But there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/monbiot0521.html

Last week, I phoned the FBI. Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? "The investigation is continuing," the spokesman replied. "Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government office?" I asked. He put down the phone.

Had he stayed on the line, I would have asked him about a few other offenses the FBI might wish to consider. The army's development of weaponized anthrax, for example, directly contravenes both the biological weapons convention and domestic law. So does its plan to test live microbes in "aerosol chambers" at the Edgewood Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as the research group Project Sunshine has discovered, appear to be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research programs which the US government has secretly funded. Several prominent scientists have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigor we might have expected because the federal authorities have something to hide.

The FBI has dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=5276220&page=1

Former Agent Explains What Went Wrong in the Investigation
An Analysis By BRAD GARRETT
June 30, 2008
The anthrax investigation, almost from the beginning, was hampered by top-heavy leadership from high ranking, but inexperienced FBI officials, which led to a close-minded focus on just one suspect and amateurish investigative techniques that robbed agents in the field the ability operate successfully.




EXCLUSIVE: How the FBI Botched the Anthrax Case
Former Agent Explains What Went Wrong in the Investigation
An Analysis By BRAD GARRETT

Brad Garrett retired from the FBI and is now an ABC News consultant. He was one of the key investigators in the anthrax case.
(ABC)
I saw it firsthand as one of the FBI agents assigned to the anthrax case and directly involved in the investigation of Dr. Steven Hatfill. While I cannot comment on the guilt or innocence of Hatfill, I think I have a sense of some of the things that went wrong inside the FBI and what lessons can be learned from this embarrassing case.


Last Friday, the U.S. Department of Justice agreed to pay $5,825,000 to Hatfill, whom former Attorney General John Ashcroft once described as "a person of interest" in the investigation into the anthrax murders of seven people in 2001.


The vaguely-worded settlement agreement appeared on the online docket of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on Friday. The original complaint accused several government officials, including Ashcroft, of deliberately leaking information about the criminal probe into Hatfill in order to harass him and to hide the FBI's lack of hard evidence. The written settlement agreement contained no admissions of leaks or wrongdoing by government officials, however.



There are many lessons learned from the missteps in the anthrax investigation. As an FBI agent for more than 20 years with experience on other high profile cases, I was involved in the anthrax investigation along with countless other hard-working, decent FBI agents, federal prosecutors, and investigators.

Lesson One: Stay focused and professional regardless of the atmosphere.


The FBI's motto, "Fidelity, Bravery, and Integrity," cannot be ignored, even in times of high anxiety. The anthrax case was unprecedented even in terms of other high-profile cases: two members of Congress, Sen. Tom Daschle (D-ND) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), and a prominent member of the television media, Tom Brokaw of NBC received anthrax-laced letters. A letter is also believed to have been mailed to ABC News, where the young child of a producer there was infected, though no letter was ever found.

[Twist_U_Up]

1. Keep up the great work seemslikeadream. I know I appreciate the posts.

I haven't had the time to dig into more of these rat bastards shenanigans as of late but I can always count on coming here, slogging through the bullshit from the resident water carriers and find a diamond in the manure pile from you.
I don't get into it with them anymore besides an occasional toying of them but I am reading your posts with great interest. Thanks and post em if ya got em.
Truth to Power
911 was an inside job

[Grateful for Hope]

2. Some good info here, SLaD.

Thank you for posting this.

[Diane_nyc]

3. Does anyone want to challenge the idea that the anthrax attacks were probably an inside job?

Apparently not. It's kind of hard to dispute, isn't it?

Of course, we can't yet be absolutely 100% sure. But can anyone dispute that there are, at least, valid reasons to suspect that the anthrax attacks were an inside job?

Anyhow, S.L.A.D., thanks for posting this.

[Bolo Boffin]

4. Does anyone want to challenge the idea that the anthrax attacks came from outer space?

We have literally just as much evidence there as for any other hypothesis. On this one, it's all speculation.

[petgoat]

15. You don't regard the fact that the anthrax came from Fort Detrick as evidence? nt

[Bolo Boffin]

18. It came from the Ames strain, which is more available than the Bush Administration

thirsting for war with Iraq would have had you realize back in 2001.

Once again a brilliant opportunity to frame Iraq and get that war on good and proper WASTED. What the hell are these governmental conspirators thinking!!!

[Diane_nyc]

72. Do you REALLY think the anthrax is as likely to have come from outer space as ...

... as from someone with access to some lab here in the U.S.A.?

Do you believe that the FBI was wrong in considering the latter to have been the most likely possibility? If so, why?

[Bolo Boffin]

77. There is just as much evidence of that as anything else.

"someone with access to some lab here in the U.S.A." is NOT the equivalent of "inside job."

Since the letters were mailed here, the person(s) must have had access to some sort of lab here, even if it was one they constructed themselves.

Therefore, if space aliens could have gotten their hands on the Ames strain, they could have done it themselves.

This absurd example is not meant for the FBI's edification, but for you and the gentle readers. If space aliens is just as possible as inside job from everything that we know, then "inside job" isn't the lock you propose it to be.

[petgoat]

80. Disinfo technique #13: Alice in Wonderland Logic

US government labs have the equipment, the expertise, the personnel, and the anthrax.

Even if for the sake of argument you grant that space aliens exist, there is no evidence
that they have any of that.

[Diane_nyc]

97. Do you really think the FBI's original hypothesis was no more likely than a space alien doing it???

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=213631&mesg_id=213898">boloboffin wrote:

"someone with access to some lab here in the U.S.A." is NOT the equivalent of "inside job."

Since the letters were mailed here, the person(s) must have had access to some sort of lab here, even if it was one they constructed themselves.

Of course, by "a lab," I had in mind either a military lab or a legit research lab (e.g. a university lab), not a "lab" in someone's basement. Sorry if I wasn't clear.

This was the FBI's original hypothesis. Do you now claim that the FBI's original general hypothesis was no more likely than a space alien doing it?

[Bolo Boffin]

107. boloboffin also wrote "absurd example"

Your literalness becomes your undoing, Diane_nyc.

[Grateful for Hope]

109. modified

Not worth the effort. Readers of this forum can see what was actually written and what the intent was.

[Bolo Boffin]

110. Yes, they can, Hope. Back under your rock. n/t

[Diane_nyc]

111. And your point? To suggest that the FBI's original hypothesis is so utterly UNLIKELY?

What is the point of your absurd example?

Do you think the FBI's original general hypothesis (someone with access to a lab here in the U.S.A., with "lab" meaning more than just a "lab" in someone's basement) is so utterly unlikely?

Of course we don't know who was responsible for the anthrax attacks, and of course we don't yet have any real evidence for any one suspect in particular.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that one can make reasonable preliminary guesses as to the relative likelihood of various categories of people. Cops have to make such preliminary guesses in order to begin an investigation, after all. Other people can make reasonable preliminary guesses too. Do you not agree? If not, why not?

My posts in this thread, all along, had to do with such preliminary estimates of likelihood.

[Bassman66]

112. Yes, investigators wouldn't start with a list that included...

..space aliens.

However no one would be surpised if such a list included anyone with connections to anthrax labs in the US.

The list could be narrowed down further by looking at the people who were targeted and possible motives for the attacks.

I can't think what would motivate space aliens to target the Bush-unfriendly media and those opposed to the Patriot Act.

[Bolo Boffin]

113. Until you drop the pretense that your first statement was "the FBI's original hypothesis"

we're not getting anywhere.

You said simply that the anthrax attacks were an inside job. Now you've qualified it with "the FBI's original hypothesis."

If "someone with access to a government lab" is the new indication of an "inside job," then the "OCT" itself is an inside job. The terrorists were inside the United States, making their job of taking over airplanes much easier. "Inside job" becomes useless as a descriptive term.

I submit to you that "inside job" doesn't just mean somebody with access, but several somebodies with actual authority to be preventing such attacks participating in them. The way that some mob figures evaded prosecution for so long was getting people on the inside who should have been investigating them and proscecuting them to look the other way -- that was an "inside job." Stephen Hatfill (strictly for example) cooking up some anthrax in his government lab on the sly is not an inside job.

[Bassman66]

117. So no aliens then? nt

[Diane_nyc]

118. Yes, the FBI's original hypothesis does qualify as an "inside job"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=213631&mesg_id=214006">boloboffin wrote:

If "someone with access to a government lab" is the new indication of an "inside job," then the "OCT" itself is an inside job. The terrorists were inside the United States, making their job of taking over airplanes much easier.

The hijackers were inside the country, but not in any role requiring great trust on any matter relevant to the crime. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/inside%20job">as quoted on dictionary.reference.com, an "inside job" is:

A crime perpetrated by, or with the help of, a person working for or trusted by the victim.

Obviously, someone with a job in a government lab, with access to anthrax, has been trusted not to use said anthrax for any private nefarious purposes.

On the other hand, the hijackers did not commit their crime by abusing any position of trust beyond (according to the official story) just garden-variety security lapses.

When I wrote my http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=213631&mesg_id=213712">first post in this thread, I had in mind both the FBI's original "lone mad scientist" hypothesis and other, more "conspiratorial" hypotheses involving a person whose job entailed access to a government lab. Either of these would qualify as an "inside job," as distinct from a hypothesis in which the anthrax came from Iraq (for example) or was obtained from a U.S. lab via burglary.

I submit to you that "inside job" doesn't just mean somebody with access, but several somebodies with actual authority to be preventing such attacks participating in them.

Not according to either of the http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/inside%20job">the definitions given on dictionary.reference.com. Both definitions refer to the criminal in the singular, and neither definition mentions any specific kind of authority -- just trust, employment, and/or close association with the victim.

(Edited to fix links.)

[Bolo Boffin]

119. So the "OCT" was an inside job. The hijackers did abuse a position of trust.

It's a position of trust that we all afford each other in our daily lives.

It's all an inside job. If the hijackers hadn't been trusted, they couldn't have done what they did.

The term means nothing now.

[Diane_nyc]

120. Obviously, the definition must be referring to trust beyond everyday "trust" ....

... otherwise, as you rightly point out, almost every crime would be an inside job.

[JackRiddler]

5. Anthrax 2001: data dump

Starting with the "Justice for 9/11" complaint, Nov. 2004 - sorry if a lot's going to repeat in the following...

APPENDIX A6

ANTHRAX ATTACKS


The targeting, timing and open-source evidence of the still-unsolved anthrax attacks of September and October 2001 suggest a covert action by a group of conspirators aiming to achieve a shift in the balance of domestic political power; possibly also with intent to distract from the ongoing 9/11 investigations. There is probable cause to believe parties other than the original perpetrators have engaged in a cover-up, destruction of evidence, and obstruction of justice after the fact. Five deaths and 22 infections are attributed to the attacks, with one decedent (Kathy Nguyen) and many of the injured parties having resided in New York State.


1. Numerous waves of hoax anthrax mailings using threat letters and harmless powders had occurred in the years and months previous to September 11, with various targets: abortion clinics, political figures, most of them clearly unrelated to the later real anthrax attacks.

2. Immediately after September 11, the specter of a possible follow-up biological warfare attack was raised as an imminent possibility and a subject of many rumors. The Federal Aviation Administration ("FAA") imposed a two-day ban on agricultural crop-duster flights (September 23-25, see, The Label, 9/01, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, at pested.unl.edu/thelabel/tlsep01.htm). Apparently the FAA acted on information that al-Qaeda operatives had considered using crop-dusters to deliver andthrax or other pathogens from the air, and that alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had inquired prior to September 11 about renting such planes ("Report: U.S. Warns of Chance of Attack This Week," Reuters, 9/23/01).

3. The first wave of anthrax letters was apparently mailed from Trenton, New Jersey with postmarks of September 18, 2001. The Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") has published photographs of two envelopes addressed to the network news anchor Tom Brokaw (of NBC) and The New York Post. Other mailings presumably went to the network news anchors Peter Jennings (of ABC) and Dan Rather (of CBS). Employees of both later developed symptoms, but envelopes addressed to ABC and CBS are not known to have been recovered. Although persons in the New York area began to develop symptoms that later turned out to be anthrax-related as early as on September 22, the first confirmation that an individual had been diagnosed with inhalation anthrax came on October 3, 2001. The victim was Robert Stevens, a photo editor with The Sun tabloid at the offices of American Media, Inc. ("AMI") in Boca Raton, Florida.

4. Despite the widespread expectations and warnings of an imminent biological warfare attack between September 11 and October, 2001, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson on October 4 assured the public from the White House briefing room that, "I want everybody to understand that sporadic cases of anthrax do occur in the United States.... t this point in time, it's an isolated case, and there is no other indication anybody else has got anthrax." (The New Republic, 10/16/01, online at www.tnr.com/express/crowley101601.html)

5. Stevens died on October 5, the first known victim of inhalation anthrax in the United States in 27 years. The FBI reported finding anthrax spores on Stevens's keyboard at work on October 7, at which point the AMI offices were shut down. Another AMI employee, Ernesto Blanco, hospitalized with pneumonia on October 1, tested positive for anthrax (he later recovered). By then the most widespread and logical assumption was that the events constituted a premeditated attack. "Scientists in the US are analysing the anthrax that killed Stevens, and comparing it to strains from around the world, in an effort to trace the bacteria's geographic origins," the New Scientist wrote. "The results have not yet been announced." ("Florida cases likely to be first ever anthrax attack," New Scientist, 10/9/01 at www.anthraxinvestigation.com/misc2.html#NewSci02)

6. The FBI has published photographs of two envelopes from the second wave of anthrax letters, which were postmarked October 9 in Trenton, NJ and addressed to Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD), at the time Senate Majority Leader, and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), at the time chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Subsequent reports of anthrax letters or spores discovered at mailrooms in other Federal agencies and at State Department consulates in Lithuania and Pakistan were later reportedly determined to have been the result of cross-contamination in the postal system, mistaken testing, or hoax mailings.) The anthrax in the letters to the two Senators was found to be ten times as pure as the anthrax in the letters to the media, and had therefore gone through a far more sophisticated stage of processing designed to "weaponize" it.

7. On October 10 and 11, 2001, Iowa State University in Ames destroyed anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept in more than 100 vials, "after relatively brief deliberations with the FBI" and with the additional approval of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("CDC"). The move was supposedly prompted by security concerns, given the ongoing investigation of the Stevens death. The destruction of the vials was overseen by James A. Roth, a microbiologist at the university's College of Veterinary Medicine, who later said, "we think had all the strains already" (New York Times, 11/9/01, emphasis ours). The spores in the attack mailings were later determined to have been derived from the "Ames strain" of anthrax commonly used in biological warfare research and development, of which the originals were kept by the University. We submit that the move is suspicious on its face in both timing and the justification given, and may constitute destruction of evidence in an ongoing criminal case. A full investigation would clarify the background, determining for example if the University truly acted on its own initiative or under pressure from a governmental agency or third party, and the reasons behind the FBI and CDC approval of the move.

8. According to news reports, starting on September 11 the White House administered doses of the broad-spectrum antibiotic Cipro, which is effective against anthrax, to an undetermined number of staff members. Judicial Watch later filed a lawsuit demanding the White House produce documents and information on the rationale for this decision ("JW Sues Bush Administration For Anthrax Docs. Seeks Documents About Terrorist Attack that Killed At least Five," www.judicialwatch.org/archive/newsletter/2002/0802k.shtml). A full investigation would seek to determine on what information the White House acted, and whether it implies specific advance knowledge of the coming anthrax attacks.


