----- Original Message -----
From: "M.O.M." <nox2128@...>
To: "mom" <mom-l@...>
Sent: Tuesday, April 09, 2002 11:34 AM
Subject: Anthrax and the Agency -- Thinking the Unthinkable


> Anthrax and the Agency -- Thinking the Unthinkable
> By Wayne Madsen
> April 8, 2002
>
> Now that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has officially put
> the anthrax investigation on a back burner, it is time for Americans to
> think the unthinkable: that the FBI has never been keen to identify the
> perpetrator because that perpetrator may, in fact, be the U.S.
> Government itself. Evidence is mounting that the source of the anthrax
> was a top secret U.S. Army laboratory in Maryland and that the
> perpetrators involve high-level officials in the U.S. military and
> intelligence infrastructure.
>
> FBI Debunks Anthrax-Hijacker Link
>
> Coming shortly after the hijacked airliner attacks on New York and
> Washington, the anthrax attacks on the U.S. Congress, major media
> outlets, and the U.S. Postal System were, at first, blamed by the Bush
> administration on Al Qaeda or Iraq. However, on March 23, the FBI
> officially announced that "exhaustive testing did not support that
> anthrax was present anywhere the hijackers had been." This statement
> came after a rather weak story based on conjecture appeared in The New
> York Times. The article reported that a Fort Lauderdale emergency room
> doctor treated Saudi hijacker Ahmed Alhanzawi in June 2001 for a
> cutaneous anthrax lesion on his leg. Although the doctor, Christos
> Tsonas, did not think the lesion was caused by anthrax at the time he
> cleansed and treated the wound, he later changed his mind after
> realizing Alhanzawi was one of the hijackers.
>
> Although Tsonas' theory was rejected by the FBI, it was supported by
> Johns Hopkins University's Center for Biodefense Strategies. Johns
> Hopkins has its own peculiar link to anthrax. President Bush recently
> named as the Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr.
> Elias Zerhouni, an Algerian-born professor at Johns Hopkins University
> and notorious Pentagon yes-man on anthrax bio-defenses. As a member of
> the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, Zerhouni and
> his colleagues, serving on a National Academy of Sciences Institute of
> Medicine special committee, gave a green light to the Pentagon's use of
> a questionable anthrax vaccine on military personnel. According to Dr.
> Meryl Nass, a member of the Federation of American Scientists who spent
> three years studying the world's largest recorded anthrax epidemic in
> Zimbabwe from 1979 to 1980, the report generated by Zerhouni and his
> colleagues "relies on ignoring many pieces of crucial information, and
> its recommendations give the Department of Defense everything it could
> have wanted. The report appears to be 'spun' to support a number of DOD
> initiatives, and it provides the needed justification for restarting
> mandatory anthrax vaccinations over the objections of many in Congress."
>
> U.S. Link to Anthrax No Conspiracy Theory
>
> Forget unfounded conspiracy theories. The evidence is overwhelming that
> the FBI has consistently shied away from pursuing the anthrax
> investigation, in much the same way it avoided pursuing leads in the USS
> Cole, East Africa U.S. embassies, and Khobar Towers bombings.
>
> On April 4, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross broadcast on ABC
> World News Tonight that after six months the FBI still had hardly any
> clues and no suspects in its anthrax investigation. A Soviet defector,
> the former First Deputy Director of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992 and
> anthrax expert, Ken Alibek (formerly Kanatjan Alibekov), now a U.S.
> government consultant, made the astounding claim that the person who is
> behind the anthrax attacks may, in fact, been advising the U.S.
> government. After having passed a lie detector test, Alibek was cleared
> of any suspicion.
>
> Interestingly, Alibek is President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems. On
> October 2, 2001, just two days before the first anthrax case was
> reported in Boca Raton, Florida and a week and a half before the first
> anthrax was sent through the mail to NBC News in New York, Advanced
> Biosystems received an $800,000 grant from NIH to focus on very specific
> defenses against anthrax. Hadron has long been linked with the CIA. The
> links include charges by many former government officials, including the
> late former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, that the company's
> former President, Earl Brian, illegally procured a database system
> called PROMIS (Prosecutors' Management Information System) from Inslaw,
> Inc. and used his connections to the CIA and Israeli intelligence to
> illegally distribute the software to various foreign governments.
