* was Al Qaeda responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks; as long as the FBI continues to hide the truth, we won’t know
Posted by Lew Weinstein on August 10, 2009
* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *
Anthony Kimery writes (8-7-09)
- “Adaptive and highly resilient,” Al Qaeda “remains the most serious terrorist threat we face as a nation,” said former career CIA official John Brennan in a speech last Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.
- Al Qaeda’s “intent to carry out attacks against the United States and US interests around the world with weapons of mass destruction, if possible, remains undiminished, and another attack on the US homeland remains the top priority for the Al Qaeda senior leadership,” Brennan stated.
- Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair said Al Qaeda “has shown interest in recruiting and training Western individuals to execute attacks,” and that “the Intelligence Community continues to look for indications of Al Qaeda having contacts and/or sleeper cells in the US.”
- Buttressing what Brennan said about Al Qaeda’s desire to obtain WMDs, Blair told the Committee that “we continue to receive intelligence indicating that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are attempting to acquire chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons and materials.”
- Charles Faddis, a 20-year veteran CIA officer who was a National Counterterrorism Center department chief overseeing “worldwide operations against the terrorist WMD target” when he retired from the clandestine services last year, told HSToday.us that “biological weapons are the most likely” terrorist WMD threat right now, noting that such an attack would “be devastating and it would totally cause catastrophic casualties.”
Read the entire article at …
http://www.hstoday.us/content/view/9715/150/
LMW COMMENT …
Concerns like those expressed above emphasize how important it is for the FBI to actually solve the 2001 anthrax case, instead of insisting that its obviously phony case against Dr. Ivins must stand. We need Congressman Holts’s Anthrax Investigation Commission. We need full disclosure of all the FOIA materials requested by DXer and others. We need the truth.
For a fictional (but realistic) account of what might have happened in the 2001 anthrax attacks, and why the FBI has failed to solve the case, you are invited to read my novel CASE CLOSED.
* What does a novel have to do with the real anthrax case?
* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *
******
Ike Solem said
DXer, that’s a long excerpt from Richard Preston’s “Demon in the Freezer” – you should really cite that more carefully. Here are a few more excerpts from that same book that may help illuminate the issue:
From Oct 15, 2001 – the Daschle letter is opened.
“At ten o’clock on a warm autumn morning in Washington, D.C., a woman – her name has not been made public – was opening mail in the Hart Senate Office Building, on Delaware Avenue. She worked in the office of Senator Tom Daschle, the Senate majority leader, and she was catching up with mail that had come in on the previous Friday. The woman slit open a hand-lettered envelope that had the return address of the fourth-grade class at the Greendale School in Franklin Park, New Jersey. It had been tightly sealed with clear adhesive tape. She removed a sheet of paper, and powder fell out, the color bleached bone, and landed on the carpet. A puff of dust came off the paper. It formed tendrils, like the smoke rising from a snuffed-out candle, and then the tendrils vanished.”
That’s the characteristic of an engineered aerosolized bioweapon. Normal materials – even the finest concrete dust – just don’t behave that way.
“Odorless, invisible, buffeted in currents of air, the particles from the letter were pulled into the building’s high-volume air-circulation system. For forty minutes, fans cycled the air throughout the Hart Senate Office Building, until someone finally thought to shut them down. In the end, the building was evacuated for a period of six months, and the cleanup cost twenty-six million dollars.”
Again, this was the result of a very small amount of material being released in one office. (The contract for the cleanup was handled by Camp Dresser Mckee’s Oak Ridge Tennessee division. Oak Ridge is primarily managed by Battelle for the DOE, although many engineering subcontracts with Bechtel Jacobs etc. exist as well.)
“Soon after the Capitol Police got the call from the woman in Senator Daschle’s office, a team of HMRU agents was dispatched from Quantico. The Capitol Police had sealed off the senator’s office. The HMRU team put on Tyvek protective suits, with masks and respirators, retrieved the letter from the wastebasket, and did a rapid test for anthrax – they stirred a little bit of the powder into a test tube. It came up positive…”
This is notable because it is the first forensic test on the Daschle anthrax. The material was then taken to Fort Detrick:
“The main building of USAMRIID is a dun-colored, two-story monolith that looks like a warehouse. It has virtually no windows, and tubular chimneys sprout from its roof. The building covers seven acres of ground. There are biocontainment suites near the center of the building – groups of laboratory rooms that are sealed off and kept under negative air pressure so that nothing contagious will leak out. The suites are classified at different levels of biosecurity, from Biosafety Level 2 to Level 3 and finally to Level 4, which is the highest, and where scientists wearing biosafety space suits work with hot agents – lethal, incurable viruses …. The chimneys of the building are always exhausting superfiltered and superheated sterilized air, which is drawn out of the biocontainment zones.”
That is the kind of general setup one would need to produce this material without contaminating everything in the vicinity with extremely hazardous spores – which is why low tech terrorists were ruled out. However, the reason that Iraq was ruled out had to do with the technical quality of the aerosol prep, as well as the genetics of the strain used.
Now, for the first forensic test of the Daschle anthrax at USAMRIID:
“John Ezzell took up a metal spatula – a sort of metal knife – and slid it very slowly inside the envelope. He took up a small amount of the powder on the tip of the spatula, lifted it out, and held it up inside the hood. He wanted to get the powder into a test tube, but it started flying off the spatula, the particles dancing up and away into the hood, pulled by the current of air in the hood. The powder had a pale, uniform, light tan color. It had tested positive in the rapid field test for anthrax, and it had the appearance of a biological weapon.”
This caused consternation:
“On the morning of the 16th, the day after it was delivered to USAMRIID, the powder in the letter mailed to Senator Dachle was being studied by John Ezzell, the civilian microbiologist who accepted it from the agents of the FBI’s Hazardous Material Response Unit. But Jahrling wanted Tom Geisbert to get the sample under the electron microscope, and that didn’t seem to be happening fast enough. Jahrling met Ezzell in a hallway and said, in a loud voice, “Goddamn it, John, we need to know if the powder is laced with smallpox.”
So, dry and wet microsamples of the Daschle anthrax were then examined under microscopes, first with the wet suspension:
“The view was wall-to-wall anthrax spores. The spores were ovoids, rather like footballs but with more softly rounded ends. The material seemed to be absolutely pure spores.”
However, that involved soaking the spores in liquid – what did the initial preparation look like?
“He began preparing a sample for the scope. He opened the tube and tapped a little bit of the anthrax onto a piece of sticky black tape that would hold the powder in place. But the anthrax bounced off the tape. The particles wouldn’t stick. Eighty percent of the Daschle particles flittered away in air currents up the hood. That was when he understood that the Hart Building was utterly contaminated.”
“He somehow managed to get some of the particles to stick to the tape. He hurried the sample into the scope room, put it under a scanning scope, and zoomed in. What he saw shocked him.”
“The spores were stuck together into chunks that looked like moon rocks. They reminded him of grinning jack-o’-lanterns, skeletons, hip sockets and Halloween goblin faces. The anthrax particles had an eroded, pitted look, like meteorites fallen to earth. Most chunks were very tiny, sometimes just one or two spores, but there were also boulders. One boulder looked to him like a human skull, with eye sockets and a jaw hanging open and screaming. It was an anthrax skull.”
“The skulls were falling apart. He could see them crumbling into tiny clumps and individual spores, smaller and smaller as he watched. This was anthrax designed to fall apart in the air, to self-crumble, maybe when it encountered humidity or other conditions. He had a national security clearance, and he knew something about anthrax, but he could not imagine how this weapon had been made. It looked extremely sinister. He started feeling shaky.”
This account has never been contradicted in any specific manner, and the nature of the additive involved a silica preparation, as shown by AFIP analysis – which isn’t contradicted by the Sandia work in any way.
Now, the reason that Battelle’s actions seem suspicious is that the FBI also asked them to do the same work at their West Jefferson facility. One HHS official had this to say about the Battelle analysis:
“…the people at Battelle took the anthrax and heated it in an autoclave, and this caused the material to clump up, and they told the FBI it looked like puppy chow. It was like a used-car dealer offering a car for sale that’s been in an accident and is covered with dents, and the dealer is still trying to claim that this is the way the car looked when it was new.”
They’ve never satisfactorily explained why they did that – but what is even stranger is that apparently photos of said “puppy chow” were also shown to biowarfare experts like Ken Alibek, who (naturally) concluded that it wasn’t a high-tech preparation.
One other thing about the forensics and the famous flask:
“In the end, USAMRIID scientists would analyze more than thirty thousand samples related to the anthrax terrorism – far more than any other lab, including the CDC.”
If they were constantly analyzing samples of aerosolized anthrax, then cross-contamination of the famous Ivins flask would not be so hard to imagine. All it would take is a few spores from the evidence making their way into the flask for it to turn up a positive match to the letter.
DXer said
Ike writes:
“This account has never been contradicted in any specific manner, and the nature of the additive involved a silica preparation, as shown by AFIP analysis – which isn’t contradicted by the Sandia work in any way.”
It has been contradicted in a specific manner insofar as John Ezzell himself contradicted it and said this past year that his previous description could be explained by his never having seen the real thing. Moreover, Sandia’s research did insofar as it demonstrated that the silica was not on the outside of the exosporium, but was absorbed in the coat. See the two different images involving silica processing in the non-biological signatures paper I posted by Dr. Velsko.
But the more fundamental contradiction is that Dr. Ezzell last month admitted to me that he previously had made dry powdered anthrax at Ft. Detrick — at the request for DARPA. Until you ask him and he tells you equipment he used, whether or not it involved silica, and its performance characteristics, you have no reason to be talking about Dugway and Battelle, at the exclusion of the programs funded by DARPA for which they used Ames.
Ike Solem said
References for your claims?
According to published reports, you are wrong:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/030526/26anthrax.htm
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The Killer Strain
By Marilyn W. Thompson
Posted 5/18/03
When a series of letters packed with anthrax spread terror along the East Coast in late 2001, the FBI turned to the 42,000-member American Society for Microbiology, asking scientists to seek out clues that might lead to the arrest of the bioterrorist. The bureau also turned to one microbiologist in particular, John Ezzell, then head of the special pathogens division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., to help them understand this deadly bacterium. In this excerpt from The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government Exposed (HarperCollins), Ezzell confronts what he called “The Face of Satan”–the most refined anthrax he had ever seen.”