/ more notes

• Operation Clear Vision: reconstructing Russian anthrax bombs (1997-2000)
- State Department objected: violation of biowarfare conventions
"A bomb is a bomb is a bomb."
- Pentagon, CIA insisted, went ahead with research.
- Suspended by White House in 2000.

• Operation Jefferson (West Jefferson, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Institute)

• Revival of programs under Bush administration.
- Supermarket terrorism ($1 million budget)
- Judith Miller allowed to report from facility by Pentagon after French objection.


The Congress that rushed through the USA PATRIOT Act nearly unread was the same Congress that was packing and rushing out of Washington because the leadership of the opposition Democrats had been subjected to an anthrax attack.

I consider this fact inseparable from any discussion of how the USA PATRIOT Act was passed. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, received an anthrax letter within days of questioning the original draft of the USA PATRIOT Act. The Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, also received a letter at the same time. Soon after, both reversed themselves and dropped their objections to the legislation, which radically curtails the civil liberties guaranteed in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

By way of anthrax, Congress was terrorized and broken.

The anthrax attacks of October 2001 should have put an end to doubts about the "War on Terror" and the likelihood that elements of the U.S. government are willing to stage inside-job terror attacks on American soil. Instead the attacks have been forgotten, although at the time they were trumped up into something even bigger than 9/11.

Unlike the case of 9/11, the facts about the anthrax attacks are simple, clear and close to conclusive:

-The Bush government revived an anthrax program early in 2001 on orders from Cheney and had developed a new milling process just before Sept. 11. Incredibly, this was called "Project Jefferson" (!).

- A week before Sept. 11, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon was experimenting in the "defensive" development of anthrax milling methods. Government scientists were assigned to put together home-made laboratories, using only materials available commercially, on the sparse budget of a mere one million of your taxpayer dollars. When this was revealed, the Pentagon said they weren't actually taking the final step, of milling live spores (although I wonder why, once ready, they would not want to see how well their lab works). The idea of the exercise, supposedly, was to see what terrorists might whip together from store-bought items. The French got wind of this program and complained to a United Nations committee, since the biowarfare convention outlaws all research, including "defensive research." To allay these concerns, the Pentagon invited an NY Times reporter, our old friend Judy Miller, to the Texas base where the experiments were held.*
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04GERM.html?searchpv=nytToda
y&pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04BIOW.html

-On Sept. 11th the White House immediately put some of its staff, reportedly including Cheney himself, on Cipro. How did they know to pick this antibiotic, out of the many available? How could they guess that anthrax (or another pathogen against which Cipro can protect) was coming? This is the subject of a discovery suit by Judicial Watch: how did they know?**

-A wave of stories immediately after Sept. 11th announced that anthrax was the likeliest next attack. We were even threatened with a specific sequence of future attacks: anthrax, smallpox, plague. (They've been drumming up the smallpox scare ever since the anthrax attacks stopped.) Of all the hundreds of biowar germs and literally thousands of types of terror attacks, why was this idea circulated so prominently? Who was behind spreading these stories? Why so specific?

-Suspect Hatfill, while working biowarfare research at SAIC/Batelle Memorial in 1999, commissioned his colleague in science, William Capers Patrick, the renowned dean of American biowarfare research, to write a report on modalities that terrorists might employ in sending anthrax through the mail.

-The report from that study specified an ideal spore concentration and weight of anthrax sample per envelope. These were the amounts that were then reportedly used in the attacks on Daschle and Leahy. In other words, the anthrax attackers had access to this secret report.

-The anthrax went first to the headquarters of the country's biggest tabloid owner (National Enquirer and The Sun). The Enquirer had printed a series of anti-Bush "conspiracy" stories, including one claiming that McVeigh was still breathing after his execution. The Enquirer also published embarrassing pictures of the Bush twins drunk, which had gotten much play on Drudge and similar outlets. Was this an object lesson to the media? (Note: never established how it got to Bob Stevens; no envelope located; theory that it may have been spread from one floor to another by a vacuum cleaner .. or was he directly hit, via keyboard?)

-The wife of the paper's editor had rented an apartment to Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi. Was the paper going to do a story about this that would not have fit the official 9/11 line?

-At this point, the FBI on a request from Iowa State University allowed the destruction of a stockpile of original Ames strain samples on Oct. 13, days after the Bob Stevens case became known. Why?! This was a precaution?!

-The next group of attacks hit the New York media. The letters arrived just as the Afghanistan campaign began and caused maximum coverage of nothing but anthrax. For a vital week or two, both the Afghanistan campaign and the 9/11 investigation became secondary concerns to the media.

-At that point the FBI immediately called off one-half of the thousands of agents who were working on 9/11 and put them to work on anthrax.

-The third wave of attacks, the one that exactly fit the specifications of the secret paper commissioned by Hatfill, was sent first to Daschle and Leahy - the majority leader of the Democratic opposition in the Senate, and the Democratic head of the Judiciary Committee.

-The government said the anthrax powder sent to Daschle and Leahy had been put through a much more sophisticated process of milling to aerosolize the spoors, such as would require advanced technology from a state weapons program.

-This exceptional piece of constituent mail arrived at Daschle and Leahy's offices about a week after the USA PATRIOT Act was submitted to the Congress. Leahy had initially opposed the Act, and requested clarification of its more extreme provisions from Ashcroft. Ashcroft never answered.

- Senate offices were shut down and Capitol Hill went into an uproar. For weeks, as employees lined up for doses of antibiotics, Hazmat and FBI agents poked around in the Senate.

- By the end of that month the Republican-majority House chose to run home. As they left, they cast their votes for the USA PATRIOT Act and its negation of the U.S. Constitution. As Republican Congressman Ron Paul has made clear, most of them did not even receive a text of the 300-page final version of the USA PATRIOT Act before they voted for it, let alone read it.

- The Senate soon followed suit, also approving USA PATRIOT.

- Reports told that Sens. Kennedy and Levin, two other liberals, had also received anthrax letters, although no photos of these letters were published.

- The notes included with the anthrax letters to Daschle, Leahy and Tom Brokaw tried to point the blame at Arab perpetrators, but these were clumsy and transparent. ("Allah is Great" instead of "God Is Great" or "Allah Akhbar.")

- The news at first wanted to blame it on Arabs, or Iraq. Why should that damned Osama bin Laden hate the Democratic leadership, as opposed to Republican leaders?

- Only days later did reports arrive of anthrax being found in mail to the White House, Pentagon, Federal Reserve, CIA, etc. All of their mail had by then been very safely isolated on military bases. No details about these alleged attacks have been released. We have not seen copies of the letters, as was the case with the letters to Daschle, Leahy and Tom Brokaw. There have to my knowledge been no follow-up reports on the provenance of the anthrax employed in these cases. (In fact, most reports now say all anthrax reports other than AMI and the letters mailed to media and Democratic senators in Sept./Oct. 2001 turned out not to be anthrax.)

How strange how the first attacks, the only ones that had a chance to get through, went to the Democratic leadership!

- Suddenly, the anthrax wave stopped as quickly as it had begun. The biggest U.S. media story of October 2001 was effectively swept away. The media obediently switched to the taking of Kabul and spent November 2001 preparing us for a thoughtful Thanksgiving, with endless soul-searching stories asking how our country could have ever produced Johnny Taliban Walker.

- Anthrax has since been mentioned only rarely and out of context, as when Powell had the gall to hold up a vial of white powder at the UN and ask where Saddam is hiding his anthrax. Well, Colin, where are you keeping yours?

-All the foreign anthrax letters reported at various times in 2001 have been dismissed as white-powder hoaxes.

-It was established quickly that the anthrax to Leahy and Daschle was of recent production, with high-quality, weaponized spores such as can be produced only by a specialist at an advanced facility; and that the lineage goes back to Fort Detrick, Maryland and the Ames strain used by American biowarfare programs.

-For all this, the anthrax perpetrator(s) made an obvious effort to minimize casualties and target the letters very specifically to individuals. The same amount of anthrax could have been spread in a fashion causing many more deaths.

-Having gotten as far as Steven Hatfill, the FBI investigation stalled. Hatfill has been a "person of interest" for more than two years, his house has been invaded several times by sniffer-dog teams, and the FBI even drained a pond near his house to see if he had grown anthrax spores in it; but no further progress has been reported in the investigation.

- Could it be that the "lone perpetrator" thesis is not sustainable, and they don't want to deal with the implications?

What can we conclude?

Unlike Sept. 11th, the anthrax attacks were a selective wave of terror. The confirmed letters, the ones that resulted in the deaths of six people, were targeted at specific individuals: reporters, news media personalities, and four leading Democratic senators. This was by design, there was nothing random about it. The perpetrators have not been presented and so we can only speculate about their motives, but there is no doubt about the direct and predictable effect of their design: the attacks were perfectly sequenced and timed to cow the opposition, force through the Patriot Act, make an exampe of deviant journalists, divert the 9/11 investigation, and frighten and occupy the media during the first phase of the Afghanistan war. The attacks provided important reinforcement in keeping these various actors from questioning the official post-Sept. 11th atmosphere of terror and panic. They were the key step in initiating the formal transformation of American society and law.

In simpler words, the anthrax attacks look exactly as though they were planned and executed by a black-ops or damage-control team working on behalf of the Bush regime's goals, either as rogues or as appointed hitmen. They may have hit Bob Stevens as a revenge job, they hit the media to shut them up, and they hit Daschle and Leahy to intimidate them into accepting the USA PATRIOT Act. We might compare the crew who were responsible for this to Nixon's Plumbers, except that they were more sophisticated and effective in their choice of methods; or, perhaps, they simply had better protection among their sponsors.

That is the hypothesis so far that best covers all of the above facts. In this case, there is no doubt which way Occam's razor cuts. Anthrax was almost certainly an inside job.

In fact, this is the thesis that many people subscribe to when speaking off the record in the the world capital of paranoia itself, Washington, DC.

And what has Daschle done or said about these facts? Are Brokaw and Rather really unaware of all this? They have chosen not to defend themselves against what are, in effect, attempts on their own lives.

This is the context in which we should view the Jan. 2002 call from Cheney, the premature Cipro-taker, to Daschle, the anthrax recipient. Cheney threatened Daschle of dire consequences if he should push too hard for a 9/11 investigation in the Congress. This single call led to a series delays in the Congressional joint inquiry of Sept. 11, which finally opened in June 2002.

Daschle - and Leahy, and all the other Senators including Kerry and Edwards - are so scared, or so compromised, or otherwise being blackmailed with other threats, that they have not risen to this challenge. I don't envy or accuse them, but how can you expect these guys to ever confront the Bush mob?

(*NOTE: What justification is there for programs like "Jefferson"? This program not only finds out what terrorists might do, it no doubt discovers ways to do it that they might not have thought of themselves. The government scientists gain the astonishing insight that there's fuck-all they can do to stop evil biology students from engaging in such activities if they so wish. And the program's results will be written up in a little "defensive" manual on how to make your own anthrax lab. One day, probably soon, that will end up in the hands of one of our freedom fighters somewhere... and a years down the line he or his successor will use it against the U.S., thus setting off the next round of "defensive" activity on our part. At least it's lucrative!)

(** Note 2: Interestingly, earlier in the year one Jerome Hauer took up his new job under Tommy Thompson at the Health Department, as the advisor for bioterrorism. This is the same Jerome Hauer who developed the West Nile spraying program and, ahem, the Office of Emergency Management on Floor 23 of WTC 7, during his tenure as a terrorism adviser to the City of New York. And the same Hauer who claimed to have gotten John O'Neill his last job, as counter-terror chief at the WTC, where he died on Sept. 11th.)




i. The anthrax poisonings and attempted poisonings of elected representatives and media figures were carried out by an as-yet unidentified lone scientist without the knowledge or support of any state agency or agents. Moreover, these rogue attacks had no coordination or connection to the 9/11 plot, did not influence any 9/11 inquiries, and did not appreciably affect the post-9/11 balance of domestic political power.
g. Also languishing is a Judicial Watch suit demanding the White House clarify the rationale for placing some of its staff on the antibiotic Cipro immediately after the 9/11 attacks (on September 11, but before the anthrax attacks).17

6. ANTHRAX ATTACKS: The as-yet unsolved anthrax attacks of October 2001 and their impact on domestic politics and the 9/11 investigations. (Appendix A6)
4 Reportedly, planned hearings of several Congressional committees were curtailed or cancelled after pressure by the White House and Vice-President Cheney personally on Daschle, who had also been targeted with an anthrax mailing a month after September 11 when he was speaking out against the White House proposal for the USA PATRIOT Act.
17 Question whether this is an indication of foreknowledge constituting official misconduct or a crime under certain circumstances.


"A classified report dated February, 1999 discusses responses to an anthrax attack through the mail. The report, precipitated by a series of false anthrax mailings, was written by William Capers Patrick, inventor of the US weaponization process, under a CIA contract to SAIC. The report describes what the US military could do and what a terrorist might be able to achieve. According to the NY Times (12 Dec. 01) the report predicted about 2.5g of anthrax per envelope (the Daschle letter contained 2g) and assumed a poorer quality of anthrax than that found in the Daschle letter. If the perpetrator had access to the materials and information necessary for the attack, he must have had security clearance or other means for accessing classified information, and may therefore have seen the report and used it as a model for the attack."

Science Applications International Corporation ("SAIC")

"Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act" ("USA PATRIOT Act")

Resources

"Anthrax and Biological Weapons" by Richard J. Ochs (www.freefromterror.net). Reconstructs anthrax attacks with emphasis on their political impact. Author in basic agreement with the above analysis.



"Analysis of the Anthrax Attacks," Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Federation of American Scientists, archived at www.anthraxinvestigation.com/anthraxreport.htm.

"The Anthrax Cases," by Ed Lake, www.anthraxinvestigation.com. See especially timeline at www.anthraxinvestigation.com/#Timeline. Meticulous compilation of all news reports, open-source evidence, and possible scenarios; differing with the analysis of Rosenberg, author determined to uphold "lone wolf" scenario.

Marilyn W. Thompson, "The Pursuit of Steven Hatfill," Washington Post, 9/14/03 www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A49717-2003Sep9?language=printer

Not long after he got there in 1999, Hatfill and SAIC Vice President Joseph Soukup hired Patrick to study the potential dangers of anthrax sent through the mail. Patrick calculated what would happen if anthrax were to be stuffed into a standard-size envelope. He based his findings on filling an envelope with 2.5 grams of Bacillus globigii, an anthrax simulant. Patrick, who was polygraphed by the FBI for three hours last year, says he was under the impression the research would be used in preparedness training. But the study received no attention until 2002, when the FBI unearthed it and tried to determine whether it had served as a template for the anthrax mailings.

Reports on Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Leahy's opposition to provisions in USA PATRIOT Act legislation, "Senate Democrats, White House Reach a Deal on Anti-Terror Bill," Washington Post, 10/4/2001, archived at www.anthraxinvestigation.com/wp1003.html

Ron Paul says the text of the USA PATRIOT bill was not made available for review until the night before the vote: Kelly Patricia O Meara, "Police State," Insight Magazine, 11/9/01 www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=143236

www.insightmag.com/main.cfm?include=detail&storyid=143236

Guy Gugliotta and Gary Matsumoto, "FBI's Theory On Anthrax Is Doubted. Attacks Not Likely Work Of 1 Person, Experts Say," Washington Post, 10/28/02.
www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28334-2002Oct27?language=printer

H.P. Albarelli Jr. "Anthrax Investigation Provokes Charges of Cover-Up," Counterpunch, 3/13/02
www.ccmep.org/hotnews/anthrax031302.html

Kathy Bushouse and Jon Burstein, "Widow of anthrax victim files lawsuits alleging negligence," South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 9/25/03.
Archived at www.anthraxinvestigation.com/misc6.html#ss-30924

William J. Broad, "Top Scientists Link Lethal Anthrax to U.S. Weapons Program," New York Times, 12/3/01. Archived at cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/2001/nyt120301.html


cooperativeresearch.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=complete_911_timeline&theme=anthrax

Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) confirms rumors circulating in Washington that this sweeping new law, with serious implications for each and every American, was not made available to members of Congress for review before the vote. "It's my understanding the bill wasn't printed before the vote — at least I couldn't get it. They played all kinds of games, kept the House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a handful of staffers actually read it, but the bill definitely was not available to members before the vote."

