Document:911 Plotters Bury Anthrax Evidence

 essay  by Michael B Green dated 2008-08-03

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Subjects: Amerithrax
Source: OpEdNews (Link)

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This is Part 1 of a 2 part series. Part 2: FBI Anthrax Frame-up

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911 Plotters Bury Anthrax Evidence

Bruce E. Ivins, a bioweapons researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease, died Tuesday, July 29 2008, reportedly by suicidal drug overdose just as the Department of Justice was about to charge him with the 2001 anthrax attacks. The FBI had spent nearly seven years trying to railroad Steven Hatfill for the deeds, but failed miserably, and the Department of Justice recently settled a legal action with Hatfill by compensating him with over $5,000,000 so that it could turn its attention to easier prey. Ivins' attorney, Paul F. Kemp, who has represented him for over a year, has declared Ivins innocent, regrets that he cannot clear his name in court, even while Ivins' social worker therapist obtained a court restraining order against him stating that his treating psychiatrist Dr. David Irwin, "called him homicidal, sociopathic with clear intentions." These politically convenient diagnoses had not prevented the 62-year-old Ivins from enjoying a distinguished 33 year career with the Department of the Army.

I see little or no evidence implicating Ivins in the anthrax terrorism; if he has a link at all it will be minor and ancillary. Most likely, he has been chosen as the most vulnerable individual to serve as a patsy, unlike the formidable Steven Hatfill who has defended himself so very well. We should not forget the modus operandi of the FBI on political cases, say Brandon Mayfield and the Madrid train bombings. These are typically all-out frame-ups. Mayfield was an American attorney who had converted to Islam, married a Muslim woman, and provided legal help to Muslims who were being persecuted under the PATRIOT act. The FBI named Mayfield as the man whose thumb print matched the print on an unexploded detonator cap found near the train station bomb site with "100% certainty" even though the Spanish police had already told the FBI that it was not a match and that they had the actual person in custody whose thumb print matched that found on the cap. During a July 16, 2008 Q&A at the downtown Los Angeles Library with Mayfield's attorney, Steven T. Wax, I laid out the case for a deliberate and cynical FBI frame-up of Mayfield. Wax would not go so far in public, but he discreetly said that after the Spanish police announced their finding publicly, the FBI sent their agents to meet with them and then announced to the press, "The Spanish police agree with us." Wax said that he had spoken personally with the head of the Spanish police who was present at that meeting, and who advised Wax that the FBI had simply lied. I suggest that we not be deceived by the most recent presentation of "evidence" of Ivins' guilt.

What strikes me most is that this (probably genuine) suicide is designed to put a lid upon the conspiratorial facts. The August 1, 2008 Wall Street Journal reported and opined:

The Justice Department hasn't yet decided whether to close the investigation, officials said, meaning it's still not certain whether Dr. Ivins acted alone or had help. One official close to the case said that decision was expected within days. If the case is closed soon, one official said, that will indicate that Dr. Ivins was the lone suspect.

I assure you that the Journal is the ghost of our fascist future talking, with Dr. Ivins playing the role of lone nut so certified by both his social worker therapist and his psychiatrist. But the facts say otherwise.

Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com has been conscientiously tracking the anthrax terrorism for years. In his most recent essay of August 1, 2008, Greenwald details how immediately after the anthrax attacks four "well-placed sources" independently reported to ABC that preliminary lab results definitively linked the anthrax to Iraq by tell-tale traces of the compound bentonite. ABC's Brian Ross broadcast this news loudly and long, and thereby vastly influenced public opinion linking Saddam to 9/11, but there is not and never was an iota of truth to these reports: bentonite was never detected by those tests. ABC kept the secret of this false leak until 2007; ABC knows its "well-placed sources" and refuses to tell Greenwald, who opines:

...if they were really "well-placed," one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted — Ft. Detrick. That means that the same [Ft. Detrick] Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.

It's extremely possible — one could say highly likely — that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain — as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax — is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims. Feeding claims to ABC News designed to link Saddam to those attacks would, for obvious reasons, promote the goal of the anthrax attacker(s). ...

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. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds.

