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Anthrax unthinkable { April 8 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
>http://www.counterpunch.org/>http://www.counterpunch.org/
>
>April 8, 2002
>
>Anthrax and the Agency
>Thinking the Unthinkable
>By Wayne Madsen
>
>Now that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has officially put the
>anthrax investigation on a back burner, it is time for Americans to think the
>unthinkable: that the FBI has never been keen to identify the perpetrator
>because that perpetrator may, in fact, be the U.S. Government itself. Evidence
>is mounting that the source of the anthrax was a top secret U.S. Army
>laboratory
>in Maryland and that the perpetrators involve high-level officials in the U.S.
>military and intelligence infrastructure.
>
>FBI Debunks Anthrax-Hijacker Link
>
>Coming shortly after the hijacked airliner attacks on New York and Washington,
>the anthrax attacks on the U.S. Congress, major media outlets, and the U.S.
>Postal System were, at first, blamed by the Bush administration on Al Qaeda or
>Iraq. However, on March 23, the FBI officially announced that "exhaustive
>testing did not support that anthrax was present anywhere the hijackers had
>been." This statement came after a rather weak story based on conjecture
>appeared in The New York Times. The article reported that a Fort Lauderdale
>emergency room doctor treated Saudi hijacker Ahmed Alhanzawi in June 2001
>for a
>cutaneous anthrax lesion on his leg. Although the doctor, Christos Tsonas, did
>not think the lesion was caused by anthrax at the time he cleansed and treated
>the wound, he later changed his mind after realizing Alhanzawi was one of the
>hijackers.
>
>Although Tsonas' theory was rejected by the FBI, it was supported by Johns
>Hopkins University's Center for Biodefense Strategies. Johns Hopkins has
>its own
>peculiar link to anthrax. President Bush recently named as the Director of the
>National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Elias Zerhouni, an Algerian-born
>professor at Johns Hopkins University and notorious Pentagon yes-man on
>anthrax
>bio-defenses. As a member of the National Academy of Sciences' Institute of
>Medicine, Zerhouni and his colleagues, serving on a National Academy of
>Sciences
>Institute of Medicine special committee, gave a green light to the Pentagon's
>use of a questionable anthrax vaccine on military personnel. According to Dr.
>Meryl Nass, a member of the Federation of American Scientists who spent three
>years studying the world's largest recorded anthrax epidemic in Zimbabwe from
>1979 to 1980, the report generated by Zerhouni and his colleagues "relies on
>ignoring many pieces of crucial information, and its recommendations give the
>Department of Defense everything it could have wanted. The report appears
>to be
>'spun' to support a number of DOD initiatives, and it provides the needed
>justification for restarting mandatory anthrax vaccinations over the
>objections
>of many in Congress."
>
>U.S. Link to Anthrax No Conspiracy Theory
>
>Forget unfounded conspiracy theories. The evidence is overwhelming that
>the FBI
>has consistently shied away from pursuing the anthrax investigation, in
>much the
>same way it avoided pursuing leads in the USS Cole, East Africa U.S.
>embassies,
>and Khobar Towers bombings.
>
>On April 4, ABC News investigative reporter Brian Ross broadcast on ABC World
>News Tonight that after six months the FBI still had hardly any clues and no
>suspects in its anthrax investigation. A Soviet defector, the former First
>Deputy Director of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992 and anthrax expert, Ken
>Alibek
>(formerly Kanatjan Alibekov), now a U.S. government consultant, made the
>astounding claim that the person who is behind the anthrax attacks may, in
>fact,
>been advising the U.S. government. After having passed a lie detector test,
>Alibek was cleared of any suspicion.
>
>Interestingly, Alibek is President of Hadron Advanced Biosystems. On
>October 2,
>2001, just two days before the first anthrax case was reported in Boca Raton,
>Florida and a week and a half before the first anthrax was sent through
>the mail
>to NBC News in New York, Advanced Biosystems received an $800,000 grant
>from NIH
>to focus on very specific defenses against anthrax. Hadron has long been
>linked
>with the CIA. The links include charges by many former government officials,
>including the late former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, that the
>company's
>former President, Earl Brian, illegally procured a database system called
>PROMIS
>(Prosecutors' Management Information System) from Inslaw, Inc. and used his
>connections to the CIA and Israeli intelligence to illegally distribute the
>software to various foreign governments.
