I Can Feel It In The Air Tonight, Oh Lord

Conditions: Unsettled, but hopeful.


Anthrax Attack Reloaded.

After the attacks of 9/11, America reeled again just one week later when seemingly-random people started receiving Anthrax in their mail. The media had a field day, wildly speculating over who was attacking America with chemical weapons, and the easy assumption was that this was a continuation of the terror campaign started on 9/11. In all, five people died, and 17 others were infected with the bioweapon. And the country was driven to previously-unheard of levels of fear and paranoia. Government urged people to buy Duct tape and practice sealing up their houses in the case of an attack. It can be argued the Anthrax attacks had a greater impact on America, and a greater influence on her invasion plans of Iraq, than the 9/11 attack. Eventually the truth came out that the Anthrax had originated in America herself, and that the likely culprit was a scientist working at a military lab. But after seven years, they eventually cleared his name. And started looking at one of his colleagues: Bruce Irvins. The same Bruce Irvins who just committed suicide.

Ivins, 62, who worked at an Army biodefense laboratory at Fort Detrick, took his own life Tuesday as federal authorities were closing in after investigating him for more than a year in connection with the deaths of five people poisoned by anthrax sent through the mail.
[...]

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland. Relatives told The Associated Press that he killed himself. Kemp said his client's death was the result of the government's "relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo."

For more than a decade, Ivins had worked to develop an anthrax vaccine that was effective even in cases where different strains of anthrax were mixed _ a situation that made vaccines ineffective _ according to federal documents reviewed by the AP. In 2003, he shared the Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service for his work on the anthrax vaccine. The award is the highest honor given to Defense Department civilian employees.

Ivins conducted numerous anthrax studies, including one that complained about the limited supply of monkeys available for testing. The study also said animal testing couldn't accurately show how humans would respond to anthrax treatment.

- huffingtonpost.com/

Is this really what it was all about? Some deranged scientist deciding to randomly mail off anthrax in order to better test how to combat it?

FREDERICK, Md. — Bruce E. Ivins, the late microbiologist suspected in the 2001 anthrax attacks, had attempted to poison people and his therapist said she was "scared to death" of him, according to court testimony that emerged Saturday.

Social worker Jean Duley testified at a court hearing in Frederick on July 24 in a successful bid for a protective order from Ivins _ who five days later committed suicide _ that he "actually attempted to murder several other people."
[...]

"As far back as the year 2000, the respondent has actually attempted to murder several other people, either through poisoning. He is a revenge killer. When he feels that he's been slighted or has had _ especially toward women _ he plots and actually tries to carry out revenge killings," Duley said.

She added that Ivins "has been forensically diagnosed by several top psychiatrists as a sociopathic, homicidal killer. I have that in evidence. And through my working with him, I also believe that to be very true."

How could a deranged sociopath, diagnosed as homicidal, be allowed to keep working at a top secret Government lab? Doesn't a doctor, upon making this kind of diagnosis, then have a responsibility to notify the authorities? Is this the type of people the Bioweapons division of the U.S government is looking for? Is this exactly the personality type it takes to work with such horrific weapons? Did Ivins stay below the radar because, despite being a sociopath, he didn't really stand out at the lab?

The Justice Department attributed the break in the case to "new and sophisticated scientific tools" that cost the FBI about $10 million. Investigators said the science focused, in part, on how the anthrax strains were handled and who had access to it at the time of the mailings.

FBI scientists were able to isolate strains used in the attacks, and determined they were not as common as previously thought. And that led investigators to Ivins.

- huffingtonpost.com/

So, is that it? Some nutjob scientist terrorizes an entire nation, because he's a nutjob? Not bloody likely. For starters the man's friends and neighbors describe his as a really nice guy. Aha you say, aren't most serial killers always described as nice guys? Well, yes. But consider that the lab he worked at only dealt with the liquid form of anthrax. Aha, but the FBI believe he had the skills and access to equipment in order to turn that into the power-based anthrax. Well, apart from his working at the lab in question, and convincing his therapist he was a homicidal killer, what evidence does the FBI have against him?