And why would that be? "This is a very bad bill," explains Paul, "and I think the people who voted for it knew it and that's why they said, 'Well, we know it's bad, but we need it under these conditions.'" Meanwhile, efforts to obtain copies of the new law were stonewalled even by the committee that wrote it.

I like to refer to this legislation," continues Strossen, "as the 'so-called antiterrorism law,' because on its face the provisions are written to deal with any crime, and the definition of terrorism under the new law is so severely broad that it applies far beyond what most people think of as terrorism." A similar propensity of governments to slide down the slippery slope recently was reported in England by The Guardian newspaper. Under a law passed last year by the British Parliament, investigators can get information from Internet-service providers about their subscribers without a warrant. Supposedly an antiterrorist measure, the British law will be applied to minor crimes, tax collection and public-health purposes.

Under the USA PATRIOT Act in this country, Section 802 defines domestic terrorism as engaging in "activity that involves acts dangerous to human life that violate the laws of the United States or any state and appear to be intended: (i) to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; (ii) to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or (iii) to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping."



www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28334-2002Oct27?language=printer
FBI's Theory On Anthrax Is Doubted
Attacks Not Likely Work Of 1 Person, Experts Say

By Guy Gugliotta and Gary Matsumoto
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, October 28, 2002; Page A01

A significant number of scientists and biological warfare experts are expressing skepticism about the FBI's view that a single disgruntled American scientist prepared the spores and mailed the deadly anthrax letters that killed five people last year.

These sources say that making a weaponized aerosol of such sophistication and virulence would require scientific knowledge, technical competence, access to expensive equipment and safety know-how that are probably beyond the capabilities of a lone individual.


Washington's Brentwood Post Office remains closed after anthrax spores were sent through the mail facility last year. (LUCIAN PERKINS -- THE WASHINGTON POST)

As a result, a consensus has emerged in recent months among experts familiar with the technology needed to turn anthrax spores into the deadly aerosol that was sent to Sens. Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) that some of the fundamental assumptions driving the FBI's investigation may be flawed.

"In my opinion, there are maybe four or five people in the whole country who might be able to make this stuff, and I'm one of them," said Richard O. Spertzel, chief biological inspector for the U.N. Special Commission from 1994 to 1998. "And even with a good lab and staff to help run it, it might take me a year to come up with a product as good."

Instead, suggested Spertzel and more than a dozen experts interviewed by The Washington Post in recent weeks, investigators might want to reexamine the possibility of state-sponsored terrorism, or try to determine whether weaponized spores may have been stolen by the attacker from an existing, but secret, biodefense program or perhaps given to the attacker by an accomplice.

(FOLLOW LINK - VERY LONG ARTICLE)


Next to Old Rec Hall, a 'Germ-Making Plant'

New York Times
September 4, 2001
By JUDITH MILLER
www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04BIOW.html

CAMP 12, NEVADA TEST SITE, Nevada - In a nondescript mustard-colored building that was once a military recreation hall and barbershop, the Pentagon has built a germ factory that could make enough lethal microbes to wipe out entire cities.

Adjacent to the pool tables, the shuffleboard and the bar stands a gleaming stainless steel cylinder, the 50-liter (53- quart) fermenter in which germs can be cultivated.

The apparatus, which includes a latticework of pipes and other equipment, was made entirely with commercially available components bought from hardware stores and other suppliers for about $1 million - a pittance for a weapon that could deliver death on such a large scale.

The factory was built by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, an arm of the Pentagon that works to contain the spread of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons. Officials said the project was intended to assess how hard it would be for a terrorist or rogue nation to assemble a germ factory.


-------------------------------------

Following is interview with JOHN JUDGE (has a detail wrong: FBI was contacted by U of Iowa 10 days AFTER the first anthrax envelope was mailed, during the "Bob Stevens phase" of the attacks, and hence a smoking gun destruction of evidence! According tot the story the University wanted to destroy it, and asked the FBI if they could, and the FBI allowed this. Was front page of NY Times.)


"Anthrax - didn't come from abroad, the trail led to door of Ft. Detrick and then it stopped. They realized from its DNA signature that it was Ames screen-which means U. of Iowa, which had an archive of all the known pathenogenic strains of anthrax_.if you inhale it's a lot more lethal_. People would order various strains from them in order to work on cures for it or work to weaponize it. Once they identified it as Ames strain, it would have been possible to go back to Ames and figure out which particular batch this came from and then that batch would have had a paper trail of who had ordered that batch, but 10 days before the first Anthrax envelope was mailed, (this was recorded by the NY Times, and this was called a "bungling" of the investigation) FBI contacted the U. at Ames and convinced them to destroy the entire 70 year archive. So, there's absolutely no paper trail left. But there is information in the public record info about Project Jefferson and Operation Clear Vision, both running in year up to 9/11 reported on September 4th and 5th, it was a international scandal, USA was doing projects and experiments with chemical and biological elements that violated international treaties that the US had signed. They claimed that they had to because something similar was going on in Russia. Project Jefferson was first ordered by Rumsfeld when he came in to Pentagon, he tasked the DIA to generate the next generation of Anthrax. Anthrax should be genetically altered to be more resistant to the normal antibiotics (which was the case with this), and more weaponized, more distributable. _was weaponized at a level they had never seen. In other words, the earlier weaponization had gotten it down to 2 or 3 billion spores per gram, this was over a trillion spores per gram. It was a very lethal weapon. It couldn't have been developed by some guy in a lab. But on September the 9th, two days before the attack, the DIA held a press conference here in DC and announced they had developed the next generation of anthrax. Also, right on 9/11 the White House staff was told to go on Cipro. There was also a huge contract with Bioport, who put that out right before the attack. The Peace Center began when all this was a twinkle in some geneticist's eye.

SH: What are your conclusions about Anthrax?

JJ: Well, I think that this was another domestic terrorist attack that had the signature of US intelligence, or military intelligence on it. I think that that's where people have been reluctant to look.


-------- anthrax stories in the week before Sept. 11:

U.S. Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits

September 4, 2001
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad.
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04GERM.html?searchpv=nytToday&pagewanted=all

Over the past several years, the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons that, some officials say, tests the limits of the global treaty banning such weapons.

The 1972 treaty forbids nations from developing or acquiring weapons that spread disease, but it allows work on vaccines and other protective measures. Government officials said the secret research, which mimicked the major steps a state or terrorist would take to create a biological arsenal, was aimed at better understanding the threat.

The projects, which have not been previously disclosed, were begun under President Clinton and have been embraced by the Bush administration, which intends to expand them.

Earlier this year, administration officials said, the Pentagon drew up plans to engineer genetically a potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax, a deadly disease ideal for germ warfare.

The experiment has been devised to assess whether the vaccine now being given to millions of American soldiers is effective against such a superbug, which was first created by Russian scientists. A Bush administration official said the National Security Council is expected to give the final go-ahead later this month.

Two other projects completed during the Clinton administration focused on the mechanics of making germ weapons.


ANOTHER TIMELINE, FOCUSING ON THE MICROBIOLOGIST DEATHS:

Origins of the Patriot Act

September 11, 2001: Some White House personnel, including Vice President
Cheney's staff, are given Cipro, the anti-anthrax drug, and told to take it
regularly on the evening after the attacks. Judicial Watch
later sues the Bush Administration to release documents showing who knew
what and when, and why Presidential staff were protecting themselves against
anthrax before any anthrax attacks were known - while Senators, Congressmen
and others were not.

September 18, 2001: The first anthrax letters are mailed out, two days
after the anti-terrorism bill Patriot Act is first proposed. But the
anthrax crisis won't begin until October 4 with the first confirmed
sickness.

October 1, 2001 (B): The New York Times notes the "stepped up warnings on
the spread of chemical and biological weapons" based on a number of
statements from officials in the past few days. White House chief of staff
Andrew Card: "I'm not trying to be an alarmist, but we know that these
terrorist organizations, like al-Qaeda, run by Osama bin Laden and others,
have probably found the means to use biological or chemical warfare."
Representative Henry J. Hyde (R) says biological weapons "scare" him more
than nuclear weapons because they can be brought into the country "rather
easily." Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and others give similar warnings. Just three
days later, anthrax attacks become big news (see October 4, 2001). Times, 10/1/01]

October 2, 2001 (B): The "anti-terrorism" Patriot Act is introduced in
Congress, but is not well received by all. One day
later, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D) says he doubts the Senate will
take up this bill in the one week timetable the administration wants. As
head of the Senate, Daschle has great power to block or slow passage of the
bill.

On October 4, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D) accuses
the Bush administration of reneging on an agreement on the anti-terrorist
bill. Leahy is in a key position to block or slow the bill. Some warn that
"lawmakers are overlooking constitutional flaws in their rush to meet the
administration's timetable."

October 9, The anthrax letters to Daschle and Leahy are mailed and
postmarked on October 9, 2001 while difficulties in passing the Patriot Act
continues.

October 9, 2001: Senator Feingold (D) blocks an attempt to rush the USA
Patriot Act to a vote with little debate and no opportunity for amendments.
Feingold criticizes the bill as a threat to liberty.

October 10-11, 2001: The FBI orders the original batch of the Ames strain
of anthrax in military government laboratories to be destroyed., making
tracing the anthrax type more difficult. Suspicions that the anthrax used in
the letters was the Ames strain are confirmed on October 17. Times, 11/9/01, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 12/01] What possible excuse can
the FBI have for allowing this destruction, especially when the Ames strain
was already suspected?

October 15, 2001: Senator Daschle's office opens the letter mailed October
9, containing a lethal dose of anthrax. Senator Leahy's similar letter is
misrouted to Virginia on October 12, and isn't discovered until November 17.


October 15, 2001 (B): The BBC says "Bush has pointed the finger at Osama
bin Laden" for the anthrax attacks. Bush states, "There may be some possible
link. We have no hard data yet, but it's clear that Mr. Bin Laden is an evil
man."

October 16-17, 2001: 28 congressional staffers test positive for anthrax.
The Senate office buildings are shut down, followed by the House of
Representatives.

October 24, 2001: The House of Representatives passes the final version of
the Patriot Act and other previously unpopular Bush projects: Alaska oil
drilling, $25 billion in tax cuts for corporations, taps into Social
Security funds and cuts in education. Republican Congressman
Ron Paul states: "It's my understanding the bill wasn't printed before the
vote - at least I couldn't get it. They played all kinds of games, kept the
House in session all night, and it was a very complicated bill. Maybe a
handful of staffers actually read it, but the bill definitely was not
available to members before the vote." It is later found that only two
copies of the bill were made available in the hours before its passage, and
most House members admit they voted for the Act without actually reading it
first. Two days later, the Senate passes the final
version of the Patriot Act. Anthrax targets Senators Daschle and Leahy now
support the bill. Bush signs it into law the same day.

Ancillary notes:

November 12, 2001: Dead microbiologist is Dr. Benito Que, 52, was "an
expert in infectious diseases and cellular biology at the Miami Medical
School. Police originally suspected that he had been beaten on November 12
in a carjacking in the medical school's parking lot. Strangely enough,
though, his body showed no signs of a beating. Doctors then began to suspect
a stroke."

November 16, 2001: Dead microbiologist: Dr. Don Wiley, 57, disappears
during a business trip to Memphis, Tennessee. He had
just bought tickets to take his son to Graceland the following day. Police
found his rental car on a bridge outside Memphis. His body was later found
in the Mississippi River. Forensic experts said he may have had a dizzy
spell and fallen off the bridge.

November 21, 2001 (B): Dead microbiologist: World-class microbiologist and
high-profile Russian defector Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik, 64, dies of a stroke.
Pasechnik, who defected to Britain in 1989, had played a huge role in the
development of Russian biowarfare, heading a lab of 400 "with an unlimited
budget" and "the best staff available."

November 24, 2001: Three more dead microbiologists: A Swissair flight from
Berlin to Zurich crashes during its landing approach; 22 are killed and nine
survive. Among those killed are Dr. Yaakov Matzner, 54, Amiramp Eldor, 59
and Avishai Berkman, 50.

December 10, 2001: Dead microbiologist: "Dr. Robert Schwartz, 57, was
stabbed and slashed with what police believe was a sword in his farmhouse in
Leesberg, Va. His daughter, who identifies herself as a pagan high
priestess, and three of her fellow pagans have been charged."

December 14, 2001: Dead microbiologist: Nguyen Van Set, 44, dies in an
airlock filled with nitrogen in his lab in Geelong, Australia. The lab had
just been written up in the journal Nature for its work in genetic
manipulation and DNA sequencing. Scientists there had created a virulent
form of mousepox. "They realized that if similar genetic manipulation was
carried out on smallpox, an unstoppable killer could be unleashed,"
according to Nature.

January 2002: Two dead microbiologists: Ivan Glebov and Alexi Brushlinski.
Pravda reports that Glebov died as the result of a bandit attack and reports
without explanation that Brushlinski was killed in Moscow.

February 9, 2002 (B): Dead microbiologist: Victor Korshunov, 56, is bashed
over the head and killed at the entrance of his home in Moscow, Russia.

February 11, 2002: Dead microbiologist: Dr. Ian Langford, 40, is found
dead, partially naked and wedged under a chair in his home in Norwich,
England. When found, his house was described as "blood-spattered and
apparently ransacked."

February 28, 2002 (B): Two dead microbiologists in San Francisco: While
taking delivery of a pizza, Tanya Holzmayer, 46, is shot and killed by a
colleague, Guyang Huang, 38, who then apparently shot himself.

March 13, 2002: A bomb and two smaller explosive-type devices are found and
defused in the stairwell outside of the Shelby County Regional Forensic
Center, Memphis, Tennessee, where county medical examiner Dr. O. C. Smith
works. Smith states, "We have done several high-profile cases including
missing Harvard researcher Dr. Don Wiley... The police state, "It
potentially could have been a large blast if exploded." The mystery gets
deeper: in June, Dr. Smith is attacked, bound with barbed wire and left with
a bomb tied to his body (see June 1, 2002).

March 24, 2002 (C): Dead microbiologist: David Wynn-Williams, 55, is hit by
a car while jogging near his home in Cambridge, England.

March 25, 2002: Dead microbiologist: Steven Mostow, 63, dies when the
airplane he was piloting crashes near Denver, Colorado. He worked at the
Colorado Health Sciences Centre and was known as "Dr. Flu" for his expertise
in treating influenza, and expertise on bioterrorism.

May 2, 2002: After extensive testing, the DNA sequence of the anthrax sent
through the US mail in 2001 is deciphered, and it confirms suspicions that
the bacteria originally came from USAMRIID. Furthermore, analysis of
genetic drift determines that the attacker's anthrax was not separated from
the source anthrax at USAMRIID for many generations. It suggests that
USAMRIID or USAMRIID samples given to Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah and/or
Porton Downs in Britain are the most likely sources of the anthrax used in
the attacks.