Greenwald hasn't yet understood that the media is under the general operational control of the intelligence agencies and under their full control when covert operations are involved — that's when the actual agents with reporter's pads get the key assignments from management who is amongst, or serves the interest of, the plotters. And Greenwald may be missing an essential point, or not making his point so persuasively as he might. Whoever leaked the false news was not corrected publicly by the Fort Detrick lab that knew that there was no bentonite to implicate Saddam Hussein and Iraq because the Cheney/Bush administration was implementing their plans to attack Iraq that long antedated 911 by means of the anthrax theater to link him to terrorism on U.S. soil, which pre-existing plans are documented by Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill and Bob Woodward (see ). This means that the top laboratory personnel were complicit or they were ordered or intimidated to shut up and they have stayed quiet for a very long while. Our government is organized so that such dissent based on the facts cannot occur. Indeed, it would be impossible for our four so-called independent news sources to lie to ABC without full confidence that ABC would not check their story with someone who knew the truth, that no one who knew the true Ft. Detrick laboratory results would speak out, and that no competing “news” agency would ever investigate or challenge their claims. The deed itself is evidence of full and long-standing complicity and cooperation between the intelligence community and the overall media for the purpose of misleading the public.

Greenwald notes that Richard Cohen of the Washington Post admits being advised by a high-ranking government official to start taking Cipro before the anthrax attacks — but he apparently does not know that Cheney & friends began their Cipro on 9/11, several weeks prior to the outbreak — and cannot understand the media resistance encountered, i.e., complicity at the highest levels, so takes the irrelevant moral high road by flogging complicity that he mistakes for dereliction or cowardice (some of which are present as the plot later reveals itself to those who either play along or pay the piper).

Michael C. Ruppert did a fine job in Crossing the Rubicon, Chapter 16, "Silencing Congress," detailing how Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle and Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Pat Leahy, had their oral and written objections to the PATRIOT ACT — Ashcroft had not even deigned a response to Leahy's letters — were brought to an abrupt end by their receipt of anthrax letters that months later were quietly identified in the media as having originated "in CIA-run covert research programs." (pp. 269-271)

An especially clear integration of evidence for the anthrax being a state-sponsored false-flag operation occurs in an October 10, 2004 analysis by a blogger with the nom de plume of "Allie," who notes that targeting the necessary political enemies Daschle and Leahy provided the opportunity to take vengeance on several personal Bush enemies as well: the two newspaper editors responsible for exposing the drunken sluttish madcap behavior of the Bush twins, and NBC's Tom Brokaw for having Bill Clinton as a guest over White House objections September 18, 2001, the letter to Brokaw being mailed that very day that the White House's last-minute protests failed. r As Allie summarizes, putting too much emphasis on Bush the individual:

The anthrax attacks were concurrent with the debate of Bush's Patriot Act by Congress and the media.

• The Senators who received anthrax letters were trying to amend the Patriot Act to protect civil liberties and the innocent.
• Two Senate democratic leaders received anthrax letters mailed the same day that Senator Feingold blocked an attempt to rush the bill through without discussion or amendments.
• Senator Leahy received an anthrax threat after he expressed reservations about the Bill. As Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, he managed the debate on the Bill.
• Senate Majority Leader Daschle received the first Senate anthrax letter as he led the opposition to the original version of the Bill.
• After receiving the anthrax letter, Daschle switched from supporting a 2 year limit on the Bill, later defending a 4-year sunset clause as the "appropriate balance."
• No Republican received an anthrax letter.
• The House and Senate buildings were closed and not reopened until after the Patriot Act was passed.
• The Supreme Court was shut down with an anthrax scare the day after the constitutionally-challenged Patriot Act was signed by President Bush.
• All the contaminated letters contained the Ames strain of anthrax, the DNA of which is traced to the original batch preserved in a university lab in Ames, Iowa. This strain was "weaponized" in Utah into a potent powder with an elaborate secret technique developed at Fort Detrick, Md.
  
  

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

It's as plain as the nose on your face. Why is the major media pussyfooting around it? Are they still terrified? The anthrax attacks were almost certainly an attempted Operation Northwoods/Media Attack/Political Coup and its targets, as group, would only have been chosen by George Bush.

One cannot run a covert operation on the scale of 911, or even the second phase of persuading Congress to do the right thing without first controlling the media that are not merely the lapdogs of their imperialist masters, but an active branch of the intelligence community even though many of the news people themselves do not know it.

