he knew too much? I don’t rule out some degree of involvement by Ivins, perhaps amounting only to knowledge of whom the perpetrators might be. However, in my view, he’s taking the fall for those who planned and executed the first biological attack on American soil. Surely a lone nut could not have carried out this technically difficult and logistically complicated scheme to terrorize an entire nation on the eve of such momentous events. That isn’t “conspiracism” – it’s common sense. With the exoneration of Steven Hatfill and the posthumous demonization of an apparently innocent man, the country is waking up to the importance of the previously nearly forgotten anthrax story – which, I might add, we’ve pursued in this space with some regularity year after year.

~ Justin Raimondo

Antiwar | Justin Raimondo | Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Suskind: Bush ordered fake letter linking Iraq to 9/11

Author: Only White House reaction is ‘calling me names’

A blockbuster new book from investigative journalist Ron Suskind adds another revelation to the growing canon demonstrating the lengths to which President Bush and members of his administration lied, misled and deceived the American people to pursue its invasion of Iraq.

Bush allegedly ordered the CIA to forge a handwritten letter from the head of Iraq’s intelligence service to Saddam Hussein that purported to link the Iraqi dictator to the ringleader of the hijackers who toppled the Twin Towers on 9/11, according to news accounts of Suskind’s new book, The Way of the World: A Story of Truth and Hope in an Age of Extremism. Such use of an intelligence service to influence domestic political debate could be an impeachable offense, Suskind writes.

Politico’s Mike Allen reports:

According to Suskind, the administration had been in contact with the director of the Iraqi intelligence service in the last years of Hussein’s regime, Tahir Jalil Habbush al-Tikriti.

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.” [...]

The author claims that such an operation, part of “false pretenses” for war, would apparently constitute illegal White House use of the CIA to influence a domestic audience, an arguably impeachable offense.

The faked letter was first reported as genuine by the conservative London Sunday Telegraph in December 2003. Right-wing commentators and Bush defenders harped on that disclosure as evidence of Saddam Hussein’s involvement in the 9/11 attacks. According to Suskind’s book, the CIA had been protecting Habbush in the early months of the invasion; the agency persuaded the Iraqi intelligence chief to write the letter in his own handwriting and paid him $5 million.

CBS White House correspondent Bill Plante reported Tuesday that Suskind’s sources had seen a draft of the letter written on White House stationary.

Suskind outlined his findings further in a Huffington Post diary Tuesday:

The Iraq Intelligence Chief, Tahir Jalil Habbush — a man still carrying with $1 million reward for capture, the Jack of Diamonds in Bush’s famous deck of wanted men — has been America’s secret source on Iraq. Starting in January of 2003, with Blair and Bush watching, his secret reports began to flow to officials on both sides of the Atlantic, saying that there were no WMD and that Hussein was acting so odd because of fear that the Iranians would find out he was a toothless tiger). The U.S. deep-sixed the intelligence report in February, “resettled” Habbush to a safe house in Jordan during the invasion and then paid him $5 million in what could only be considered hush money.

In the fall of 2003, after the world learned there were no WMD — as Habbush had foretold — the White House ordered the CIA to carry out a deception. The mission: create a handwritten letter, dated July, 2001, from Habbush to Saddam saying that Atta trained in Iraq before the attacks and the Saddam was buying yellow cake for Niger with help from a “small team from the al Qaeda organization.”

The mission was carried out, the letter was created, popped up in Baghdad, and roiled the global newcycles in December, 2003 (conning even venerable journalists with Tom Brokaw). The mission is a statutory violation of the charter of CIA, and amendments added in 1991, prohibiting CIA from conduction disinformation campaigns on U.S. soil.

The Way of the World is Suskind’s third book on the inner workings of the Bush administration, joining The One Percent Doctrine, which outlined the often extreme anti-terror policies advanced by the likes of Vice President Dick Cheney, and The Price of Loyalty, which painted a picture of the early day’s of Bush’s presidency with the help of ousted former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill.

Predictably, the White House is unhappy with Suskind’s latest offering and the Bush administration is relying on its trademark push-back of insulting the messenger. White House spokesman Tony Fratto insulted Suskind, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his work with the Wall Street Journal, as a practitioner of “gutter journalism,” and called the allegations “absurd.”