June 1, 2002: Memphis, Tennessee, medical examiner O.C. Smith is attacked
with chemical spray, bound with barbed wire, and left lying in a nearby
parking lot with a bomb tied to his body. He is rescued several hours later.
In recent months, Smith has been working on the death of Harvard University
microbiologist Don Wiley, who supposedly fell from a Memphis bridge in
December (see November 16, 2001).

August 18, 2002 (B): An FBI forensic linguistics expert says the anthrax
mailer was probably someone with high-ranking US military and intelligence
connections. He says he has identified two suspects who both worked for the
CIA, USAMRIID and other classified military operations. He expresses
frustration about accessing evidence. "My two suspects both appear to have
CIA connections. These two agencies, the CIA and the FBI, are sometimes seen
as rivals. My anxiety is that the FBI agents assigned to this case are not
getting full and complete cooperation from the US military, CIA and
witnesses who might have information about this case."

[Bassman66]

6. Brilliant JackRiddler.

But have you seriously considered the possibility that the attacks came from space? :-)

Thanks for posting this devastating summary of the anthrax situation.

[Bolo Boffin]

8. My goodness.

APPENDIX A6

ANTHRAX ATTACKS


The targeting, timing and open-source evidence of the still-unsolved anthrax attacks of September and October 2001 suggest a covert action by a group of conspirators aiming to achieve a shift in the balance of domestic political power; possibly also with intent to distract from the ongoing 9/11 investigations. There is probable cause to believe parties other than the original perpetrators have engaged in a cover-up, destruction of evidence, and obstruction of justice after the fact. Five deaths and 22 infections are attributed to the attacks, with one decedent (Kathy Nguyen) and many of the injured parties having resided in New York State.


1. Numerous waves of hoax anthrax mailings using threat letters and harmless powders had occurred in the years and months previous to September 11, with various targets: abortion clinics, political figures, most of them clearly unrelated to the later real anthrax attacks.

2. Immediately after September 11, the specter of a possible follow-up biological warfare attack was raised as an imminent possibility and a subject of many rumors. The Federal Aviation Administration ("FAA") imposed a two-day ban on agricultural crop-duster flights (September 23-25, see, The Label, 9/01, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, at pested.unl.edu/thelabel/tlsep01.htm). Apparently the FAA acted on information that al-Qaeda operatives had considered using crop-dusters to deliver andthrax or other pathogens from the air, and that alleged 9/11 ringleader Mohamed Atta had inquired prior to September 11 about renting such planes ("Report: U.S. Warns of Chance of Attack This Week," Reuters, 9/23/01).

3. The first wave of anthrax letters was apparently mailed from Trenton, New Jersey with postmarks of September 18, 2001. The Federal Bureau of Investigation ("FBI") has published photographs of two envelopes addressed to the network news anchor Tom Brokaw (of NBC) and The New York Post. Other mailings presumably went to the network news anchors Peter Jennings (of ABC) and Dan Rather (of CBS). Employees of both later developed symptoms, but envelopes addressed to ABC and CBS are not known to have been recovered. Although persons in the New York area began to develop symptoms that later turned out to be anthrax-related as early as on September 22, the first confirmation that an individual had been diagnosed with inhalation anthrax came on October 3, 2001. The victim was Robert Stevens, a photo editor with The Sun tabloid at the offices of American Media, Inc. ("AMI") in Boca Raton, Florida.

4. Despite the widespread expectations and warnings of an imminent biological warfare attack between September 11 and October, 2001, Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson on October 4 assured the public from the White House briefing room that, "I want everybody to understand that sporadic cases of anthrax do occur in the United States.... t this point in time, it's an isolated case, and there is no other indication anybody else has got anthrax." (The New Republic, 10/16/01, online at www.tnr.com/express/crowley101601.html )

5. Stevens died on October 5, the first known victim of inhalation anthrax in the United States in 27 years. The FBI reported finding anthrax spores on Stevens's keyboard at work on October 7, at which point the AMI offices were shut down. Another AMI employee, Ernesto Blanco, hospitalized with pneumonia on October 1, tested positive for anthrax (he later recovered). By then the most widespread and logical assumption was that the events constituted a premeditated attack. "Scientists in the US are analysing the anthrax that killed Stevens, and comparing it to strains from around the world, in an effort to trace the bacteria's geographic origins," the New Scientist wrote. "The results have not yet been announced." ("Florida cases likely to be first ever anthrax attack," New Scientist, 10/9/01 at www.anthraxinvestigation.com/misc2.html#NewSci02 )

6. The FBI has published photographs of two envelopes from the second wave of anthrax letters, which were postmarked October 9 in Trenton, NJ and addressed to Sen. Tom Daschle (D-SD), at the time Senate Majority Leader, and Patrick Leahy (D-VT), at the time chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. (Subsequent reports of anthrax letters or spores discovered at mailrooms in other Federal agencies and at State Department consulates in Lithuania and Pakistan were later reportedly determined to have been the result of cross-contamination in the postal system, mistaken testing, or hoax mailings.) The anthrax in the letters to the two Senators was found to be ten times as pure as the anthrax in the letters to the media, and had therefore gone through a far more sophisticated stage of processing designed to "weaponize" it.

7. On October 10 and 11, 2001, Iowa State University in Ames destroyed anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept in more than 100 vials, "after relatively brief deliberations with the FBI" and with the additional approval of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ("CDC"). The move was supposedly prompted by security concerns, given the ongoing investigation of the Stevens death. The destruction of the vials was overseen by James A. Roth, a microbiologist at the university's College of Veterinary Medicine, who later said, "we think had all the strains already" (New York Times, 11/9/01, emphasis ours). The spores in the attack mailings were later determined to have been derived from the "Ames strain" of anthrax commonly used in biological warfare research and development, of which the originals were kept by the University. We submit that the move is suspicious on its face in both timing and the justification given, and may constitute destruction of evidence in an ongoing criminal case. A full investigation would clarify the background, determining for example if the University truly acted on its own initiative or under pressure from a governmental agency or third party, and the reasons behind the FBI and CDC approval of the move.

8. According to news reports, starting on September 11 the White House administered doses of the broad-spectrum antibiotic Cipro, which is effective against anthrax, to an undetermined number of staff members. Judicial Watch later filed a lawsuit demanding the White House produce documents and information on the rationale for this decision ("JW Sues Bush Administration For Anthrax Docs. Seeks Documents About Terrorist Attack that Killed At least Five," www.judicialwatch.org/archive/newsletter/2002/0802k.sht... ). A full investigation would seek to determine on what information the White House acted, and whether it implies specific advance knowledge of the coming anthrax attacks.

None of this is evidence of an inside job.

/ more notes

• Operation Clear Vision: reconstructing Russian anthrax bombs (1997-2000)
- State Department objected: violation of biowarfare conventions
"A bomb is a bomb is a bomb."
- Pentagon, CIA insisted, went ahead with research.
- Suspended by White House in 2000.

• Operation Jefferson (West Jefferson, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Institute)

• Revival of programs under Bush administration.
- Supermarket terrorism ($1 million budget)
- Judith Miller allowed to report from facility by Pentagon after French objection.

Did those Russian anthrax bombs involve envelopes? No? Well, so much for this.

The Congress that rushed through the USA PATRIOT Act nearly unread was the same Congress that was packing and rushing out of Washington because the leadership of the opposition Democrats had been subjected to an anthrax attack.

I consider this fact inseparable from any discussion of how the USA PATRIOT Act was passed. The chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy, received an anthrax letter within days of questioning the original draft of the USA PATRIOT Act. The Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, also received a letter at the same time. Soon after, both reversed themselves and dropped their objections to the legislation, which radically curtails the civil liberties guaranteed in the U.S. Bill of Rights.

By way of anthrax, Congress was terrorized and broken.

The anthrax attacks of October 2001 should have put an end to doubts about the "War on Terror" and the likelihood that elements of the U.S. government are willing to stage inside-job terror attacks on American soil. Instead the attacks have been forgotten, although at the time they were trumped up into something even bigger than 9/11.

Ever heard of Post Hoc? You're soaking in it.

Unlike the case of 9/11, the facts about the anthrax attacks are simple, clear and close to conclusive:

-The Bush government revived an anthrax program early in 2001 on orders from Cheney and had developed a new milling process just before Sept. 11. Incredibly, this was called "Project Jefferson" (!).

- A week before Sept. 11, the New York Times reported that the Pentagon was experimenting in the "defensive" development of anthrax milling methods. Government scientists were assigned to put together home-made laboratories, using only materials available commercially, on the sparse budget of a mere one million of your taxpayer dollars. When this was revealed, the Pentagon said they weren't actually taking the final step, of milling live spores (although I wonder why, once ready, they would not want to see how well their lab works). The idea of the exercise, supposedly, was to see what terrorists might whip together from store-bought items. The French got wind of this program and complained to a United Nations committee, since the biowarfare convention outlaws all research, including "defensive research." To allay these concerns, the Pentagon invited an NY Times reporter, our old friend Judy Miller, to the Texas base where the experiments were held.*
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04GERM....
y&pagewanted=all
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/09/04/international/04BIOW....

Sounds like a worthwhile experiment. From your link:

In a program code-named Clear Vision, the Central Intelligence Agency built and tested a model of a Soviet-designed germ bomb that agency officials feared was being sold on the international market. The C.I.A. device lacked a fuse and other parts that would make it a working bomb, intelligence officials said.

At about the same time, Pentagon experts assembled a germ factory in the Nevada desert from commercially available materials. Pentagon officials said the project demonstrated the ease with which a terrorist or rogue nation could build a plant that could produce pounds of the deadly germs.

Well, this could indict the Bush Administation or Al Qaeda or our invisible space aliens. If anybody could build the factory, right? It's not evidence of an inside job. Now if you could trace the anthrax to that particular mill -- oh, wait, you can't?

Moving on.

-On Sept. 11th the White House immediately put some of its staff, reportedly including Cheney himself, on Cipro. How did they know to pick this antibiotic, out of the many available? How could they guess that anthrax (or another pathogen against which Cipro can protect) was coming? This is the subject of a discovery suit by Judicial Watch: how did they know?**

Cipro: http://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/cipro.htm

It's such a specific drug. :eyes: Are you fucking kidding me?

More later...

[Bassman66]

9. There are none so blind as those...

...who twist and turn and spin and misrepresent the truth at every opportunity.

I'm not suggesting you're like that Bolo.

[hack89]

12. Don't be so tough on JR. nt

[Bassman66]

10. "It's such a specific drug. Are you fucking kidding me?"

Why were they dishing it out at the White House?

Outbreak of flu?

Yeah, yeah... ah hoc pro whatever.

[hack89]

11. So continuity of government plans

wouldn't take a possible chemical or biological attack into account and dispense a common, broad spectrum antibiotic as a precaution to key personnel?

[JackRiddler]

19. So let THEM say that, then. Why didn't they respond to the request?

Or is it your passion to explain their actions for them?

[Bolo Boffin]

22. I think they did say "continuity of government" was the reason.

:rofl:

[JackRiddler]

36. I've learned not to rely on your memory. Cite.

[hack89]

30. Just presenting a possible explanation

take it or leave it as you see fit.

[Bassman66]

61. Leave it if it's all the same to you.

They havn't explained themselves to date, as with a lot of 9/11 decisions that indicate foreknowledge.

[hack89]

62. And if they did you wouldn't believe them anyway

if nothing else, the truther world is a perfectly contained one. A self licking ice cream cone comes to mind - perfectly constructed such that anything that conflicts with your preconceived notion on the truth is cheerfully discarded.

[Bassman66]

64. How do you know that?

Carry on putting words in people's mouths.
Bedunker protocol #1435.

[JackRiddler]

17. You're not really this bad? I seem to remember better...

"None of this is evidence of an inside job."

In telling the story in detail, not every fact related must on its own constitute such evidence. But I know, all you ever see is trees, trees, everywhere, and these horrid forest theorists claim otherwise.

In that first list, Thompson's action (4) is evidence of negligence, the Ames action is evidence of destruction of evidence. Don't these things merit prosecutorial scrutiny on the probable cause standard? No questions there, because you think you have plausible answers set up in advance of investigation?

"Ever heard of Post Hoc?"

Yes, it and "cui bono" do not constitute proof, but are routinely and usefully deployed as criminological starting points in working out (or ruling out) possible suspects and motives for a crime. Do you know the difference between evidence and proof?

And why can't you advance any kind of post hoc evidence for your space aliens? (Never mind, I know it's in Bedunker Union rules to mention UFOs and such unprompted, every chance you get.)

"Sounds like a worthwhile experiment."

Actually, it's a violation of the biowarfare conventions, which also prohibit development of weapons on the defensive principle, and was cited as such in the French protest to the UN, prompting the Pentagon to give Miller a tour of the facility. And it establishes that the government had revived its anthrax programs in 2001 prior to September 11th.

"Well, this could indict the Bush Administation or Al Qaeda or our invisible space aliens. If anybody could build the factory, right?"

Anybody (with a million dollars, note) didn't build the factory. The US government did, as part of its revival of anthrax programs.

"Cipro: http://www.rxlist.com/cgi/generic/cipro.htm It's such a specific drug. Are you fucking kidding me?"

As I mentioned, a broad-spectrum antibiotic, but advertised as the best for anthrax, after the fact. Judicial Watch put in a suit to ask on what basis this move was made. Do you object to the release of the White House's rationale for preemptively having staff take this antibiotic? Apparently, you do.

[Bolo Boffin]

20. That's the second time you've cited Judicial Watch approvingly, Jack!

And Sweet Pea is barely out the door. You can catch him if you run.

ETA: You're shamelessly admitting that all you're doing is JAQing off and collecting various facts at random. No real argument, just sinister implications. And none of it, absolutely none of it, is conclusive at all. It's total truthiness.

Amazing.

[SDuderstadt]

25. Hey, Bolo! I like that!

I assume "JAQ" means "just asking questions", right?


"JAQing off"....priceless. Can I use that?

[Bolo Boffin]

26. Oh, yes. I didn't come up with it. I forget who did.

But when it's appropriate, feel free.

[SDuderstadt]

28. Just so you know...

I am going to be good and resist the temptation to refer to JR as "JAQRiddler". Or, maybe not.


On top of that, everytime I am accused of being an "OCTabot", I am going to accuse my accuser of being a "JAQ-off". After all, turnabout IS fair play, no?

[Bryan Sacks]

32. bedunker Strategy # 33: When you are pwn3d, distract with name-calling n/t

[SDuderstadt]

33. Please point out where Bolo called anyone a name...n/t

[Bryan Sacks]

35. bedunker strategy #111: focus on semantics for the sheer hell of it

[SDuderstadt]

37. Oh. I see....

now it's "semantics". Did Bolo call anyone a name or not?

[Bryan Sacks]

41. by clear implication he did, and YOU got the implication loud and clear

Is calling someone's work 'JAQing off' the equivalent to calling them a 'JAQoff?' It certainly put YOU in mind of it, didn't it?

But then again, someone to whom people refer to as 'Doody' would be sensitive, I suppose.

Last post on this nonsense from me

[SDuderstadt]

44. Oh, I see....

now it's not name-calling....it's name-implying.

[SDuderstadt]

60. Why don't you come and call me "Doody" to my face?

Or, are you all just going to titter amongst yourselves? We'll see how far that gets. What a bunch of juveniles.

[Ghost in the Machine]

122. Ohhhh... you get me all hot & sweaty when you talk tough like that!!

I can't help myself though... rolling around on the floor laughing my ass off at you *does* require some physical exertion....