August 6, 2008 Addendum

New evidence convincingly demonstrates the political cover-up and Bruce Ivins’s innocence. The Wall Street Journal front-page headline of Monday, August 4, 2008 trumpeted “FBI USED DNA TO LINK ANTHRAX TO SUSPECT.” The story, irrelevantly but alarmingly showing a fully suited HAZMAT worker decontaminating a federal building (while a normally clothed civilian stands by watching) reported, “Using new DNA technology, the Federal Bureau of Investigation analyzed the anthrax strain sent to victims of the attack and linked it to the spores handled by Dr. Ivins, according to federal officials close to the seven-year investigation.” Presumably the DNA technology had to be “new” to explain why the link had not been made long ago, but the article never says how “new” or what the new technology was. Although the Ames strain of virus that caused the deaths originated in a CIA research lab, subsequent news reports state that dozens of research labs throughout the world have samples of it, thus we wait to learn how the “new” technology found a specific subspecies of Ames anthrax that was linked to Ivins and him alone. Remarkably, but not surprisingly, the article never reaches that issue past its headline and introduction; instead, it then tells us what a nutcase Ivins was.

And here, the facts are instructive. Jean Duley, previously identified as Ivins’s therapist, “described a man who was preparing for an angry confrontation over being the focus of the FBI investigation.” But of course guilty people, especially guilty biochemical researchers, don’t usually fantasize “angry confrontations” with the authorities, but people who are being framed often do. The Journal advises that Duley:

...testified before a Maryland circuit court that Dr. Ivins told a July 9 group therapy session of a "long and detailed homicidal plan and intention...to kill his co-workers," according to a tape of the hearing. "Because he was about to be indicted on capital murder charges that he was going to go out in a blaze of glory," she said. Ms. Duley described Dr. Ivins as "a revenge killer" who had attempted to poison people as far back as the year 2000, according to the tape. "He has been forensically diagnosed by several top psychiatrists as a sociopathic homicidal killer," she said in the court hearing.

The politically convenient diagnoses make one look to the source, and the August 6, 2008 Washington Post tells us more about Ms. Duley.

The counselor he saw for group therapy and biweekly individual sessions, who would eventually tell a judge that he was a "sociopathic, homicidal killer," had a troubled past. Jean C. Duley, who worked until recent days for Comprehensive Counseling Associates in Frederick, is licensed as an entry-level drug counselor and was, according to one of her mentors, allowed to work with clients only under supervision of a more-seasoned professional.

Shortly before she sought a "peace order" against Ivins, Duley had completed 90 days of home detention after a drunken-driving arrest in December, and she has acknowledged drug use in her past.

In a 1999 interview with The Washington Post, Duley described her background as a motorcycle gang member and a drug user. "Heroin. Cocaine. PCP," said Duley, who then used the name Jean Wittman. "You name it, I did it."

So Ms. Duley, who is an entry-level counselor-in-training and must work under supervision and is probably on criminal probation from her DUI, is the vulnerable “therapist-counselor” ripe for corruption and intimidation by the FBI. The "mighty Wurlitzer," aka mainstream media, that the CIA’s Frank Wisner began organizing into a formal program of public deception and disinformation under Operation Mockingbird in the late 1940s, has presented Ivins’s suicide as occurring in response to nothing but the news that the FBI was closing in on him and that he would be indicted. But all the evidence indicates that the FBI was closing in on him by framing him, setting him up, substituting destruction of his career and family life for evidence that they lacked, or would have to "produce" themselves, literally. The Post offers this summary account:

It [late last fall] was around the time that FBI agents showed Ivins’s 24-year-old daughter pictures of the victims who had died in the 2001 anthrax attacks and told her, "Your father did this," the scientist said. The agents also offered her twin brother the $2.5 million reward for solving the anthrax case — and the sports car of his choice.

...According to the scientist [the Post interviewed], who said he spent about 80 hours with Ivins to help him recover from his [alcohol] addiction, the FBI agents pressured Ivins's children, and they were pressuring Ivins in public places. One day in March, when Ivins was at a Frederick mall with his wife and son, the agents confronted the researcher and said, "You killed a bunch of people." Then they turned to his wife and said, "Do you know he killed people?" according to the scientist.