Such a reaction is merely aimed at downplaying the impact of Suskind’s explosive revelations, the author says.

“So, here we go again: the administration full attack mode, calling me names, George Tenet is claiming he doesn’t remember any such thing — just like he couldn’t remember “slam dunk” — and reporters are scratching their heads,” Suskind writes at Huffington Post. “Everything in the book is on the record. Many sources. And so, we watch and wait….”

Suskind appeared Tuesday on NBC’s Today Show for interviews about the latest book.

This video is from NBC’s Today Show, broadcast August 5, 2008.

Download video This video is from CBS’ Early Show, broadcast August 5, 2008. Download video Raw Story | David Edwards and Nick Juliano | Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Marching Off Into Tyranny

In last weekend’s edition of CounterPunch, Alexander Cockburn updates the ongoing persecution of Sami Al-Arian by federal prosecutors. Al-Arian was a Florida university professor of computer science who was ensnared by the Bush Regime’s need to produce “terrorists” in order to keep Americans fearful and, thereby, amenable to the Bush Regime’s assault on US civil liberties.

	Sami Al-Arian is a fabricated terrorist created by federal prosecutors and judges in behalf of an undeclared agenda.

The charges against Al-Arian were rejected by a jury, but the Bush Regime could not accept the obvious defeat. If Al-Arian was not a terrorist, then other of the Bush Regime’s fabricated cases might fall apart, too.

In open view, the US Department of Justice (sic) proceeded to trash every known ethical rule of prosecution. I don’t need to repeat the facts, as they are covered by Cockburn’s articles and in The Tyranny of Good Intentions.

Instead, I want to point out another meaning of the Al-Arian case. The Justice (sic) Department itself knows that it is persecuting a totally innocent person for reasons of a political agenda–the need to convince gullible Americans of an ongoing terrorist threat. The existence of this threat is used to justify the Bush Regime’s adoption of police state measures, such as spying on Americans without warrants, arresting them without charges, and refusing to let go of them when they are cleared by juries.

Sami Al-Arian is a fabricated terrorist created by federal prosecutors and judges in behalf of an undeclared agenda. The Al-Arian case proves that terrorists are in short supply and that the Bush Regime has had to create them out of total innocents. The “war on terror” is a hoax used to justify war crimes and the overthrow of America’s civil liberties.

The anthrax scare is one more example of the Bush Regime’s use of disinformation to advance an undeclared political agenda. As Glenn Greenwald reminded us last week in Salon, the Bush Regime used Brian Ross at ABC News to spread the lie far and wide that US government tests proved that the anthrax mailed to various Americans, including prominent US Senators, was made in Iraq by Saddam Hussein. This lie was essential for scaring Congress into passing the Bush Regime’s Gestapo laws, such as the PATRIOT Act, and for overcoming opposition to invading Iraq.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/print.html

When it leaked out that the anthrax actually came from a US government lab, the Bush Regime tried to frame a US scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, but failed. On June 28th, the Los Angeles Times reported that Hatfill, “The former Army scientist who was the prime suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax mailings agreed Friday to take $5.82 million from the government to settle his claim that the Justice Department and the FBI invaded his privacy and ruined his career.” Indeed, U.S. District Court Judge Reggie B. Walton allowed Hatfill’s attorneys two years to review all news reports and FBI evidence. Judge Walton stated: “there is not a scintilla of evidence that would indicate that Dr. Hatfill had anything to do with this.” http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-anthrax28-2008jun28,0,5742061.story

The anthrax matter was again news last week when another US government scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, “committed suicide.” Instantly, the deceased Ivins was fingered as the culprit. Overnight a man, liked and respected by his colleagues, who had worked on American biological warfare weapons for years, became a deranged homicidal maniac who decided to murder Americans at random in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 by sending them letters containing anthrax.

I don’t believe a word of it. But assume that it is true. Blaming the anthrax letters on Ivins does not resolve the issue of why the Bush Regime lied to Brian Ross and used ABC to put the blame on Saddam Hussein in order to invade an innocent country.

Wouldn’t a government that would lie about something this serious lie about other serious matters?

