Saddam and Anthrax Attacks

[Care4all]

maaaaaaaybe he figured out who it was and then the culprits had him killed.

he could have also helped the fbi, to help himself...to cover his own tracks, we really don't know....

the whole thing is disturbing really!

i hate mystery ''who dun its'', that never have an ending that explains it all!

care

 

[sealybobo]

Both targets were symbolic in nature, not strategic. The WTC was the symbol of American financial power and the Pentagon the symbol of American military might. There was nothing to be gained strategically by striking at either. The point was to spread fear by striking at the symbols of our strength in our own country. Definitely a psychological tactic.

FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials

FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials

 

[sealybobo]

Both targets were symbolic in nature, not strategic. The WTC was the symbol of American financial power and the Pentagon the symbol of American military might. There was nothing to be gained strategically by striking at either. The point was to spread fear by striking at the symbols of our strength in our own country. Definitely a psychological tactic.

The unresolved story of ABC News' false Saddam-anthrax reports

The unresolved story of ABC News' false Saddam-anthrax reports - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

 

[sealybobo]

I say the Bush white house sent the anthrax. But even if they didn't, they were not interested in finding out who did. They wanted to link it to Saddam.

If that doesn't tell you something, nothign will.

 

[DiamondDave]

I say the Bush white house sent the anthrax. But even if they didn't, they were not interested in finding out who did. They wanted to link it to Saddam.

If that doesn't tell you something, nothign will.

Ok Dale Gribble

 

[sealybobo]

Ok Dale Gribble

(a) "the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite";

(b) bentonite is "a troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet";

(c) "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons";

(d) bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program"; and,

(e) "the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994" and "the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electron microscope."

At different times, Ross attributed these claims to "three well-placed but separate sources" and, alternatively, to "at least four well-placed sources."

All of those factual claims -- each and every one of them, separately -- were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so.

 

[sealybobo]

Ok Dale Gribble

(1) How can ABC News just let these Saddam-anthrax reports -- as false as they were consequential -- remain uncorrected and unexplained, even through today?

(2) More importantly, Ross claimed at the time, and there is no reason to doubt it, that these false reports -- clearly designed to blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks in the eyes of Americans -- were fed to him by "at least four well-placed sources." Who were the well-placed, multiple sources feeding ABC News completely fictitious claims linking Saddam Hussein to the anthrax attacks, including false claims about the results of government tests? What possible justification is there for concealing the identity of those who manipulated ABC to disseminate these fictitious claims?

 

[Orange_Juice]

I say the Bush white house sent the anthrax. But even if they didn't, they were not interested in finding out who did. They wanted to link it to Saddam.

If that doesn't tell you something, nothign will.

I bet this guy did it on his own and the right wingers just went with it

 

[sealybobo]

I bet this guy did it on his own and the right wingers just went with it

You mean they lied us into a war?

What else did they lie about?

Remember Colon Powell took a vile of anthrax (not really anthrax) to the UN?

Wow! Thanks for admitting they lied.

""No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon" Condy Rice's 9-11 statement.

Amazing you guys still don't want to impeach. Just don't lie about a blowjob.

 

[DiamondDave]

break out the tinfoil hats for bobo and oj

PSSSttttt... The JFK movie was hogwash too.... as were the 9-11 truther sites/films

 

[wihosa]

How nice to have so many right wing dupes to help cover up crimes.

No one can ever suggest a conspiracy no matter how obvious, otherwise they'll be accussed of wearing tin foil hats.

Anyone looking at all of the circumstances of 9-11 and the war/occupation of Iraq can see that a conspiracy is the most likely explanation for the unexplainable.

 

[Orange_Juice]

You mean they lied us into a war?

What else did they lie about?

Remember Colon Powell took a vile of anthrax (not really anthrax) to the UN?

Wow! Thanks for admitting they lied.

""No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon" Condy Rice's 9-11 statement.

Amazing you guys still don't want to impeach. Just don't lie about a blowjob.

Oh, I agree with you on all that, but I'm just saying the guy could have acted alone, and the right wingers just picked up on the story and used it. Remember those complete idiots that sent a video to ABC before the 2004 election saying they were terrorists and bent on destroying America? Same sort of thing.

Still doesn't mean there are not a lot of questions that need answered, though. Big questions

 

[sealybobo]

I guess he's off the hook? But what happened to those ABC news sources that said he was behind the attack? and what about the messages that went along with the attacks that tried to link the attacks to Islamic radicals?