As far as the weaponization characteristics?
” He began slowly removing the letter from its envelope. As he worked, he noticed a bit of white powder tucked into one of the letter’s folds. Almost as soon as he saw it, the powder dispersed, spreading invisibly through the safety cabinet.
Even though he had been studying anthrax for years, Ezzell had never actually seen the bacterium in its weaponized form. This was a powder so virulent that normal laboratory rules did not apply. “After all these years of looking, here it is,” he thought. “This is the real thing.”
How do you respond to that, DXer?
DXer said
Ike,
I refer to John Ezzell’s quote last year when he addressed this subject. In response you cite a 2003 article. For all the things he has said in the past year, with the most notable in the NYT in a September 2008 article by Scott Shane in which he also quoted Jeff Mohr at Dugway, I recommend google news. Searching for the phrase “real thing” may be fruitful.
As for my characterization of my conversation with Dr. Ezzell last month when he returned my call, I refer you to
http://www.anthraxandalqaeda.com
For your convenience, I can repeat myself here: John explained that he was a under a gag order. And that the clicking likely indicated the conversation was being wiretapped. I said I was confident it was and noted that the FBI would not be doing its job if it weren’t. I told him, though, that I didn’t place particular stock in clicking. (Nowadays interceptions are commonly conducted at the switch and can be done at a computer keyboard. The absence of clicking therefore is immaterial; clicking just means that you have a bad connection or that they are not maintaining the “transparency” of the interception that they should and perhaps are using outdated methods.)
Dr. Ezzell confirmed that he made the dry powder at the request for DARPA. When he returned my call I was in the process of leaving him a continuation of my first message and so he had no hesitation in calling back which, to my way of thinking, indicates that he does not have any sort of consciousness of guilt. It’s the ones who refuse to answer questions that warrant suspicion.
Dr. Ezzell said that as he told the FBI, it was gamma irradiated and testing confirmed that it was inactive. I heard him to say that it was for work done at John Hopkins and he may have said the John Hopkins Applied Physics lab, but I wasn’t taking notes and wasn’t recording. I would call him back but I’m too shy and don’t want to impose. He called me the first time and can call back again if he wants to convey more.
He retired in 2006 and he has Parkinsons which is why I had not called him sooner when I learned many months ago that he was the one referenced in the email by Dr. Ivins to Pat Fellows as having made the powder determined to be closest to the powder used in the anthrax mailings.
But clearly in a follow-up conversation, I would want to bear down on the method he used, whether silica was used, and its performance characteristics (or at least the size distribution of the particles, if known). I have the utmost confidence in him being a straight shooter. I just don’t think it is fair for him to be quoted in the NYT September 2008 article saying Dr. Ivins had the equipment available to him at Ft. Detrick if, when the particulars are studied, the broad conclusion is contradicted by accounts by people with personal knowledge of what was available at the Bacteriology Division at the time. For example, the motor of the fermenter was seized and the lyophilizer was a SpeedVac that was too small. We can see by Ivins’ entry and exit records he was in Building 1425 and not elsewhere at Ft. Detrick — such as at the Special Pathogens lab run by Dr. Ezzell.
So hopefully reporters will explore that question relating to the method Dr. Ezzell. JE worked btw in 1996 for the FBI’s in the Hazardous Materials Response Unit. While the key inquiry is what equipment Dr. Ezzell used, I did not have the presence of mind to pursue it given that the focus of my questioning was elsewhere. We expected to talk again after he did some reading that I recommended but then I have been distracted — and all my free time taken up by a genealogy project.
We don’t really disagree, Ike, insofar as you are focused on Battelle and Dugway, and I am focused on access to the know-how and access to Ames associated with two leading Battelle consultants in 1999. That know-how icluded a confidential patent relating to concentration of anthrax using silica in the culture medium. That is the process the WMD Chief suggests is indicated by the forensics. You think the Dugway 1990s method commonly used by Harper and Larsen was the state-of-the-art method using silica in the processing, but it was not. My thinking is informed by controlled experiments done by the Air Force lab for which data was explained to me and produced the same Silicon Signature. That lab head says the “Microdroplet Cell Culture” method co-invented by the Battelle consultants in Al-Timimi’s suite is an “encapsulation” patent. The two Battelle consultants were in the same suite and 15 feet away from the man described by his lawyer as an “anthrax weapons suspect”, who was Andrew Card’s former assistant. Al-Timimi was actively coordinating with the 911 imam and Bin Laden’s sheik. So you and my friend Barry have President Eisenhower to quote, and I have the defense counsel for the FBI’s “anthrax weapons suspect” to quote.
If you want to take a fact-based approach, then I encourage you to submit FOIA requests and obtain relevant documents that support your Battelle Theory.
My focus is the overlap between Battelle/Dugway and the DARPA projects involving the same researchers. My FOIA focus on the documents relating to the provision of Ames strain, including virulent Ames supplied by Bruce Ivins. So we don’t really disagree. The evidence as to intent here is overpowering as to my theory — and mere unsupported conjecture on the part of a “Battelle Theory.” Which is why Eisenhower ends up being quoted rather than the lawyer currently defending the “anthrax weapons suspect” in ongoing proceedings which are highly classified — so highly classified that not even defense counsel or the judge’s clerk is allowed to participate.
Ken Alibek has forthrightly answered all my questions to him for a half decade now — and so it is not as if I have not explored all theories, including a Battelle Theory and Ed’s First Grader Theory. It’s just way too easy to say the dead guy or non-existent unnamed people did it as the audiotapes of the messages left by Dr. Ivins on his therapist’s machine demonstrate.
DXer said
It was Jahrling, rather than Dr. Ezzell, who was the subject of this article I was remembering. Thank you Ike for pressing me and requiring a source on a quote/point that I was misattributing to Dr. Ezzell. As I’ve suggested based on my conversation with Dr. Ezzell, he in fact had seen the real thing and so there is no incongruency in his positions.
Dr. Ezzell, the FBI’s own anthrax scientist since 1996, had made dry powdered anthrax at Ft. Detrick for DARPA. None of these book authors and journalists relying on John have mentioned it — and apparently they did not know it.
_______________
Scientist concedes ‘honest mistake’ about weaponized anthrax
Peter B. Jahrling, who aided the federal probe of the 2001 mailings, says he erred when he told White House officials that material he examined probably had been altered to make it more deadly.
By David Willman, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
September 17, 2008
WASHINGTON — An acclaimed government scientist who assisted the federal investigation of the 2001 anthrax mailings said Tuesday that he erred seven years ago when he told top Bush administration officials that material he examined probably had been altered to make it more deadly.
The scientist, Peter B. Jahrling, had observed anthrax spores with the aid of an electron microscope at the government’s biological warfare research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md.
On Oct. 24, 2001, Jahrling was summoned to the White House after reporting to his superiors what he believed to be signs that silicon had been added to anthrax recovered from a letter addressed to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.).
The presence of silicon was viewed with alarm because the material, if artificially added to the anthrax, would make it more buoyant in air and more capable of penetrating deeply into the lungs.
“I believe I made an honest mistake,” Jahrling said in response to questions e-mailed to him for this article, adding that he had been “overly impressed” by what he thought he saw under the microscope.
“I should never have ventured into this area,” said Jahrling, who is a virologist, referring to his analysis of the anthrax, which is a bacterium. Jahrling’s initial analysis — and his briefing of officials at the White House — was first detailed in a 2002 book by bestselling author Richard Preston.
Although Jahrling was careful in 2001 not to implicate Iraq or any other regime in the mailings, others used his analysis to allege that the silicon perhaps linked the letters to Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.
Inhaled anthrax can kill at a rate of 80% to 90% unless patients are treated quickly with an antibiotic.
Jahrling’s comments Tuesday came soon after a congressional hearing at which FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III announced that he was arranging for an outside review of scientific findings that helped the bureau conclude that another scientist at Ft. Detrick, Bruce E. Ivins, perpetrated the deadly mailings. The review is to be overseen by the National Academy of Sciences, Mueller said.
FBI scientists and outside experts hired by the bureau to analyze the anthrax recovered from the mailings announced Aug. 18 that although they had found silicon, it occurred within the spores naturally and was not added.
In challenging those experts, one journalist reminded them that Jahrling, among other scientists, had concluded otherwise.
DXer said
I agree with you on the policy issue. I agree with the points you make above and that Dr. Ebright also has made so well all these years.
I also tend to favor the view that a mini-spraydryer as the method used. (To be honest, I’m ignorant about a jet mill but realize it has been used in the past). The Bucci tech representative for the mini-spraydryer (the small size seriously reduces containment problems and is indicated by the small scale of the powder) says that for many years the machine has been able to result in a consistent 1 micron particle. Also, he says that it is not possible to avoid the charge given the speed it comes out of the nozzle. My own lay view is that the key was the arrival of commercially available silica nanoparticles — suddenly the commercial powders available in 2001 went nano with, I believe, aerogel. Now when experts like Dr. Alibek or Dr. Kiel say there are simpler methods of drying, such as a fluidized bed dryer, I have no basis to disagree. I just hope the experts consider whether the charge observed really was due to the mail sorting machines (I’m skeptical) rather than the velocity comming out of the nozzle in a Bucci mini-spraydryer. There were 200 in the US in 2001. I don’t know the basis for you saying that Ft. Detrick did not have one. I don’t know one way or the other. I would note that the anthrax simulant made to test the threat of mailed anthrax threat after Zawahiri’s threat to use mailed anthrax if the bail of Vanguards of Conquest #2 was denied (see February 2001 PDB) was spraydried at Niro in Denmark. It then was mixed with silica at a dairy processor in Wisconsin. And so in gauging Zawahiri’s access to know-how relating to weaponization, I would consider such things as experience at making a bt simulant for pesticides but also dairy processing and food science research. Again, in making simulant made for aerosol experiments in 2001, Dugway relied on a dairy processor.