The Bush Regime stands against against the truth. That is why it pretends to have the power to prevent executive branch officials wanted for questioning by Congress from appearing before the people’s representatives. Nothing could make clearer the contempt that the Bush Regime has for the American people and their elected representatives than its arrogant claim that it is unanswerable to them.

Obviously, neither the President nor the Vice President respect their oaths of office. If they will betray such a serious oath, won’t they lie about everything, even 9/11 itself?

According to the discredited 9/11 Commission Report, a few Muslims hatched a multi-year plot that went undetected by the vast security agencies of the United States and its allies, and within one hour on one morning at four different locations defeated airport security, NORAD, the US Air Force, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, the Pentagon’s defenses and crashed three hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center towers and the heart of the US military. Muslims were able to achieve this fantastic feat operating out of caves in Afghanistan.

We now know for a fact that the “terrorist anthrax attack” had nothing whatsoever to do with Muslim terrorists. Even the US Government now blames white American citizens, employees of the federal government, for the anthrax letters that, at the time, were blamed on the “Osama bin Laden al Qaeda plot against America.”

We now know for a fact that this was intentional disinformation planted by the Bush Regime on a gullible and incompetent ABC News reporter, who is a disgrace to journalism. No one denies this.

We also know for a fact that ABC News will not say who planted on ABC the lies that committed the United States to the dishonor of an illegal invasion, war crimes, and executive branch attack on the US Constitution. How can anyone anywhere in the world rely on ABC News when it serves as a disinformation agency for a criminal regime?

One logical conclusion is that the anthrax attack was part of the same false flag operation that pulled off 9/11. The anthrax letters made the “terrorist attack” seem wider and more general. This increased the sense of peril and Americans’ fear and anger, thereby opening wider the door for the Bush Regime’s attack on Iraq and US civil liberty.

Now that the dead Ivins can be conveniently blamed for the anthrax mailings, the Bush Regime can declare the case closed, thus protecting the false flag operation from further risk of exposure.

Many Americans lack the mental and emotional strength to confront the facts. The facts are too unsettling and many are relieved when the “mainstream media” spins the facts away. Many Americans find it too appalling that any part of “their” government, even a rogue operation, could possibly have been involved in any way in the 9/11 or anthrax attacks. No evidence–not even full confessions–could convince them otherwise. Many Americans have welcomed their brainwashing by the neoconservatives: America is pure; her shining virtue causes evil men to attack her; they hate us because we are good and they are evil.

For the sake of argument, let’s accept this make-believe. It does not explain why, in order to protect us from evil men, the US Constitution needs to be dismantled and civil liberties set aside. Our Founding Fathers said that dismantling the Constitution and setting aside civil liberties are precisely what would make us unsafe in the extreme. The Bush Regime has never explained how the civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution interfere with any legitimate response to terrorism.

The fact still remains that the Bush Regime responded to 9/11 and anthrax letters with a comprehensive assault on US civil liberty. The Bush Regime’s assault on America has been much more successful than its assault on “terrorism.” Who remembers the promise of a “six weeks war”? Americans have been mired for 6 years in two wars without end which the neoconned Bush Regime, in alliance with Israeli zionists, seeks to expand to Iran, Pakistan, Syria, and Lebanon. The Republican candidate for president has given his commitment to a 100-year “war against terrorism.” Many Americans will vote for this candidate who wants to fight against a hoax for 100 years.

In The Twilight of Democracy: The Bush Plan for America, Jennifer Van Bergen explains the constitutional and legal principles on which American liberty is based and the Bush Regime’s intense assault on these principles. Part I of her book sets out the Constitutional principles that are under attack. Part II details the systematic attack on the US Constitution that is the heart and soul of the Republican neoconservative Bush Regime–and a Regime it is as it asserts that it is above the law and unanswerable to law, Congress, the federal courts, and the Constitution that it is sworn to uphold

Jennifer Van Bergan likens Bush and his brownshirt supporters to Julius Caesar in motives, though not in courage. She cites the poet Lucan who in his work Pharsalia described Caesar as he flouted the law of the Roman Republic and crossed the Rubicon with his army: “When Caesar crossed and trod beneath his feet the soil of Italy’s forbidden fields, ‘here,’ spake he, ‘peace, here broken laws be left; Farewell to treaties. Fortune, lead me on; War is our judge.’”

