The FBI’s Emerging, Leaking Case Against Ivins
It’s certainly possible that once the FBI closes its investigation and then formally unveils its evidence — which apparently will happen tomorrow — a very convincing case will be made that Bruce Ivins perpetrated the anthrax attacks and did so alone. But what has been revealed thus far — through the standard ritual of selected Government leaks which the establishment media, which some exceptions, just mindlessly re-prints no matter how frivolous — is creating the opposite impression. The FBI’s coordinated leaking is making their claim to have solved the anthrax case appear quite dubious, in some instances laughably so.
One glaring and important exception to the dynamic of uncritical media recitation is this morning’s New York Times article by Scott Shane and Nicholas Wade, which evinces very strong skepticism over the FBI’s case thus far and discloses facts that create more grounds for skepticism. Given everything that has happened over the last seven years — not just with the anthrax attacks but with countless episodes of Government deceit and corruption — it’s astonishing (and more than a little disturbing) how many people are willing, even eager, to assume that the Government’s accusations against Ivins are accurate even without seeing a shred of evidence to support those claims.
When you add on to that the magnitude of this case and the ample reasons for error and deceit — it’s the first lethal bioterrorism attack on the U.S., one which, according to the Government itself, originated at a U.S. Government facility, perpetrated by a U.S. Army scientist, that was then used by numerous factions inside the Government and out to ratchet up fear levels and falsely blame Iraq and/or Al Qaeda for the attacks and, thereafter, was blamed on someone who appears to have been completely innocent — what minimally rational person would be willing to assume that the Government’s uncorroborated, unexamined, untested claims are accurate? In today’s Los Angeles Times, Gabriel Schoenfeld of Commentary wrote:
Whether Ivins is conclusively shown to be the perpetrator, or whether he was an innocent man hounded by intrusive surveillance and public humiliation into suicide, questions about the FBI’s performance are piling up. The bureau’s horrific track record before 9/11, and its single-minded focus on Hatfill after the anthrax attacks, raises the suspicion that, in the dramatic events of last week, we are glimpsing yet another monumental screw-up, one fully worthy of the FBI’s inglorious recent past.
This morning I interviewed Rep. Rush Holt, whose Central New Jersey district includes a mailbox where at least one of the anthrax letters was mailed, and who is also a trained physicist and Chairman of the Select Intelligence Oversight Panel (the audio of the interview is here). Rep. Holt said:
Having watched how [the FBI] collected evidence, I don’t have a lot of confidence, and I think the burden is on them to satisfy me, and other members of Congress, that they’ve done this right. . . . The case seems to me at this point to be circumstantial, and again, without briefings from the FBI, it would be presumptuous of me to say. And it would be presumptuous of people in Central New Jersey to breathe a sigh of relief and say: “They got the murderer. He is no longer at-large.” The people deserve better re-assurances than what they’ve been given.
Those re-assurances simply aren’t possible without a full-scale Congressional hearing or even an external Commission of the type that investigated the 9/11 attacks — endowed with full subpoena power — to examine all of the unresolved issues here, including the ABC/bentonite angle, a proposal which Rep. Holt said today he supports. * * * * *
Just to illustrate how utterly unreliable and often frivolous the Government-media leaking ritual has been, look at what happened yesterday. The AP’s big, leaked scoop of the day to incriminate Ivins was this:
The top suspect in the 2001 anthrax attacks was obsessed with a sorority that sat less than 100 yards away from a New Jersey mailbox where the toxin-laced letters were sent, authorities said today. . . . The bizarre link to the sorority may indirectly explain one of the biggest mysteries in the case: why the anthrax was mailed from Princeton, 195 miles from the Army biological weapons lab the anthrax is believed to have been smuggled out of.
That’s not exactly convincing evidence. Its primary purpose seems to be to make Ivins look creepy — he harbored a decades-long obsession with a college sorority — but at least one could argue it would be enough of a circumstantial link to be worth noting. But as it turns out, the leaked information wasn’t even close to accurate. Shortly after that leak appeared, it transformed into this laughable claim in an updated AP story:
The mailbox just off the campus of Princeton University where the letters were mailed sits about 100 yards away from where the college’s Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter stores its rush materials, initiation robes and other property. Sorority members do not live there, and the Kappa chapter at Princeton does not provide a house for the women.