The unintentional irony in your post made it twice as funny, too. You spew out some anonymous internet threat/challenge, then call someone else "juvenile"... :rofl:

You'd be even more comical if people didn't lose 10 IQ points just from reading most of your bullshit posts...


Why don't you come and call me "Doody" to my face?

I'll accept that challenge.. please PM me your home & work addresses, along with your scheduled work hours, so I know where & when to visit you... maybe in the future you shouldn't let your mouth write checks that you body can't cash....

[Twist_U_Up]

125. tempting isnt it

[SDuderstadt]

126. C'mon out...

you're all like a bunch of little girls

[Twist_U_Up]

129. I take it self defense isnt your strong point.

"like a bunch of girls"
lol
are you like 9 ?

[SDuderstadt]

130. No, I meant what I said....

you guys are like a bunch of little girls. I don't know what's so hard to understand in what I said.

[Name removed]

132. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[SDuderstadt]

135. Nothing rallies the "truth community"...

like a little name calling. Pathetic.

[Ghost in the Machine]

131. He'd piss his pants as he ran away screaming...

I've run across a thousand others just like him in my time... just like the Klan Klowns that hide behind their hoods to spread their hate or the 'tough guy' who thinks he's tough because he beats his wife and kids but pisses his pants and cowers down when confronted by a man.

Yeah, I know the type....

[Twist_U_Up]

134. he wouldnt show.

ive met his type before.
Big and bad behind the puter but when it comes time to pony up. They are nowhere to be found.
I call them keyboard warriors.

[SDuderstadt]

136. This is unintentional irony, right?

Right?

[Bolo Boffin]

48. :eyes:

http://www.google.com/search?q=jaqing

Jack's name and JAQing off as a term is what is laughably known as a coincidence, as that Google search will show you.

True to form, you guys connect the dots where there were none. BACK. AWAY. FROM THE SHARPIE.

[Name removed]

127. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[JackRiddler]

40. Please don't insult the intelligence of the moderators...

I'm sure they're not impressed with your tactical misinterpretation, and I cite neither "approvingly" or "disapprovingly," I merely cite that JW, amid all the bullshit they do, put in a legal motion to see the White House rationale for the Cipro move. This is a matter of the legal record. And I don't see who would object to such a motion, or why.

By the way, didn't you cite JW approvingly back when they took to the air to hit at the Pentagon hoax?

[Grateful for Hope]

93. You are correct, Jack.

Bolo was inviting the forum to go to the Judicial Watch website:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=125&topic_id=87321#87516

"Sis, Boom, Bah".

[JackRiddler]

94. Thanks for that...

Some guesses are just so easy to make. Hoist by your own confirmation petard, etc. etc.

[Bolo Boffin]

95. "Bolo was inviting the forum to go to the Judicial Watch website:"

Because it was the best place to get those tapes that I knew of at that time.

Put down the skiv, Hope, and back away.

[Grateful for Hope]

98. Awww...poor bolo.

He sure hates it when he gets back what he dishes out. Poor, poor bolo.

[Bolo Boffin]

106. Spare me your crocodile tears, lady.

You've got the taste of blood in your mouth, and you need to back the fuck off.

[Grateful for Hope]

108. "Pot calling kettle"...n/t

[Twist_U_Up]

128. lol yep transparancy is his problem now

[Ghost in the Machine]

121. You got owned.. again... just quit whining about it, ok?

"Because it was the best place to get those tapes that I knew of at that time." So... as long as it fits *your* needs, it's fine, but damn if anyone *else* can use it to fit *their* needs, right?

Sounds like something a hypocritical rightwing fundie would spew if you ask me....

[Bolo Boffin]

13. Part Two

-A wave of stories immediately after Sept. 11th announced that anthrax was the likeliest next attack. We were even threatened with a specific sequence of future attacks: anthrax, smallpox, plague. (They've been drumming up the smallpox scare ever since the anthrax attacks stopped.) Of all the hundreds of biowar germs and literally thousands of types of terror attacks, why was this idea circulated so prominently? Who was behind spreading these stories? Why so specific?

-Suspect Hatfill, while working biowarfare research at SAIC/Batelle Memorial in 1999, commissioned his colleague in science, William Capers Patrick, the renowned dean of American biowarfare research, to write a report on modalities that terrorists might employ in sending anthrax through the mail.

-The report from that study specified an ideal spore concentration and weight of anthrax sample per envelope. These were the amounts that were then reportedly used in the attacks on Daschle and Leahy. In other words, the anthrax attackers had access to this secret report.

My, I remember the smallpox scare of aught-two. Don't you?

Rank speculation. Assertions without the slightest basis in fact.

And this is JackRiddler posting this trash! Why, all that harumphing about how the 9/11 debunkers won't discuss his stuff so they can debunk the easy stuff like WTC 7 and nukes...

...and then Jack posts bullshit like this! Since we can discuss people's motivations now, it looks to me that Jack has been upset not that people aren't bothering with his superior bullshit, but that he doesn't dare release his bullshit lest it be shown to be the same as Ace Baker ranting about fake planes.

And it is, it is...

-The anthrax went first to the headquarters of the country's biggest tabloid owner (National Enquirer and The Sun). The Enquirer had printed a series of anti-Bush "conspiracy" stories, including one claiming that McVeigh was still breathing after his execution. The Enquirer also published embarrassing pictures of the Bush twins drunk, which had gotten much play on Drudge and similar outlets. Was this an object lesson to the media? (Note: never established how it got to Bob Stevens; no envelope located; theory that it may have been spread from one floor to another by a vacuum cleaner .. or was he directly hit, via keyboard?)

-The wife of the paper's editor had rented an apartment to Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi. Was the paper going to do a story about this that would not have fit the official 9/11 line?

And they left Al Gore completely alone, right? Riiiiiiiiiight. Cherrypicking for sinister implication, and rank assumption, and a nice little batch of JAQing off. Nicely done, Jack.

-At this point, the FBI on a request from Iowa State University allowed the destruction of a stockpile of original Ames strain samples on Oct. 13, days after the Bob Stevens case became known. Why?! This was a precaution?!

Umm, a few things happened between the tabloid attack and the stockpile destruction. Right, Jack? Wasn't that, oh, I don't know, maybe the other attacks?

And, putting on my Perry Logan hat, why is it that only now the virus is getting destroyed? Wouldn't they have gotten rid of that before the attacks?

ISU asked to destroy it. Now Iowa State is in on it? Will the madness never end????

-The next group of attacks hit the New York media. The letters arrived just as the Afghanistan campaign began and caused maximum coverage of nothing but anthrax. For a vital week or two, both the Afghanistan campaign and the 9/11 investigation became secondary concerns to the media.

-At that point the FBI immediately called off one-half of the thousands of agents who were working on 9/11 and put them to work on anthrax.

Isn't it suspicious that the media dropped everything and started talking anthrax? Isn't it suspicious that the FBI started investigating a crime?

NO.

-The third wave of attacks, the one that exactly fit the specifications of the secret paper commissioned by Hatfill, was sent first to Daschle and Leahy - the majority leader of the Democratic opposition in the Senate, and the Democratic head of the Judiciary Committee.

So we go from "reportedly" to "exactly" with nary a single bit of documentation and corroboration AT ALL. Next time this gets told, Hatfill will have signed it and included a funny poem telling where his NEXT mailing will go...

Oh, wait. Wrong Riddler.

-The government said the anthrax powder sent to Daschle and Leahy had been put through a much more sophisticated process of milling to aerosolize the spoors, such as would require advanced technology from a state weapons program.

This was about the time they were beating the Iraq war drums, wasn't it?

Did this special milling process turn out to be true? Um, no.

In 2006, the FBI revised its assessment of the anthrax powder. While it was of exceptional purity and quality, scientists now say it lacked signs of the special milling process necessary for weaponization. In addition, the particular Ames strain of the anthrax used in the attacks – a clue seeming to point to a domestic source – has turned out to be far more common than originally believed, appearing in laboratories world-wide, including nations of the former Soviet Union.

So this was all getting caught up in the general Iraq bullshit. Instead of finding the real culprit(s), the investigation became part of the march to war. Sounds like something a little more worth your average war protestor's time and not this insane "inside job" bullshit, Jack.

You are against the war, right, Jack? Since we're allowed to talk motivations now, you're not here spreading bullshit to discredit the war protesters, are you? Hmmm?

More later....

[Bryan Sacks]

14. On what NEW EVIDENCE was the FBI's initial assessment of the anthrax reversed?

right, I though so. None you or the WSJ provided.

[Bolo Boffin]

16. Silly Bryan. It was a LACK of actual signs that would have been present.

:eyes:

So you believe the FBI then but not now?

Funny, I believed them then AND now. Had no reason not to. You on the other hand are indulging your confirmation bias.

tch, tch

[Bryan Sacks]

31. right! They jumped to conclusions originally! Of Course!

They couldn't detect the LACK originally! Naturally, they saw something that wasn't there, only to NOT see it later!

I got it!

[JackRiddler]

43. Love it... thanks for a laugh.

No, no, if the FBI sees something for 5 years and then suddenly doesn't see it, the proper posture is always: believe them both times. We've always been at war with Eastasia.

[Bryan Sacks]

34. bedunker strategy #105: focus on semantics to avoid addressing question

[SDuderstadt]

38. "truther" strategy 1-200

claim every argument you can't answer is simply "semantics"

[Bryan Sacks]

42. are you implying I can't answer an argument here? Say what it is, then.

The closeted liars and obfuscators are on your side of the fence, Duderstadt. Remember that. We just had another reminder of it with the departure of 'SP'.

[SDuderstadt]

45. "Liars and obfuscators"

So, no one on your "side" has lied or obfuscated? Really?

[Bryan Sacks]

47. you must have my side confused with what you call the 'truther' side

I'm in the 9/11 skeptic camp. Difference explained numerous times.

[SDuderstadt]

50. Seems like a "distinction without a difference" to me....

please educate me.

[Bryan Sacks]

52. 'truther' vs skeptic

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=206255&mesg_id=206324

[SDuderstadt]

54. No offense, Bryan...

but I went to the link and found the biggest collection of goobledygook I've ever read. Could you explain the difference again in plain English? Also, please let me know if I am a "left-structuralist".

[Bryan Sacks]

55. sorry, have to let you do the work. If you have specific questions, I'll answer.

As for the left-structuralist question: I don't know. Haven't paid close enough attention, honestly.

[SDuderstadt]

56. How can I "do the work"....

from your gobbledygook? Do you write that way on purpose believing people will think you are some sort of intellectual?

[Bolo Boffin]

63. True Scotsman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

[Diane_nyc]

73. On the (at least) two meanings of "9/11 Truth" (and "Truther")

I've replied http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=125&topic_id=206255&mesg_id=213886">here.

[JackRiddler]

29. If you can't remember the anthrax panic of September aught-ONE (not -two)

...which would be puzzling - weren't you on-planet? - you could always make use of your reading lessons.

Anthrax was introduced as a theme well before the letters arrived anywhere, with propaganda focusing on details such as Atta's swollen hands at a Florida pharmacy and the government ordering the grounding of crop-duster planes on Sept. 24, with ample national news coverage.

As for the panoply of other germ terrors sure to come, one scare-sample of many (do you have Lexis?):

Anthrax, Smallpox, Plague: Reborn as Bioweapons?
By Barry James
International Herald Tribune (=NYT & WP)
October 12, 2001

The threat of anthrax, an ancient scourge described in the Bible, again hangs over mankind. And one of history's great medical advances—the defeat of smallpox—could be undone if the worst of the dark fears stirred up by the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington come to pass.

Also lurking in the background is another of the human race's great enemies: bubonic plague. It was probably the Black Death that killed a third of Europe's population in the Middle Ages.

Anthrax, smallpox, and plague are three of the biological agents that experts fear most, should terrorists seek to carry out an even deadlier attack, because these diseases can be spread so quickly through a population.

While there are significant practical difficulties in mounting an attack using any of them, terrorists may already have the capability to do so. The CIA warned earlier this year that terrorist groups were actively searching the Internet for information on biological weapons, as well as chemical and nuclear ones. And the terrorist suspect Osama bin Laden said in 1998 that it was a "religious duty" to acquire unconventional weapons.

"I'm not trying to be alarmist," said Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, "but we know these terrorist organizations have probably found the means to use biological and chemical weapons."

I'm not trying to be alarmist, either, but Card also knew his own terrorist organization had just reactivated its biowarfare research and development a few months earlier.

"Isn't it suspicious that the media dropped everything and started talking anthrax?"

No, it's irresponsible, but nothing new for them. More importantly, it is a predictable consequence of the anthrax attacks, and therefore worthy of consideration as motive for a psychological operation.

"Isn't it suspicious that the FBI started investigating a crime?"

Certainly not. It's suspicious that they therefore shut down half of the investigation of another crime, their biggest crime ever, overnight, to complaints from the field agents working the Sept. 11 case. (And with resignations of the investigation leaders to follow in November.) Did you notice how that long FBI 9/11 investigation timeline recently released in redacted form tails off soon after?

"In 2006, the FBI revised its assessment of the anthrax powder. While it was of exceptional purity and quality, scientists now say it lacked signs of the special milling process necessary for weaponization."

So, in 2001 the FBI said it was weaponized. Scientists with actual names were cited saying so in the press at the time, as linked above. As opposed to the "scientists now say" of 2006, who go nameless in a Wall Street Journal article with clear editorial elements and slams at "the agenda of the political left, which didn't want the trail of evidence to prove state-sponsorship of terror – particularly by Iraq."

So back then the FBI gets as far as Hatfill, a veteran of the dirty war on behalf of Rhodesia's last stand war, who happens to be acquainted with many other scientists in US biowarfare research. There, the investigation mysteriously stalls. At "lone scientist" and "person of interest," possibly because to go beyond that to "government laboratory" and "team" is unthinkable.

FIVE YEARS LATER, besieged by Hatfill's partisans and facing his suit, "the FBI revised its assessment" and "scientists now say."

What kind of mind puts full faith in historical revision on this level of bullshit (from the Murdochized WSJ, no less) instead of the original stories with actual scientist cites?

"So this was all getting caught up in the general Iraq bullshit."

Says you, devising the excuses on their behalf, and not caring what the actual reasons may have been. As usual.

"Instead of finding the real culprit(s), the investigation became part of the march to war."

Nope. The sequence was exactly reversed: soon after the mailings arrived, there was all the howling about al-Qaeda and how maybe Atta got a vial from that (non-existent) Iraqi agent (he didn't meet) in Prague. Then, by the time there was an open "march" to the Iraq invasion (starting low-key in the spring of 2002 and really launched in Aug./Sep. 02), the FBI had already settled on its idea of weaponized anthrax produced by "lone scientist" within the US biowarfare programs. By that time, the Oct. 01 anthrax attacks had turned into a footnote for the media, at best.

"Umm, a few things happened between the tabloid attack and the stockpile destruction. Right, Jack? Wasn't that, oh, I don't know, maybe the other attacks?"

And this justifies the destruction of the original samples, or the approval of it by the FBI, in what way exactly?

"And, putting on my Perry Logan hat, why is it that only now the virus is getting destroyed?"

That hat is notorious for lowering your IQ. For starters, it's a bacteria.

"ISU asked to destroy it."

The story as related in the Times coverage clearly leaves other possibilities open as to who may have asked them to "ask." Regardless of the idea's origin, it's suspect and destroys the lineage and thus possible evidence in the case. How do you imagine that this is rational, inoccuous behavior?