Anyone who believes that the Bush Regime’s “war on terror” is about terrorism, oil, getting even with those who attacked us, bringing freedom and democracy to Muslims–whatever rationale makes the gratuitous war crimes committed by the Bush Regime acceptable to gullible Americans–needs to read Jennifer Van Bergan’s Bush Plan for America. Nothing less than American liberty is at stake.

The hour is late. Gullible Americans are being marched off into tyranny as the promised land of safety.

Information Clearing House | Paul Craig Roberts | Tuesday, August 5, 2008

The Hidden Anthrax Letters Suspect

August 3, 2008

The FBI knows of a man who was caught entering the lab where the Anthrax used in the letters was kept, after he had been fired for a racially motivated attack on a co-worker. So, why is the FBI wasting its time with Steven Hatfill?

History teaches us that since the dawn of the industrial age, all wars have been started with deceptions and manufactured provocations. Hitler staged a fake attack from Poland to start WW2. FDR maneuvered Japan into attacking the fleet at Pearl Harbor then presented the attack as a total surprise to the American people.

News Story identifying Dr. Philip Zack as the man caught entering the Anthrax storage area at Fort Detrick without authorization.

In this story, it is reported that Dr. Zack was caught on a security tape making an unauthorized entry into the Anthrax storage area.

Foreign press picks up story that Anthrax letters were sent by American bio-war scientist … and that the FBI is dragging its feet on the case.

FBI’S PRIME SUSPECT ON ANTHRAX LETTERS IS JEWISH! No wonder they were dragging their feet.

Salon’s story of the attempt to frame Dr. Ayaad Assaad, an Egyptian, for the Anthrax letters

Already the hate email is pouring in insisting that coverage of this story is “anti-Semitic”. Clearly, a certain nation is terrified of this story getting wide coverage.

The time has come to face the unpleasant fact the citizens of the United States may well be the victims of the most incredible hoax in history regarding who is really behind the attacks on the World Trade Towers, the mailing of Anthrax letters to political and media leaders, and even to doubts that Daniel Pearl’s killers are actually who we have been told they are.

The fact is that evidence presented to the public as to who was behind 9-11 is largely faked while evidence that links the Israeli Spy/Phone Tapping Ring to the attacks has been classified by the US Government itself, as reported in Carl Cameron’s four part story on the spy ring on Fox News (subsequently erased from the mainstream media’s web sites).

“reports that Israel was conducting spying activities in the United States may have a grain of truth Note the of second paragraph from the bottom of this story in which a US official admits that even if the Israelis were running a spy ring in the United States, the information would be kept from the American people.

The time has come to seriously consider that the American people are being tricked into a war. Such things are hardly new. Recently declassified documents prove beyond al doubt that Pearl Harbor was not only NOT a surprise, but was the desired result of an 8 step ONI plan written by Arthur H. McCollum and implemented by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, in order to trick the people of the United States into a war against Hitler, via the back door of Japan. And according to Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent, the bombing of Libya during the Reagan administration was the result of a trick played by the Mossad in which a radio transmitter was smuggled into Tripoli and used to create fake radio messages for the US to intercept. The motto of the Mossad is, “By way of deception, thou shalt do war”.

The Israeli government has a history of tricking the United States into attacking their enemies for them. A classic example is the Lavon Affair.

THE LAVON AFFAIR

In 1954, Israeli agents working in Egypt planted bombs in several buildings, including a United States diplomatic facility, and left evidence behind implicating Arabs as the culprits. The ruse would have worked, had not one of the bombs detonated prematurely, allowing the Egyptians to capture and identify one of the bombers, which in turn led to the round up of an Israeli spy ring. Some of the spies were from Israel, while others were recruited fro the local Jewish population. Israel responded to the scandal with claims in the media that there was no spy ring, that it was all a hoax perpetrated by “anti-Semites”. But as the public trial progressed, it was evidence that Israel had indeed been behind the bombing. Eventually, Israeli’s Defense Minister Pinhas Lavon was brought down by the scandal, although it appears that he was himself the victim of a frame-up by the real authors of the bombing project, code named “Operation Susannah.”