>
>Ross reported that U.S. military and intelligence agencies have refused to
>provide the FBI with a full listing of the secret facilities and employees
>working on anthrax projects. Because of this stonewalling, crucial
>evidence has
>been withheld. Professor Jeanne Guilleman of MIT's Biological Weapons Studies
>Center told ABC, "We're talking here about laboratories where, in fact, the
>material that we know was in the Daschle letter and in the Leahy letter could
>have been produced. And I think that's what the FBI is still trying to
>find out."
>
>But the FBI does not seem to want to pursue these important leads.
>
>CIA Testing Anthrax and the U.S. Mail
>
>The first major media outlet to accuse the FBI of foot dragging was the
>BBC. On
>March 14, the BBC's Newsnight program highlighted an interview with Dr.
>Barbara
>Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists. After claiming the CIA was
>involved, through government contractors, in secret testing of sending anthrax
>through the mail, Rosenberg, someone with close ties to the biological warfare
>community, has been attacked by the White House, FBI, and, not
>surprisingly, the
>CIA.
>
>The BBC also interviewed Dr. Timothy Read of the Institute of Genomic Research
>and a leading expert on the genetic characteristics of anthrax. Read said
>of the
>two strains, "They're definitely related to each other ... closely
>related to
>each other." However, Read would not go so far as to suggest the Florida
>strain,
>known as the Ames strain, and that developed at the U.S. Army's top
>secret Fort
>Detrick biological warfare laboratory - officially known as the U.S. Army
>Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases -- were one and the same.
>
>William Capers Patrick III was part of the original Fort Detrick anthrax
>development program, which "officially" ended in 1972 when President Nixon
>signed, along with the Soviet Union and United Kingdom, the Biological Weapons
>Convention. Nixon had actually ordered the Pentagon to stop producing
>biological
>weapons in 1969. It now seems likely that the U.S. military and intelligence
>community failed to follow Nixon's orders and, in fact, have consistently
>violated a lawful treaty signed by the United States.
>
>Cuba certainly accused the United States of using biological war weapons
>against
>it during the 1970s. In his book, Biological Warfare in the 21st Century,
>Malcolm Dando refers to the U.S. bio-attacks against the Caribbean island
>nation. The American covert campaign targeted the tobacco crop using blue
>mold,
>the sugar cane crop using cane smut, livestock using African swine fever, and
>the Cuban population using a hemorrhagic strain of dengue fever.
>
>Last December, the New York Times claimed Patrick authored a secret paper
>on the
>effects of sending anthrax through the mail, a report he denies. However,
>Patrick told the BBC that he was surprised that as an expert of anthrax
>(he was
>a member of the UN biological warfare inspection team in the 1990s), the
>FBI did
>not interview him right after the first anthrax attacks.
>
>The BBC reported that Battelle Memorial Institute (a favorite Pentagon and CIA
>contractor and for whom Alibek served as biological warfare program manager in
>1998) conducted a secret biological warfare test in the Nevada desert using
>genetically-modified anthrax early last September, right before the terrorist
>attacks. The BBC reported that Patrick's paper on sending anthrax through the
>mail was also part of the classified contractor work on the deadly
>bacterial agent.
>
>But would the U.S. Government knowingly subject its citizenry to a dangerous
>test of biological weapons? The evidence from past tests suggests it has
>already
>done so. According to Dando, in the 1950s, the military released uninfected
>female mosquitoes in a residential area of Savannah, Georgia. It then
>checked on
>how many entered houses and how many people were bitten. In 1956, 600,000
>mosquitoes were released from an airplane on a bombing range. Within one day,
>the mosquitoes had traveled as far as two miles and had bitten a number of
>people. In 1957, at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, the Q-Fever toxin
>discharged by an airborne F-100A plane. If a more potent dose had been
>used, the
>Army concluded 99 per cent of the humans in the area would have been infected.
>In the 1960s, conscientious objecting Seventh Day Adventists, serving in
>non-combat positions in the Army, were exposed to airborne tularemia. In
>addition to Dando's revelations, a retired high-ranking U.S. Army civilian
>official reported that the Army used aerosol forms of influenza to infect the
>subway systems of New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia in the early 1960s.
