Posted on 08/20/2002 3:03:49 AM PDT by snopercod
Edited on 04/22/2004 11:46:56 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Having spent a lot of time on the arms-control wars over the past 30 years, I'm well acquainted with the Federation of American Scientists. Its mission is promoting arms control with a scientific twist, nicely illustrated with the huge anthrax outbreak near a suspected Soviet biological weapons facility at Sverdlovsk in 1979.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
The Bush administration is quite happy for the FBI to be led around by Barbara Rosenberg -- for now.
Look very carefully at the interestingly-named "Amerithrax" investigation.
I recommend everyone check out the FBI's Amerithrax web site thoroughly; follow the links, read the text, look at the pictures, play the WAVs. It won't take you very long. Then ask yourself: what is the real purpose of Amerithrax?
The Amerithrax investigation is in the process of being very publicly discredited. Almost every big-name paper in the country has now run an editorial deriding the FBI and the apparent attempt to "Jewell" Dr. Steven Hatfill. The Amerithrax crew -- two men and a dog, basically -- has been putting on a brave show, flashing Steve Hatfill's picture around Princeton, NJ, asking residents if they remember seeing him mail a letter ten months ago.
Nothing will come of this, of course.
Louisiana State University, which hired Hatfill last month on a DOJ-funded contract as a $150K/yr bioterror response trainer, put him on one-month's paid leave on August 2, promising to review his status at the end of that period. On or before that date, the matter of Steven J. Hatfill will become a dead issue. Which means that the "rogue scientist" myth will be dead, for all intents and purposes.
Which means that the question people will be asking themselves is, who gave Mohammed Atta the anthrax?
On September 2, just over a week before the orgy of retrospectives and navel-gazing which will accompany the 9/11 anniversary, President George W. Bush will return to Washington, rested from his one-month vacation in Waco, TX. It may be anticipated that one of the first items on his agenda will be to establish the context for the next phase of the War on Terrorism, including fulfilling his promise to "make the case" for his stated goal of removing Saddam Hussein, by any and all means necessary.
The White House served notice a few days ago that "making the case" will involve "talking more" about the disputed story of Mohammed Atta's visit to Prague to meet with an Iraqi intelligence agent. What does "talking more" about this incident mean? Will this be a generalized, airy-fairy, philosophical discussion about the impossibility of knowing anything for certain? Or will it be something else?
Hands up who still can't see where this is going. Anyone?
A cunning woman scientist who heads Saddam Hussein's bio-terrorism team may be the mastermind behind the world's anthrax scare, a leading American germ warfare expert says.Rihab Taha, 45, is so notorious that United Nations weapons inspectors have nicknamed her "Dr. Germ" for deadly experiments she conducted ...
The British-trained Taha gained a biology degree at the University of East Anglia after arriving in 1979 to study crop diseases.
But when she returned to Iraq, Taha led a team that made germs causing victims' eyes to bleed and produced a bacteria that gave babies a deadly diarrhea.
U.N. inspectors believe Taha, who has a 5-year- old daughter, tests her poisons on human guinea pigs.
In 1995, she admitted that a secret germ factory she set up near Baghdad had made thousands of gallons of anthrax and botulism - enough to kill millions.
Military officials in Washington recently identified Taha as "the leading official in charge of Iraq's biological weapons program."
She is also politically well-connected. Her husband is Iraqi oil minister Amir Rashid Ubaydi, who helps direct the country's relations with the U.N. weapons-inspection teams ...
Over the years, Iraq has produced great quantities of liquid anthrax for deployment in missile warheads, U.N. inspectors say, and Iraqi agents are known to meet periodically with bin Laden operatives.
Investigators have been looking with renewed interest at two reported meetings last summer between Mohamed Atta, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 hijackings, and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague.
See: Ritter: Iraq 'No Threat' [Free Republic], NewsMax.com, November 19, 2001, by Carl Limbacher and NewsMax.com Staff (posted by JeanS).
NewsMax has reported before how former UN Arms Inspector Scott Ritter has become an apologist for Saddam Hussein's regime.As the administration has pointed a clear finger at the Iraqi regime for building weapons of mass destruction, Ritter took to the airwaves to pour cold water in the allegations.
Ritter said he had "no doubt" Hussein was building such weapons -- but only up until 1993.
Since then, Ritter told Fox News' John Gibson, Iraq's "determination to acquire such weapons isn't there."
He claimed Iraq's doesn't have the "industrial infrastructure" to build such weapons, and that their number one goal is to have "sanctions lifted."
It all sounds good, but diametrically contradicts what Ritter said in 1996, when he quit the UN team claiming the Clinton administration had not allowed inspectors to do their job ...
See: Scott Ritter blames right wing "McVeigh Groups" for Anthrax, FoxNews interview with Scott Ritter, October 19, 2001 (posted by GuillermoX ).