>
> Ross reported that U.S. military and intelligence agencies have refused
> to provide the FBI with a full listing of the secret facilities and
> employees working on anthrax projects. Because of this stonewalling,
> crucial evidence has been withheld. Professor Jeanne Guilleman of MIT's
> Biological Weapons Studies Center told ABC, "We're talking here about
> laboratories where, in fact, the material that we know was in the
> Daschle letter and in the Leahy letter could have been produced. And I
> think that's what the FBI is still trying to find out."
>
> But the FBI does not seem to want to pursue these important leads.
>
> CIA Testing Anthrax and the U.S. Mail
>
> The first major media outlet to accuse the FBI of foot dragging was the
> BBC. On March 14, the BBC's Newsnight program highlighted an interview
> with Dr. Barbara Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists.
> After claiming the CIA was involved, through government contractors, in
> secret testing of sending anthrax through the mail, Rosenberg, someone
> with close ties to the biological warfare community, has been attacked
> by the White House, FBI, and, not surprisingly, the CIA.
>
> The BBC also interviewed Dr. Timothy Read of the Institute of Genomic
> Research and a leading expert on the genetic characteristics of anthrax.
> Read said of the two strains, "They're definitely related to each other
> ... closely related to each other." However, Read would not go so far as
> to suggest the Florida strain, known as the Ames strain, and that
> developed at the U.S. Army's top secret Fort Detrick biological warfare
> laboratory - officially known as the U.S. Army Medical Research
> Institute of Infectious Diseases -- were one and the same.
>
> William Capers Patrick III was part of the original Fort Detrick anthrax
> development program, which "officially" ended in 1972 when President
> Nixon signed, along with the Soviet Union and United Kingdom, the
> Biological Weapons Convention. Nixon had actually ordered the Pentagon
> to stop producing biological weapons in 1969. It now seems likely that
> the U.S. military and intelligence community failed to follow Nixon's
> orders and, in fact, have consistently violated a lawful treaty signed
> by the United States.
>
> Cuba certainly accused the United States of using biological war weapons
> against it during the 1970s. In his book, Biological Warfare in the 21st
> Century, Malcolm Dando refers to the U.S. bio-attacks against the
> Caribbean island nation. The American covert campaign targeted the
> tobacco crop using blue mold, the sugar cane crop using cane smut,
> livestock using African swine fever, and the Cuban population using a
> hemorrhagic strain of dengue fever.
>
> Last December, the New York Times claimed Patrick authored a secret
> paper on the effects of sending anthrax through the mail, a report he
> denies. However, Patrick told the BBC that he was surprised that as an
> expert of anthrax (he was a member of the UN biological warfare
> inspection team in the 1990s), the FBI did not interview him right after
> the first anthrax attacks.
>
> The BBC reported that Battelle Memorial Institute (a favorite Pentagon
> and CIA contractor and for whom Alibek served as biological warfare
> program manager in 1998) conducted a secret biological warfare test in
> the Nevada desert using genetically-modified anthrax early last
> September, right before the terrorist attacks. The BBC reported that
> Patrick's paper on sending anthrax through the mail was also part of the
> classified contractor work on the deadly bacterial agent.
>
> But would the U.S. Government knowingly subject its citizenry to a
> dangerous test of biological weapons? The evidence from past tests
> suggests it has already done so. According to Dando, in the 1950s, the
> military released uninfected female mosquitoes in a residential area of
> Savannah, Georgia. It then checked on how many entered houses and how
> many people were bitten. In 1956, 600,000 mosquitoes were released from
> an airplane on a bombing range. Within one day, the mosquitoes had
> traveled as far as two miles and had bitten a number of people. In 1957,
> at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, the Q-Fever toxin discharged by
> an airborne F-100A plane. If a more potent dose had been used, the Army
> concluded 99 per cent of the humans in the area would have been
> infected. In the 1960s, conscientious objecting Seventh Day Adventists,
> serving in non-combat positions in the Army, were exposed to airborne
> tularemia. In addition to Dando's revelations, a retired high-ranking
> U.S. Army civilian official reported that the Army used aerosol forms of
> influenza to infect the subway systems of New York, Chicago, and
> Philadelphia in the early 1960s.
