Posted on 06/07/2002 7:45:03 AM PDT by mrustow
I don't believe they did, but then, her FAS "report" is a pedantic piece of work that is hard to get that much out of. What she does is tailor her story to her audience of the moment. When she spoke to foreign journalists, they would help her out, by claiming to have their own FBI sources, supporting her wild CIA scientist-assassin story.
nonetheless, evidence does seem to point to homegrown anthrax ... or a homegrown "distributor" ... it would seem Saddam would have picked different targets rather than Brokaw and Daschle, et al ... though I must admit the first time I heard "anthrax" I susupected Saddam (cf: HBO's "The Doomsday Gun") ...
If you have evidence supporting the "home-grown" assassin theory, I'd love to see it. I've heard many a CLAIM that such evidence exists, but I've never seen anyone come up with any. Meanwhile, mucho evidencia points to foreign terrorists.
A lot of self-styled conservatives won't admit to that scenario, but it is why political correctness is only one of the reasons society is the way it is.
Since that report about the Ag. Dept. loan officer who said she had the encounter with Atta, about half of the news reports I've heard have presumed that what Atta planned to do was fill the passenger cabin with a tank...in order to fill it with fuel in order to use the plane as a smaller version of the 9-11 planes.
These reports don't mention the possibility that Atta was going to fill the tank with anthrax or some other noxious biological or chemical weapon.
The anthrax last year may have been domestic...but the press and the guvmint just seem cock-sure that it couldn't have been foreign origin. Got to find a white male right-winger to pin this one on!
Remember how, at first, we heard that scientists could determine the exact lab the anthrax came from? Genetic fingerprints, and all that? We don't hear any of that cocksure talk any more.
Posted on 6/6/02 9:25 PM Pacific by Pokey78
We Americans have conjured so specific a vision of terrorists — swarthy, glowering Muslims mumbling fanatically about Allah — that we're missing the threat from home-grown nuts, people like David Burgert.
Mr. Burgert, a 38-year-old who last made a living renting out snowmobiles here in this spectacularly beautiful nook of northwestern Montana, had a terror plan that made Osama bin Laden's look rinky-dink. Not content merely to kill a few thousand people, Mr. Burgert's nine-member militia was planning a violent revolution and civil war to overthrow the entire United States government.
The plan, according to Sheriff James Dupont, was for the militia to use its machine guns, pipe bombs and 30,000 rounds of ammunition to assassinate 26 local officials (including Mr. Dupont), and then wipe out the National Guard when it arrived. After the panicked authorities sent in NATO troops, true American patriots would rise up, a ferocious war would ensue, and the U.S. would end up back in the hands of white Christians.
"The good thing is that most of the people who would do it are so stupid that they would kill themselves first," said Sheriff Dupont, who runs the law here in rugged Flathead County, which is bigger than all of Connecticut and has lots more grizzly bears.
But the litany of domestic militia plots, failed ones, is still sobering. In Michigan, militia members planned to bomb two federal buildings. Missourians planned to attack American military bases, starting with Fort Hood, Tex., on a day it opened to tens of thousands of visitors. California militia members planned to blow up a propane storage facility. Most unnerving, a Florida militia plotted to destroy a nuclear power plant.
If these were Muslims who were forming militias and exchanging tips for making nerve gas, then we'd toss them in prison in an instant. But we're distracted by our own stereotypes, searching for Muslim terrorists in the Philippine jungle and the Detroit suburbs and forgetting that there are blond, blue-eyed mad bombers as well. We're making precisely the mistake that the Saudis did a few years ago: dismissing familiar violent fanatics as kooks.
In fact, militia members and Al Qaeda members are remarkably similar. Both are galvanized by religious extremism (America's militias overlap with the Christian Identity movement, which preaches that Jews are the children of Satan and that people of color are sub-human), both see the United States government as utterly evil, and both are empowered by the information revolution that enables them to create networks, recruit disciples and trade recipes for bio- and chemical weapons.
It would be a mistake to put one's faith in the militias' eternal incompetence. Jessica Stern of Harvard has written about an anti-government activist named James Dalton Bell, who earned a degree in chemistry from M.I.T. and is unquestionably brilliant. By age 14, he says, "I was studying the isomerization of benzyl thiocyanate to the isocyanate."
Weren't we all? But Mr. Bell, who is now in jail, is also believed by the authorities to have manufactured sarin, a nerve gas, in his basement. He led a chemical attack against an I.R.S. office and wrote an Internet book called "Assassination Politics," which outlines a very clever scheme to pay for contract killings of federal officials with digital cash in a way that preserves anonymity at both ends. There is also evidence that Mr. Bell talked "hypothetically" of poisoning a city's water supply.
The things you learn in Montana: According to militia members here, the World Trade Center attacks were a plot by the Feds to declare an emergency and abolish the Bill of Rights; the Columbine school shootings were a federal test of new mind-control technology; a map on a Kix cereal box shows the occupation zones Americans will be herded into after the United Nations takes over.
Another thing you learn here is how to deal with grizzlies. Don't be so focused on a distant moose that you ignore the bear behind you. And if it charges, stand your ground until it's 10 feet away, then shoot pepper spray into its eyes, and — very quickly — step aside.
Right now, I'm afraid that the Bush administration is so focused on the distant moose that we're oblivious to the local grizzlies like Dave Burgert creeping up on us.