A PhD animal geneticist 1 mile from me was arrested the day and minute Al-Timimi’s residence was searched in 2001. He is experienced with mixing with silica. I called him to ask him about these questions some years ago. He thanked me for his concern but could not speak to the issue because too much was going on. I was always fascinated also by the claim that someone expert in making bt simulant in NYC was connected to the people responsible for WTC 1993 — there was someone who claimed (and published the telephone records as I recall) that a reporting call upon the event was made by one of the WTC 1993 perps from this person’s dorm room — and he later has become an aerobiology expert. I once emailed him to ask him about the forensics relating to the Silicon Signature (years ago) but he did not respond. It seems like a difficult case to solve and I wish the FBI the best.
DXer said
What continued to plague the FBI was a failure to communicate — but it was not just a failure to communicate between agencies, but it became a failure to communicate between the investigative squads. Had there been such communication, an Ivins Theory might never have flown when it was first raised up the flag pole. (Admittedly, we can only go by the information disclosed to date; we don’t know what they have not disclosed). It is easy for Mr. Dellefera to say that everyone was on board when everyone on the Task Force who knew how the dots connected had been replaced.
A failure to communicate was the subject of one of the very first and most important Amerithrax meetings. Preston explains:
“Parker and Jahrling were driven to Washington in the general’s staff car by a sergeant wearing fatigues. They went to the sixth floor of HHS headquarters and met Thompson and senior staff in a large meeting room. They were surprised to see Robert Mueller, the FBI director. Also in the room were a number of obviously powerful dark-suited officials who had names like John Roberts, and mumbled that they were from some institute or other. They were top management from the CIA. Their real names were classified.
Jahrling had brought Geisbert’s photographs of the anthrax particles and laid them out. Then he produced something else: six tubes of orange-tan powders from the Al-Hakm anthrax facility in Iraq. A friend of Jahrling’s had collected them there.
The powders were anthrax surrogate — fake bioweapons, used for testing a real bioweapon. Iraqi scientists had been making anthrax surrogate out of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is closely related but is harmless to people. (It is anthrax for insects and is used by gardeners to kill grubs. The Iraqis had claimed for a while that the Al-Hakm facility had been built to deal with grubs in Iraq.) He passed the bag around the room, assuring people the vials weren’t dangerous. Everyone could see how different the Iraqi anthrax looked from the Daschle powder. It was heavy and crude, and contained large amounts of bentonite (a type of clay); it looked like lumps of dirt. At least at the time Al-Hakm was running, the Iraqis had been using a different formula from what was used for the Daschle powder.
Towards the end of the day, Parker and Jahrling headed back to Fort Detrick. It was rush hour and the traffic was moving like glue. On Wednesdays, Jahrling always picked up his daughter Bria at a dance class, and he was looking forward to a bit of time with her.
Just as the car arrived at the entrance to Fort Detrick, the general’s mobile rang. He told Jahrling: “We’re wanted at the White House. Right now.”
The sergeant whipped a U-turn, popping the lights and sirens, weaving through traffic. Eventually, Jahrling remembered his daughter. He called his wife and said: “I’m not getting Bria.” “What do you mean?” “I can’t tell you.” “What do you mean you can’t tell me? Where are you, Peter?” “I can’t say where I am.” The car was already approaching the White House. “Peter, do you still have that stuff from Iraq in your pocket?” General Parker asked. “You might not want to bring it into the White House.” The secret service might not react well. Jahrling rammed it down between the car seats.
The meeting took place in the Roosevelt room. There was a long table in the centre with leather armchairs around it. John Ashcroft, the attorney-general, sat at it, as did Mueller and Thompson. The meeting was chaired by Tom Ridge, who had recently been named director of homeland security. Jahrling started to sit by the wall, but someone took him by the arm and showed him to the centre of the table, where he faced cabinet members in dark suits.
Jahrling was wearing his candy-striped shirt and snappy tie. The doors were closed by the secret service. Ashcroft led the meeting. He did not mince words. There was an obvious lack of communication between the army, FBI and CDC, he said, and the purpose of this meeting was to determine why the CDC hadn’t realised the anthrax was weapons-grade material and hadn’t taken action faster on the Brentwood mail facility.
There was a feeling that whoever had released the anthrax could do it again, perhaps with a massive release inside a landmark building or into the air of a city. This was an urgent national threat. Where did the communication break down? Had the army given the information to the FBI? Had the FBI informed the CDC about the highly dangerous nature of the anthrax? Ashcroft was Mueller’s boss and he looked straight at the FBI director. Mueller turned his gaze to General Parker.
Mueller thanked the army for bringing the nature of the anthrax to the FBI’s attention. He said the FBI had received conflicting data on the anthrax but now acknowledged the army had been right: the Daschle anthrax was a weapon. Then 20 people around the table started arguing: what is a biological weapon? Ashcroft cut everyone off. “Okay, okay! All this discussion about what’s a biological weapon is angels dancing on the head of a pin. I want to hear what the professor has to say.”
Jahrling, who is not a professor, looked behind him. Then he realised the attorney-general meant him. Jahrling cleared his throat and directed everyone’s attention to Geisbert’s pictures of the anthrax skulls that had been passed around. Someone asked: “Does the professor think this anthrax could be a product of Iraq?” The best Jahrling could say was that it could be, but all the samples they’d seen from Iraq so far were entirely different.
The meeting raced off on the question of whether a “state actor” could have been behind the anthrax attacks. The atmosphere in the room started to feel like a war council deciding whether or not to attack Iraq. Jahrling got scared. “Whoa!” he blurted. “This anthrax isn’t a compelling reason to go to war. It isn’t necessarily the product of a state actor.” He blushed: saying “Whoa!” to the cabinet seemed flippant.
Then he went on. “This anthrax could have come from a hospital lab or from any reasonably equipped college microbiology lab.” Ashcroft tore the FBI, the army and the HHS off a strip. He gave them a stern warning to get their acts together and start communicating more effectively. He made it perfectly clear that those who serve at the pleasure of the president can cease to serve in an instant. Afterwards, Jahrling began to wonder.
A small laboratory, two or three people? Could this be an inside job from within USAMRIID? He had the dizzying thought that the terror might just be coming from someone he knew. In November, the anthrax was identified as the Ames strain, collected from a dead cow in Texas in 1981. It had ended up at USAMRIID, which had distributed it to other labs around the world. The fact that it wasn’t military pointed to a homegrown American terrorist rather than a foreign source — to someone who might simply have wanted to get attention.
One day I spoke with a scientist who until recently was an influential executive in the FBI. He confessed they had no idea who was behind the anthrax attacks. “It could be years before we get a break,” he said. “I have a feeling that, in the end, it’s going to be like one of our fugitive cases, where a girlfriend rats on the guy or someone talks. I’m a forensic scientist, but unfortunately I have a feeling that traditional investigation is going to solve this case in the end — not science.”
© Richard Preston 2002″
Ike Solem said
DXer, you seem to misunderstand the issue when you say that:
“true crime analysis is no place for political activism. Battelle, btw, would have no reason to use the strain associated with its research.”
The strain associated with the attacks was the Ames strain, which is the anthrax vaccine challenge strain, supplied by Fort Detrick to several different laboratories, including Dugway and Battelle.
Now, scientifically speaking, if you were to create an anthrax bioweapon based on Soviet designs (Project Clear Vision, say), you would use the same strain used in prior tests, right?
This might actually aid your hypothesis, as it shows that the Ames strain may have been fairly widely available – except that the genetic tests drastically narrow the distribution.
I think we’ve been through the aerosol containment issue, too.
DXer said
What strain was used in Project Clear Vision?
Are you suggesting that there George Mason did not have a BL-3? That UNM did not have a BL-3? That Houston did not have a BL-3 (as of March 2001)? That LSU did not have a BL-3? That Edgewood did not have a BL-3 (in 2001)? That USAMRIID did not have a BL-3? SRI? Hadron? ISU USDA? While a BL-3 was not necessary given the small scale, the problem was that there were so many BL-3s that the opportunities even to access to a BL-3 were as numerous as the opportunities to access virulent Ames.
DXer said
Now let’s go back and review what was known about Project Jefferson and Clear Vision at the time of the anthrax mailings. They had been the subject of extensive reporting in a book called GERMS by William Broad and Judy Miller of the New York Times that came out shortly before 9/11. Approval was by James Baker at the White House, as I recall. Someone would have to turn to the book for fuller details.
That would make the anthrax mailer candidate for a stupid criminal feature, wouldn’t it — if they were participants in that project, or egads, interviewed by the NYT correspondents? To use product made in a project being reported nationally at the time by NYT investigative journalists would win them a prize, dontcha think?
They were legal under the treaties according to learned counsel and skeptics like the oft-quoted bioweapons researcher ML didn’t disagree.
Ike Solem said
Yes, that’s why theft or diversion of material produced under “biological threat assessment” programs is the most likely scenario.
Battelle Memorial Institute is the world’s largest private research corporation, set up as a non-profit, with management contracts for quite a few DOE labs as well as HHS facilities as well as university public-private partnerships. If they provided facilities for some biowarfare program, than only a tiny number of people would have even known about it, and an unknown number of people might have had access to the powders they produced.
Second, the equipment used for spore production falls into the ‘electrospray-drying’ category by all estimations, and this was also reported in the press:
That’s just for jet mills, however – and the spore preparation was apparently too fine even for that. So, what happened to the Boston FBI lines of inquiry? Neither jet mills nor spray dryers were present at Fort Detrick, and the more recent FBI claims about making the powder with a lyophilizer are demonstrably false.
Plus, DXer, I think the main point here is that billions of dollars have been misappropriated since then for highly unwise ‘biodefense projects’ that run the risk of accidental pathogen releases in populated areas all over the country, and that the main driver behind this wrongheaded approach is the fear generated by the anthrax letters. If the very biodefense labs that are now being widely promoted by the private contractors and federal bureaucracies (HHS in particular) were themselves the source of those anthrax letters, well, it calls the entire program into question – and that is demonstrably the case, isn’t it?
Furthermore, there are much better uses of federal funds when it comes to disease prevention – the top global killers are AIDS, malaria and TB and rising drug resistance is a serious problem. That’s where funds should be applied, not to the development of new anthrax and smallpox vaccines for the benefit of Emergent Biosolutions, Pharmathene, and all the other Project Bioshield contractors (which also includes Battelle, of course).