>
> From Fort Detrick With Love
>
> The Hartford Courant reported last January that 27 sets of biological
> toxin specimens were reported missing from Fort Detrick after an
> inventory was conducted in 1992. The paper reported that among the
> specimens missing was the Ames strain on anthrax. A former Detrick
> laboratory technician named Eric Oldenberg told The Courant that while
> at Detrick, he only handled the Ames strain, the same strain sent to the
> Senate and the media. The Hartford Courant also revealed that other
> specimens missing included Ebola, hanta virus, simian AIDS, and two
> labeled "unknown," a cover term for classified research on secret
> biological agents.
>
> Steven Block of Stanford University, an expert on biological warfare,
> told The Dallas Morning News that, "The American process for preparing
> anthrax is secret in its details, but experts know that it produces an
> extremely pure powder. One gram (a mere 28th of an ounce) contains a
> trillion spores . . . A trillion spores per gram is basically solid
> spore . . . It appears from all reports so far that this was a powder
> made with the so-called optimal U.S. recipe . . . That means they either
> had to have information from the United States or maybe they were the
> United States." (author's emphasis).
>
> Block also told the Dallas paper, "The FBI, after all these months, has
> still not arrested anybody . . . It's possible, as has been suggested,
> that they may be standing back because the person that's involved with
> it may have secret information that the United States government would
> not like to have divulged."
>
> And what the government would not want divulged is the fact that the
> United States has been in flagrant violation of the 1972 Biological
> Weapons Convention. Article 1 of the convention specifically states:
> "Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any
> circumstance to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or
> retain: 1. Microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever
> their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that
> have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful
> purposes. 2. Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use
> such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict."
>
> The Death of Dr. Wiley: Murder They Wrote
>
> The one person who was in a position to know about the origin of the
> anthrax sent through the U.S. Postal Service met with a very suspicious
> demise just a month after the attacks first began.
>
> The reported "suicide" and then "accidental death" of noted Harvard
> biophysics scientist and anthrax, Ebola, AIDS, herpes, and influenza
> expert, Dr. Don C. Wiley, on the Interstate 55 Hernando De Soto Bridge
> that links Memphis to West Memphis, Arkansas, was probably a
> well-planned murder, according to local law enforcement officials in
> Tennessee and Arkansas.
>
> On November 15, Wiley's abandoned 2001 Mitsubishi Galant rental car was
> strangely found in the wrong lane, west in the eastbound lane of the
> bridge. The keys were still in the ignition, the gas tank was full, the
> hub cap of the right front wheel was missing, and there were yellow
> scrape marks on the driver's side of the vehicle, indicating a possible
> sideswipe.
>
> Wiley had last been seen four hours earlier, around midnight, before his
> car was found around 4:00 AM on the bridge. He was last seen in the
> lobby of Memphis' Peabody Hotel, leaving a banquet of the St. Jude
> Children's Research Hospital, on whose advisory board he served. Police
> quickly "concluded" that Wiley committed suicide by jumping off the
> bridge into the Mississippi River. It appears the early police
> conclusion, decided without a full investigation, was engineered by the
> FBI. On December 20, Wiley's body was recovered in the river in Vidalia,
> Louisiana, 320 miles south of Memphis. After Wiley's friends and family
> discounted claims of suicide, the Memphis coroner concluded on January
> 14, 2002 that Wiley had "accidentially" fallen over the side of the
> bridge after a minor car accident.
>
> Not so, say seasoned local law enforcement officials who originally
> assigned homicide detectives to the case. Memphis police claim there was
> only 15 minutes between the last time police had checked the bridge and
> the time they discovered Wiley's abandoned vehicle. They suspected Wiley
> was murdered. However, the local FBI office in Memphis stuck by its
> story that Wiley's death was not the result of "foul play." A Memphis
> police detective said, "the newspaper account of Wiley's accident did
> not clear anything up for me," adding, "everything attributed to the
> 'accident' could also be attributed to something else."
