Posted on 10/16/2001 3:20:32 AM PDT by maquiladora
The acknowledgment from President George Bush that Osama bin Laden could well be behind the series of anthrax attacks which have occurred across the US raises questions as to what the links are between the letters containing the biological weapon and the al-Qaida network.
It has emerged that the wife of the editor of The Sun newspaper in Boca Raton, Florida, whose picture editor died after coming into contact with anthrax, rented an apartment to one of the men who hijacked the second aeroplane to fly in the World Trade Centre.
Gloria Irish, the wife of The Sun's editor Michael Irish, rented a $900-a-month fifth-floor apartment in the Delray Racquet Club to Hamza al-Ghamdi. She also let out a room at the Hamlet, a gated community, to Marwan al-Shehhi who is believed to have been the ringleader on the same flight.
Both men left Florida on September 9 for Boston, from where they hijacked the plane.
Yesterday the connection was being investigated by the FBI but it was being looked on as a "strange coincidence" until further links emerged.
Suspicions were first raised by the first outbreak in Florida because 11 out of 19 hijackers involved in the September 11 attacks had possible addresses in the Florida area, many within just a few miles of the offices of The Sun and other supermarket tabloid newspapers.
The principal, though circumstantial, evidence against al-Qaida is the coincidence of timing. The scare in the days after the attacks, and the threats that have been made by Bin Laden and his spokesmen are believed by many officials not to be unconnected.
Investigators also discovered that Mohamed Atta, the hijackers' ringleader, and another of his cohorts had taken out subscriptions to the supermarket tabloid, which went on to publish screaming headlines about Bin Laden, including one which said: "Wanted: Dead or Alive" with "alive" scratched out.
Some of the letters which caused a scare but eventually tested negative were mailed from St Petersburg, Florida
However, the letters sent to Senator Tom Daschle and the NBC news anchor Tom Brokaw were postmarked Trenton, New Jersey and have tested positive for anthrax.
New Jersey has figured prominently as a centre for Islamists connected with al-Qaida. Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, who operated out of Jersey City, proved a magnet for young militants across the world, including El Sayyid Nosair, who killed the racist rabbi Meir Kahane; and Ramzi Youssef, who was eventually convicted of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre. Youssef had direct contact with Bin Laden and received funds from the al-Qaida organisation.
The FBI is also looking at records of a meeting between Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague earlier this year. Iraq is known to have amassed enough weapons of mass destruction to enable them to wipe out the world's population.
Richard Butler, the former UN arms inspector in Iraq, said yesterday there was some evidence that al-Qaida had acquired anthrax from Iraq. He said the Egyptian government believed the bacteria could have been handed over during the Prague meeting.
"I don't believe that the terrorist groups - al-Qaida, Osama bin Laden - could themselves make anthrax," he told CNN. "So it would have been made by a scientist somewhere, obviously. What we've got to be certain about above all is whether it came from a country supporting these terrorists as a matter of policy, such as Iraq, which we know has made this stuff.
"And there is a credible report, not yet fully verified that they may indeed, have given anthrax to exactly the group that did the World Trade Centre."
He added that the Egyptian government was helping in the investigation.
"They feel that it's possible that not many months ago that anthrax - a small quantity of it was handed over in Prague, Czechoslovakia, to Mohamed Atta, a pilots aboard one of the planes that flew into the World Trade Centre," he said.
Intelligence sources believe that Bin Laden operatives have been preparing for spectacular terrorist strikes using biological weapons for a number of years. It is believed that viruses causing deadly diseases such as ebola and salmonella were procured in Russia and that anthrax was obtained from North Korea.
Sources believe that some of the terrorists have been trained to grow lethal biological cultures and have the ability to turn them into weapons in man-made laboratories.
In spite of finding no firm link between the anthrax and al-Qaida, Vice-President Dick Cheney had already acknowledged that "we have to be suspicious". He pointed out that terrorist manuals known to have been used by Bin Laden supporters contained instructions for the use of biological weapons.
He said: "We know that [Bin Laden] has over the years tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical weapons. We know that he's trained people in his camps in Afghanistan. For example, we have copies of the manuals that they've actually used to train people with respect to how to deploy and use these kinds of substances.
"So, you start to piece it altogether. Again, we have not completed the investigation and maybe it's coincidence, but I must say I'm a sceptic."
Judith Miller, the New York Times journalist who received a letter containing a suspicious powder, wrote in her book Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War: "We remain woefully unprepared for a calamity that would be unlike any this country has experienced."
Either we've got competing theories, disinformation, or TWO strains of anthrax...
I'd have thought pretty much all libraries were man-made. Is this to distinguish them from alien labs? Or those pesky natural labs that keep springing up?
I've never heard that before. Why would they have any interest in targeting us?
Or are you saying that the Star of David story was the disinformation?
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