It’s just the wrong approach, and the funding tap needs to be shut off – but unfortunately the new HHS secretary is a big advocate of biowarfare contracts, and wants to put a $1 billion Agro-Bio Defense lab smack in the middle of Kansas, where they will grow and culture hoof-and-mouth disease, among others – see this story on the issue:
http://www.miamiherald.com/opinion/other-views/story/1179078.html
So, that’s the central issue – and it’s unfortunately bipartisan, as both the Democratic HHS Secretary and the Republican Senator from Kansas back this loony idea:
Even during the heyday of the old U.S. biowarfare program, they didn’t put hoof-and-mouth disease in tornado alley next to large herds of cattle…
Even the Kansas governor is behind it:
Stark, raving mad… but then, maybe they don’t know about these projections for an outbreak:
Foot-and-mouth Disease Could Cost Kansas Nearly A Billion Dollars, ScienceDaily (Nov. 29, 2007)
“Under the small cow-calf scenario, researchers predicted that 126,000 head of livestock would have to be destroyed and that a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak would last 29 days. In the medium-sized operation, those numbers went up to 407,000 animals and 39 days. In the scenario where five large feedlots were exposed at the same time, researchers predicted that 1.7 million head of livestock would have to be destroyed and that an outbreak would last nearly three months.”
Nothing to worry about here – full speed ahead!
DXer said
The example of Rauf Ahmad illustrated the risk of the infiltration of US and UK biodefense that should be apparent to anyone not motivated by politics or an even more base personal self-interest.
In 1999, al-Zawahiri recruited Pakistani national Rauf Ahmad, to set up a small lab in Khandahar, Afghanistan and to attend annual conferences organized by Bruce Ivins and his UK and US colleagues. There is documentary evidence of Ayman Zawahiri’s intent to use anthrax against US targets. Ike, offers no evidence as to Dugway or Battelle. Similarly, Ed offers none as to Dr. Bruce Ivins. George Tenet has explained that in December 2001, “a sharp WMD analyst at CIA found the initial lead on which we would pull and, ultimately, unravel the al-Qa’ida anthrax networks. We were able to identify Rauf Ahmad from letters he had written to Ayman al-Zawahiri. … We located Rauf Ahmad’s lab in Afghanistan. We identified the building in Khandahar where Sufaat claimed he isolated anthrax. We mounted operations that resulted in the arrests and detentions of anthrax operatives in several countries.”
Delivering the James Smart Lecture, entitled “Global Terrorism: are we meeting the challenge?” at the headquarters of the City of London Police, Ms. Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5, said: “Western security services have uncovered networks of individuals, sympathetic to the aims of al-Qa’ida, that blend into society, individuals who live normal, routine lives until called upon for specific tasks by another part of the network.” She concluded: “The threats of chemical, biological and radiological and suicide attacks require new responses and the Government alone will not achieve all of it; industry and even the public must take greater responsibility for their own security.”
Milton Leitenberg wrote in a chapter on evolving threats in Wenger and Wollenmann’s 2007 Bioterrorism: Confronting A Complex Threat: “The first significant and meaningful information on what Al-Qaida may at some point have hoped to achieve in the area of bioweapons appeared on a single page in the journal SCIENCE in mid-December 2003, and then in declassified documents that were obtained in the last week of March 2004. … Appended to the single page in SCIENCE via the internet address was a list of thirty-two items: eleven books and twenty-one professional journal papers nearly all dating from the 1950s and 1960s dealing with pathogens or bioweapons.” He explained: “They were found in Al Qaida training camp near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 2001. Mr. Leitenberg concludes: “If it should turn out, as is currently assumed, that the Amerithrax perpetrator came from within the US government’s own biodefense program, with access to strains, laboratories, people and knowledge, then all previous conceptions about the significance of the events would be substantially altered.” He observes that “Al-Qaeda has actively recruited educated college graduates and … specifically sought individuals with particular knowledge and training. … Such recruiting patterns do not automatically translate into either an interest or capability in bioweapons, but they would be a key advantage should the interests of such a group turn in that direction, as Al-Zawahiri’s [1999] memorandum quoted above suggests they may.”
As described by Dr. Peter Turnbull’s Conference report for SFAM on “the First European Dangerous Pathogens Conference” (held in Winchester), at the September 1999 conference, the lecture theater only averaged about 75 at peak times by his head count. There had been a problem of defining “dangerous pathogen” and a “disappointing representation from important institutions in the world of hazard levels 3 and 4 organisms.” Papers included a summary of plague in Madagascar and another on the outbreak management of hemorrhagic fevers. Dr Paul Keim of Northern Arizona University presented a paper on multilocus VNTR typing, for example, of Bacillus anthracis and Yersinia pestis. There were more than the usual no-show presenters and fill-in speakers. In his report, Dr. Turnbull looked forward to a second, fully international conference in 2000 focused on the ever increasing problems surrounding hazard levels 3 and 4 organisms and aimed at international agreement on the related issues. Ayman Zawahiri’s infiltrator Rauf Ahmad attended along with Bruce Ivins.
The next year, on the Sunday at the start of the Organization of the Dangerous Pathogens meeting in September 2000, which the SFAM director confirmed to me that Rauf Ahmad also attended, was gloomy. Planning had proved even more difficult than the International Conference on anthrax also held at the University of Plymouth, in September 1998. The overseas delegates included a sizable contingent from Russia. The organizers needed to address many thorny issues regarding who could attend. One of the scientists in attendance was Rauf Ahmad. The Washington Post reports: “The tall, thin and bespectacled scientist held a doctorate in microbiology but specialized in food production, according to U.S. officials familiar with the case.” Les Baillie the head of the biodefense technologies group at Porton Down ran the scientific program. Many of the delegates took an evening cruise round Plymouth harbor. The cold kept most from staying out on the deck. Later attendees visited the National Marine Aquarium — with a reception in view of a large tankful of sharks. Addresses include presentations on plagues of antiquity, showing how dangerous infectious diseases had a profound that they changed the course of history. Titles include “Magna pestilencia – Black Breath, Black Rats, Black Death”, “From Flanders to Glanders,” as well as talks on influenza, typhoid and cholera. The conference was co-sponsored by DERA, the UK Defence Evaluation and Research Agency.
Les Baillie of Porton Down gave a presentation titled, “Bacillus anthracis: a bug with attitude!” He argued that anthrax was a likely pathogen to be used by terrorists. As described at the time by Phil Hanna of University of Michigan Medical School on the SFAM webpage, Baillie “presented a comprehensive overview of this model pathogen, describing its unique biology and specialized molecular mechanisms for pathogenesis and high virulence. He went on to describe modern approaches to exploit new bioinformatics for the development of potential medical counter measures to this deadly pathogen.” Bioinformatics was the field that Ali Al-Timimi, who had a security clearance for some government work and who had done work for the Navy, would enter by 2000 at George Mason University in Virginia. Despite the cold and the sharks, amidst all the camaraderie and bonhomie no one suspected that despite the best efforts, a predator was on board — on a coldly calculated mission to obtain a pathogenic anthrax strain. The conference organizer Peter Turnbull had received funding from the British defense ministry but not from public health authorities, who thought anthrax too obscure to warrant the funding. By 2001, sponsorship of the conference was assumed by USAMRIID.
USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins had started planning the conference held in Annapolis, Maryland in June 2001 three years earlier, immediately upon his return from the September 1998 conference.
According to the Pakistan press, a scientist named Rauf Ahmad was picked up in December 2001 by the CIA in Karachi. The most recent of the correspondence reportedly dates back to the summer and fall of 1999. Even if Rauf Ahmad cooperated with the CIA, he apparently could only confirm the depth of Zawahiri’s interest in weaponizing anthrax and provided no “smoking gun” concerning the identity of those responsible for the anthrax mailings in the Fall 2001. The Pakistan ISI, according to the Washington Post article in October 2006, stopped cooperating in regard to Rauf Ahmad in 2003.
I have uploaded scanned copies of some 1999 documents seized in Afghanistan by US forces describing the author’s visit to the special confidential room at the BL-3 facility where 1000s of pathogenic cultures were kept; his consultation with other scientists on some of technical problems associated with weaponizing anthrax; the bioreactor and laminar flows to be used in Al Qaeda’s anthrax lab; and the need for vaccination and containment. He explained that the lab director noted that he would have to take a short training course at the BL-3 lab for handling dangerous pathogens. Rauf Ahmad noted that his employer’s offer of pay during a 12-month post-doc sabbatical was wholly inadequate and was looking to Ayman to make up the difference. After an unacceptably low pay for the first 8 months, there would be no pay for last 4 months and there would be a service break. He had noted that he only had a limited time to avail himself of the post-doc sabbatical. I also have uploaded a handwritten copy of earlier correspondence from before the lab visit described in the typed memo. The Defense Intelligence Agency provided the documents to me, along with 100+ pages more, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (“FOIA”). 90 of the 100 pages are the photocopies of journal articles and disease handbook excerpts.
The Post, in an exclusive groundbreaking investigative report, recounts that the FBI’s New York office took the lead U.S. role — and its agents worked closely with the CIA and bureau officials in Pakistan in interrogating Rauf. Though not formally charged with any crimes, Rauf agreed to questioning. While the US media focused on the spectacle of bloodhounds alerting to Dr. Steve Hatfill and the draining of Maryland ponds, this former Al Qaeda anthrax operative provided useful leads. But problems began when the U.S. officials sought to pursue criminal charges, including possible indictment and prosecution in the United States. In earlier cases, such as the othopedic surgeon Dr. Amer Aziz who treated Bin Laden in the Fall of 2001, the Pakistani government angered the Pakistani public when it sought to prosecute professionals for alleged ties to al-Qaeda. In the case of Amer Aziz, hundreds of doctors, engineers and lawyers took to the streets to demand his release. In 2003, the Pakistanis shut off U.S. access to Rauf. By then, I had noticed the reporting of his arrest in a press article about the raid of a compound of doctors named Khawaja and published it on my website. According to Pakistani officials, there was not enough evidence showing that he actually succeeded in providing al-Qaeda with something useful. Since then, the Post reports, Rauf has been allowed to return to his normal life. Attempts by the Post to contact Rauf in Lahore were unsuccessful. Initially the government agency had said an interview would be possible but then backpedaled.