That would be quite an unusual and bizarre for way such an obsessive interest to express itself — he used a mailbox in proximity not to a sorority house, which doesn’t even exist on that campus at all, but was merely near a storage room the sorority uses to store some material. And, as the updated AP article then disclosed, there was zero basis for believing Ivins had anything to do with the Princeton sorority at all:
[The Princeton chapter’s Sorority adviser Katherine Breckinridge] Graham said there was nothing to indicate that any of the sorority members had anything to do with Ivins. “Nothing odd went on,” said Graham, an attorney and Kappa alumna.
But even that pitifully thin reed was then reduced further still when that ever-vanishing leak made this appearance in this morning’s New York Times article:
Years ago, he had visited Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority houses at universities in Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia, an obsession growing out of a romance with a sorority sister in his own college days at the University of Cincinnati — although someone who knew him well said the last such visit was in 1981.
Within less than 24 hours, we went from “a New Jersey mailbox used to send the anthrax was less than 100 yards away from a sorority for which Ivins harbored an intense life-long obsession” to “the mailbox was near a storage closet used by a sorority that Ivins used to frequent 27 years ago and by a specific chapter that Ivins appeared to have absolutely nothing to do with.” And then there is the Hatfill-like leaking of scurrilous information about Ivins, including the fact that he had — as the NYT put it today — “a history of alcohol abuse, had for years maintained a post office box under an assumed name that he used to receive pornographic pictures of blindfolded women.” Leaving aside the fact that alcohol abuse and pornography consumption aren’t exactly clues marking someone as the anthrax killer, how bad could his “alcohol abuse” have been if he continued to maintain Government clearance to work at a U.S. Army facility with the nation’s most dangerous pathogens?
And what had originally been leaked as the sinister-sounding claim that Ivins maintained “a post office box under an assumed name” transformed into the much more innocuous revelation that he did so in order to surreptitiously receive porn — behavior that isn’t exactly unusual given that “revenues for the world pornography industry hit an estimated $97 billion in 2006, overshadowing the revenues of the top technology companies — the likes of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo! and Apple — combined.” Bruce Ivins isn’t the only American male surreptitiously using pornography, to understate the case drastically. The FBI’s need to demonize Ivins as a creepy, porn-loving drunk suggests that their actual evidence is far from convincing.
* * * * *
The leaked “scientific” evidence is no better. If anything, it’s worse. The Washington Post today reports — all based on anonymous leaks — that “key to the probe” is the fact that Ivins “borrowed from a bioweapons lab that fall freeze-drying equipment that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores” and that “the drying device, known as a lyopholizer, could help investigators explain how he might have been able to send letters containing deadly anthrax spores to U.S. senators and news organizations.” The article further claims that “the device was not commonly used by researchers at the Army’s sprawling biodefense complex at Fort Detrick, Md.”
But that appears to be completely false. Here is the abstract of a 1995 research report, for which Ivins was the lead scientist, reporting on discoveries made as part of their research into anthrax vaccines (h/t substantial). This is the method they described using:
The efficacy of several human anthrax vaccine candidates comprised of different adjuvants together with Bacillus anthracis protective antigen (PA) was evaluated in guinea pigs challenged by an aerosol of virulent B. anthracis spores. The most efficacious vaccines tested were formulated with PA plus monophosphoryl lipid A (MPL) in a squalenel lecithin/Tween 80 emulsion (SLT) and PA plus the saponin QS-21. The PA+MPL in SLT vaccine, which was lyophilized and then reconstituted before use, demonstrated strong protective immunogenicity, even after storage for 2 years at 4°C. The MPL component was required for maximum efficacy of the vaccine. Eliminating lyophilization of the vaccine did not diminish its protective efficacy. No significant alteration in efficacy was observed when PA was dialyzed against different buffers before preparation of vaccine. PA+MPL in SLT proved superior in efficacy to the licensed United States human anthrax vaccine in the guinea pig model.
Clearly, Ivins’ legitimate work researching anthrax vaccines entailed the use of a lyopholizer. As the commenter notes, “If you google ‘lyophilize’ and ‘anthrax’, most of the pages returned are about anthrax vaccines, which is what Dr. Ivins was working on at Ft. Detrick.” Indeed, even the Post article — while breathlessly touting the profound importance of Ivins’ incriminating possession of a lyopholizer — says this:
He did at least one project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that would have given him reason to use the drying equipment, according to a former colleague in his lab.