People die from anthrax samples that might be identified and traced using this stockpile, and to you the logical reaction of the university is to immediately destroy its stockpile after keeping it for more than 80 years? And the FBI says, sure, go ahead, why not? Strange, the Times story suggested there was something controversial about it, I wonder why.

"Now Iowa State is in on it?"

Presumably not, or they would have kept the samples for future attacks. Way to not get the point!

"Will the madness never end????"

The healing can start any time you're willing. I recommend meditation as a first step. Try to visualize your chosen enemies as subjects in their own right. Repeat this line of thought: "Winning is not everything. I can be wrong. Seeing this is good for me."

"Sounds like something a little more worth your average war protestor's time..."

Why don't you let this average war protestor, whoever he/she is, decide?

"and not this insane 'inside job' bullshit"

What about your precious time, then? And the bile can't be good for you, either.

Thanks for the exercise. Please have the last word on this sub-thread.

[Grateful for Hope]

39. Good points, Jack.

Thank goodness for posters like you and Bryan. I have a lot of admiration for both of you.

[Bolo Boffin]

66. Sis, Boom, Bah! n/t

[Bolo Boffin]

65. "Thanks for the exercise." Tap-dancing like that could be considered exercise, I'd have to agree.

I'm wondering why you even bothered to type so much if you were just going to avoid my questions. I guess the appearance of dealing with them is much more important to your ego.

For example, you mock me for missing the 'aught-one' date of the anthrax scare. What I mentioned was the smallpox scare of 'aught-two'. Which didn't happen. So your fearmongering was just that. Nice how you can employ Card's techniques and still get to deride him for doing so. I think I'll just deride you both for doing so. "I'm not trying to be alarmist, but..." :rofl:

"worthy of consideration as motive for a psychological operation." -- God DAMN. Those Cheney fuckers think of EVERYTHING.

Do you have the only remaining copy of Miss Manners on FBI Allocation? What is the recommended amount of agents the FBI should place on a possibly continuing terrorist attack?

Weaponized: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/coatings.html AND http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/weaponization.html AND #4 on this page: http://www.anthraxinvestigation.com/#Timeline.

March to War: Now interestingly enough, you added a word to what I said. I said the investigation became part of the march to war. You began talking about the "open" march to war.

That's not what I said. What you did here is create a strawman. You yourself know good and well that Bush came into office wanting war with Iraq. Rumsfeld was taking notes about turning 9/11 into Iraq if possible. That's the march to war I was talking about. Beat your straw men all you like, but it's clear that's what you're doing.

The march to war with Iraq is the context of the entire anthrax investigation.

Timeline question: you put the tabloid attack and the stockpile destruction right next to each other, the better to facilitate the post hoc fallacy in your readers. I called you on it, and you tapdance away, wondering why this justifies the destruction of the Iowa State samples. What reasons did Iowa State give for destroying the samples? Can you find that in your Lexis?

You really did start dancing there. The next item is your calling me on a mistake I did make, stating that anthrax is a virus, not a bacterium. (OMG! I can be wrong and admit it!) However, you use that mistake to once again tapdance around the question. Why is it that only now they are "getting rid of the evidence"?

Times article on ISU destruction of stockpile:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9804EEDF1738F93AA35752C1A9679C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=1

Point out the places where you see suggestions that someone other than ISU was the motivator behind the destruction. All I see is that the university was afraid of security and the FBI thought nothing was wrong because the Ames strain had been sent all over the place.

Controversy, later? Sure. It was a fuckup. Fuckups happen. What you don't have is evidence that something more sinister is going on. All you have that way is implication.

No wonder you gave me the last word in this subthread. You must be exhausted from all that "exercise."

[Bolo Boffin]

21. Part Three

-This exceptional piece of constituent mail arrived at Daschle and Leahy's offices about a week after the USA PATRIOT Act was submitted to the Congress. Leahy had initially opposed the Act, and requested clarification of its more extreme provisions from Ashcroft. Ashcroft never answered.

- Senate offices were shut down and Capitol Hill went into an uproar. For weeks, as employees lined up for doses of antibiotics, Hazmat and FBI agents poked around in the Senate.

- By the end of that month the Republican-majority House chose to run home. As they left, they cast their votes for the USA PATRIOT Act and its negation of the U.S. Constitution. As Republican Congressman Ron Paul has made clear, most of them did not even receive a text of the 300-page final version of the USA PATRIOT Act before they voted for it, let alone read it.

- The Senate soon followed suit, also approving USA PATRIOT.

- Reports told that Sens. Kennedy and Levin, two other liberals, had also received anthrax letters, although no photos of these letters were published.

- The notes included with the anthrax letters to Daschle, Leahy and Tom Brokaw tried to point the blame at Arab perpetrators, but these were clumsy and transparent. ("Allah is Great" instead of "God Is Great" or "Allah Akhbar.")

Sigh. None of which is actually evidence. This isn't Post Hoc precisely. It's Cum Hoc. It's still a fallacy. Until you provide actual evidence that these events are truly related, you got nothing.

ETA: Oh, I forgot. That masterful notation of "Allah is Great", that's what I'm talking about. Since that is NEVER used in English, here's a short list of suspects to start considering.

http://www.google.com/search?q=Allah+is+great

Hmm. 20,200,000 hits. That's not very short. Maybe that's not the "clumsy" construction you believe it to be, Jack.

- The news at first wanted to blame it on Arabs, or Iraq. Why should that damned Osama bin Laden hate the Democratic leadership, as opposed to Republican leaders?

- Only days later did reports arrive of anthrax being found in mail to the White House, Pentagon, Federal Reserve, CIA, etc. All of their mail had by then been very safely isolated on military bases. No details about these alleged attacks have been released. We have not seen copies of the letters, as was the case with the letters to Daschle, Leahy and Tom Brokaw. There have to my knowledge been no follow-up reports on the provenance of the anthrax employed in these cases. (In fact, most reports now say all anthrax reports other than AMI and the letters mailed to media and Democratic senators in Sept./Oct. 2001 turned out not to be anthrax.)

How strange how the first attacks, the only ones that had a chance to get through, went to the Democratic leadership!

Yawn. Wake me up when you get past the "sinister implication" part and start laying out the actual fingerprints and incontrovertible evidence that convicts anyone, anyone, anyone at all.

- Suddenly, the anthrax wave stopped as quickly as it had begun. The biggest U.S. media story of October 2001 was effectively swept away. The media obediently switched to the taking of Kabul and spent November 2001 preparing us for a thoughtful Thanksgiving, with endless soul-searching stories asking how our country could have ever produced Johnny Taliban Walker.

- Anthrax has since been mentioned only rarely and out of context, as when Powell had the gall to hold up a vial of white powder at the UN and ask where Saddam is hiding his anthrax. Well, Colin, where are you keeping yours?

-All the foreign anthrax letters reported at various times in 2001 have been dismissed as white-powder hoaxes.

zzzzzZZZZZZZZzzzzzz

-It was established quickly that the anthrax to Leahy and Daschle was of recent production, with high-quality, weaponized spores such as can be produced only by a specialist at an advanced facility; and that the lineage goes back to Fort Detrick, Maryland and the Ames strain used by American biowarfare programs.

Covered this already. Nope, and most of the current strains around the world come from the Ames strain.

-For all this, the anthrax perpetrator(s) made an obvious effort to minimize casualties and target the letters very specifically to individuals. The same amount of anthrax could have been spread in a fashion causing many more deaths.

Cheney: "And it would have been perfect if it hadn't been those fucking postal workers!!!!"

-Having gotten as far as Steven Hatfill, the FBI investigation stalled. Hatfill has been a "person of interest" for more than two years, his house has been invaded several times by sniffer-dog teams, and the FBI even drained a pond near his house to see if he had grown anthrax spores in it; but no further progress has been reported in the investigation.

- Could it be that the "lone perpetrator" thesis is not sustainable, and they don't want to deal with the implications?

Could it be that they fucked up the investigation so royally that the trail is hopelessly cold, as the WSJ article talks about?

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121478249006714421.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

More later....

[Bolo Boffin]

67. Part Four

What can we conclude?

So far you've been misrepresenting, JAQing off, making sinister implications, stacking up facts, rank speculation, all behavior that we have seen from those pesky 9/11 "truthers" you like to pretend you're so superior to. No TRUE 9/11 skeptic would talk such trash, unaware of the geopolitical undercurrents of deep-state players and whatnot. And yet, here you are, posting crap just as loopy as the rest, drowning in bullshit. That's not a data dump -- it's a data goatse. WAAAAAAAY too much information.

Unlike Sept. 11th, the anthrax attacks were a selective wave of terror.

A wave of two.

Hmm. An initial attack to draw attention and then a second attack for maximum effect. Where have we seen THAT M.O. before?

The confirmed letters, the ones that resulted in the deaths of six people, were targeted at specific individuals: reporters, news media personalities, and four leading Democratic senators. This was by design, there was nothing random about it.

News flash: Bears shit in the woods.

The perpetrators have not been presented and so we can only speculate about their motives, but there is no doubt about the direct and predictable effect of their design: the attacks were perfectly sequenced and timed to cow the opposition, force through the Patriot Act, make an exampe of deviant journalists, divert the 9/11 investigation, and frighten and occupy the media during the first phase of the Afghanistan war.

You need to see a doctor about these persistent attacks of Post Hoc.

The attacks provided important reinforcement in keeping these various actors from questioning the official post-Sept. 11th atmosphere of terror and panic. They were the key step in initiating the formal transformation of American society and law.

In simpler words, the anthrax attacks look exactly as though they were planned and executed by a black-ops or damage-control team working on behalf of the Bush regime's goals, either as rogues or as appointed hitmen. They may have hit Bob Stevens as a revenge job, they hit the media to shut them up, and they hit Daschle and Leahy to intimidate them into accepting the USA PATRIOT Act.

Count the right-wing libertarian buzzwords in those two short sections. See, I can do sinister implication, too!

We might compare the crew who were responsible for this to Nixon's Plumbers, except that they were more sophisticated and effective in their choice of methods; or, perhaps, they simply had better protection among their sponsors.

That is the hypothesis so far that best covers all of the above facts. In this case, there is no doubt which way Occam's razor cuts. Anthrax was almost certainly an inside job.

The conspiracy theorist's proof:

1. List a whole bunch of facts, the more, the better
2. Suggest a sinister motive
3. ????
4. XXX "was almost certainly an inside job."

THAT's what makes you a conspiracy theorist, Jack. You haven't proven any such thing. The suggestion of a motive that accords with your confirmation bias is enough to declare anthrax "almost certainly an inside job." You're cleverer than most because you always give yourself an out - "almost certainly", the suggestion that our black ops team could be "rogue".

But the bottom line is that you make the same mistakes in your chosen field of CT bullshitery as the nukes-CD folks and the plane deniers and DEW fanatics. You just don't tie yourself down to physical evidence.

And in the interest of getting through this mountain of crap, here's a note about that long list of dead microbiologists at the end of your data goatse.

Microbiologists Dead! God in Heaven!

http://www.socgenmicrobiol.org.uk/pubs/micro_today/obituaries.cfm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/20/AR2008062002954.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/02/obituaries/02schatz.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-sir-howard-dalton-distinguished-microbiologist-771193.html
http://nihrecord.od.nih.gov/newsletters/03_20_2001/obits.htm
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb5037/is_200706/ai_n25192664
http://www.csm-scm.org/english/obituaries_det_fitzjames.asp
http://www.rcpe.ac.uk/publications/articles/vol31_no3/W_Obituaries.pdf
http://www.startribune.com/obituaries/20551239.html

OMFG! MICROBIOLOGISTS DIE!

Seriously, you've got the Bermuda Triangle fallacy going here. How many microbiologists have to die before you get it? People die. :eyes:

[JackRiddler]

68. The FBI has a more efficient way of saying nothing.

Last week, I phoned the FBI. Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have gone cold? "The investigation is continuing," the spokesman replied. "Has it gone cold because it has led you to a government office?" I asked. He put down the phone.

I dance, you gesture. No problem. Send it to the judges.

[Bolo Boffin]

69. And there's only one explanation for such an act, right?

Conclusive evidence is what you seek if you're trying to prove your case.

If you're just JAQing off and spinning sinister implications, well, dance, Jack, dance.

[JackRiddler]

70. No, but there is a likeliest explanation

except for those who never allow context, never see a forest but only trees they hate.

[Bolo Boffin]

71. Likeliest is a function of your confirmation bias, Jack.

The thought of a FBI person hanging up on a crazy isn't the unusual option you'd like it to be, especially since you have no evidence of it being anything else.

ETA: For example, I LOVE context. Context is what so often shows why your particular arrangement of trees is simply bullshit.

[JackRiddler]

75. Condescension is neither a sign nor a substitute for intelligence.

Your bias is clear enough: the question of whether people in an agency were involved is by definition "crazy," end of discussion.

To make you feel smart, you have a list of standard dismissive phrases you apply falsely and ritually to "stacks of facts" you don't like. Add lots of anger, contempt and bad manners, and you think you've won or even made an argument. Where are your "stacks of facts," where is your hypothesis to explain them?

Meanwhile, you didn't know if anthrax was a virus or a bacterium. This is indeed a minor mistake - that is, assuming you spent no time learning about this subject, which your posts otherwise indicate.

I leave this exchange to the readers, I'm happy enough with my part in it, and don't want to get unseemly.

[Bolo Boffin]

76. Perhaps you should put the "condescension" tactic down, Jack.

A fair accounting of condescension here would have both you and I on death row here, fairly convicted.

[petgoat]

82. Yeah, but Jack's is justified; yours isn't. nt

[Bolo Boffin]

96. Petgoat, who the fuck made you judge of anything?

Seriously.

You prattle on here about how the "hot sheets of air" made it just look like the perimeter columns were bending in.
You speculate that bands of child molesters and junkies were used to plant explosives in the towers so that when they were killed after the job was done, they'd never be missed.

Who the fuck cares what you think?

[petgoat]

99. Sherlock Holmes was a junkie. But you knew that, right? nt

[Bolo Boffin]

105. Sherlock Holmes was a fictional character, petgoat.

But you knew that, right?

[petgoat]

114. As usual you miss the point.

Junkies are not necessarily the drooling incompetents you see on TV is
the point.

(You do have TV in your neck of the woods, right? It's a device that
allows one to see moving pictures in a manner similar to the way you
can hear voices and music on a radio.)

In fact some of them are the most charming people you will ever meet.
They have to be, to survive. You really should get out more. Maybe
if you exposed yourself to more reality and less of the fantasies in
your head, then your opinions would be less peculiar.

[Bolo Boffin]

115. If conversations with you didn't make me so sad, I'd die of laughter.

Seriously. I'm looking on your responses with absolute astonishment, and I almost laugh, but then a deep sadness pervades me as I contemplate it, chilling any amusement I might have at such amazing non-sequiters because I realize that you do mean what you say.

However, I'll give you one chance. Maybe the entire time I have seen you posting here, you've been engaging in the most incredible piece of street performance theater ever, EVER. You make the most outlandish assertions possible and you stick by them doggedly for all this time, just because it amuses you to think someone would take these pronouncements seriously.

If this is not true, if you are serious about these things, then I grieve for you.

[petgoat]

116. Thanks for making clear yet once again that you don't know what you're talking about. nt

[Bassman66]

81. Quite! nt.

[petgoat]

74. Disinfo technique #19. Demand impossible proofs.

Also #2, Become incredulous and indignant.

http://members.aol.com/richrwg/truthno.htm

[Bolo Boffin]

78. I've demanded an "impossible proof"???

*looks around*

Where?