They found that Dr. Ivins, who had 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.

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.

What is more relevant, agents focused new attention on a 2002 Army investigation of a spill of anthrax the same year outside the secure laboratory that Dr. Ivins worked in, and his puzzling behavior in trying to clean the area with bleach while failing to report the contamination. They studied his anthrax vaccine patents and considered whether the promise of royalties after a bioterrorism scare might have been a motive.

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.

- nytimes.com/

That's it? 18 months of 'sharpened focus' and you've got a possible attempt to make money from the cure, and questionable clean-up protocols? I think we're going to need a bit more, considering how badly the investigation has gone so far. Glenn Greenwald has written an article for Salon focusing on the strange twists on this investigation, and the deeper implications it has had on the country and the world.

The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.
[...]

The letter sent to Leahy contained this message:

We have anthrax.

You die now.

Are you afraid?

Death to America.

Death to Israel.

Allah is great.

By design, those attacks put the American population into a state of intense fear of Islamic terrorism, far more than the 9/11 attacks alone could have accomplished.

Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent -- indispensably aided by ABC News -- to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
[...]

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.

So, these fake tests were done at Ft Detrick, the same installation Ivins worked at, therefore the same installation the attacks originated from. The letters accompanying the anthrax intends to give the impression Islamic extremeists are behind it. The test results points to the attacks coming from Iraq. Thanks primarily to ABC, the link between Iraq and attacks on America has been planted in the soil of the American mind.

And then, when President Bush named Iraq as a member of the "Axis of Evil" in his January, 2002 State of the Union speech -- just two months after ABC's report, when the anthrax attacks were still very vividly on the minds of Americans -- he specifically touted this claim:

"The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade."

Bush's invocation of Iraq was the only reference in the State of the Union address to the unsolved anthrax attacks. And the Iraq-anthrax connection was explicitly made by the President at a time when, as we now know, he was already eagerly planning an attack on Iraq.
[...]

Having heard ABC News in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack flamboyantly and repeatedly link Saddam to the anthrax attacks, followed by George Bush's making the same linkage (albeit more subtly) in his January, 2002 State of the Union speech, much of the public had implanted into their minds that Saddam Hussein was not just evil, but a severe threat to the U.S., likely the primary culprit behind the anthrax attacks. All along, though, the anthrax came from a U.S. Government/Army research lab.

Critically, ABC News never retracted its story (they merely noted, as they had done from the start, that the White House denied the reports). And thus, the linkage between Saddam and the anthrax attacks -- every bit as false as the linkage between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks -- persisted.

Now we know specifically where the anthrax came from. So the question becomes, who generated the false reports that linked the anthrax to Iraq and Saddam Hussien, thereby creating the inevitable drumbeat for war?

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and -- as importantly -- to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this.

- salon.com/

This is a huge story. This attack was enough to send America over the edge into rage-fueled hysteria. So for these findings to take this long to come to the light, is just wrong. And the lack of anything truly definitive is galling. No suicide note, no direct evidence (so far), just more messy allegations. Is this how it's going to end? Will we ever really know if and, if so, why, this guy decided to scare a nation again so completely in that delicate moment of panic after 9/11?

More: Bruce Ivins Wasn't the Anthrax Culprit



Do you want to know more?

Speaking of wrong, Ron Suskind, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, has just written a book about the Iraq war that's a little scandalous. Wow, how unique. So what new bit o' scandal does Ronny boy have for us?

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."

- huffingtonpost.com/

And as we all remember, that link was touted as direct evidence of Iraq being behind the Sept 11 attacks, despite it being complete bullshit. While this gets no one off the hook, it was obvious in 2003 Iraq had nothing to do with it, it's yet another damning revelation. We'll add it to the pile.