This morning I spoke with Dr. Luke D. Jasenosky of the Harvard School of Medicine’s Immune Disease Institute. Dr. Jasenosky said that it is “very common” for someone engaged in the vaccine research of the type Ivins did to use a lyopholizer, and that he “would actually be surprised if they weren’t using one.” The Post article goes to great lengths to stress how small and easily hidden this device is — to imply that Ivins could have weaponized the anthrax without being detected — but the FBI found out that Ivins had possession of a lyopholizer because of this:
Ivins had to go through a formal process to check out the lyopholizer, creating a record on which authorities are now relying.
So he didn’t exactly hide his acquisition and use of the device which, the FBI is now trying to suggest, he secretly used to convert wet spores into dry anthrax in order to perpetuate the anthrax attacks. Quite the opposite — he obtained the device in exactly the way that regulations required, knowing that there would be a clear and easy paper trail reflecting that he obtained this device — one which he obviously had legitimate reasons, at least some occasions, to use in his work. The FBI is presumably leaking its most convincing evidence. If sorority obsessions, porn collections and lyopholizer usage are its most convincing, one shudders to imagine what its less convincing evidence is.
* * * * *
All sorts of similar questions are raised by the onslaught of other FBI leaks. Dr. Jasenosky told me that he finds claims of some “ground-breaking” new DNA technique, or some “big breakthrough” to be “quite strange,” given that what the news accounts have described is nothing more than an incremental extension of molecular analysis techniques that have existed for several years and which, at most, appear to have only enabled existing techniques to be conducted more rapidly. He further emphasized that even the most sophisticated DNA tests could never link anthrax to any particular scientist, and that no assessment of the FBI’s assertions is possible without a thorough review of its underlying data. Dr. Meryl Nass said the same thing today: “Let me reiterate: No matter how good the microbial forensics may be, they can only, at best, link the anthrax to a particular strain and lab. They cannot link it to any individual.”
And then there is the issue of Ivins’ mental state. The New York Times reported today that part of the FBI investigation was so heavy-handed that it actually entailed showing gruesome photographs of the anthrax victims to Ivins’ adult children, telling them that their father is the one who did that, while trying to entice them to turn on him with promises of a reward. As Rep. Holt indicated this morning, is it any wonder that any person — guilty or not — would experience severe psychological distress when targeted by the FBI that way? Moreover, this morning’s Frederick News Post (doing some of the best reporting in the country on this case) reported that it was FBI agents who told Jean Duley to seek a protective order against Ivins — the action that then created the record used by most media outlets to depict Ivins as a crazed psychopath.
No matter what the FBI says over the next week, or whenever it is that it finally gets around to stopping its manipulative leaks to its media friends and begins instead showing the public its evidence, a full-scale investigation is required here. Bruce Ivins may very well be the anthrax killer, having acted alone, but there is no rational basis for believing right now that he is.
UPDATE: The incomparably meticulous Marcy Wheeler has constructed a very helpful and typically well-documented timeline of key anthrax events, here.
One of the unanswered questions, even by the FBI’s case, is why the targets of the anthrax attacks (Sen. Leahy, Sen. Daschle and Tom Brokaw, among others) were selected. Brad Friedman has obtained interesting evidence of Ivins’ political leanings, including the fact that he was a registered Democrat who has voted in numerous Democratic primaries since 1996.
Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.
© Salon.com
Framing and cover-ups—-what this criminal administrations excels at!
FBI? What’s not to trust?
“The nation’s top two law enforcement officials acknowledged Friday the FBI broke the law to secretly pry out personal information about Americans.”
“A sample review of 77 case files at four FBI field offices showed that agents had underreported the number of national security letter requests by about 22 percent.
Additionally, the audit found, the FBI identified 26 possible violations in its use of the letters…
The audit also concluded that the FBI for three years underreported to Congress how often it used national security letters to ask businesses to turn over customer data.”
Fidelity, Bravery, Integrity.
Indeed.
The United States of America=Banana Republic on Steroids.
May the steroids cause its death soon.
Nothing to see here, move on. Ivins is obviously guilty of the anthrax attacks, like Saddam was guilty of the 9/11 bombings. Everything is so convenient.
Trust the government, trust the FBI, trust your TV, trust Obama.
The government would never lie to get into a war (Pearl Harbor, Gulf of Tonkin, Panama, Iraq).