[petgoat]

79. conclusive evidence of black ops is hard to come by

[wildbilln864]

7. excellent post as usual SLaD! Thank you. nt

[petgoat]

23. Gonzo Speculation on Anthrax

The threat was not just to individuals, it was to institutions.

That newspaper office in Florida was so throughly contaminated
(in every room) that the building had to be vacated. Can you
imagine the effect if WaPo or the NYT or CBS had to abandon its
offices, its computers, its files, its studios?

But the bigger threat was to the insurance companies. Imagine
how easy it would be to contaminate a skyscraper. Drop anthrax
dust out of your pants cuff on the elevator floor in the morning
rush hour and let the office workers track the stuff onto every
floor. Imagine not only the disruption to the tenants' operations,
but the expense of decontaminating an entire building, and the
damage to its desirability as a workplace. Would you like to
work in a decontaminated office? They'd probably have to change
the address!

I believe that only the context of the implied threat of anthrax
attacks can explain the insurer's haste to pay the $861 million
on WTC7, apparently without asking any questions, and not even
waiting for FEMA to issue its report. The psychology would be:
"We need to cooperate with the authorities in every way possible
to see that the terrorists can not commit massive bio-vandalism,
and that includes paying out quickly, not asking divisive questions."

(I'll pre-emptively strike bolo's certain argument that the WTC
lawsuits show I'm full of shit. No they don't, bolo, 'cause the
WTC lawsuits do not challenge the official facts in any way.)

[Bolo Boffin]

24. *pat pat pat pat pat*

There you go. Now off to bed with you.

[SDuderstadt]

27. You know, you've got me thinking here...

how do we know that the CBS and/or other studios were NOT compromised by anthrax threats and during the "hidden evacuations" the perps altered all the videos of the "planes"?

I'd like to offer a new slogan for the "truth movement".

"If you can imagine it, it proves a conspiracy". How's that?

[seemslikeadream]

46. Just for emphasis

But there is surely a point after which incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure

[SDuderstadt]

49. As much as I despise Bush....

I really resent his being compared to Hitler. That is really over the top.

[seemslikeadream]

51. Just to be very clear about what I am saying, so there are no misunderstandings

http://www.takebackthemedia.com/flash/bushnonazi1.swf


http://www.bushflash.com/14.html

[SDuderstadt]

53. Bush is a jerk and a criminal....

but he's hardly Hitler. I really object to this.

[Twist_U_Up]

100. Of course you do. We expect nothing less from you

[Bassman66]

104. "I hate Bush, but..."

You hear it so many times.
From the same people.

[seemslikeadream]

57. Ya know I just might have to apologize for my inadequacies

I don't think I have explained my views on this very well. Here's someone who was not quite there yet in January 2004. I wonder how this Holocaust survivor feels 4 years later?




Bush-Hitler: A Holocaust Survivor Speaks Out
The Bush Hitler Thing
t r u t h o u t | Reader Submission

Friday 09 January 2004

Dear Sir,

My family was one of Hitler's victims. We lost a lot under the Nazi occupation, including an uncle who died in the camps and a cousin killed by a booby trap. I was terrified when my father went ballistic after finding my brother and me playing with a hand grenade. (I was only 12 at the time, and my brother insisted the grenade was safe.) I remember the rubble and the hardships of 'austerity' - and the bomb craters from Allied bombs. As late as the 1980s, I had to take detours while bombs were being removed - they litter the countryside, buried under parking lots,buildings, and in the canals and rivers to this day. Believe me, I learned a lot about Hitler while I was growing up, both in Europe and here in the US - both my parents were in the war and talked about it constantly, unlike most American families. I spent my earliest years with the second-hand fear that trickled down from their PTSD - undiagnosed and untreated in those days.

I'm no expert on WWII - but I learned a lot about what happened in Germany - and Europe - back in those days. I always wondered how the wonderful German people - so honest, decent, hard-working, friendly, and generous - could ever allow such a thing to happen. (There were camps near my family's home - they still talk about them only in hushed conspiratorial whispers.) I asked a lot of questions - we were only a few kilometers from the German border - and no one ever denied me. My relatives had obviously spent a lot of time thinking about the war - they still haven't forgotten - I don't think anyone can forget such a horrible nightmare. Among the questions I asked:

Why didn't you do anything about the people in the camps?

Everyone was terrified. People 'disappeared' into those camps. Sometimes the Nazis came and lined everyone up, walking behind them - even school children - with a cocked pistol. You never knew when they would just shoot someone in the back of the head. Everyone was terrified. Everyone was disarmed - guns were registered, so all the Nazis had to do was go from house to house and demand the guns.

Didn't you see what was happening?

We saw. There was nothing we could do. Our military had no modern weapons. The Nazis had technology and resources - they just invaded and took over - we were overwhelmed by their air power. They had spies everywhere - people spying on each other, just to have an 'ace in the hole' in case they were accused - and anyone who had a grudge against you could accuse you of something - just an accusation meant you'd disappear. Nobody dared ask where you had gone - anyone who returned was considered suspicious - what had they said, and who did they implicate? It was a climate of fear - there's nothing anyone can do when the government uses fear and imprisonment to intimidate people. The government was above the law - even in Germany, it became 'every man for himself'. Advancement was possible by exposing 'traitors' - anyone who questioned the government. It didn't matter if the people you accused were guilty or not - just the accusation was enough.

Did anyone know what was going on?

We all knew. We imagined the worst because the Nazis made 'examples' of a few people in every town and village. Public torture and execution. The most unspeakable atrocities were committed in full view of everyone. If this is what happened in public, can you imagine what might be going on in the camps? Nobody wanted to know.

Why didn't the German people stop the Nazis?

Life was better, at first, under the Nazis. The war machine invigorated the economy - men had jobs again, and enough money to take care of their family. New building projects were everywhere. The shops were full again - and people could afford good food, culture, and luxuries. Women could stay home in comfort. Crime was reduced. Health care improved. It was a rosy scenario - Hitler brought order and prosperity. His policies won widespread approval because life was better for most Germans, after the misery of reparations and inflation. The people liked the idea of removing the worst elements of society - the gypsies, the homosexuals, the petty criminals - it was easy to elicit support for prosecuting the corrupt 'evil'people poisoning society. Every family was proud of their hometown heroes - the sharply-dressed soldiers they contributed to his program - they were, after all,defending the Fatherland. Continuing a proud tradition that had been defeated and shamed after WWI, the soldiers gave the feeling of power and success to the proud families that showered them with praise and support. Their early victories were reason to celebrate - in spite of the fact that they faced poorly armed inferior forces - further proof that what they were doing was right, and the best thing for the country. The news was full of stories about their bravery and accomplishments against a vile enemy. They were 'liberating' these countries from their corrupt governments.

These are some of the answers I gleaned over the years. As a child, I was fascinated with the Nazis. I thought the German soldiers were really something - that's how strong an impression they made, even after the war. After all, they weren't the ones committing war crimes - they were the pride of their families and communities. It was just the SS and Gestapo that were 'bad'. Now I know better -but that pride in the military was a strong factor for many years, only adding to the mystique of military power - after all, my father had been a soldier too, but in the American army. It took a while to figure out the truth.

Every time I've gone back to Europe, someone has taken me to the 'gardens of stone' - the Allied cemeteries that dot the countryside. With great sadness, my relatives would stand in abject misery, remembering the nightmare, and asking 'Why?'. Maybe that's why they wouldn't support the US invasion of Iraq. They knew war. They knew occupation. And they knew resistance. I saw the building where British flyers hid on their way back to England - smuggled out by brave families that risked the lives of everyone to help the Allies. As a child, I had played in a basement, where the cow lived under the house, as is common there. The same place those flyers hid.

So why, now, when I hear GWB's speeches, do I think of Hitler? Why have I drawn a parallel between the Nazis and the present administration? Just one small reason -the phrase 'Never forget'. Never let this happen again. It is better to question our government - because it really can happen here - than to ignore the possibility.

So far, I've seen nothing to eliminate the possibility that Bush is on the same course as Hitler. And I've seen far too many analogies to dismiss the possibility. The propaganda. The lies. The rhetoric. The nationalism. The flag waving. The pretext of 'preventive war'. The flaunting of international law and international standards of justice. The disappearances of 'undesirable' aliens. The threats against protesters. The invasion of a non-threatening sovereign nation. The occupation of a hostile country. The promises of prosperity and security. The spying on ordinary citizens. The incitement to spy on one's neighbors - and report them to the government. The arrogant triumphant pride in military conquest. The honoring of soldiers. The tributes to 'fallen warriors. The diversion of money to the military. The demonization of government appointed 'enemies'. The establishment of 'Homeland Security'. The dehumanization of 'foreigners'. The total lack of interest in the victims of government policy. The incarceration of the poor and mentally ill. The growing prosperity from military ventures. The illusion of 'goodness' and primacy. The new einsatzgrupen forces. Assassination teams. Closed extralegal internment camps. The militarization of domestic police. Media blackout of non-approved issues. Blacklisting of protesters - including the no-fly lists and photographing dissenters at rallies.

There isn't much doubt in my mind - anyone who compares the history of Hitler's rise to power and the progression of recent events in the US cannot avoid the parallels. It's incontrovertible. Is Bush another Hitler? Maybe not, but with each incriminating event, the parallel grows -it certainly cannot be dismissed. There's too much evidence already. Just as Hitler used American tactics to plan and execute his reign, it looks as if Karl Rove is reading Hitler's playbook to plan world domination - and that is the stated intent of both. From the Reichstag fire to the landing at Nuremberg to the motto of "Gott Mit Uns" to the unprovoked invasion and occupation of Iraq to the insistence that peace was the ultimate goal, the line is unbroken and unwavering.

I'm afraid now, that what may still come to pass is a reign far more savage and barbaric than that of the Nazis. Already, appeasement has been fruitless - it only encourages the brazen to escalate their arrogance and braggadocio. Americans support Bush - by a generous majority - and mass media sings his praises while indicting his detractors - or silencing their opinions completely. The American people seem to care only about the domestic economic situation - and even in that, they are in complete denial. They don't want to hear about Iraq, and Afghanistan is already forgotten. Even the Democratic opposition supports the occupation of Iraq. Everyone seems to agree that Saddam Hussein deserves to be executed -with or without a trial. 'Visitors' are fingerprinted. Guilty until proven innocent. Snipers are on New York City rooftops. When do the Stryker teams start appearing on American streets? They're perfectly suited for 'Homeland Security' - and they've had a trial run in Iraq. The Constitution has been suspended - until further notice. Dick Cheney just mentioned it may be for decades - even a generation, as Rice asserts as well. Is this the start of the 1000 year reign of this new collection of thugs? So it would seem.

I can only hope that in the coming year there will be some sign - some hint - that we are not becoming that which we abhor. The Theory of the Grotesque fares all too well these days. It may not be Nazi Germany - it might be a lot worse.

SL | Wisconsin

-------

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)



http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Articles3/Jayne_Hitler-Bush.htm


31 Similarities Between Hitler and President Bush
by Edward Jayne

www.dissidentvoice.org
August 29, 2004
(revised from an earlier version posted March 29, 2003)






When President Bush decided to invade Iraq, his spokesmen began comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolph Hitler, the most monstrous figure in modern history. Everybody was therefore shocked when a high German bureaucrat turned the tables by comparing Bush himself with Hitler. As to be expected, she (the bureaucrat) was forced to resign because of her extreme disrespect for an American president. However, the resemblance sticks--there are too many similarities to be ignored, some of which may be listed here.

Like Hitler, President Bush was not elected by a majority, but was forced to engage in political maneuvering in order to gain office.


Like Hitler, Bush began to curtail civil liberties in response to a well-publicized disaster, in Hitler’s case the Reichstag fire, in Bush’s case the 9-11 catastrophe.


Like Hitler, Bush went on to pursue a reckless foreign policy without the mandate of the electorate and despite the opposition of most foreign nations.


Like Hitler, Bush has increased his popularity with conservative voters by mounting an aggressive public relations campaign against foreign enemies. Just as Hitler cited international communism to justify Germany’s military buildup, Bush has used Al Qaeda and the so-called Axis of Evil to justify our current military buildup. Paradoxically none of the nations in this axis--Iraq, Iran and North Korea--have had anything to do with each other.


Like Hitler, Bush has promoted militarism in the midst of economic recession (or depression as it was called during the thirties). First he used war preparations to help subsidize defense industries (Halliburton, Bechtel, Carlyle Group, etc.) and presumably the rest of the economy on a trickle-down basis. Now he turns to the very same corporations to rebuild Iraq, again without competitive bidding and at extravagant profit levels.


Like Hitler, Bush displays great populist enthusiasm in his patriotic speeches, but primarily serves wealthy investors who subsidize his election campaigns and share with him their comfortable lifestyle. As he himself jokes, he treats these individuals at the pinnacle of our economy as his true political “base.”


Like Hitler, Bush envisages our nation’s unique historic destiny almost as a religious cause sanctioned by God. Just as Hitler did for Germany, he takes pride in his “providential” role in spreading his version of Americanism throughout the entire world.


Like Hitler, Bush promotes a future world order that guarantees his own nation’s hegemonic supremacy rather than cooperative harmony under the authority of the United Nations (or League of Nations).


Like Hitler, Bush quickly makes and breaks diplomatic ties, and he offers generous promises that he soon abandons, as in the cases of Mexico, Russia, Afghanistan, and even New York City. The same goes for U.S. domestic programs. Once Bush was elected, many leaders of these programs learned to dread his making any kind of an appearance to praise their success, since this was almost inevitably followed by severe cuts in their budgets.


Like Hitler, Bush scraps international treaties, most notably the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Biological Weapons Convention, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Convention on the Prohibition of Land Mines, the Chemical Weapons Convention, the Kyoto Global Warming Accord, and the International Criminal Court.


Like Hitler, Bush repeats lies often enough that they come to be accepted as the truth. Bush and his spokesmen argued, for example, that they had taken every measure possible to avoid war, than an invasion of Iraq would diminish (not intensify) the terrorist threat against the U.S., that Iraq was linked with Al Qaeda, and that nothing whatsoever had been achieved by U.N. inspectors to warrant the postponement of U.S. invasion plans. All of this was false. They also insisted that Iraq hid numerous weapons it did not possess since the mid-190s, and they refused to acknowledge the absence of a nuclear weapons program in Iraq since the early nineties. As perhaps to be expected, they indignantly accused others of deception and evasiveness.


Like Hitler, Bush incessantly shifted his arguments to justify invading Iraq--from Iraq’s WMD threat to the elimination of Saddam Hussein, to his supposed Al Qaeda connection, to the creation of Iraqi democracy in the Middle East as a model for neighboring states, and back again to the WMD threat. As soon as one excuse for the war was challenged, Bush advanced to another, but only to shift back again at another time.


Like Hitler, Bush and his cohorts emphasize the ruthlessness of their enemies in order to justify their own. Just as Hitler cited the threat of communist violence to justify even greater violence on the part of Germany, the bush team justified the invasion of Iraq by emphasizing Hussein’s crimes against humanity over the past twenty-five years. However, these crimes were for the most part committed when Iraq was a client-ally of the U.S. Our government supplied Hussein with illegal weapons (poison gas included), and there were sixty U.S. advisors in Iraq when these weapons were put to use (see NY Times, Aug. 18, 1992). U.S. aid to Iraq was actually doubled afterwards despite disclaimers from Washington that our nation opposed their use. President Reagan’s special envoy Donald Rumsfeld personally informed Hussein of this one hundred percent increment during one of his two trips to Iraq at the time. He also told Hussein not to take U.S. disclaimers seriously.