Good point. That was accidental, of course, but you are correct.
I'm glad you mentioned this, because it led me to dig a little into the background. The Soviets always maintained that the 1979 incident, which killed at least 68 people, was caused by tainted meat. This became a bone of contention with the Reagan administration. The controversy remained unresolved during the 1980s, the US intelligence community favoring the biowar accident theory, and much of the (left-wing) scientific community backing the Soviets' natural outbreak explanation. Barbara Rosenberg's SIPRI/Pugwash peacenik globalist buddy, Harvard biologist Matthew Meselson, led the pack in carrying the Soviet's water. Later, when it became irrefutable that the Reagan administration had called the incident correctly, a cornered Meselson admitted that, yes, it was a biowar accident, but it might have only have involved a few grammes of weaponized material -- such as the Soviets were permitted for defensive research under treaty obligations. This was, of course, pure bunk: the release involved several pounds of weaponized anthrax. The whole story only came out after the collapse of the Communist regime and the ascendancy of Yeltsin. (Source: Anthrax at Sverdlovsk, 1979)
Those of us who were politically aware during the nineteen eighties know exactly what motivates people like Barbara "Nuthatch" Rosenberg. I had her number right from the start. Mind you, I think she has been used by the current administration, which has tacitly encouraged the media to dwell on various far-fetched "natural" or "domestic" theories since the first case in Florida. The leveraging of useful idiots on the left to further policy objectives has become a lietmotif of this administration -- witness the way that the Dems' "blame Dubya" hysteria has been used to subvert PC multuculturalist objections to the war on terrorism. Of course, if it works, why not use it? As a bystander, I find it fascinating to watch.
The administration also retains the option, whenever it would find it useful, of revealing the truth, which would simultaneously reveal the useful idiots for what they are.
A paste? That's the first I've heard of that. Is there a reference for this?
Also, don't be too quick to assume that the different mailings of anthrax were all the same. We don't know that either. As I've outlined elsewhere, the symptoms are different enough to suggest that there may have been differences in the anthrax between Florida and the Northeast. See my posts #13 and 14 on another thread for a discussion of whether the differences are statistically significant. The sample sizes are very small, making it difficult to demonstrate statistical significance, but it appears to at least approach statistical significance. (The difference between Florida and the Northeast with respect to the symptoms of long-term survivors is significant at the p=0.2 level [80% confidence level]. This isn't bad for such a small sample size. When you add in the differential rates of cutaneous vs. inhalation anthrax between envelope recipients in FL vs. NY, this will decrease the p-value and increase the confidence level further.)
Newsweek magazine reported on its Web site Monday that the American Media office received a "weird love letter to Jennifer Lopez" a week before the Sept. 11 attacks. Inside was what was described as a "soapy, powdery substance" and a Star of David charm. The letter was handled by both Stevens and Blanco, according to unidentified workers cited by Newsweek.There's Atta's sense of humor again. What a cut-up.
"Soapy" doesn't sound like the texture of a dry, 1-5 micron powder. Sounds like the anthrax might have been cut with something -- e.g. soap. But, who knows? It doesn't mean we're safer or less safe. It doesn't mean anything important. Neither do your p-values, I'm afraid.
Incidentally, I am curious about the contents of that "strangely-worded" J-Lo letter. I got the impression at the time that there might have been pornography in the letter, which again sounds like the sort of goof Atta might have pulled, what with his complexes about women and "Western decadance." If you recall, one of the so-called "false alarms" during the anthrax panic was a letter to Microsoft from Malaysia, which contained pornography. As I recall, the letter had apparently been opened in shipment and the "anthrax" (or whatever it was) had been added by someone other than the sender. Here's an interesting tidbit from an article posted last night, F.B.I. Denial of Search Warrant for Suspect's Belongings Is at Center of Inquiries:
In [20th hijacker] Mr. Moussaoui's other belongings, the agents also found a letter from a Malaysian computer company, Infocus Tech, offering a business reference for Mr. Moussaoui. The letter was signed by "Yazid Sufaat, managing director," a Malaysian microbiologist who had been identified as an important Qaeda organizer in Southeast Asia.
I wouldn't assume that every "false alarm" we heard about last October was a genuine "false alarm." Some of those threats may have been quite genuine -- even if the anthrax was sometimes a blank. There are some interesting loose ends out there, I think.
In one of the New York mailings (NBC News, I think, but it might have been the New York Post), the wrong letter (one from St. Petersburg, FL) was initially identified, based on the fact that it appeared "strange." If the real anthrax letter hadn't materialized, the original letter would probably still be regarded as suspicious; it's hard to know if that's what's happening with the Lopez letter or not.
With regard to all the hoaxes, I have thought from the beginning that some of them were not hoaxes, but decoys, sent by the terrorists to sow confusion and to try to overburden both investigators and medical workers. They could also have been sent to test our responses. (There were apparently several letters from St. Petersburg; these might fall into the category of decoy rather than hoax.)
There were also the earlier letters sent from Indianapolis to Sean Hannity and probably others. It would be most interesting to see copies of these. (A New York Post reporter has apparently seen one of these letters, but very little has been made public about them.)
Thanks for the link on the Moussaoui Malaysian connection; I hadn't seen that.
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