ThomHartmann.com - Rumsfeld and Cheney Revive Their 70's Terror Playbook
In 1972, President Richard Nixon returned from the Soviet Union with a treaty worked out by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the beginning of a process Kissinger called "détente." On June 1, 1972, Nixon gave a speech in which he said:
"Last Friday, in Moscow, we witnessed the beginning of the end of that era which began in 1945. With this step, we have enhanced the security of both nations. We have begun to reduce the level of fear, by reducing the causes of fear—for our two peoples, and for all peoples in the world."
But Nixon left amid scandal and Ford came in, and Ford's Secretary of Defense (Donald Rumsfeld) and Chief of Staff (Dick Cheney) believed it was intolerable that Americans might no longer be bound by fear. Without fear, how could Americans be manipulated? And how could billions of dollars taken as taxes from average working people be transferred to the companies that Rumsfeld and Cheney - and their cronies - would soon work for and/or run?
Rumsfeld and Cheney began a concerted effort - first secretly and then openly - to undermine Nixon's treaty for peace and to rebuild the state of fear.
They did it by claiming that the Soviets had a new secret weapon of mass destruction that the president didn't know about, that the CIA didn't know about, that nobody knew about but them. It was a nuclear submarine technology that was undetectable by current American technology. And, they said, because of this and related-undetectable-technology weapons, the US must redirect billions of dollars away from domestic programs and instead give the money to defense contractors for whom these two men would one day work or have businesses relationships with.
The CIA strongly disagreed, calling Rumsfeld's position a "complete fiction" and pointing out that the Soviet Union was disintegrating from within, could barely afford to feed their own people, and would collapse within a decade or two if simply left alone.
As Dr. Anne Cahn, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency from 1977 to 1980, told the BBC's Adam Curtis for his documentary "The Power of Nightmares":
"They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They’re saying, 'we can’t find evidence that they’re doing it the way that everyone thinks they’re doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don’t know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.'
"INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Even though there was no evidence.
"CAHN: Even though there was no evidence.
"INTERVIEWER: So they’re saying there, that the fact that the weapon doesn’t exist…
"CAHN: Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It just means that we haven’t found it."
But Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted Americans to believe there was something nefarious going on, something we should be very afraid of. To this end, they convinced President Ford to appoint a commission including their old friend Paul Wolfowitz to prove that the Soviets were up to no good.
Wolfowitz's group, known as "Team B," came to the conclusion that the Soviets had developed several terrifying new weapons of mass destruction, featuring a nuclear-armed submarine fleet that used a sonar system that didn't depend on sound and was, thus, undetectable with our current technology. It could - within a matter of months - be off the coast of New York City with a nuclear warhead.
Although Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld's assertions of this powerful new Soviet WMD was unproven - they said the lack of proof proved the "undetectable" sub existed - they nonetheless used their charges to push for dramatic escalations in military spending to selected defense contractors, a process that continued through the Reagan administration.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz helped re-organized a group - The Committee on the Present Danger - to promote their worldview. The Committee produced documentaries, publications, and provided guests for national talk shows and news reports. They worked hard to whip up fear and encourage increases in defense spending, particularly for sophisticated weapons systems offered by the defense contractors for whom many of these same men would later become lobbyists.
And they succeeded in recreating an atmosphere of fear in the United States, and making themselves and their defense contractor friends richer than most of the kingdoms of the world.
Trillions of dollars and years later, it was proven that they had been wrong all along, and the CIA had been right. Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz lied to America in the 1970s about Soviet WMDs and the Soviet super-sub technology.
Not only do we now know that the Soviets didn't have any new and impressive WMDs, but we also now know that the Soviets were, in fact, decaying from within, ripe for collapse any time, regardless of what the US did - just as the CIA (and anybody who visited Soviet states - as I had - during that time could easily predict). The Soviet economic and political system wasn't working, and their military was disintegrating.
But the Cold War was good for business, and good for the political power of its advocates, from Rumsfeld to Wolfowitz to Cheney who have all become rich in part because of the arms industry.
Today, making Americans terrified with their so-called "War On Terror" is the same strategy, run for many of the same reasons, by the same people. And by hyping it - and then invading Iraq to bring it into fruition - we may well be bringing into reality forces that previously existed only on the margins and with very little power to harm us.
Most recently we've learned from former CIA National Intelligence Officer for the Middle East and South Asia Paul Pillar that, just like in the 1970s, the CIA disagreed in 2002 with Rumsfeld and Cheney about an WMD threat - this time posed by Iraq - even as Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz were telling America how afraid we should be of an eminent "mushroom cloud."
We've seen this movie before. The last time, it cost our nation hundreds of billions of dollars, vastly enriched the cronies of these men, and ultimately helped bring Ronald Reagan to power. This time they've added on top of their crony enrichment program the burden of over 2200 dead American servicemen and women, tens of thousands wounded, as many as a hundred thousand dead Iraqis, and a level of worldwide instability not seen since the run-up to World War Two.
When Hilary Clinton recently noted that the only political card Republicans are any longer capable of playing is the card of fear, she was spot-on right. They're now even running radio and TV commercials designed to terrorize our children ("Do you have a plan for a terrorist attack?"), the modern reincarnation of "Duck and Cover."
Now that former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has confessed that many of the terror alerts that continually popped up during the 2004 election campaign were, as USA Today noted on 10 May 2005, based on "flimsy evidence" or were >done over his objection at the insistence of "administration officials," it's increasingly clear that the Bush administration itself is the source of much of the "be afraid!" terror inflicted on US citizens over the past 5 years.
It's time for patriotic Americans of all political affiliations, and for our media, to join with Senator Clinton, former CIA official Paul Pillar, and the many others who are pointing this out, and refuse to allow the Bush administration to inflict terror on Americans - and the world - for political gain.
As Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his first inaugural address in 1932, when Americans were terrorized by the Republican Great Depression, the echoes of World War One, and the rise of Communism in Russia:
This is preeminently the time to speak the truth, the whole truth, frankly and boldly. Nor need we shrink from honestly facing conditions in our country today. This great Nation will endure as it has endured, will revive and will prosper. So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.
Indeed, the best hope for the growth of democracy around the world and the survival of individual liberty in the United States is for us to turn away from Rumsfeld's and Cheney's politics of terror and fear, and once again embrace the great vision of this nation, held by her great statesmen and women from 1776 to today. Indeed, they are still among us, as we saw most recently when a brave few senators stood up to filibuster the nomination of Samuel Alito.
In this election year, we must redouble our efforts to swell their ranks, to involve ourselves in local and national political groups, and to return America to her destiny as the world's beacon of courage, liberty, and light.