Yazid Sufaat got the job handling things at the lab instead of Rauf Ahmad. More importantly, Zawahiri, if keeping with his past experience, would have kept things strictly compartmentalized — leaving the Amerithrax Task Force much to do.
http://www.anthraxandalqaeda.com
Ike Solem said
FBI was told to blame Anthrax scare on Al Qaeda by White House officials
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
Saturday, August 2nd 2008, 6:32 PM
WASHINGTON – In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out, the Daily News has learned.
After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, Mueller was “beaten up” during President Bush’s morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide.
“They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East,” the retired senior FBI official told The News.
On October 15, 2001, President Bush said, “There may be some possible link” to Bin Laden, adding, “I wouldn’t put it past him.” Vice President Cheney also said Bin Laden’s henchmen were trained “how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.”
But by then the FBI already knew anthrax spilling out of letters addressed to media outlets and to a U.S. senator was a military strain of the bioweapon. “Very quickly [Fort Detrick, Md., experts] told us this was not something some guy in a cave could come up with,” the ex-FBI official said. “They couldn’t go from box cutters one week to weapons-grade anthrax the next.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/08/02/2008-08-02_fbi_was_told_to_blame_anthrax_scare_on_a.html
So, unless you are saying there are Al Qaeda moles at Dugway or Battelle, it seems unlikely. What is more suspicious is the kind of scientific advice that the FBI has received from the biodefense sector, i.e. the National Labs operated by DOE and a small number of private contractors. The agenda there seems to be to simply increase funding for biowarfare programs and draw attention away from their past activities in the 1980s and 1990s.
DXer said
Ike is correct. The White House strongly believed that US-based operatives were responsible for the anthrax mailings. (see transcript in book by Woodward). And for good reason. That is still where the evidence currently points.
President Bush had previously been briefed on the intention to use mailed anthrax if bail was denied for the Vanguards of Conquest #2, and bail was denied on October 5, 2001.
Ike, your unsupported conjecture that Battelle is responsible is no more well-grounded than your earlier suggestion that a BL-4 was required. While your political activism is commendable, and I share your political views, true crime analysis is no place for political activism. Battelle, btw, would have no reason to use the strain associated with its research.
In late January 2001, the Immigration Minister in Canada and the Justice Minister received an anthrax threat in the form of anthrax hoax letters. The letters were sent upon the announcement of bail hearing for a detained Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Mohammad Mahjoub. Mahjoub had managed Bin Laden’s farm in Sudan. Minister Caplan had signed the security certificate authorizing Mahjoub’s detention. After arriving in Canada in 1996, Mahjoub had continued to be in contact with high level militants, including his former supervisor, an Iraqi reputed to be Bin Laden’s chief procurer of weapons of mass destruction. In February 2001, the CIA briefed the President in a Presidential Daily Brief (”PDB”) on “Bin Laden’s Interest in Biological and Radiological Weapons” in a still-classified briefing memorandum. Like the PDB on Bin Laden’s threat to use planes to free the blind sheik, the February 2001 PDB illustrated Richard Clarke’s suggestion that most intelligence is open source. The PDB likely will be found to address the detention of Mohammad Mahjoub, his status in the Vanguards of Conquest/Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and threats of revenge relating to the conviction and sentencing of senior militant Egyptians. There was little about Ayman’s plan to use anthrax against US targets in retaliation for rendering of EIJ leaders that was not available to anyone paying attention. On October 5, 2001, Mahjoub’s bail was denied. Someone then rushed to carry out the earlier threat. They mailed a finely powdered anthrax to the two United States Senators they deemed most responsible for the rendition of Egyptian Islamic Jihad leaders and appropriations to Egypt and Israel. President Obama and the House Intelligence Committee now needs to ask for the CIA’s February 2001 PDB to President Bush on the planned use of anthrax in retaliation of rendering and detention of IG and EIJ leaders. Amerithrax would be seen with entirely new eyes.
One supporter of the detained Vanguards of Conquest leader Mohammad Mahjoub was Ali Al-Timimi, a microbiologist who worked in the building housing the Center for Biodefense funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”). In a filing unsealed this Spring, Dr. Ali Al-Timimi’s lawyer, Professor and MSNBC commentator Jonathan Turley, explained that his client “was considered an anthrax weapons suspect.” Al-Timimi was a computational biologist who came to have an office 15 feet from the leading anthrax scientist and the former deputy commander of USAMRIID. A motion filed in early August 2008 seeking to unseal additional information in federal district court was denied. The ongoing proceedings are highly classified.
Dr. Al-Timimi’s counsel summarizes:
“we know Dr. Al-Timimi:
* was interviewed in 1994 by the FBI and Secret Service regarding his ties to the perpetrators of the first World Trade Center bombing;
* was referenced in the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing (“Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US”) as one of seventy individuals regarding whom the FBI is conducting full field investigations on a national basis;
* was described to his brother by the FBI within days of the 9-11 attacks as an immediate suspect in the Al Qaeda conspiracy;
* was contacted by the FBI only nine days after 9-11 and asked about the attacks and its perpetrators;
* was considered an anthrax weapons suspect;
[redacted]
* was described during his trial by FBI agent John Wyman as having “extensive ties” with the “broader al-Qaeda network”;
* was described in the indictment and superseding indictment as being associated with terrorists seeking harm to the United States;
* was a participant in dozens of international overseas calls to individuals known to have been under suspicion of Al-Qaeda ties like Al-Hawali; and
* was associated with the long investigation of the Virginia Jihad Group.
***
The conversation with [Bin Laden's sheik] Al-Hawali on September 19, 2001 was central to the indictment and raised at trial. ***
[911 imam] Anwar Al-Aulaqi goes directly to Dr. Al-Timimi’s state of mind and his role in the alleged conspiracy. The 9-11 Report indicates that Special Agent Ammerman interviewed Al-Aulaqi just before or shortly after his October 2002 visit to Dr. Al-Timimi’s home to discuss the attacks and his efforts to reach out to the U.S. government.
[IANA head] Bassem Khafagi was questioned about Dr. Al-Timimi before 9-11 in Jordan, purportedly at the behest of American intelligence. [redacted ] He was specifically asked about Dr. Al-Timimi’s connection to Bin Laden prior to Dr. Al-Timimi’s arrest. He was later interviewed by the FBI about Dr. Al-Timimi. Clearly, such early investigations go directly to the allegations of Dr. Al-Timimi’s connections to terrorists and Bin Laden — [redacted]”
The letter attached as an exhibit notes that in March 2002 Al-Timimi spoke with Al-Hawali about assisting Moussaoui in his defense. Al-Hawali was Bin Laden’s sheik who was the subject of OBL’s “Declaration of War.” Moussaoui was the operative sent by Bin Laden to be part of a “second wave” who had been inquiring about crop dusters. The filing and the letter exhibit each copy defense co-counsel, the daughter of the lead prosecutor in Amerithrax. That prosecutor has pled the Fifth Amendment concerning all the leaks hyping a “POI” of the other Amerithrax squad, Dr. Steve Hatfill. His daughter withdrew as Al-Timimi’s pro bono counsel on February 27, 2009.
‘Dr. Ali Al-Timimi’s Support Committee’ in an email to supporters dated April 5, 2005 explained: “This is a summary of the court proceedings that took place yesterday April 4th 2005. We will send a summary everyday inshallah. *** “In his opening statement, Defense attorney Edward B. MacMahon Jr. said that Al-Timimi was born and raised in Washington DC. He has a degree in Biology and he is also a computer scientist, and a mathematician. He worked for Andrew Card, who’s now the White House chief of staff, at the Transportation Department in the early 1990s.”
Bruce Ivins had supplied the virulent Ames strain of anthrax to Ann Arbor researchers. One of the researchers, Dr. Hamouda, obtained his PhD in microbiology from Cairo Medical in 1994. He and his wife came to the United States to settle that year. By 1998, he was working on a DARPA-funded project involving nanoemulsions and a biocidal cream. In December 1999, he and two colleagues travelled to a remote military installation in Utah to test its effectiveness in killing aerosolized anthrax surrogates. An April 2001 report describing testing at Dugway concluded that the best performing decontamination agents were from University of Michigan, Sandia National Laboratories, and Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL). The FBI and CIA may have been concerned that there might have been unauthorized access to the Ames strain. That would explain their aggressive prosecution of various matters related to Al-Timimi’s charity IANA charity which was in Ann Arbor 1 mile from the NanoBio office. IANA promoted the views of Bin Laden’s sheiks. Al-Timimi was IANA’s most celebrated speaker. He was in active contact with one of those sheiks, who had been Ali’s religious mentor at university in Saudi Arabia.
IANA speaker Ali Al-Timimi worked in the same building as two other DARPA-funded researchers — famed Russian bioweapons scientist Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID Deputy Commander and Acting Commander Charles Bailey. Al-Timimi was a current associate and former student of Bin Laden’s spiritual advisor, dissident Saudi Sheik al-Hawali. Ali Al-Timimi preached on the end of times and the inevitability of the clash of civilizations. He was in active contact with the sheik whose detention had been the express subject of Bin Laden’s 1996 Declaration of War. At GMU, Dr. Bailey would publish a lot of research with the “Ames strain” of anthrax. The anthrax used in the anthrax mailings was traced to Bruce Ivins’ lab at USAMRIID, where Ivins, according to a former colleague, had done some work for DARPA. Al-Timimi would speak along with the blind sheik’s son at charity conferences. The blind sheik’s son served on Al Qaeda’s WMD committee. Al-Timimi’s mentor Bilal Philips was known for recruiting members of the military to jihad. The first week after 9/11, FBI agents questioned Al-Timimi. He was a graduate student in a program jointly run by George Mason University and the American Type Culture Collection (”ATCC”). Ali, according to his lawyer, had been questioned by an FBI agent and Secret Service agent in 1994 after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He had a high security clearance for work for the Navy in the late 1990s. The defense webpage reported he hadonce served as the assistant for the White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card. (Mr. Card had been Secretary of Transportation in 1992-1993; from 1993 to 1998, Mr. Card was President and Chief Executive Officer of the American Automobile Manufacturers Association.) As time off from his university studies permitted, Ali was an active speaker with the charity Islamic Assembly of North America.