And even if they lie, it is for your benefit; not the corporations like Halliburton and Exxon who are making billions of dollars.
Don’t you feel the love?
There is no need to vote for third party because the status quo is perfectly acceptable. Nader just keeps repeating the same thing over and over about all these issues time and time again. He is sounding like a broken record - stop corporate profiteering, reform campaign financing, etc. Why doesn’t he just get off his high horse.
Support Obama who proposes ‘change.’ And I have it on good evidence that Obama has no interest in that particular Pennsylvania sorority.
Good thing our mainstream media does a great job on informing the public of all they need to know.
How many other alcoholic, porn-soliciting employees are working in highly secretive, secure establishments of the U.S. and its subsidiaries? What about universities conducting such research? Shouldn’t there be some investigation of such institutions? And, shouldn’t the “suspects’” names be leaked to the press to allow the rest of the public to pass judgment on them and pressure them to “confess?” Or, better yet, take their own lives to save the expense of investigations and trials?
Just asking,
peace,
st john
i have never been able to understand why the public (there’s a sucker born every minute) has so much trouble seeing 9/11 for what it was - false flag event
can we now get around to an investigation and let’s put bush and cheney…er i mean the culprits in jail
i would prefer we rendition them to eastern europe and have them dropped in boiling oil but there you go
This one could be their undoing. These thugs may finally get caught in their own web. But of course, it all depends on whether the American people really want to know the truth. And THAT is a really big “IF”.
the mighty wurlitzer’s stops are all pulled out, and the “lone nut symphony” is being played at full volume.
all loyal americans, join the chorus and sing along!
My sense is he was asked to work on this particular strain of Anthrax, and his bosses, playing Big Brother, knew of any weaknesses in his “profile.” At some point they knew they’d need to hold up a scapegoat and he was THE chosen one. How convenient that dead men CAN tell no tales. And as Mr. Greenwald points out, and any seasoned attorney would tell his jury, given the preponderance of evidence with respect to the character of those accusing him, where is there basis for reliable judgment? Smoke and mirrors, what spooks depend upon and what Bush & Co have made into a high government art form of the darkest, macabre sort.
Cheney is guilty as sin. He is behind the 9-11 debacle and the anthrax mailings to liberal senators. Nuff said.
He will never be brought to justice because he will hide in his undisclosed locations forever.
I repeat my comment on:
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/05/10826/
Still no mention of the elephant in the room. The selectivity of the government officials who received the letters and their relationship to getting the Patriot Act passed. That’s the real story here.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
It’s a case of the foxes not only guarding the hen house, but being put in charge of investigating the murder of several hens who died of wounds from animal bites.
We should want the kind of assurance we could get from an examination of all of the unresolved issues here by “…an external Commission of the type that investigated the 9/11 attacks….” ???
No one who’s read the Commission’s report and noted that Building 7 is not even mentioned would feel assured by an investigation conducted by such a Commission. Is a 47 story building too small to merit mention, couldn’t they think of any plausible explanation for it to fall (at free-fall speed), or did they forget it even existed?
What if they didn’t want the public to suspect the truth about 9/11? What if they wouldn’t want the public to suspect the truth about the anthrax attacks?
How the mighty have fallen–deservedly so! Does anybody believe anything the FBI alleges, says, or claims anymore? What a bunch of bureaucratic fumbling clowns these brutes have become.
I listened to NPR the other day and they interviewed numerous relatives, neighbors, and co-workers all of whom said they flat out don’t belierve any of the FBI claims regarding Bruce Ivins. Several of them believe that if he did commit suicide, it was provoked by the FBI harasssment of him.
Everybody knows about the battleship Maine, the gulf of Tonkin lies, Why is the prospect of governmental, corporate, military complicity in 9/11 considered crazy?
The first anthrax victim to die, Robert Stevens, was a photo editor for National Enquirer publication the Sun. A month before he was killed, he published a photo spread of Jenna Bush falling down drunk in a bar.
One story that seems to be completely missed is: Why do scientists need to weaponize anthrax, or any other vector for that matter, to create a vaccine for it? Supposedly the US is signatory to a treaty not to make biological weapons. Sure, I can understand the need to carry out research to create vaccines and such but why do we have: “…“borrowed from a bioweapons lab that fall *freeze-drying equipment* that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores” and that “the drying device, known as a *lyopholizer*…” if the US isn’t actively violating the treaty and creating bio-weapons? How come that angle isn’t being picked up? And here’s something to worry about, the US has at times tested substances on people and populations without their knowledge and, of course, without their consent. (Radiation experiments, spraying substances, LSD in MKUltra). Does this shameful administration plan to “test”, or rather do a false-flag operation in the near future as a means of maintaining their grip on power? Am I being paranoid? Maybe. Or maybe I’m not being paranoid enough!