The same week, Ivins angrily told a former colleague that he suspected his therapist was cooperating with the FBI. On March 19, police were called to Ivins's home and found him unconscious. He was evaluated at Frederick Memorial Hospital. (Emphasis added)

What the Post omits are the particulars that the FBI confided to Ivins or his family that Ivins appreciated could have come only from his “therapist,” Jean Duley. Other news accounts describe the FBI confiscating Ivins’s guns, making frequent unannounced visits to his home, and confiscating his computers. When there is a genuine hot trail of evidence, the FBI does not need to behave like thugs arbitrarily assaulting Ivins’s right to a life, which assaults gave rise to any fantasies of revenge he had: so would we all.

These strong-arm tactics are typically reserved for the innocent who are singled out for destruction, not on the guilty intended to be brought to trial, because such goon-behavior would play out at trial as obvious prejudice, if not outright obstruction of justice. As an historic example of witness intimidation that would not have occurred if a trial were planned, I offer a similar but milder assault on Dr. William Perry, the Dallas surgeon at Parkland Hospital who described a bullet entrance wound in Kennedy’s throat at a press conference an hour after the president’s death on a Friday. During and after the autopsy in which the results were rigged the results, Dr. Perry received intimidating calls clearly intended to change his opinion to fit the official story that JFK was shot from behind by Oswald, Dr, Perry would not agree because he knew that the bullet wound in Kennedy's throat was an entrance wound and that he would be required to testify at Oswald’s trial. But he was told not to attend the press conference for Saturday, and by Sunday Oswald was dead. The operatives who told Dr. Perry to change his opinion were not worried about their efforts to obstruct justice coming out at Oswald’s trial because they knew there would be no such trial. (For details, see my essay Besmirching History )

The FBI and CIA have a long and ignominious history of destroying lives, driving people to suicide or near-suicide, sometimes with the help of their own intelligence-linked mental health professionals. For the JFK assassination alone, read the hard-to-find history of Dallas Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig, When They Kill a President, or Ralph Leon Yates and Abraham Bolden (both detailed in James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable), or Michael C. Ruppert (still with us, but broken) at his website or investigative reporter Gary Webb (hounded into suicide after exposing CIA drug pushing into inner-city ghettoes in the San Jose Mercury News and later in his book, Dark Alliance).

The WSJ of August 6, 2008 now reveals the FBI’s evidence against Ivins. According to the FBI, they found a flask in a lab to which Ivins (and many others) had access that had the two strains of anthrax found in one of the victims and that a diligent search of shipping records for the strains – made in two separate places – found them intersecting only at the lab in Ft. Detrick where Ivins worked. So says the FBI who discovered the flask years after 911, time enough for a guilty man to have wiped clean and discarded all of the evidence, but lucky for the FBI, and according to the FBI, not Bruce Ivins! There is still no mention of the “new technique” that permitted the FBI to reach its startling conclusions, probably because there is no “new technique.” How was this “new evidence” discovered? Was it by search warrant or open seizure of evidence for the purpose of analysis? No, it was done in the dark of night with the security cameras turned off. The Journal advises:

The FBI appointed two veteran agents to take over leadership of the case in 2006. Vincent Lisi, a supervisory agent, and Edward Montooth, an inspector in the case, helped lead a team that re-examined all the evidence.

By late 2006, it was clear the investigation was homing in on Dr. Ivins, said Jeffrey Adamovicz, who took over as chief of Dr. Ivins's division in 2003. The FBI began searches and seizures in the lab, usually but not always at night. Dr. Adamovicz didn't know what was searched because the FBI would turn off the security cameras while they were there.

The FBI took samples of anthrax from Dr. Ivins's freezer relating to old experiments, Dr. Adamovicz said. Agents returned a few months later and took a different set of samples contained in a "beaker or large vial," Dr. Adamovicz recalled. It isn't clear whether this is the flask the FBI is focused on. Later, the FBI took Dr. Ivins's computer. Dr. Adamovicz said the scientist was very upset, adding, "He mentioned a couple times maybe they were trying to set him up." (Emphasis added)

History is instructive. The FBI has a long and dishonorable history of manufacturing and distorting forensic results to fit the political needs. One example from the JFK assassination is especially memorable. The Mannlicher-Carcano rifle that Lee Harvey Oswald allegedly used to shoot Kennedy was immediately sent to FBI headquarters and checked for prints by its top fingerprint expert, but there were none. Later in the case as more evidence was needed for the Warren Commission, two FBI agents visited Oswald in the morgue carrying the Mannlicher-Carcano, asked the morgue personnel to leave, and later, lo! one of Oswald’s prints was discovered on the rifle anew. For an instructive account of the FBI’s routine corruption of evidence, read John F. Kelley, Tainting Evidence, or read the “USDOJ-FBI Labs Report” and then everything you can find on the fate of FBI whistle-blower Frederick Whitehurst.