>
> However, according to U.S. intelligence sources, Wiley may have been the
> victim of an intelligence agency hit. That jibes with local police
> comments that the FBI and "other" U.S. agencies stepped in to prevent
> the local Memphis police from taking a closer look into the case.
> Employees of St. Jude's Childrens' Hospital in Memphis, on whose board
> Wiley served, were suddenly deluged with unsubstantiated rumors that
> Wiley was a heavy drinker and despondent.
>
> It is a classic intelligence agency ploy to spread disinformation about
> "suicide" victims after their murders. The favorite rumors spread
> include those about purported alcoholism, depression, homosexuality,
> auto-erotic asphyxia, drug addiction, and an obsession with pornography,
> especially child pornography.
>
> According to the local police, it would have been easy to determine if
> Wiley was a heavy drinker and that would have shown up in his autopsy.
> The police also reckon that if Wiley left the Peabody under the
> influence, four hours later he should have been sober enough not to have
> fallen over the side of the bridge. Also, the bridge railing is high
> enough that event the 6' 3" Wiley could not have accidentally fallen
> over it without assistance. Add that to the fact that no one in the
> history of the bridge had fallen over the side.
>
> Police also feel that even at 4:00 AM, there should have been someone
> else on the bridge who would have called the police about a person who
> was driving down the interstate the wrong way. Due to the fact that
> access is restricted to the bridge, one would have to have driven a long
> way on the wrong lane. Some police are of the opinion Wiley was stuck
> with a needle and that one reason he was dumped into the fast-moving
> Mississippi is that with the length of his time in the water (one
> month), the needle mark evidence would have largely disappeared.
>
> And in yet another strange twist, on March 14, a bomb and two smaller
> explosive devices were found at the Shelby County Regional Forensic
> Center, which houses the morgue and Medical Examiner's Office that
> conducted Wiley's autopsy. Dr. O.C, Smith, the medical examiner, told
> Memphis' Commercial Appeal, "We have done several high-profile cases
> from Dr. Wiley to Katherine Smith (a Department of Motor Vehicles
> employee mysteriously found burned to death in her car after being
> charged in a federal probe with conspiracy to obtain fraudulent drivers'
> licenses for men of Middle East origin) but there has been no indication
> that we offended anyone . . . we just don't know if we were the attended
> target or not."
>
> Knowledgeable U.S. and foreign intelligence sources have revealed that
> Wiley may have been silenced as a result of his discovery of U.S.
> government work on biological warfare agents long after the U.S., along
> with the Soviet Union and Britain, signed the 1972 Biological Weapons
> Convention.
>
> A South African Connection
>
> The death of Wiley may be also linked to revelations recently uncovered
> in South Africa. His expertise on genetic fingerprints for various
> strains may have led him to particular countries and their bio-warfare
> projects.
>
> The South African media has been abuzz with details of that nation's
> former biological warfare program and its links to the CIA. The South
> African bio-chemical war program was code-named Project Coast and was
> centered at the Roodeplat Research Laboratories north of Pretoria. The
> lab maintained links to the US biowarfare facility at Fort and Britain's
> Porton Down Laboratory. The head of the South African program, Dr.
> Wouter Basson, was reportedly offered a job with the CIA in the United
> States after the fall of the apartheid regime. According to former South
> African National Intelligence Agency deputy director Michael Kennedy,
> when Basson refused the offer, the CIA allegedly threatened to kill him.
> Nevertheless, the U.S. pressured the new President Nelson Mandela to
> turn over the records and fruits of Basson's work. Much of this work was
> reportedly transported to Fort Detrick.
>
> Basson also claimed to have been involved in a project called Operation
> Banana, which, using El Paso, Texas as a base with the CIA's blessing,
> was designed to transport cocaine to South Africa from Peru. The
> cocaine, hidden in bananas, was to be used in developing a new
> incapacitating drug.
>
> One of the South African's secret projects involved sending anthrax
> through the mail. Among the techniques that fell into the hands of the
> Americans was a method by which anthrax spores were, with deadly effect,
> incorporated on to the gummed flaps of envelopes.