I’m normally trying to get my fellow lefties to relax on the hyperbolic conspiracy theories that make the rest of the country think we are crazy, but this whole case really stinks.
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/peek/93904
With Bu$h the inferior, Shotgun Dick and the rest of the gang you can’t be paranoid, suspicious, or cynical enough to keep up.
The dead guy was supposedly immoral enough to indiscriminately kill and clever enough to pull off this anthrax thing without getting caught red handed, but dumb enough to hang around and moral enough to kill himself at the thought of discovery.
Man is that convenient!
One must also bear in mind how Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al waxed eloquent on how great the emerging field of custom made bioweapons will be in the future in their Project for a New American Century paper “Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for the New Century.”
Unfortunatly most web copies of this paper have now been scrubbed (I do have it on hard disk somewhere) but they specifically mention how great it will be when this exciting emerging field perfects bio weapons that can “attack specific genotypes”.
I guess planning for genocide comes naturally to these guys since they already practice it with conventional weapons.
Yes, the whole thing smacks of cover up, but what else is new. I was talking with a person who knew Ivins personally and he thought the whole thing was a crock. However, it is a very convenient crock for Bush and his buddies. We can now just forget about it since the bad guy is dead. Where is Sherlock Holmes when you need him?
Shouldn’t Michael Albert, David Corn, Alexander Cockburn, and Noam Chomsky start putting out articles calling you all crazed conspiracy theorists?
Let’s just let the MSM and government present the facts for us, and then accept them without questions or skepticism.
(I’ve changed a few references to make it current) but like David Corn said,
“the notion that the U.S. government either detected the attacks but allowed them to occur, or, worse, conspired to kill (a couple) of Americans (with anthrax) to launch a war-for-oil in (Iraq) is absurd.”
See? We’re safe. Our government is innocent. To suggest otherwise is absurd. Case closed.
What was Duley’s political party affiliation by the way?
Would a PhD vaccine researcher like Dr. Bruce Ivins misspell penicillin as ‘penacilin’? Seems to me it is more likely that a person like Dr. Ivin’s so-called ‘therepist’ would have written this, just like she apparently misspelled the word therapist on an interview note of hers taken by the FBI for evidence. Would a therapist then apparently violate patient confidentiality by openly accusing her patient of being a ‘homicidal maniac’?
chimpeach: “What was Duley’s political party affiliation by the way?”
Would a registered Democrat like Dr. Ivins try to kill two other leading Democrats by mailing them weaponized anthrax?
DAVID PEACE: There’s also the EPA lying about the air quality in NYC after 911, and the poor downwinders told they would be perfectly safe from radiation around them!
NEITSCHZE: I think people think history “already happened,” so they can look at things in the past from a safe distance and think, “Wow, our leaders lied to us!” But the same persons somehow can’t step out of their own blindspot to recognize THAT is indeed the current scenario, a sort of Machiavellian leit motif that has prove quite efficient when a war is “needed” to boost the national GNP.
.
What do Dr. Bruce Ivins and Lee Harvy Oswald have in common ????
They both are the OFFICIAL Fall Guys ….. Closed Cases …
.
I F Stone said it so well in his day, the FBI is “the American gestapo.” That wouldn’t include all the rank and file, but at the top level, it’s likely right on the mark.
“.
What do Dr. Bruce Ivins and Lee Harvy Oswald have in common ????
They both are the OFFICIAL Fall Guys ….. Closed Cases …”
not only them - what about the guy who shot mlk, bobby, even the 19 arab boys of the 9/11 fairy tale
they all fit the bill - lone crazed gunmen
one thing abut the secret government - when they find a fairy tale that works they stick to it
Watch “The Power of Nightmares,” an excellent documentary which puts all the pieces together.
RE:”frank xavier August 5th, 2008 5:40 pm
The first anthrax victim to die, Robert Stevens, was a photo editor for National Enquirer publication the Sun. A month before he was killed, he published a photo spread of Jenna Bush falling down drunk in a bar.”
OH MY GOD!