More: Author Stands by His Claim of White House Forgery



A Glimmer Of Hope.

It's been a long since you could say there was anything quantifiably hopeful coming out of Iraq.
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The leader of one of the most powerful militias in Iraq, Moqtada al-Sadr, is to order his followers to disarm and transform themselves into a purely social and political organisation, according to a new strategy document published yesterday.

Such a shift would mark a significant step forward for US and Iraqi government attempts to pacify Iraq.

Sadr's Mahdi army, committed to forcing US troops out of Iraq, has been behind much of the violence since the 2003 invasion. His forces have maintained a ceasefire since May.

According to the document, a copy of which has been obtained by the Wall Street Journal and whose authenticity has been confirmed by a Mahdi army spokesman, Sheikh Salah al-Obeidi, the militia will concentrate in future on education, provision of social services and religion.

- guardian.co.uk/

With news that Iraqi reconstruction is really finally starting to happen, much of it funded by their natural resources, there is just the slightest glimmer of hope coming from that ravaged land.




Anniversary With A Bang.



On August 6, 1945, the Enola Gay dropped the A-bomb that in a stroke changed this civilisation from stupid, pig-ignorant, brick-stubborn and insane, to stupid, pig-ignorant, brick-stubborn, insane, and capable of wiping ourselves out completely. Since that moment in time, still burnt in into the bricks of Hiroshima, mankind has edged closer and closer to the brink of self-destruction, teetering over it on occasion, only to luckily find our balance in the nick of time. Pathetically, we still refuse to learn from our mistakes.

Since 1945, the United States is believed to have been on the brink of using nuclear weapons at least three times. In waging their bogus "war on terror", the present governments in Washington and London have declared they are prepared to make "pre-emptive" nuclear strikes against non-nuclear states. With each stroke toward the midnight of a nuclear Armageddon, the lies of justification grow more outrageous. Iran is the current "threat". But Iran has no nuclear weapons and the disinformation that it is planning a nuclear arsenal comes largely from a discredited CIA-sponsored Iranian opposition group, the MEK - just as the lies about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction originated with the Iraqi National Congress, set up by Washington.

The role of western journalism in erecting this straw man is critical. That America's Defence Intelligence Estimate says "with high confidence" that Iran gave up its nuclear weapons programme in 2003 has been consigned to the memory hole. That Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad never threatened to "wipe Israel off the map" is of no interest. But such has been the mantra of this media "fact" that in his recent, obsequious performance before the Israeli parliament, Gordon Brown alluded to it as he threatened Iran, yet again.

This progression of lies has brought us to one of the most dangerous nuclear crises since 1945, because the real threat remains almost unmentionable in western establishment circles and therefore in the media. There is only one rampant nuclear power in the Middle East and that is Israel. The heroic Mordechai Vanunu tried to warn the world in 1986 when he smuggled out evidence that Israel was building as many as 200 nuclear warheads. In defiance of UN resolutions, Israel is today clearly itching to attack Iran, fearful that a new American administration might, just might, conduct genuine negotiations with a nation the west has defiled since Britain and America overthrew Iranian democracy in 1953.

In the New York Times on July 18, the Israeli historian Benny Morris, once considered a liberal and now a consultant to his country's political and military establishment, threatened "an Iran turned into a nuclear wasteland". This would be mass murder. For a Jew, the irony cries out.

The question begs: are the rest of us to be mere bystanders, claiming, as good Germans did, that "we did not know"? Do we hide ever more behind what Richard Falk has called "a self-righteous, one-way, legal/moral screen [with] positive images of western values and innocence portrayed as threatened, validating a campaign of unrestricted violence"? Catching war criminals is fashionable again. Radovan Karadzic stands in the dock, but Sharon and Olmert, Bush and Blair do not. Why not? The memory of Hiroshima requires an answer.

- guardian.co.uk

- Peace out.