>
> Other South African bio-chemical weapons allegedly transferred to the
> CIA included, in addition to anthrax, cholera, smallpox, salmonella,
> botulinum, tularemia, thallium, E.coli, racin, organophosphates,
> necrotising fasciitis, hepatitis A, HIV, paratyphoid, Sarin VX nerve
> gas, Ebola, Marburg, Rift Valley hemorrhagic fever viruses, Dengue
> fever, West Nile virus, highly potent CR tear gas, hallucinogens
> Ecstasy, Mandrax, BZ, and cocaine, anti-coagulant drugs, the deadly
> lethal injection drugs Scoline and Tubarine, and cyanide.
>
> Many of Dr. Wiley's family and friends doubt he would have committed
> suicide. The fact that he was certainly in a position to know about the
> origination of various viruses and bacteria -- which could have led to
> the U.S. government -- would have made him a prime target for a
> government seeking to cover up its illegal work in biological warfare.
>
> Wiley's Anthrax Research
>
> And Wiley had a significant connection to anthrax research. Wiley was
> not only a professor at Harvard but also conducted research at the Chevy
> Chase, Maryland Howard Hughes Medical Center, which does work for the
> National Institutes of Health. On October 1, 2001, just three days
> before the first reported anthrax case in Florida, the Hughes Center
> announced that a joint Harvard-Hughes team had identified a mouse gene
> that made mice resistant to anthrax bacteria. Although the media failed
> to play it up later, that research involved using Wiley's expertise on
> the immune system. The new gene, identified as Kif1C, located in
> chromosome 11 of a mouse, enhanced the defense systems of special immune
> cells, called macrophages, against the destructive effects of anthrax
> bacteria.
>
> Wiley's was not the only suspicious death of a scientist with knowledge
> of biological defenses. Just three day before Wiley's death, Dr. Benito
> Que, a Miami Medical School cellular biologist specializing in
> infectious diseases, died in a violent attack. The Miami Herald reported
> Que died after "four men armed with a baseball bat attacked him at his
> car." A week after Wiley died, Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, a former
> scientist for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union's biological weapons
> production factory, was found dead from an alleged stroke in Wiltshire,
> not far from Britain's Porton Down biological warfare center. Pasechnik
> had defected from the Soviet Union in 1989 and was an expert on the
> Soviet Union's anthrax, smallpox, plague, and tularemia programs. While
> at Biopreparat, Pasechnik worked for Alibek, who defected three years
> later. When he died, Pasechnik was assisting the British government's
> efforts in providing bio-defenses against anthrax.
>
> Anthrax and Operation Northwoods
>
> For those who disbelieve the possibility that the U.S. Government is the
> number one suspect in the anthrax attacks, they are directed to James
> Bamford's book on the National Security Agency, Body of Secrets. The
> book reveals that in 1962,Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman
> Lemnitzer was planning, along with other member of the Joint Chiefs, a
> virtual coup d'etat against the administration of President Kennedy
> using acts of terrorism carried out by the military but to be blamed on
> the Castro government in Cuba. The secret pan, code-named Operation
> Northwoods, entailed having U.S. military personnel shoot innocent
> people on the streets of American cities, sink boats carrying Cuban
> refugees to Florida, and conduct terrorist bombings in Washington, DC,
> Miami and other cities. Innocent people were to be framed for committing
> bombings and hijacking planes. If John Glenn's liftoff from Cape
> Canaveral in February 1962 were to end in an explosion, Castro would be
> blamed. Plans were made to shoot down civilian aircraft en route from
> the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama, or Venezuela and then
> blame Cuba. The U.S. military also planned to attack Jamaica and
> Trinidad and Tobago, both British colonies, and make it appear that the
> Cubans had done it in order to bring Britain into a war with Cuba.
>
> So far, the Bush administration has refused to support a full and
> independent Congressional investigation into the events of September 11
> and the later events involving anthrax. It seems it and the three-letter
> agencies the administration is so fond of praising, and funding, know
> more about the source of the anthrax attacks than they are admitting. If
> the saying, "where there's smoke, there's fire," has any basis of truth,
> the United States is in the midst of a raging inferno. Who will answer
> the fire alarm?
>
> * Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist based in Washington, DC.
> He can be reached at: WMadsen777@...
>
> http://www.counterpunch.org/madsenanthrax.html
>
> --
>
>
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