I KNEW it! Darth my ass - it was that punkass himself!
David.Peace2002: Regarding weaponized anthrax, here’s a very brief, annotated version of the timeline:
- The Japanese dusted the wings of birds with anthrax and released them over China in attempted biological attacks.
- Russia and the US both stockpiled many germs for potential germ warfare.
- I believe it was during these cold war years that someone invented the weaponizing process, which the inventor spoke about briefly in TV interviews since the Anthrax letter attacks. Anthrax in nature is heavy and has a static charge that keeps it from working airborne, so they dry it, cut/mill it to a fine-cut, dust version, and as some comments on the timeline at the link above indicate, add silica. When it’s airborne, it’s more problematic for inhalation, rather than the form in which it is found in nature, which could get into an open sore and cause problems.
- During the Nixon years, there was a bio-warfare treaty, which some claim we violated by continuing our research (and sending Sadam samples during the Reagan years).
- The official explanation of the continued need for “samples” of weaponized anthrax is that we need samples in order to develop vaccines. We need weaponized samples in case our enemies develop some weaponized airborne form.
Nietzsche August 5th, 2008 5:36 pm
Good comment: If it can be shown that the FBI has screwed this up and made it a political football, with Ivins as the patsy, and his suicide somewhat convenient, then perhaps the idea of 9-11 and the anthrax letters as inside jobs becomes more plausible. This might be a positive (tho’ unpredicted) effect.
frank xavier August 5th, 2008 5:40 pm
Thanks for pointing out that connection. He was the photo-editor; what about the photographer?
cactuspie August 5th, 2008 4:15 pm:
Greenwald links to the timeline, which does list the passage of the Patriot Act. And Greenwald mentions the party affiliation of Ivins, which makes all this more problematic:
Possibility A:
Ivins, a Democrat, gets fed up with Democratic cuts to bioweapons vaccine research, so he targets key Democrats. Official story? Too thin?
Possibility B:
Ivins the Dem targets Dems with the idea that they might get sympathy as victims, and this will help the Dems. Plan backfires, Patriot Act is passed, Bush ratings remain high, Dems are soft on terror. (Unlikely?)
C:
Ivins didn’t do it. Had nothing to do with it.
D:
Ivins was given a LOT of money to provide the anthrax, someone else provided the letters and addresses, and Ivins used the money to… to… get a P.O. Box and buy a lot of porn?
E:
Some letters were from the same party or group, but others were not? Copycat? Or more inside-jobbers jumping on bandwagon? (Oooo…. Is reality more complicated than we’d like?)
F: Your guess?
It was a lone nut case with mental problems..He was trained by the Soviets yes thats it…Ahh err….he was mad at the Government because the made him watch porn!! He was a sleeper agent, left over from the Cold war.
There was no one else involved really…trust us……No evidence whatsoever that it had anything to do with any patriot act…anyone who believes that is just drinking Saddams Kooli aid..wait saddam is dead…ok they are drinking Ahmanijaheds kooliad.
Nothing to see here..hes dead now case closed.
Guess who else, besides McSame, was hawking the Iraq-Anthrax connection as early as 10/09/01?
http://www.weeklystandard.com/content/public/articles/000/000/000/333urert.asp
The most amusing statement in this entire article is when Greenwald says, ( I paraphrase) maybe when the FBI presents its actual evidence…..it will prove that Ivins actually is the anthrax killer.
The entire article makes it abundantly clear that the whole case reeks of lies, distortions, intimidation, manufactured “facts” that contradict each other. Sorry but I fail to see how anything else they present has a shred of credibility.
But then I’m one of those “tinfoil hat” conspiracy nuts.
Perhaps this will be the wake up call that gets the fourth estate to actually analyze what happened on 9/11.
The “ZIONIST” controlled Media in the western countries, are working hard to keep out any discussion of the real perpetrators of 911.
That is because ISRAEL is up to it’s eyeballs in the whole scenario.
The MOSSAD wired the World Trade Centre Buildings, and Building No:-7 with “THERMITE”, for their perfect “Controlled Demolition. All with the help of the ISI, the CIA, and elements of the MAFIA.
In Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine” the Pinochet regime terrified the Chilean people into submission to their rule by letting them see atrocities being perpetrated by their rulers, in their midst. The effect of the anthrax scare is still being felt today by those in the halls of Congress, even such as we elected in ‘06 to oppose the regime. Pretty sure most of them know in their hearts who is at the root of the problem. Sure, Dr. Ivins, a registered Democrat aimed his weaponized anthrax against his own party leaders. Gimme a break.