While the WSJ’s big stories declare Ivins’s guilt, an opinion piece by Richard Spertzel of August 5, 2008, buried in the back pages proves his innocence. Spertzel was head of the biological weapons section of UNSCOM for 1994-1999, and has followed the case carefully; he mentions no DNA “new technique” in his analysis, but underscores that the “DNA match” is a red herring, and thus I suggest that it is likely planted evidence. The key issue has not been the DNA type, but the technology for weaponizing the samples. Spertzel advises:

According to a FBI news release from November 2001, the particles were coated by a "product not seen previously to be used in this fashion before." Apparently, the spores were coated with a polyglass which tightly bound hydrophilic silica to each particle. ...Another FBI leak indicated that each particle was given a weak electric charge, thereby causing the particles to repel each other at the molecular level. This made it easier for the spores to float in the air, and increased their retention in the lungs. In short, the potential lethality of anthrax in this case far exceeds that of any powdered product found in the now extinct U.S. Biological Warfare Program.

...The FBI has not officially released information on why it focused on Ivins, and whether he was about to be charged or arrested. And when the FBI does release this information, we should all remember that the case needs to be firmly based on solid information that would conclusively prove that a lone scientist could make such a sophisticated product.

From what we know so far, Bruce Ivins, although potentially a brilliant scientist, was not that man. The multiple disciplines and technologies required to make the anthrax in this case do not exist at Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. Inhalation studies are conducted at the institute, but they are done using liquid preparations, not powdered products.

The FBI spent between 12 and 18 months trying "to reverse engineer" (make a replica of) the anthrax in the letters sent to Messrs. Daschle and Leahy without success, according to FBI news releases.

The new evidence supports what the initial evidence so strongly suggested, that Ivins had been selected as a vulnerable patsy due to his history of alcoholism to push him back to drink and depression, had been driven to kill himself by systematic FBI abuse to destroy the fabric of his life and any hopes for his future, and has been accompanied by a media barrage that substitutes hot air, nasty rumors, dubious if not outright false accusations by Jean Duley, probably FBI-planted evidence on the flask, and the wonderful red herring of DNA-match when the principal issue was that the highly specific and technologically advanced weaponization of the anthrax was vastly beyond the skills or machinery Ivins possessed.

Could Ivins have been a part of the plot? Well, no. In addition to the reasons against this already stated, once it is plain that the FBI’s task is to bring this story to a close by protecting the perpetrators, it should be obvious that they would not do so by going after one of the guilty parties lest he spill the beans, or lest his political and personal affiliations point the finger at his comrades capable of perfecting the anthrax. The mainstream media has thus been silent about Bruce Ivins’s political affiliations because they apparently point nowhere; indeed Brad Friedman at Bradblog.com has discovered that Ivins was a registered Democrat since the 1980s, not a likely right-wing terrorist.

The Daily News Washington Bureau has an August 2, 2008 headline, “FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials” followed by this story:

On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, "There may be some possible link" to Bin Laden, adding, "I wouldn't put it past him." Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden's henchmen were trained "how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together."

But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. "Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with," the ex-FBI official said. "They couldn't go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next."

The demands of the White House coupled with the hard evidence of the origin of the anthrax put the FBI in a dilemma. They now had to “solve the case” but could not point the finger of guilt where it belonged, at the actual perpetrators, the same folk that the vast array of other evidence indicts as the domestic authors of 911, not opportunistic Freidmanites who “seize the day” for their own purposes. Hence the FBI was forced into its ridiculous dance with bioweapons researchers Steven Hatfill and its much more successful and perfectly lethal destruction of Bruce E. Ivins in the service of treason that passes for “national security.” The FBI is a political police force and member of the intelligence community, but a low-ranking one that, like the clowns, is often assigned the task of following the parade and cleaning up after the elephants have passed. Bruce E. Ivins has been a victim of one such clean-up job.