So now we have the present situation. Ruined buildings, dead people, Anthrax in the mail. There is a constant hue and cry to try to blame Arab Muslims by the Israeli government, which seeks to enlarge its territory (Israel has invaded every single nation it shares a border with since its creation) and by the US government, which seeks to grab control of what remains of the world’s oil reserves. Either through this mutually reinforcing agenda, of perhaps because of blackmail of our officials by Israel, the US has become Israel’s partner in this hoax, which leads us to the reason for the US to classify evidence that links Israel’s arrested spies with the events of 9-11.

“Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It’s classified information.”
— US official quoted in Carl Cameron’s Fox News report on the Israeli spy ring.

History teaches us that since the dawn of the industrial age, all wars have been started with deceptions and manufactured provocations. Hitler staged a fake attack from Poland to start WW2. FDR maneuvered Japan into attacking the fleet at Pearl Harbor then presented the attack as a total surprise to the American people.

Evidence that 9-11 is another such deception mounts every day. Almost a year ago, in March 2001, long before the attacks on the World Trade Towers, while the American people were being distracted by “All Condit, All The Time”, the United States Government was already informing other nations of plans to invade Afghanistan in October, 2001. And, in October 2001, the United States did in fact invade Afghanistan, right on schedule, which means that the attacks on the World Trade Towers occurred at just the exact moment when the United States needed a population angry enough to support a war.

Have we been hoaxed? Would someone really sacrifice some buildings (as FDR sacrificed some ships) to start a war? Against the $5 trillion worth of oil under the Caspian Sea, the price of a new World Trade Center in New York is just pocket change, a cheap price to pay indeed for control of such vast oil reserves, and an even better deal if the oil under Iraq can be added to the prize package, especially for a government too deeply in debt to get out without massive conquests of someone else’s resources.

The fact that the Anthrax Letters were NOT sent by an Arab Muslim but by a Jewish gentleman with the intent to FRAME an Arab Muslim strongly suggests that the entire sequence of recent events has been one gigantic frame-up, which would explain again why the US Government is itself classifying evidence that links some of the arrested Israeli spies with the events of 9-11.

History may be repeating itself again. We cannot afford to dismiss the possibility that, once again, Americans are the victims of a hoax designed to trick them into sacrificing their wealth and the lives of their children in a war of someone else’s making; a war of the worst kind, war for profit and empire.

One more lesson from history needs to be repeated. Since the dawn of the industrial age, the overwhelming majority of wars have been LOST by the side that initiated them.

Just one more reason for caution.

“By way of deception, thou shalt do war” — Motto of Israel’s Mossad

A pathetic attempt to shift the focus on the Anthrax letters

As most readers are already aware, the Anthrax contained in the letters sent to Congress was determined to be from a US military laboratory. This raised the question in the public’s mind as to who, inside a US facility, would be playing games with Anthrax. Suspicion focused on Dr. Ayaad Assaad, an Egyptian scientist working at Fort Detrick, based on an anonymous letter. Because Dr. Assaad’s race fit in perfectly with the agenda of sparking a war into Arab lands rich in oil, the media ballyhooed that the FBI was closing in on the “Arab Anthrax Terrorist”.

Ah, but the best laid plans gang aft aglay, and the FBI discovered that the end of the hunt for the sender of the Anthrax letters was NOT Dr. Assaad the Egyptian, but Dr. Zack, who is Jewish. At this point, both the FBI and the mainstream media stopped making any public comments on the case.

The above BBC article is clearly another step in the plan to try to shift the suspicion for the Anthrax letters further away from the Dr. Zack, to spare Israel further embarrassment in what appears to be a modern day revival of the Lavon Affair. However, the claim that the Anthrax letters were simply an experiment in mail delivery that went awry is discredited by recalling that the envelopes and their contents were written in a way to cast suspicion for the letters in a specific direction, at Arabs! This clear evidence of a deliberate frame up proves that not only was this not simply a test procedure, but that the Anthrax in the letters was intended to kill people, while the letters themselves pointed the finger of blame.

It would appear that even the BBC is not above spreading a little bit of propaganda.

Proof of a deliberate frame-up is before your eyes - someone INTENDED for Arabs to take the blame.

What Really Happened | Mike Rivero | Sunday, August 3, 2008

Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News

Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News