What better person to blame than a dead man who can’t refute the charges or defend himself in any way????? How convenient for the FBI that he came along when he did.
This is not new. In the 1970’s the CIA directed terrorist attacks throughout western Europe and blamed it on leftists. See the 3 part video about Operation Gladio here:
http://liberationvideo.blogspot.com/2008/05/operation-gladio.html
Every time I think I can’t be more disgusted and embarrassed by my Government - I find I’m wrong. After reading this excellent piece of reporting/commentary, there’s really only one thing to do: Dismantle the entire FBI and start over. We knew the Bush Administation was venal and corrupt, and every word out of its mouth was a lie, “including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” We knew the putative “Justice Department” was any oxymoron, confirming that our nation still understood the concept of irony. We just didn’t know to what extent these things were all true. The FBI either hounded a scientific nerd to death .. or the CIA killed him. And the very fact that we can be so sure that only one of these two options is true - is a disgusting commentary on the State of the Nation. We should be ashamed of ourselves.
The US Congress needs to immediately begin a public investigation of the anthrax attacks as part of a full-scale public inquiry into the crimes of the Bush/Cheney administration and related Bush family crimes, dating back to before World War II. This is a rare opportunity to stand for truth.
Instead they will do nothing but cower and await their turn to abuse power.
It is well past time for a second American revolution.
In a related story, a peer-reviewed article was published yesterday by Kevin Ryan and several others which proves conclusively that large amounts of high-energy explosives were used to bring down the World Trade Center in New York City on September 11, 2001.
Let’s see what the US media has to say about that, if anything.
Want the truth? Waterboard Cheney!
http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2008/08/04/anthrax-timeline/
(posted by a commenter)
I think it’s important to remember what Dennis Kucinich told us in 2002
“Let us pray that our nation’s leaders will not be overcome with fear. Because today there is great fear in our great Capitol. And this must be understood before we can ask about the shortcomings of Congress in the current environment. The great fear began when we had to evacuate the Capitol on September 11. It continued when we had to leave the Capitol again when a bomb scare occurred as members were pressing the CIA during a secret briefing. It continued when we abandoned Washington when anthrax, possibly from a government lab, arrived in the mail. It continued when the Attorney General declared a nationwide terror alert and then the Administration brought the destructive Patriot Bill to the floor of the House. It continued in the release of the Bin Laden tapes at the same time the President was announcing the withdrawal from the ABM treaty. It remains present in the cordoning off of the Capitol. It is present in the camouflaged armed national guardsmen who greet members of Congress each day we enter the Capitol campus. It is present in the labyrinth of concrete barriers through which we must pass each time we go to vote. The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear, ill equipped to deal with the Patriot Games, the Mind Games, the War Games of an unelected President and his unelected Vice President.”
These people are scared for their lives. They face a monster with many heads and if you succeed in removing one, you still face a monster. Only now it’s wounded and more dangerous.
Guilty or innocent, Dr. Ivins was about to have the full power of the government arrayed against him. All his funds - savings, investment, pension, home - would be needed, and more. Even if he “won” he would be destroyed, and his family with him. By committing suicide, he rendered the government’s case moot.
His family wil continue to have shelter and money now. Personally, I suspect he was very much overwrought and not fully responsible for his action. He must have felt himself cornered, and I think he sacrificed himself to protect his loved ones.
Why no photographs of Jean Carol Duley, the “therapist” ?
No biography of such an important person?
paul s
Notice how TV news is reporting this? Most of the MSM TV reporters are ultra emphasizing the same words and phrases as if they’re giving post hypnotic suggestions to the audience.
well, nothing new in that anymore.
“dept of justice officials say they had the right man and the case is definitely solved.”
“the case will be closed, says the FBI”
“the government has determined there are no other suspects and is expected to close the case”
“the government is expected to declare the case solved”
According to an AP wire account by reporter Peter Yost dated Aug 06, the FBI declined to describe to reporters its investigative techniques of Ivins.
Yost also quoted Ivins’ lab colleague and friend Dr W. Russell Byrne to the effect that the FBI made him and all the other interviewed persons sign nondisclosure forms.
Essentially perpetual gag orders.
Just like good ole times at the KGB.