 

[Orange_Juice]

Update:

Scientists have begun to chime in on the evidence and are strongly disagreeing with the scientific claims reached by the FBI.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/opinion/10andrews.html

As a scientist, however, I feel compelled to comment on what should have been the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s strongest link between Dr. Ivins and the terrible crime — deadly anthrax spores. In the summary of its findings, the F.B.I. states that investigators used four different genetic techniques to match the anthrax-laced attack letters to a unique DNA footprint of a single anthrax spore preparation in one flask that had been in Dr. Ivins’s custody.

Sounds reasonable. Yet the investigators present no details on the scientific methods they used to make this match or how they employed them. That’s a problem, because without such detail it is hard to tell if they specifically ruled out a similar match between the anthrax in the letters and anthrax preparations with the same DNA footprint kept at a number of other labs around the country. The basic methods of genetic analysis are well known. Why not provide enough detail about their procedure to enable other scientists to tell whether they could actually single out Dr. Ivins’s spore preparation as the culprit?

The investigators fail to address another underlying problem with their anthrax match: that Dr. Ivins was an investigator in the case before he was a suspect. After the anthrax attack, Dr. Ivins himself worked directly with the evidence. The F.B.I. asked Dr. Ivins to help them with the forensics in the case by analyzing the contents of suspicious letters. And he did so for years, until the authorities began to suspect that the anthrax spores used in the mailings might have originated from his lab.

Dr. Ivins, for instance, was asked to analyze the anthrax envelope that was sent to Mr. Daschle’s office on Oct. 9, 2001. When his team analyzed the powder, they found it to be a startlingly refined weapons-grade anthrax spore preparation, the likes of which had never been seen before by personnel at Fort Detrick.

It is extremely improbable that this type of preparation could ever have been produced at Fort Detrick, certainly not of the grade and quality found in that envelope.

But even leaving that aside, there are important questions left unanswered. First, isn’t it possible that the manipulation of the contents of the anthrax letters in Dr. Ivins’s laboratory might have contaminated the work environment enough to potentially jeopardize the integrity of subsequent samples taken from the lab? Might that perhaps explain why the anthrax powder used in the attacks was later found to have the same DNA footprint as the other anthrax preparations in Dr. Ivins’s lab? At the very least, wouldn’t this call his guilt into doubt?

It was as if a gun used in a murder was unintentionally returned to the scene of the crime several days after the murder. What are the legal implications of such a possibility? Wouldn’t a court be especially cautious in considering evidence involving a weapon in such circumstances?

This case is apparently closed with Dr. Ivins’s death. But until the F.B.I. discloses its scientific testing methods and data, many questions will remain unanswered.

Gerry Andrews is an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Wyoming

 

[wihosa]

Here's a simple question, was an autopsy performed? Or was it simply concluded he died from an overdose of acetaminophen because a large amount was found in is stomach. Was the cause of death actually determined?

 

[Gunny]

Ok Dale Gribble

Spot on!

 

[Orange_Juice]

I'd have to say that the FBI's case is pretty shaky

 

[DiamondDave]

not as shaky as any of your supposed cases

 

[sealybobo]

What's crazy about the fact that ABC helped Bush lie us into a war? Then they never retracted their story until the White House finally came clean. What kind of journalism is that? It is supposed to be the other way around. The media is supposed to expose the government when they are lying. The media should be like another branch of government, but instead they are the propoganda department for the GOP. Sick!

 

[sealybobo]

not as shaky as any of your supposed cases

You do know that the government is corrupt, don't you? I thought you knew that and you just claimed that the Dems are no better. Now are you suggesting that the GOP is innocent and richous?