Like Hitler, Bush takes pride in his status as a “War President,” and his global ambition makes him perhaps the most dangerous president in our nation’s history, a “rogue” chief executive capable of waging any number of illegal preemptive wars. He fully acknowledges his willingness to engage in wars of “choice” as well as wars of necessity. Sooner or later this choice will oblige universal conscription as well as a full-scale war economy.


Like Hitler, Bush continues to pursue war without cutting back on the peacetime economy. Additional to unprecedented low interest rates bestowed by the Federal Reserve, he has actually cut federal taxes twice by substantial amounts, especially for the top one percent of U.S. taxpayers, while conducting an expensive invasion and an even more expensive occupation of a hostile nation. As a result, President Clinton’s $350 billion budget surplus has been reduced to a $450 billion deficit, comprising an unprecedented $800 billion decline in less than four years. At the same time the U.S. dollar has steadily dropped against currencies of both Europe and Japan.


Like Hitler, Bush possesses a war machine much bigger and more effective than the military capabilities of other nations. With the extra financing obliged by the defeat and occupation of Iraq, Bush now relies on a “defense” budget well in excess of the combined military expenditures of the rest of the world. Moreover, the $416 billion defense package passed last week by Congress will probably need to be supplemented before the end of the year.






They Thought They Were Free - Read by Dave Emory


The Germans, 1933-45

Excerpt from pages 166-73 of "They Thought They Were Free" First published in 1955

By Milton Mayer

But Then It Was Too Late

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

....

"Yes," I said.

"You see," my colleague went on, "one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, THE SHOCK DOCTRINE will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty.

"Uncertainty is a very important factor, and, instead of decreasing as time goes on, it grows. Outside, in the streets, in the general community, ‘everyone’ is happy. One hears no protest, and certainly sees none. You know, in France or Italy there would be slogans against the government painted on walls and fences; in Germany, outside the great cities, perhaps, there is not even this. In the university community, in your own community, you speak privately to your colleagues, some of whom certainly feel as you do; but what do they say? They say, ‘It’s not so bad’ or ‘You’re seeing things’ or ‘You’re an alarmist.’



Michael Parenti - Terrorism, Globalism & Conspiracy

"Coincidence Theory: By sheer chance things just happen repeatedly and coincidentally to benefit their interests without any conscious connivance by them, which is most uncanny. There is also: Stupidity Theory, Innocence Theory, Momentary Aberration Theory, Incompetence Theory, Unintended Consequences Theory and Innocent Cultural Proclivities Theory."

- Michael Parenti

[SDuderstadt]

58. Here's a HUGE difference between Hitler and Bush...

as of 1/20/09, Bush will be just another citizen unless you believe, like Hitler, Bush will send armed thugs (Nazi Storm Troopers) in and around the House and Senate chanting, "Full powers - or else! We want the bill - or fire and murder!!" to, somehow, keep himself in power. Bush is a really bad and dangerous guy. But, to suggest that he is Hitler or that he would be permitted to act like Hitler is sheer hyperbole. The suggestion that the United States is anything like the Weimar Republic shows someone who is truly ignorant of history.

[Liberal_Dog]

83. Oh Really?

I'm curious.

If Bu$h did try and seize absolute power, then exactly who are you counting on to stop him?

The "Impeachment is off the table" Democrats in Congress?

The Supreme Court???

Maybe the military?

Who exactly?

[Bassman66]

84. The Bush family has a history linked with facism. nt.

[SDuderstadt]

86. What, exactly, is a "facist"?

Someone who makes faces?

[Bassman66]

87. Thanks.

Another important point.
I bow to you sir.
You do an excellent job.

[SDuderstadt]

90. If you're going to prattle on about fascism...

you could, at least, learn to spell it properly.

[Bassman66]

102. Yes you're right.

Thank you again.
I am in your debt sir.
Things like this make all the difference.

[seemslikeadream]

89. Bush Fulfills His Grandfather's Dream

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=3530365

davidswanson (894 posts) Fri Jun-27-08 10:57 AM
Original message
Bush Fulfills His Grandfather's Dream
Edited on Fri Jun-27-08 10:58 AM by davidswanson
By David Swanson
(Originally published in July 2007, and to be published every summer until the right to do so is gone.)

It's remarkably common for a grandson to take up his grandfather's major project. This occurred to me when I read recently of Thor Heyerdahl's grandson taking up his mission to cross the Pacific on a raft. But what really struck me was the BBC story aired on July 23rd, 2007, documenting President George W. Bush's grandfather's involvement in a 1933 plot to overthrow the U.S. government and install a fascist dictatorship. I knew the story, but had not considered the possibility that the grandson was trying to accomplish what his grandfather had failed to achieve.

Prescott Sheldon Bush (1895 to 1972) attended Yale University and joined the secret society known as Skull and Bones. Prescott is widely reported to have stolen the skull of Native American leader Geronimo. As far as I know, this has not actually been confirmed. In fact, Prescott seems to have had a habit of making things up. He sent letters home from World War I claiming he'd received medals for heroism. After the letters were printed in newspapers, he had to retract his claims.

If this does not yet sound like the life of a George W. Bush ancestor, try this on for size: Prescott Bush's early business efforts tended to fail. He married the daughter of a very rich man named George Herbert Walker (the guy with the compound at Kennebunkport, Maine, that now belongs to the Bush family, and the origin of Dubya's middle initial). Walker installed Prescott Bush as an executive in Thyssen and Flick. From then on, Prescott's business dealings went better, and he entered politics.

Now, the name Thyssen comes from a German named Fritz Thyssen, major financial backer of the rise of Adolph Hitler. Thyssen was referred to in the New York Herald-Tribune as "Hitler's Angel." During the 1930s and early 1940s, and even as late as 1951, Prescott Bush was involved in business dealings with Thyssen, and was inevitably aware of both Thyssen's political activities and the fact that the companies involved were financially benefiting the nation of Germany. In addition, the companies Prescott Bush profited from included one engaged in mining operations in Poland using slave labor from Auschwitz. Two former slave laborers have sued the U.S. government and the heirs of Prescott Bush for $40 billion.

Until the United States entered World War II it was legal for Americans to do business with Germany, but in late 1942 Prescott Bush's businesses interests were seized under the Trading with the Enemy Act. Among those businesses involved was the Hamburg America Lines, for which Prescott Bush served as a manager. A Congressional committee, in a report called the McCormack-Dickstein Report, found that Hamburg America Lines had offered free passage to Germany for journalists willing to write favorably about the Nazis, and had brought Nazi sympathizers to America. (Is this starting to remind anyone of our current president's relationship to the freedom of the press?)

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee was established to investigate a homegrown American fascist plot hatched in 1933. Here's how the BBC promoted its recent story:

"Document uncovers details of a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by right-wing American businessmen. The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression. Mike Thomson investigates why so little is known about this biggest ever peacetime threat to American democracy."

Actually, if you listen to the 30-minute BBC story, there is not one word of so much as speculation as to why this story is so little known. I think a clue to the answer can be found by looking into why this BBC report has not led to any U.S. media outlets picking up the story this week.

The BBC report provides a good account of the basic story. Some of the wealthiest men in America approached Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler, beloved of many World War I veterans, many of them embittered by the government's treatment of them. Prescott Bush's group asked Butler to lead 500,000 veterans in a take-over of Washington and the White House. Butler refused and recounted the affair to the congressional committee. His account was corroborated in part by a number of witnesses, and the committee concluded that the plot was real. But the names of wealthy backers of the plot were blacked out in the committee's records, and nobody was prosecuted. According to the BBC, President Roosevelt cut a deal. He refrained from prosecuting some of the wealthiest men in America for treason. They agreed to end Wall Street's opposition to the New Deal.

Clearly the lack of accountability in Washington, D.C., did not begin with Nancy Pelosi taking Dubya's impeachment off the table, or with Congress' decision to avoid impeachment for President Ronald Reagan (a decision that arguably played a large role in installing Prescott Bush's son George H.W. Bush as president), or with the failure to investigate the apparent deal that George H.W. Bush and others made with Iran to not release American hostages until Reagan was made president, or with the failure to prosecute Richard Nixon after he resigned. Lack of accountability is a proud tradition in our nation's capital. Or maybe I should say our former nation's capital. I don't recognize the place anymore, and I credit that to George W. Bush's efforts to fulfill his grandfather's dream using far subtler and more effective means than a military coup.

Bush the grandson took office through a highly fraudulent election that he nonetheless lost. The Supreme Court blocked a recount of the vote and installed Dubya.

Prescott's grandson proceeded to weaken or eliminate most of the Bill of Rights in the name of protection from a dark foreign enemy. He even tossed out habeas corpus. The grandson of Prescott, that dreamer of the 1930s, established with very little resistance that the U.S. government can kidnap, detain indefinitely on no charge, torture, and murder. The United States under Prescott Bush's grandson adopted policies that heretofore had been considered only Nazi policies, most strikingly the willingness to openly plan and engage in aggressive wars on other nations.

At the same time, Dubya has accomplished a huge transfer of wealth within the United States from the rest of us to the extremely wealthy. He's also effected a major privatization of public operations, including the military. And he's kept tight control over the media.

Dubya has given himself the power to rewrite all laws with signing statements. He's established that intentionally misleading the Congress about the need for a war is not a crime that carries any penalty. He's given himself the right (just as Hitler did) to open anyone's mail. He's created illegal spying programs and then proposed to legalize them. Prescott would be so proud!

The current President Bush has accomplished much more smoothly than his grandfather could have imagined a feat that was one of the goals of Prescott's gang, namely the elimination of Congress.

[Grateful for Hope]

137. Looks like the OP you quoted in this post

is a true patriot, SLaD.

When Bush opened his mouth to speak I shouted "Defend the Constitution, Impeach Bush!" I repeated that several times, as people nearby knocked me over, cops handcuffed me, people gave me smiles and thumbs up signs. They threw me out and a couple of more defenders of our Constitution behind me, and then a few more, and then a few more. The handcuffed citizens who'd done their duty kept comign down the hill. They did not arrest us but did give us a ride down the mountain where we joined a crowd of protesters in the road who greeted Bush's limo coming and going.

"Why I interrupted Bush at Monticello"...on the front page.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3564429

[seemslikeadream]

138. Yes thanks for posting that

:hi:



I'm just now starting to breathe again, my panties were in such a wad I thought I was gonna faint! ;)

[Grateful for Hope]

140. Glad to hear you got then straightened out, SLaD.

:rofl:

[SDuderstadt]

85. You're kidding, right?

How, exactly, would Bush try to seize absolute power? An Enabling Act? Do you honestly think even the GOP would vote for such a thing?


With all due respect, Bush is a bad dude and deserves his comeuppance. But it's the height of hyperbole to suggest that Bush is Hitler, a guy who sent 6-8 million people to their deaths in concentration camps.

I am assuming that you know that the Weimar Republic did not have the strong democratic underpinnings that we do, which is one more firewall that protects us. Have you ever even read "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" by William Shirer? How about "Hitler: A Study in Tyranny" by Alan Bullock. For the record, I despise W, but that doesn't mean he's Hitler.

[Bassman66]

88. Many the fascists have learned subtly over the years.

Same shit, less obvious.

[SDuderstadt]

91. And, you know a lot about fascist regimes, right?

You've read Shirer? Bullock?

You know, I remember the RWers always unfairly labeling us liberals as "commies" years ago and I found it offensive then. Do you think that any RW regime qualifies as fascist? Do you?

[Bassman66]

103. I'm disappointed sir.

You missed my typo.
'many' should have read 'maybe'.
Dyslexia is a pain.

"Maybe the fascists have become more subtle over the years, same shit less obvious".

Little moustaches are a bit of a give-away these days.

[seemslikeadream]

92. Hey Bassman66 ever read IBM and the Holocaust by Edwin Black?

[seemslikeadream]

59. Rove's "Third Reich of Republican majority in this country-That was absolutely his plan"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3552022


Rove's "Third Reich of Republican majority in this country-That was absolutely his plan"
Posted by kpete on Tue Jul-01-08 10:28 PM

July 1, 8:09 AM, 2008

Six Questions for Paul Alexander, Author of Machiavelli’s Shadow
By Scott Horton

..............

Republican leaders have described the Bush brand as “toxic.” Party insiders view Rove harshly. “I think the legacy,” Ed Rollins told me for my book, “is that Karl Rove will be a name that’ll be used for a long, long time as an example of how not to do it, as opposed to an example of how to do it….I think, at the end of this, the party will be weaker in numbers in the Congress, numbers of governors, numbers of state legislatures, and numbers of Republicans. He did little to attract young people to become Republicans. Anybody who’s a Republican today became a Republican during the Reagan era. Nobody who’s come of age during the Bush era will stand up and say, ‘I’m a Bush Republican. I’m going to spend the rest of my life being a Bush Republican.’” What’s more, John McCain, an otherwise attractive candidate, will have to distance himself from Bush significantly if not completely in the fall in order to have a chance of winning

...............................

When Rove headed with Bush to Washington after winning the presidency in 2000, Rove had one overriding goal, which he would state publicly over the coming years: to set up what Rove termed “a permanent Republican majority.” “When Karl got to the White House,” Texas-based Republican strategists Mark Sanders told me, “he immediately started putting together a plan for what was essentially the Third Reich of Republican majority in this country. That was absolutely his plan, a Republican majority domination not just of the U.S. House, the U.S. Senate, and the presidency, but also state legislatures across the country. This was not just a pie-in-the-sky dream that Karl had. He wanted to see the Republican Party rule for the next 30 to 40 years.”

..............

According to my source, there were a number of ongoing scandals involving Rove about which the administration in general and the president in particular were worried. There was concern that new information might surface from disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff, a convicted felon, who had a number of dealings with Rove over the years. Susan Ralston, Rove’s former assistant, was said to have changed his calendar to cover up meetings he had had with Abramoff. There was concern about how Rove had used White House resources, such as PowerPoint presentations, for political purposes—a violation of the Hatch Act. There was concern that committees in Congress had evidence linking Rove to the U.S. attorneys scandal.


more at:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/07/hbc-90003167










Polish, anyone? Surely there must be someone that speaks fluent Polish here in the dungeon?


Polski: Trzecia Rzesza - plakat polskiego ruchu oporu (Akcja N), obrazujący politykę nazistowskich Niemiec - terror i ludobójstwo. Grafika zamieszczona na stronie tytułowej czasopisma dla Niemców "Der Klaubautermann" (pol. duch okrętowy), wydawanej w języku niemieckim przez podwydział Biura Informacji i Propagandy AK (Akcja N), 1943. Po lewej - śmierć, po środku - Adolf Hitler, z prawej - Heinrich Himmler.

[Twist_U_Up]

101. Bushs the First Family when it comes to Treason

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1D6fxyOtVeI&feature=related

[SDuderstadt]

123. I gotta tell ya....

when I first read the subject line of this OP, I thought she was talking about the "truth movement" and I would've agreed that mere incompetence is not enough to explain its failure.

[Ghost in the Machine]

124. But since you were wrong...

you'll defend who it *does* apply to because you're part of the ever present group of "Operation Vigilant Water Carriers"

[maryf]

133. Thanks SLAD!

wish I could rec here!

[seemslikeadream]

139. HI!! maryf

What are you doing down here? ;)

I wasn't posting for awhile my panties seemed to have gotten bunched up!! Funny thing is I DON'T WEAR PANTIES!