Posted on 04/24/2002 8:51:24 PM PDT by knak
This is not just any college, this is MIT. My question is why did Muller, professor at Berkeley, write to the MIT newspaper (magazine, actually)? Note there is no Richard Muller who is in alumnus of MIT. Second question, why did the Tech Review print his letter?
Bingo! As I've been saying for a while, sometimes diplomacy consists of saying "nice doggie!" to a snarling mongrel, whilst looking for a rock. I suspect we're building/preparing some really nice rocks.
Technology Review is not a college newspaper,
it is a high quality, 'slick' magazine,
much more interesting than, for example,
Scientific American.
It is sent automatically to all MIT alumni,
who generally tend to be very important people,
(myself excluded).
Second question, why did the Tech Review print his letter?
It is not a letter, it is an ARTICLE.
Why does any magazine print any article??
This is not the first article Muller has written
for Technology Review,
he did an earlier one on Crop-Dusters.
How did that happen?
If you go on the theory that Atta and friends were also responsible for the Anthrax, directly or indirectly, then look at the political headlines of last year, while these terrorists were hatching their plot within our borders. You'll notice that Daschle and Leahy had attained prominence in the media. The press was talking about Dashchle as having emerged as "a leader," and, of course, Leahy achieved fame during the Ashcroft hearings. (Let's face it, the Republicans don't exactly have any exciting members in Congress). The news networks chosen could simply be those these guys watched most, or thought most Americans watched most, and the New York Post, for a long time, has been considered pro-Jewish.
The American Media anthrax can also be explained by association -- the paper is sold all over the place, and their dealings with the real-estate agent wife of an AMI bigwig (and their contempt for women) quite probably sealed that target.
Lets reverse the situation.
Suppose I were to go to Egypt
and plot a terrorist attack against some politicians.
It is a common theme of all the terrorist profiles
that they spoke English badly.
So suppose I had a rudimentary knowledge of Arabic.
Other than Mubarak,
I do not know the names of any prominent Egyptian politicians.
What do I do?
I pick up a copy of Al-Ahram,
look on the front page,
look for a political story, at random,
and write down the names of a couple politicians
mentioned in the article.
I would not know nor care what their political affiliations were.
I'd just look up their addresses
and send anthrax laced letters to them.
I do not know why everyone assumes
the author of the letters had a sophisticated knowledge
of American politics
and chose the targets on that basis.
I think the terrorists neither knew nor cared about anything like that.
That isn't exactly what I think occurred. It appears to me that the anthrax mailings were a military deterrent -- a warning to the United States by some foreign power not to engage in certain types of military actions under threat of reprisal.
I don't think the intent was to cause mass hysteria. (They had something like a million lethal doses of anthrax, if it could have been delivered differently. Even realizing that one couldn't really kill one million people with such a quantity, because of the delivery problem, surely they could think of a better way of causing mass hysteria than mailing one million doses in half a dozen envelopes.)
The purpose of the warnings wasn't really to warn the recipients -- I don't think the sender cared about those few individuals one way or the other. Nobody sends anthrax in the mail if they're unwilling to kill. On the other hand, the purpose wasn't specifically to kill (or the anthrax would have been released very differently).
The warning message basically was: "We have weaponized anthrax. We're willing to use it. And we're able to use it, because the anthrax is in the U.S. and we have agents in the U.S. Think of it as analogous to a nuclear deterrent. Don't attack us with weapons of mass destruction or otherwise threaten to bring down our government."
I think the message is probably from Iraq, based on world events, but that's just an educated guess -- it wouldn't surprise me terribly if it were from Iran, or from China, or from some other country, or from a loose alliance (an "axis of evil"). I'm sure that the U.S. government knows who sent it, because the sender would have made sure of that (since the deterrence doesn't work without us knowing the sender). [Remember Dr. Strangelove and the Doomsday Machine that the Russians hadn't announced yet? It doesn't work without the other side knowing you have it -- and believing that you're able and willing to use it.]
In summary, what happened is that somebody (Saddam Hussein?) realized that they had a non-nuclear weapon that might work as a deterrent against the use of nuclear weapons. And they're challenging us to see what we'll do about it (and to see what we can do about it).
Of course I'm not 100% sure about this. But I see no other explanation that's consistent with all the evidence.
Some well meaning but otherwise infinitely stupid individual over at FBI may have nothing more than that in mind.
The Justice Department and it's subordinate agencies have more than their fair share of such people.
Stay well - Stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
In the long run, I think China is a much greater threat. But for now Iraq is probably the immediate and direct concern.
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