>
> >From Fort Detrick With Love
>
>The Hartford Courant reported last January that 27 sets of biological toxin
>specimens were reported missing from Fort Detrick after an inventory was
>conducted in 1992. The paper reported that among the specimens missing was the
>Ames strain on anthrax. A former Detrick laboratory technician named Eric
>Oldenberg told The Courant that while at Detrick, he only handled the Ames
>strain, the same strain sent to the Senate and the media. The Hartford Courant
>also revealed that other specimens missing included Ebola, hanta virus, simian
>AIDS, and two labeled "unknown," a cover term for classified research on
>secret
>biological agents.
>
>Steven Block of Stanford University, an expert on biological warfare, told The
>Dallas Morning News that, "The American process for preparing anthrax is
>secret
>in its details, but experts know that it produces an extremely pure
>powder. One
>gram (a mere 28th of an ounce) contains a trillion spores . . . A trillion
>spores per gram is basically solid spore . . . It appears from all reports so
>far that this was a powder made with the so-called optimal U.S. recipe . . .
>That means they either had to have information from the United States or maybe
>they were the United States." (author's emphasis).
>
>Block also told the Dallas paper, "The FBI, after all these months, has still
>not arrested anybody . . . It's possible, as has been suggested, that
>they may
>be standing back because the person that's involved with it may have secret
>information that the United States government would not like to have
>divulged."
>
>And what the government would not want divulged is the fact that the United
>States has been in flagrant violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons
>Convention.
>Article 1 of the convention specifically states: "Each State Party to this
>Convention undertakes never in any circumstance to develop, produce, stockpile
>or otherwise acquire or retain: 1. Microbial or other biological agents, or
>toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in
>quantities
>that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful
>purposes. 2. Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such
>agents
>or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict."
>
>The Death of Dr. Wiley: Murder They Wrote
>
>The one person who was in a position to know about the origin of the anthrax
>sent through the U.S. Postal Service met with a very suspicious demise just a
>month after the attacks first began.
>
>The reported "suicide" and then "accidental death" of noted Harvard
>biophysics
>scientist and anthrax, Ebola, AIDS, herpes, and influenza expert, Dr. Don C.
>Wiley, on the Interstate 55 Hernando De Soto Bridge that links Memphis to West
>Memphis, Arkansas, was probably a well-planned murder, according to local law
>enforcement officials in Tennessee and Arkansas.
>
>On November 15, Wiley's abandoned 2001 Mitsubishi Galant rental car was
>strangely found in the wrong lane, west in the eastbound lane of the
>bridge. The
>keys were still in the ignition, the gas tank was full, the hub cap of the
>right
>front wheel was missing, and there were yellow scrape marks on the
>driver's side
>of the vehicle, indicating a possible sideswipe.
>
>Wiley had last been seen four hours earlier, around midnight, before his
>car was
>found around 4:00 AM on the bridge. He was last seen in the lobby of Memphis'
>Peabody Hotel, leaving a banquet of the St. Jude Children's Research
>Hospital,
>on whose advisory board he served. Police quickly "concluded" that Wiley
>committed suicide by jumping off the bridge into the Mississippi River. It
>appears the early police conclusion, decided without a full investigation, was
>engineered by the FBI. On December 20, Wiley's body was recovered in the
>river
>in Vidalia, Louisiana, 320 miles south of Memphis. After Wiley's friends and
>family discounted claims of suicide, the Memphis coroner concluded on January
>14, 2002 that Wiley had "accidentially" fallen over the side of the
>bridge after
>a minor car accident.
>
>Not so, say seasoned local law enforcement officials who originally assigned
>homicide detectives to the case. Memphis police claim there was only 15
>minutes
>between the last time police had checked the bridge and the time they
>discovered
>Wiley's abandoned vehicle. They suspected Wiley was murdered. However,
>the local
>FBI office in Memphis stuck by its story that Wiley's death was not the
>result
>of "foul play." A Memphis police detective said, "the newspaper account of
>Wiley's accident did not clear anything up for me," adding, "everything
>attributed to the 'accident' could also be attributed to something else."
