Posted on 03/08/2006 6:43:52 AM PST by TrebleRebel
(jpl) He was banned a while back for posting under multiple accounts.
He just wanted to go out with a bang.
How did he justify the claim that Hatfill was a proxy for Saddam? Is there something in the tapes, or was it just random speculation on his part?
Anyway
Hatfill was neither proxy
nor Saddam's fall guy
since Saddam did not have biological WMDs.
That at least is abundantly clear.
As you say, at this point, there really is nothing to suggest that Saddam had biological WMDs. The things that seemed to point in that direction have invariably turned out to be flaky, or unsourced, or extremely doubtful. Some of these things were probably disinformation, and some were probably expressions of genuine, if misguided, conspiratorial belief.
However, it's hard to see how one can reach a conclusion about a possible proxy from that. A proxy could have gotten his anthrax from somewhere other than Saddam but could still have been a hired gun for Saddam. Or someone could be a proxy for someone other than Saddam.
These may not be likely possibilities, of course. We may never find out.
TGS - I thought he/she/it was particularly amusing when he said we would never invade Iraq.
He gave no reasons whatsoever.
He just pulled it out of thin air.
He also rambled on about the Oklahoma City bombing
TWA flight 800, etc
insinuating that all of this was the work of Saddam.
You are right.
Saddam could have hired him to produce and distribute the 'gold standard' anthrax.
Or the Martians could have done it too.
Someone who already had access could conceivably have sold out to the highest bidder, for instance. Such a person would probably not have provided production details, thus giving Saddam no long-term WMD capability, just one-shots.
But I don't think this is at all likely.
Ergo, it is exceedingly misleading to cite the translator as an authoritative source for the presence of Hatfill in the anthrax chain of custody.
NOTE: Today I made a cognitive link of interest to many here ~ remember Mohammad Atta approached the Commerce Department's SBA rep in Florida to get a minority loan to buy a crop-duster? (Presumably to spread anthrax spores).
He'd had contact with the same Islamofascist rabble here in Northern Virginia who infested the same mosque where Amil Kansi attended.
He's the terrorist who shot up a bunch of people at the CIA entrance, then fled to Pakistan, then got caught, taken back to Virginia, and then tried, convicted and disposed of.
Anyway, Kansi used to work on taxicab brakes for the taxis driven by the guys in his mosque every holiday or Saturday morning. They did it out in the street IMMEDIATELY ACROSS FROM GILBERT COLON'S HOUSE.
He was, at the time the head of the Minority Business Loan office in the Department of Commerce.
Later on Gilbert went to work for James Riady (SEE: Lippo Group) and was working as bag man to bring in illegal campaign contributions to the Clinton campaign coffers.
Gilbert is presently on the lam fleeing prosecution in this country for all sorts of stuff.
So, how you like them apples: A Puerto Rican American in the pay of an Indonesian billionaire undoubtedly had personal, day to day contact with an AlQaida terrorist who murdered CIA employees.
That individual, in turn, had had contact with Mohammad Atta, who participated directly in the 9/11 attack, as well as others who lived in the same neighborhood and who worked for AlQaida in conducting the 9/11 attack.
I'll have to think about this for a while since I don't know what motive the Riady's would have to carry water for AlQaida or Saddam Hussein by supporting an anthrax attack. On the other hand, the Riady family might well have been involved in the Oil for Food scandals ~ but I have little expertise in tracking that daisy chain. But maybe our link between Saddam Hussein and AlQaida does not involve as many Arabs as we imagine, and instead links through Puerto Ricans and Indonesians.
Somebody might go talk to Jose Padilla about this one. That "dirty bomb" could have simply been an euphemism for "anthrax".
I'll pass. He's just a younger, blonder Geraldo.
Yes, production appears to require quite a bit of technical sophistication. (The FBI was unable to reverse-engineer the 2001 anthrax powder.)
In fact, it may be that we have overestimated the danger of rogue states and terrorism in general, for now anyway. Many of us assumed that 9/11 was the first in what would be a series of comparable attacks, but it hasn't turned out that way.
And these people are not sophisticated.
All they can think about are atomic bombs.
Well, I'm not so sure about that. Do we really know that terrorists are actively trying to arm themselves with atomic weapons? If so, why didn't A. Q. Khan make it happen when he was running his network? It seems to me that it's the Western governments and media that are focusing on atomic bombs, along with the governments of Iran and North Korea.
Terrorists seem to be concentrating on what they can do with traditional weapons such as chemical explosives.
At some point, WMD in the hands of individuals or small groups will become a problem, but maybe that development can be held off for a while still.
Perhaps, but I don't think so. I guarantee that if on 9/10/01 you had gone around asking people what they thought about the danger of a bunch of terrorists simultaneously hijacking several airplanes and successfully destroying both Twin Towers, almost everyone would have laughed at you and said that the idea was preposterous and it would never happen. That's the way these things tend to work, the danger is always overstated until it actually happens, and then all of a sudden one day out of the blue it happens, and the danger isn't overstated any more.
I think the more likely explanation is that before 9/11 our country as a whole just wasn't taking this stuff very seriously at all, and now we are, and because we are, we've made it far more difficult for our enemies to actually pull a mission of that magnitude off, though I have no doubt that they would still like to try again.
My big fear is that it looks like our government may be slipping back into complacency once again, and that it our biggest danger. If we go back to the 9/10 mindset, there's no doubt that it'll be just a matter of time before we have another major disaster happen.
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