Scott Ritter on Fox and Friends doesn't believe the anthrax is from Iraq but from "McVeigh" type "right wing" groups here in the USA.[FRPR GuillermoX 's reply 2:]
[Ritter said,] " ... clearly it's not weapons grade or weaponized anthrax ... "[At that time, it may be that only the first batch had been so analyzed.]
[FRPR angkor's reply 38:]
Appearing in a panel discussion on the History Channel last week ...First he insisted that "there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq". Then he said his UN team was forced out with "90 percent of the job done." When asked how he knew there was nothing in Iraq - since they left with 10 percent of the job undone, Ritter insisted that the remaining 10 percent was "only documentation and inventories."
He insisted he had "complete access" because "I was in Saddam HUssein's bathroom" and talked to the highest levels of Iraq's intelligence agencies. But when pressed, he could not answer the repeated questions about his certainty that there were no WMD in Iraq, since he hadn't gotten the inventories, as he previously admitted.
Throughout the discussion he was hostile, angry, combative, and just plain rude (while the other panelists were quite accomodating to his wierd outbursts).
Ritter became nearly apoplectic when Iraq's potential involvement in WTC 9/11 was raised, saying that the alleged sightings of bin Laden in Bhagdad were sheer nonsense, and that other sightings of Atta and Iraqi intelligence were also nonsense. He offered as proof that "I was in the el Rasheed Hotel in March 1998, and I didn't see bin Laden."
Mr. Ritter has enjoyed the "boot," so to speak, a "Goodbye and good riddance!" --- the "portfolio" of an agent who has been turned --- see: Ritter [is a] Mossad/CIA Agent, Claims Iraq [Free Republic], Reuters, August 29, 1998 (posted by Mayor Loz).
BAGHDAD --- Iraqi newspapers on Saturday lashed out at resigning American U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, accusing him of having links with Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, and the U.S. Central intelligence Agency."It seems that Ritter's mates in the Mossad have burdened him with anti-Iraq duties, thus prompting him to resign for being restless and sleepless of these duties,'' the daily newspaper Al-Jomhuriya said.
"By submitting his resignation, Ritter and his backers wanted to put a red seal on his intelligence past which proved recently that, thanks to his post, he was transferring information on Iraq to the Mossad,'' the paper added.
Ritter, who was involved repeatedly in stand-offs with Iraq, resigned on Wednesday and leveled an angry blast at the U.N. Security Council and the U.N. secretary-general for not standing up to Baghdad.
In a letter to chief weapons inspector Richard Butler, he said the U.N. Special Commission (UNSCOM) in charge of disarming Iraq, "hobbled as it is by unfettered Iraqi obstruction and non-existent Security Council enforcement of its own resolutions,'' was not the organization he joined almost seven years ago ...
Ritter said on Thursday that he resigned to sound a "wake-up call'' that Iraq must be compelled to give up its weapons of mass destruction ...
Mr. Ritter did not apparently quit to warn the world. Instead, he quit to function as perhaps Ms. Rosenberg's F.A.S. has, in the above Wall Street Journal article.
He perhaps quit to discredit the once-more-firm stance of the U.N. versus Iraq --- to break up the alliance against Iraq.
Perhaps this return address leads, in his past, to its creation:
4th Grade
Greendale School
Franklin Park, NJ 08852
Remember Ahmed Abdel Sattar, who carried messages between Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman and other leaders of the Islamic Group and was a Staten Island postal worker? While the government certainly hasn't said anything about him being involved in the anthrax mailings yet, I won't be surprised to learn he was involved. And we know there was an Iraqi agent working with Rahman in the first WTC bombing.
And then there were the Atta meeting in Prague and the reports of him and one of the other hijackers being treated with cipro.
I wouldn't be at all surprised to learn that Ms. Rosenberg or one of her cohorts gave out the weaponized anthrax on the same theory that Clinton gave the PRC all our missle & nuclear technology: that giving all our enemies our secrets would dispel their fear, provide parity, and make us all friends.
It's Rosemberg's fingerpointing at this guy that leads me to believe he's innocent. Otherwise, Rosenberg would be holding him up as a hero...
You'll note that it's not only Steven's first name which begins with an "S" but also Ritter's! And the month of September begins with an "S" !
(I state this because there is evidently at Free Republic, a "finder of fact" who, regarding such observations by the lay person [I could be wrong about there being an "S" in the beginning of Scott Ritter], deems them not being valid unless stamped by his approved "expert witness report analysts.")
And there are ELEVEN letters in S c o t t R i t t e r ! (Zowee!)
(Please correct me for any remarks where I failed to place an "!")
Maybe something's going to break on the anthrax front soon.
Listing the suspects, what were their respective motives for playing such a game?
And, are they protecting conspirators, or are they playing with us?
The Anthrax attack last fall of 2001, might just have been a test run by any of many foreign powers or political forces or economic forces.
It would not be the first time that poison was used on an occasion contributing to the appearance of death by related "causation."
A solid case ought to be had, prior to seizure by the law, so as to ensure as best as possible that some "bug" does not slip through its "envelope."