>
>However, according to U.S. intelligence sources, Wiley may have been the
>victim
>of an intelligence agency hit. That jibes with local police comments that the
>FBI and "other" U.S. agencies stepped in to prevent the local Memphis police
>from taking a closer look into the case. Employees of St. Jude's Childrens'
>Hospital in Memphis, on whose board Wiley served, were suddenly deluged with
>unsubstantiated rumors that Wiley was a heavy drinker and despondent.
>
>It is a classic intelligence agency ploy to spread disinformation about
>"suicide" victims after their murders. The favorite rumors spread
>include those
>about purported alcoholism, depression, homosexuality, auto-erotic asphyxia,
>drug addiction, and an obsession with pornography, especially child
>pornography.
>
>According to the local police, it would have been easy to determine if
>Wiley was
>a heavy drinker and that would have shown up in his autopsy. The police also
>reckon that if Wiley left the Peabody under the influence, four hours later he
>should have been sober enough not to have fallen over the side of the bridge.
>Also, the bridge railing is high enough that event the 6' 3" Wiley could not
>have accidentally fallen over it without assistance. Add that to the fact that
>no one in the history of the bridge had fallen over the side.
>
>Police also feel that even at 4:00 AM, there should have been someone else on
>the bridge who would have called the police about a person who was driving
>down
>the interstate the wrong way. Due to the fact that access is restricted to the
>bridge, one would have to have driven a long way on the wrong lane. Some
>police
>are of the opinion Wiley was stuck with a needle and that one reason he was
>dumped into the fast-moving Mississippi is that with the length of his time in
>the water (one month), the needle mark evidence would have largely
>disappeared.
>
>And in yet another strange twist, on March 14, a bomb and two smaller
>explosive
>devices were found at the Shelby County Regional Forensic Center, which houses
>the morgue and Medical Examiner's Office that conducted Wiley's autopsy. Dr.
>O.C, Smith, the medical examiner, told Memphis' Commercial Appeal, "We
>have done
>several high-profile cases from Dr. Wiley to Katherine Smith (a Department of
>Motor Vehicles employee mysteriously found burned to death in her car after
>being charged in a federal probe with conspiracy to obtain fraudulent
>drivers'
>licenses for men of Middle East origin) but there has been no indication
>that we
>offended anyone . . . we just don't know if we were the attended target
>or not."
>
>Knowledgeable U.S. and foreign intelligence sources have revealed that
>Wiley may
>have been silenced as a result of his discovery of U.S. government work on
>biological warfare agents long after the U.S., along with the Soviet Union and
>Britain, signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
>
>A South African Connection
>
>The death of Wiley may be also linked to revelations recently uncovered in
>South
>Africa. His expertise on genetic fingerprints for various strains may have led
>him to particular countries and their bio-warfare projects.
>
>The South African media has been abuzz with details of that nation's former
>biological warfare program and its links to the CIA. The South African
>bio-chemical war program was code-named Project Coast and was centered at the
>Roodeplat Research Laboratories north of Pretoria. The lab maintained links to
>the US biowarfare facility at Fort and Britain's Porton Down Laboratory. The
>head of the South African program, Dr. Wouter Basson, was reportedly offered a
>job with the CIA in the United States after the fall of the apartheid regime.
>According to former South African National Intelligence Agency deputy director
>Michael Kennedy, when Basson refused the offer, the CIA allegedly
>threatened to
>kill him. Nevertheless, the U.S. pressured the new President Nelson Mandela to
>turn over the records and fruits of Basson's work. Much of this work was
>reportedly transported to Fort Detrick.
>
>Basson also claimed to have been involved in a project called Operation
>Banana,
>which, using El Paso, Texas as a base with the CIA's blessing, was
>designed to
>transport cocaine to South Africa from Peru. The cocaine, hidden in
>bananas, was
>to be used in developing a new incapacitating drug.
>
>One of the South African's secret projects involved sending anthrax
>through the
>mail. Among the techniques that fell into the hands of the Americans was a
>method by which anthrax spores were, with deadly effect, incorporated on
>to the
>gummed flaps of envelopes.