Two months earlier, a laptop evidencing Al Qaeda’s intent on weaponizing anthrax was seized in Baku in July 1998, Dr. Alibek, then Program Manager, Battelle Memorial Institute, testified before the Joint Economic Committee on the subject of “Terrorist and Intelligence Operations: Potential Impact on the U.S. Economy”about the proliferation of know-how. Dr. Alibek noted that “[t]here are numerous ways in which Russia’s biological weapons expertise can be proliferated to other countries.” Indeed. Sometimes such proliferation is funded by DARPA and any student who wants to apply to work in the building can submit an application. One applicant accepted was this Salafist preacher seeing signs of the coming day of judgment and the inevitable clash of civilizations. He had been mentored by the sheik named in Bin Laden’s declaration of war in 1996. In 1999, Al-Timimi had a high security clearance for work for the Navy. His father worked at the Iraqi embassy.
Dr. Ken Alibek testified before the House Armed Services Committee Oversight Panel on Terrorism again on May 23, 2000 about the issue of proliferation of biological weapons. He explained: “Terrorists interested in biological weapons are on the level of state- sponsored terrorist organizations such as that of Osama bin Laden; on the level of large, independent organizations such as Aum Shinrikyo; or on the level of individuals acting alone or in concert with small radical organizations.” Dr. Alibek in 2003 told me he knew Ali was a hardliner. More recently he described Ali as a fanatic. Dr. Alibek continued: “Although these groups will produce biological weapons with varying levels of sophistication, they all can potentially cause great damage. *** Furthermore, there is no doubt that we will see future uses of biological weapons by terrorist groups, as there have been several attempts already.” Dr. Alibek explained to the Congressional Committee in May 2000: “When most people think of proliferation, they imagine weapons export. In the case of biological weapons, they picture international smuggling either of ready-made weapons material, or at least of cultures of pathogenic microorganisms. However, this area of proliferation is of the least concern. Even without such assistance, a determined organization could obtain virulent strains of microorganisms from their natural reservoirs (such as soil or animals), from culture libraries that provide such organisms for research purposes, or by stealing cultures from legitimate laboratories.” American Type Culture Collection, the largest microbiologist depository in the world, co-sponsored Ali’s bioinformatics program. Dr. Alibek explained: The proliferation issue is particularly complex for biological weapons. In many cases, the same equipment and knowledge that can be used to produce biological weapons can also be used to produce legitimate biotechnological products ***”
By 2001, Al-Timimi was allowed access to the most diverse microbiological repository in the world and allowed to work alongside staff at the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense. The Center for Biodefense personnel were working under the largest biodefense award in history. Delta (avirulent) Ames was supplied by NIH. Raymond H. Cypess, president of the germ bank, said of the Ames strain, “We never had it,’ and we can say that on several levels of analysis.” ATCC refuses to confirm to me whether its patent repository, as distinguished from its online category, had Ames, but we can assume government scientists would have ensured that the patent repository was considered at the same time as the online catalog and excluded as a source of the Ames. Dr. Bailey, who may be under a gag order similar to that imposed on USAMRIID personnel, refuses to confirm Ali was not much more than 15 feet from both Dr. Alibek and Dr. Bailey. Through the university counsel, he similarly has failed to address this issue of access to virulent Ames.
Al-Timimi had supervised Cairo-based militants writing for the Pittsburgh-based Assirat and then for IANA. One of them, Kamal Habib, was the founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and a friend of Ayman Zawahiri. The Cairo-based writers Kamal Habib and Gamal Sultan, approached the blind sheik Abdel Rahman about starting a political party in early 1999. On March 1 and 2, 1999, Lynne Stewart and translator Yousry visited Abdel Rahman in prison in Rochester, Minnesota and relayed the proposal. On March 6, 1999, the first press reports appeared quoting the blind sheik’s Cairo lawyer, Montasser al-Zayat, and detainees in a massive trial al-Zayat was defending, stating that Ayman likely was going to use weaponized anthrax against US targets to retaliate against the rendering and detention of the Egyptian militants. On March 9, 1999 following the visit in prison at which the political idea had been proposed, Abdel Rahman issued a statement rejecting a proposal that the Islamic Group form a political party in Egypt. That day, the Islamic Group military commander Mustafa Hamza spoke with the blind sheik’s liaison, US Post Office employee Abdel Sattar. The next month, the Blind Sheik’s publicist Sattar spoke with Taha, the IG head close to the Taliban and Bin Laden, in a three-way call with Cairo attorney Al-Zayat. Sattar also spoke on the telephone with Vanguards of Conquest spokesman Al Sirri (based in London). From the beginning, the weaponization of anthrax for use against US targets was inextricably linked to the detention of senior militant Egyptian leaders, including the blind sheik.
Biographer Draper in Dead Certain reports that on October 4, 2001, Bush teared up during a speech at the State Department thanking them for their hard work after 9/11. Back at the White House, Bush motioned Fleischer into the Oval Office. “A Boca Raton tabloid editor had checked into a Florida hospital yesterday, Bush told Fleischer. Anthrax. The veil of resoluteness fell away from the president. His shoulders were hunched. Fleischer had never seen him more upset. Neither man said a word — neither had to: This was it, the second wave.” Then, immediately after the October 5 denial of bail of the Vanguards of Conquest #2, someone mailed, on or about October 6, 2001, very fine powdered anthrax to US Senators Leahy and Daschle. An infant visiting ABC was one of the first affected, which should have been prohibited (haram) in anyone’s book. Five people died, including an elderly woman and a hospital worker. Dr. Kenneth Alibek on October 19, 2001 told CBS News’ “48 Hours” that he thought the mailings were connected in some way to the September 11th attacks and the people who planned them. He said, “In my opinion, what we see now is the second wave.” Former Defense Secretary and liberal hawk William Cohen wrote in Slate that long before the press was talking about Cipro he had bought some after an indirect tip from someone with the Administration.
The August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief (”PDB”) to the President Bush explained that Bin Laden planned to hijack some aircraft as part of an effort to free the blind sheik. A little noticed December 1998 PDB to the same effect to President Clinton, however — declassified and included in the 911 Commission Report — reported that the aircraft and attacks were being planned by the brother of Sadat’s assassin, Mohammed Islambouli. Islambouli was in a cell with Khalid Mohammed (”KSM”), who by November 2001 had come to lead the cell planning anthrax attacks in the United States. The anthrax was sent on the date of Sadat’s assassination and the date the Camp David Accords were approved. Sadat’s peace with Israel was a key reason the militants killed Sadat.
On October 22, 2001, anthrax was found on an automatic slitter used to open letters at a military facilities across the Potomac River. Unless just cross-contamination of mail, this meant the White House was a target of biological terrorism: ‘I think the seminal event of the Bush administration was the anthrax attacks,’ someone close to the president told Jacob Weisberg, the editor-in-chief of the online daily magazine, Slate. ‘It was the thing that changed everything. It was the hard stare into the abyss.’” “I sat through the most gruesome briefing in the Oval Office about anthrax, how it could spread, and how we had no defenses,” Bush’s first press secretary, Ari Fleischer told the book author in the summer of 2007. “Dick Cheney was the strongest advocate of the possibility of attack and the need to prepare for it.” After 9/11, the Secret Service began monitoring the air inside and outside the White House — the chimneys of bio-detectors were visible from the front lawn. Cheney reportedly began traveling with a biohazard protective suit. At some point, fifty members of the mail-handling staff in the executive office buildings were taking Cipro.
“The anthrax spores in the letter to Daschle were so professionally refined, the Central Intelligence Agency believed the powder must have been sent by an experienced terrorist organization, most probably Al Qaeda, as a sequel to the group’s September 11 attacks.
During a [October 17] meeting of the White House’s National Security Council that day, Cheney, who was sitting in for the President because Bush was traveling abroad, urged everyone to keep this inflammatory speculation secret.
“They thought there had been a nerve attack,” a former administration official, who was sworn to secrecy about it, later confided.
They thought Cheney had already been lethally infected. …
***
Cheney in particular was so stricken by the potential for attack that he insisted that the rest of the National Security Council undergo a gruesome briefing on it on September 20, 2001. When the White House sensor registered the presence of such poisons less than a month later, many, including Cheney, believed a nightmare was unfolding. “It was really a nerve-jangling time,” the former official said.
In time, the Situation Room alarm turned out to be false. But on October 22, the Secret Service reported it had what it believed to be additional traces on an automated letter-opening device used on White House mail.
***
By August [2003], Hambali had been captured, and had reportedly gave information leading to the revelation that Al Qaeda had been in the process of producing high-grade anthrax.
The Malaysian scientist who had been developing the anthrax had been in custody since before [KSM], since December 2001, raising questions about why the capture of Mohammed was so essential to establish this threat.
In any case, it predictably triggered renewed fears in the White House, where Bush and Cheney hammered the Agency for more details and chastised the FBI for doing too little to root out domestic sleeper cells.”
The former Egyptian Islamic Jihad/Vanguards of Conquest #1, Cairo MD Ahmed Agiza, was rendered from Sweden on December 18, 2001. He had been in Pakistan in the mid-1990s. In Iran in 2000, upon the thawing of relations between Egypt and Iran, he feared that he would be detained. He wanted to go to the UK but could not get papers. So he bought tickets for Canada. But while in Sweden in transit, he sought asylum. He was rendered shortly after a CIA analyst found documents showing the Vanguards of Conquest/Egyptian Islamic Jihad plan to use charities and universities to infiltrate the US and UK biodefense establishments.
Jacob Weisberg in the 2008 The Bush Tragedy writes. “Inside the administration, the October bioterror attacks had a greater impact than is generally appreciated — and in many ways greater than 9/11. Without the anthrax attacks, Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq.” He explains: “The anthrax attacks in New York and Washington created a sense of vulnerability that was in many respects greater than the mass murder at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. As horrific as September 11 was, it was a discrete crime, whose perpetrators were quickly identified and pursued. The anthrax letters, by contrast, killed only a few people, but remained unsolved.”