The address of the Islamic Society of Central Jersey is 4151 US Route 1 at Stouts Lane, Monmouth Junction, NJ 08852.
SAN CARLOS, Calif., Aug. 5 /PRNewswire/ -- NuGEN Technologies, Inc. today announced it has received a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) to develop a rapid and sensitive assay for the detection of anthrax. The assay will be based on NuGEN's Single Primer Isothermal Amplification Technology (SPIA(TM)), a novel method for amplifying and detecting small amounts of DNA or RNA."Our SPIA(TM) technology was developed as a high fidelity alternative to PCR without the need for complex instrumentation," said Nurith Kurn, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of NuGEN. "In this application, it potentially offers a tremendous advantage for more rapid detection of a bioterrorism agent such as anthrax. Clearly, the earlier anthrax can be detected in the environment, the earlier treatment can be administered to the population."
Despite the complexity of having to thermocycle and a lack of speed, the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) is currently the only reliable technology for the relatively rapid detection of anthrax (Bacillus anthracis). NuGEN's SPIA(TM) technology is capable of greater than 107 fold amplification of a target nucleic acid within 30 minutes. It is well suited for centralized laboratory testing since no containment of the reaction mixture is required.
"NuGEN's rapid, isothermal method will be ideally suited for environmental or field-based applications for the detection of anthrax, when integrated with existing microfluidic miniaturized devices," said Jan D'Alvise, President and CEO of NuGEN ... "
See: Anthrax Detection System Proposed, Yahoo / AP, August 12, 2002:
WASHINGTON (AP) - Using lasers to measure the scattering of light off vibrating molecules could lead to a new method for quickly detecting anthrax spores and other bioterror agents.The system is proposed in a paper appearing in Tuesday's issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The work is in its preliminary stages, acknowledges Marlan O. Scully of Texas A&M University.
"We're still doing the science, we're not ready to build the device and put it out right away," said Scully, lead researcher on the project.
But it holds the potential to speed up the detection of anthrax and other spores if development can be completed.
Interest in rapid detection of biological agents has increased since the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax-by-mail terrorism last fall.
Current detection systems can tell the difference between dust and organic compounds such as bacteria, but they can't quickly sort the dangerous spores like anthrax from germs that don't cause disease.
The international research team led by Scully hopes to take advantage of so-called Raman signals, which result from the scattering of light off vibrating molecules.
Anthrax includes certain acid and calcium compounds that produce unique Raman signals, and detecting these would quickly highlight the deadly germs.
But Raman signals are very weak, so the team is using short bursts of light from one laser to increase the oscillations of the molecules, boosting the signals much like pushing a child on a swing increases her movement.
Then a second laser is used to detect the amplified signal.
The team calls the proposed method FAST CARS &emdash; femtosecond adaptive spectroscopic techniques for coherent anti-Stokes Raman spectroscopy.
The Milwaukee County, (State of Milwaukee) map has a Greendale area just to the northwest of a Franklin area --- see: Anthrax Letter Writer Profile [Free Republic] [reply 245], F.B.I. (posted November 9, 2001 by Fearless Flyers).
No. Read what I wrote again.
"Talking more" can only mean they will begin to connect the dots for the public.
The way they lay out the case will be extremely interesting. I suspect President Bush has a very strong case to make, but that the case is explosive. We simply cannot accuse Iraq of involvement in either 9-11 or the anthrax attacks without already being ready to do something about it.
The White House has also said we now have enough force in place to remove Saddam at any time. Could just be to keep Saddam underground, but I think we mean it.
Israel is urging us not to wait.
Nations throughout the Middle East are getting ready for war.
The weather will start to turn in our favor soon.
The peace at any price crowd is suddenly going wild.
The only thing I see that argues against an impending attack is Bush's statement that he will not launch an "October surprise". Does that rule out September?
We are going to reprise the story with bin Laden. Bush will call for Saddam to be handed over for trial -- or else. If Saddam's generals are unable to arrange that, we will start to take Iraq apart. The initial phase will most likely involve splitting off the already semi-autonomous Kurdish region under the no-fly zone, installing a democratic government with the help of the Iraqi exile groups. This will also be our forward base for the rest of the military campaign.
Saddam's bioweapons-based insurance policy is all-or-nothing. He cannot do a thing to stop us from gradually dismembering his country and transferring power to democratic leaders. Meanwhile -- again assuming no coup is forthcoming -- we can kill about a year with this campaign. That will be time enough to prepare our civil defenses for most if not all plausible doomsday scenarios -- given the total urgency of that task in the new context of an ongoing hot-war with Iraq.
Saddam will be *isolated*, like Arafat has been *isolated*, only more so. When Saddam is left ruling a rump of a country, surrounded by generals who are just itching to do away with him, and the people of Baghdad have mostly fled the city in fear of the final nuclear-biological showdown, Saddam will be in a very weak position indeed.
Again, the question is, if he holds on until that point, will he take a trial and life imprisonment over revenge and death?
We are living in intersting times, to put it mildly.
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