>
>Other South African bio-chemical weapons allegedly transferred to the CIA
>included, in addition to anthrax, cholera, smallpox, salmonella, botulinum,
>tularemia, thallium, E.coli, racin, organophosphates, necrotising fasciitis,
>hepatitis A, HIV, paratyphoid, Sarin VX nerve gas, Ebola, Marburg, Rift Valley
>hemorrhagic fever viruses, Dengue fever, West Nile virus, highly potent CR
>tear
>gas, hallucinogens Ecstasy, Mandrax, BZ, and cocaine, anti-coagulant
>drugs, the
>deadly lethal injection drugs Scoline and Tubarine, and cyanide.
>
>Many of Dr. Wiley's family and friends doubt he would have committed suicide.
>The fact that he was certainly in a position to know about the origination of
>various viruses and bacteria -- which could have led to the U.S. government --
>would have made him a prime target for a government seeking to cover up its
>illegal work in biological warfare.
>
>Wiley's Anthrax Research
>
>And Wiley had a significant connection to anthrax research. Wiley was not
>only a
>professor at Harvard but also conducted research at the Chevy Chase, Maryland
>Howard Hughes Medical Center, which does work for the National Institutes of
>Health. On October 1, 2001, just three days before the first reported anthrax
>case in Florida, the Hughes Center announced that a joint Harvard-Hughes team
>had identified a mouse gene that made mice resistant to anthrax bacteria.
>Although the media failed to play it up later, that research involved using
>Wiley's expertise on the immune system. The new gene, identified as Kif1C,
>located in chromosome 11 of a mouse, enhanced the defense systems of special
>immune cells, called macrophages, against the destructive effects of anthrax
>bacteria.
>
>Wiley's was not the only suspicious death of a scientist with knowledge of
>biological defenses. Just three day before Wiley's death, Dr. Benito Que, a
>Miami Medical School cellular biologist specializing in infectious diseases,
>died in a violent attack. The Miami Herald reported Que died after "four men
>armed with a baseball bat attacked him at his car." A week after Wiley
>died, Dr.
>Vladimir Pasechnik, a former scientist for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union's
>biological weapons production factory, was found dead from an alleged
>stroke in
>Wiltshire, not far from Britain's Porton Down biological warfare center.
>Pasechnik had defected from the Soviet Union in 1989 and was an expert on the
>Soviet Union's anthrax, smallpox, plague, and tularemia programs. While at
>Biopreparat, Pasechnik worked for Alibek, who defected three years later. When
>he died, Pasechnik was assisting the British government's efforts in
>providing
>bio-defenses against anthrax.
>
>Anthrax and Operation Northwoods
>
>For those who disbelieve the possibility that the U.S. Government is the
>number
>one suspect in the anthrax attacks, they are directed to James Bamford's
>book on
>the National Security Agency, Body of Secrets. The book reveals that in
>1962,Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer was planning, along
>with other member of the Joint Chiefs, a virtual coup d'etat against the
>administration of President Kennedy using acts of terrorism carried out by the
>military but to be blamed on the Castro government in Cuba. The secret pan,
>code-named Operation Northwoods, entailed having U.S. military personnel shoot
>innocent people on the streets of American cities, sink boats carrying Cuban
>refugees to Florida, and conduct terrorist bombings in Washington, DC,
>Miami and
>other cities. Innocent people were to be framed for committing bombings and
>hijacking planes. If John Glenn's liftoff from Cape Canaveral in February
>1962
>were to end in an explosion, Castro would be blamed. Plans were made to shoot
>down civilian aircraft en route from the United States to Jamaica, Guatemala,
>Panama, or Venezuela and then blame Cuba. The U.S. military also planned to
>attack Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, both British colonies, and make it
>appear that the Cubans had done it in order to bring Britain into a war
>with Cuba.
>
>So far, the Bush administration has refused to support a full and independent
>Congressional investigation into the events of September 11 and the later
>events
>involving anthrax. It seems it and the three-letter agencies the
>administration
>is so fond of praising, and funding, know more about the source of the anthrax
>attacks than they are admitting. If the saying, "where there's smoke,
>there's
>fire," has any basis of truth, the United States is in the midst of a raging
>inferno. Who will answer the fire alarm?
>
>Wayne Madsen is an investigative journalist based in Washington, DC. He can be
>reached at: WMadsen777@aol.commailto:WMadsen777@aol.com
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