DXer said
Ike, the code used in the letters has always pointed to US-based operatives working to execute Ayman Zawahiri’s anthrax planning — not Battelle.
In planning 9/11, Atta used code in instructing Ramzi Binalshibh to send “the skirts” to “Sally”. The 9/11 Commission Staff explained that the coded reference to “Sally” referred to sending money to Zacarias Moussaoui. (Ramzi then sent Zacarias $14,000). Former CIA Director Tenet in his 2007 book Center of the Storm included Ramzi Binalshibh along with KSM and Hambali as among al-Qa’ida’s leadership “linked to the group’s highly compartmentalized chemical, biological, and nuclear networks.”
Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh used coded phrases as they approached 9/11 to include:
Faculty of Fine Arts/arts = Pentagon
Faculty of Town Planning/architecture = World Trade Center
Faculty of Law / law = The Capitol
politics = White House
White Meat = Americans
Terminal = Indonesia
Market = Malaysia
Hotel = Philippines
Village = Egypt
1. KSM and Clouds (As Sahab)
The letter sending the first anthrax reportedly had clouds pictured on it. The flagship of American Media, Inc., National Enquirer, described the letter sent AMI as follows:
“Bobby Bender came around the corner with this letter in the upturned palms of his hands,” said photo assistant Roz Suss, a 13-year Sun staffer.
“It was a business-size sheet of stationery decorated with pink and blue clouds around the edges. It was folded into three sections, and in the middle was a pile of what looked like pink-tinged talcum powder.”
In admitting that he had taken over supervising the development of anthrax for use against the US upon Atef’s death (in November 2001), KSM separately noted that “I was the Media Operations Director for Al-Sahab or ‘The Clouds,’ under Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
2. Jennifer Lopez Letter and Atta’s “Jenny” Code
The letter sent to AMI in Florida sought to dissuade Jennifer Lopez from a planned marriage. A wedding or marriage is well-known Al Qaeda code for an attack. The sender said how much he loved her and asked her to marry him. Stevens noted at the time it was especially off the wall given that the Sun did not deal with celebrities, which was the subject of the sister-paper Globe. Stevens’ fellow photo editor Roz Suss was looking over his shoulder: “With that Bob says to me,” Hey, I think there’s something gold in here. It looks like a Jewish star sticking out of the powder.” I walked up behind him and reached over his shoulder. I pulled this little star out of what looked like a mound of powder in this letter. I remember it as a fine white powder.” “It looked like something from a Cracker Jacks box,” she says. She picked it out of the powder and tossed it in her wastebasket. Stevens’ colleague Bobby Bender has a different recollection. He says he opened a letter to Jennifer Lopez, recalls handling a large envelope to Jennifer Lopez, care of the Sun. In it was a cigar tube containing a cigar, a small Star of David charm, and something that seemed like soap powder. Hambali and two al-Qaeda minions considered attacking an Israeli restaurant, with a Star of David above it, in the Khao San Rd. backpacker area in Bangkok.
A December 1998 Presidential Daily Brief to President Clinton explained: “An alleged Bin Ladin supporter late last month remarked to his mother that he planned to work in ‘commerce’ from abroad and said his impending ‘marriage,’ which would take place soon, would be a ’surprise.’” The December 1998 PDB continued: “‘Commerce’ and ‘marriage’ often are code words for attacks.” Of course, sometimes, a young man just wants to tell his mom he’s got a job or warn her that she may not approve of the woman he intends to marry. Similarly, sometimes folks who write to tabloids are merely commenting on JLo’s impending nuptials.
Jennifer Lopez’s fame had withstood a number of under performing movies, to include the movie “The Cell” in the year 2000. In the movie, following a trail of bodies, an FBI agent tracks down and captures a disturbed serial killer. Before the killer can reveal the whereabouts of his next victim (a woman trapped in a cell on the verge of drowning), he falls into a coma. Enter beautiful FBI psychologist Lopez, who uses a radical link to the killer’s brain that could destroy her own sanity. “Her mission: Find the cell’s location before time runs out, and avoid getting trapped inside the killer’s head.” According to an early National Enquirer, Stevens held it up to his face and then put it down on the keyboard (where traces of anthrax were found). The publisher’s wife was the real estate broker who rented to two of the hijackers.
The heaviest concentration was in the mailroom on the first floor, with positive findings in many cubicles throughout the first floor. The second floor had positive traces mainly in the hallways. The third floor had the fewest positive traces. The FBI has a theory that the spores were distributed on copy paper, perhaps having fallen onto an open ream of paper in the mailroom where it was stored. Perhaps instead spores could have been spread by a vacuum cleaner and collected at copier machines because of the electrostatic charge and the fans on the machines. Mrs. Stevens recently explained: “They get strange letters sometimes, and the consensus seems to be that if Robert wasn’t wearing his glasses and if it was something funny, he would hold the letters up to his face. They think perhaps that’s how he got it. Just bad luck.” The key expert evidence on this issue of the Jennifer Lopez letter thus far is the New England Journal of Medicine in which Stevens’ doctor concludes that the letter, opened 9/19 and resulting in symptoms appearing 9/30, evidenced an incubation period consistent with inhalational anthrax. (He refers to the 1979 accidental release in Russia). A recent CDC report discusses a second letter of possible interest thought to have been opened on September 25 by a different woman who was exposed. The jury will have to remain out unless and until there is more information on the letter(s) that transmitted the anthrax to AMI. The FBI went back to AMI in August 2002A February 2003 article in Esquire says the “cops and the doctors” have concluded that there were two letters, following two different paths, with one having been mailed to an old address of the National Enquirer before being forwarded. If there were two different letters, were they to two different AMI publications? That would make sense — with one directed to the Sun and one directed to the National Enquirer.
What does the J.Lo letter tell us about the sender, or senders? J.Lo is what they used to call a “sex bomb” — and the biggest one at the time. She had international fame. The vehicle had a “weird” love letter, a Star of David, maybe a cigar. Who had “issues” and weird obsessions with women, sex (with a cigar being a crude symbol) and Jewish symbolism? Atta, for example, had strict instructions in his will about what women would be allowed to do at his funeral. Follow the anomalies.
Two of the hijackers had subscriptions to AMI publications, as did Al Qaeda operative al-Marabh. Boston cab driver Al-Marabh had been in contact with the hijackers, to include Alghamdi who rented an apartment from the wife of the AMI publisher. Atta was seen at the apartment of Al-Marabh and his uncle (the co-founder with Jaballah of an islamic school in Toronto in the Spring of 2001. After coming to Canada in 1996, Jaballah spoke with Ayman regularly on Ayman’s satellite phone.
3. ”In The Hearts Of Green Birds” (Inside Green Birds)
It was widely published among the militant islamists that martyrs go to paradise “in the hearts of green birds.” The stamp’s image of a green-blue colored bird was designed by artist Michael Doret. Mr. Doret provided me “a file made directly from the original art [he] created, so the color is an accurate representation of the printed envelope.” Michael advises me that the color of the eagle is a “teal” or greenish-blue.
In the very interview with Al-Jazeera in which they admitted 9/11, and described the codes used for the four targets for the planes, KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh admitted to the Jenny code, the code for representing the date 9/11, and used the symbolism of the “Green Birds.” Osama Bin Laden later invoked the symbolism in his video “The 19 Martyrs”, describing a hijacker as “A man of worship who enjoined good and forbade evil. His body was on earth but his heart roamed with the green birds that perch beneath the Throne of the Most Merciful.” Isn’t “green birds of paradise” discussed in Abdel-Rahman’s 2,000 page PhD thesis on the chapter in the Koran called “Repentance,” which addresses the foreign policy and military affairs of the Islamic state?
A FAQ on Al Qaeda’s website, the Azzam Publications website, explained that “In the Hearts of Green Birds” refers to what is inside. The actual Arabic word used in the Hadith is not Qalb (heart) but it is Jowf which can mean any of interior, inside, or heart (as in center). There was a video based on the hadith with the title In The Hearts of Green Birds about foreign mujahideen that had been martyred in Bosnia. The audiocassette was created in August 1996 and its 3rd edition was released in January 1997. The azzam.org website selling the “In the Hearts of Green Birds” audiocassette was shut down after 9/11 because authorities thought it might contain codes and instructions to militants. British and US intelligence sources reportedly suspected that some of Azzam.com’s jihad photos and graphics contain messages embedded with a technology known as steganography. The code instead perhaps was there for all to see on the stamps of the lethal missives being sent.
In early Fall 2001, the Azzam.com website was mirrored by someone who lived 6 miles from the mailbox where the anthrax was mailed. He was indicted in Spring 2007 for income tax invasion. To the left of the advertisement for the “Green Birds” video, you’ll see the description of al-Hawali’s imprisonment. The imprisonment of al-Hawali and certain other scholars was the “Cover Theme” (which includes a related article on the torture of prisoners in Saudi prisons). GMU microbiology grad al-Timimi drafted a letter for al-Hawali and had it hand-delivered to every member of Congress on the first anniversary of the anthrax mailings.
Of course, given that the symbolism used in this regard in the anthrax mailings had an origin in religious writing, there is no direct tie with the website — the tie could be with the hadith. The London webmaster once said that the FBI allowed it to remain up (while it moved from server to server) for another year hoping to get leads on supporters.
Even Zarqawi invoked the imagery in a 60-minute audio message:
“The martyrs rejoice in the bounty provided by God. Their souls are inside the bodies of green birds that fly in heaven.”
Bin Laden was using “Green Birds” in the same way he used the repeated phrase “Looming Tower” to hint of what was to come with the planes attack on the World Trade Center. He would say:
“Wherever you are, death will find you,
even in the looming tower.”
In a prerecorded tape aired October 7, 2001, at the time of the anthrax mailing to the Senators, Bin Laden said “The winds of faith have come.”
An advertisement for “In The Hearts of Green Birds” sold by Al Qaeda’s website read: “In the Summer of 1996, Azzam Recordings released the first audio tape of its kind to be produced in English. The name of this tape was: ‘In the Hearts of Green Birds.’ It outlined some of the stories of these men. This tape was so successful, that it spread, by the Will of Allah, throughout many Muslim homes in the UK, North America and Australia. Due to popular demand, in the Summer of 1997, Azzam Recordings produced the sequel to this tape: ‘Under the Shades of Swords.’ We ask Allah to accept the Shuhadaa’ and shower His Mercy upon them.” (It appeared in the 21st issue of Nida’ul Islam magazine (http://www.islam.org.au), December-January 1997- 1998). The Virginia Paintball defendants really liked videos like “In the Hearts of Green Birds” and “Russian Hell” and found them inspirational.
In July 2002, the President of the Help The Needy (a medical technologist who was president in name only) posted a story titled: “Raising Mujaahideen” on an Islamway bulletin board (noted to be an IANA subsidiary) which invoked the “green bird” imagery. On 9/11, under the screen name islam_1981, she had posted an IANA announcement deploring the unfair suspicion fundamentalists might come over. Soon afterward, she posted an explanation that killing civilians was absolutely forbidden by the koran and that upon acceptance of a visa (and accepted in the country as a guest) a person is forbidden from attacking his host. In July 2002, however, she posted a story titled “Raising Mujaahideen” that (apparently consistent with the earlier posts) celebrated raising children to be martyrs — in the story the martyr’s “soul gently leaves his body to reside in the heart of a green bird in Jannah.” These positions were the same as Al-Timimi’s position. She was President and the Vice-President was Idris Palmer of Northern Virginia, who had co-founded the Society for the Adherence of the Sunnah with Ali Al-Timimi.
5. “Greendale School”
”Greendale School” is the return address of the anthrax letters to Senators Daschle and Leahy. In December 2002, the Arabic paper London Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported that correspondence on Zawahiri’s computer (which was obtained by the Wall Street Journal) shows Zawahiri uses “school” as code for Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The letter was found on Al Zawahiri’s computer. The letter was designed to look innocent. It was dated 3 May 2001 and signed “Dr. Nour, Chairman of the Company.” Nour is one of Zawahiri’s aliases. In this context, it was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, not Al Qaeda, of which he was Chairman.
“We have been trying to go back to our main, previous activities. The most important step was the opening of the school. We have made it possible for the teachers to find openings for profitable trade.”
The letter read:
“To: Unknown
From: Ayman al-Zawahiri
Folder: Letters
Date: May 3, 2001
The following is a summary of our situation: We are trying to return to our previous main activity. The most important step was starting the school, the programs of which have been started. We also provided the teachers with means of conducting profitable trade as much as we could. Matters are all promising, except for the unfriendliness of two teachers, despite what we have provided for them. We are patient. [This refers to an internal dispute with two senior London Egyptian islamists].
As you know, the situation below in the village [Egypt] has become bad for traders [jihadis]. Our Upper Egyptian relatives have left the market, and we are suffering from international monopolies. Conflicts take place between us for trivial reasons, due to the scarcity of resources. We are also dispersed over various cities. However, God had mercy on us when the Omar Brothers Company [the Taliban] here opened the market for traders and provided them with an opportunity to reorganize, may God reward them. Among the benefits of residence here is that traders from all over gather in one place under one company, which increases familiarity and cooperation among them, particularly between us and the Abdullah Contracting Company [bin Laden and his associates]. The latest result of this cooperation is the offer they gave. Following is a summary of the offer: Encourage commercial activities [jihad] in the village to face foreign investors; stimulate publicity; then agree on joint work to unify trade in our area. Close relations allowed for an open dialogue to solve our problems. Colleagues here believe that this is an excellent opportunity to encourage sales in general, and in the village in particular. They are keen on the success of the project. They are also hopeful that this may be a way out of the bottleneck to transfer our activities to the stage of multinationals and joint profit. We are negotiating the details with both sides.”
The full message, decoded, is thought to say:
“We have been trying to go back to our military activities. The most important step was the declaration of unity with al-Qaeda. We have made it possible for the mujahideen to find an opening for martyrdom. As you know, the situation down in Egypt has become bad for the mujahideen: our members in Upper Egypt have abandoned military action, and we are suffering from international harassment.”
“But Allah enlightened us with His mercy when Taliban came to power. It has opened doors of military action for our mujahideen and provided them with an opportunity to rearrange their forces. One benefit of performing jihad here is the congregation in one place of all mujahideen who came from everywhere and began working with the Islamic Jihad Organization. Acquaintance and cooperation have grown, especially between us and al-Qaeda.”
In December 2002, the Arabic paper London Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported that correspondence on Zawahiri’s computer (which was obtained by the Wall Street Journal) shows Zawahiri uses “school” as code for “Al Qaeda.”
Dr. Jean Rosenfeld, a researcher associated with the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion, and an expert on the symbolism of religious extremist movements, wrote me: “Greendale’ to me signified a conscious choice to use the symbolic color of Islam.” She continued: “The franked eagle on the envelope of the anthrax letters was identical to the one I caught on a documentary that showed a one-second shot of the site where Sadat was assassinated –- the huge eagle above the podium where he was when he died. That assassination was of great significance to Egyptian Jihad and produced the pamphlet by Faraj that justifies “fard ‘ayn”/individual duty as the basis of jihadist doctrine.” She explained that Al Qaeda “is rooted in Egypt and Salafism, not Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism. Al-Zawahiri, I believe, is intensely nostalgic for the Nile Valley.”
The CIA factbook explains that the color green — such as used by anthrax lab technician Yazid Sufaat in naming his lab “Green Laboratory Medicine,” and by the mailer who used the return address “Greendale School” – is the traditional color of islam. Green symbolizes islam, Mohammed and the holy war. In its section on Saudi Arabia, and the “Flag Description,” the CIA “Factbook” explains that the flag is “green with large white Arabic script (that may be translated as There is no God but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God) above a white horizontal saber (the tip points to the hoist side); green is the traditional color of Islam.”
An intelligence document first released in 2007 involves an operation by EIJ members headed by Atef and including Saif Adel in which the group headed to Somalia to work at developing a new base of operations. The group was called The Green Team. “Greendale School” was used as the return address in the letters and likely is code referring to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The stamp on the prestamped envelopes was of a green bird. For a video depicting the Green Bird’s point of view and invoking Allah’s guidance to “the straight path,” see this video “The 3D Kabah – A green birds eye view.” The koranic “Green Birds” reference is from the sentence relating to being set on “The Straight Path.” Timimi, the graduate student who had access to the Alibek/Bailey patent about concentration using hydrophobic silica, advised the EIJ founder Kamal Habib in writing for the publication called Assirat Al-Mustaqeem (“The Straight Path”).
Likely for the same reason, Al Qaeda anthrax lab technician Yazid Sufaat and Zacarias Moussaoui used the name Green Laboratory Medicine as the name of the company that he used, for example, to buy 4 tons of ammonium nitrate, and that he used to cover his anthrax production program. Green dale refers to green “river valley” — Egypt, Cairo, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and/or Egyptian Islamic Group. Put it all together and you have their new official name (though the American press does not use it) — Qaeda al Jihad. At the Darunta complex where jihadis trained, recruits would wear green uniforms, except for Friday when they would be washed.
Given that using the same address helps the second recipient receiving the letter to identify it and avoid opening it, the perp would have no reason to use the same address unless he was communicating something and wanted to draw attention to it.
Adham Hassoun and Kassem Daher used “school” as code. Canadian businessman Daher is an associate of EIJ member Jaballah, who was detained in Canada and had maintained regular contact with Ayman by satellite telephone after coming to Canada in 1996. “Is there a school over there to teach football?” Hassoun asked, using what the FBI says is code for jihad.
The Amerithrax Task Force explanation of Greendale is as follows:
“The investigation into the fictitious return address on envelopes used for the second round of anthrax mailings, “4th GRADE,” “GREENDALE SCHOOL,” has established a possible link to the American Family Association (AFA) headquartered in Tupelo, Mississippi. In October 1999, AFA, a Christian organization, published an article entitled “AFA takes Wisconsin to court.” The article describes a lawsuit filed in federal court, by the AFA Center for law and Policy (CLP), on behalf of the parents of the students at Greendale Baptist Academy. The articles focuses on an incident that occurred on December 16, 1998, in which case workers of the Wisconsin Department of Human Services went to the Greendale Baptist Academy. The article focuses on an incident that occurred on December 1, 1998, in which case workers of the Wisconsin Department of Human Services went to the Greendale Baptist Academy in order to interview a fourth grade student. The case workers, acting on an anonymous tip that Greendale Baptist Academy administered corporal punishment as part of its discipline policy, did not disclose to the staff why wanted to interview the student. The case workers interviewed the student in the absence of the student’s parents and informed the school staff that the parents were not to be contacted. The AFA CLP filed suit against the Wisconsin Department of Human Services, citing a violation of the parents’ Fourth Amendment rights.”
____________ donations were made to the AFA in the name of “Mr. and Mrs. Bruce Ivins” on eleven separate occasions beginning on December 31, 1993. After an approximate two year break in donations, the next donation occurred on November 11, 1999, one month after the initial article referencing Greendale Baptist Academy was published in the AFA Journal. It was also discovered that the subscription to the AFA Journal, in the name of ‘Mr. & Mrs. Bruce Ivins,’ … was active until March 2005.”
The logical fallacy is Ivins would have had no reason to use the same address unless he was sending a message he wanted to be received. There was no audience that reasonably would have perceived the message being sent. He had no reason to send such a message. The theory was fine for an affidavit in support of a search of a residence — but not on which to close a case.
6. “Franklin Park”
On the return address, Greendale School purported to be in Franklin Park. Padilla, the former Broward man suspected of plotting to explode a ‘’dirty bomb’’ to spread radiation in the United States, worshipped at a Broward County mosque, Masjid Al-Iman, in Fort Lauderdale. That mosque was across the street from Franklin Park. It’s address was 2542 Franklin Park Drive. Padilla was a former gang member who converted to islam while in South Florida and became an extremist while in Egypt beginning in 1998. He attended al Azhar University in Egypt and started a family there after leaving his American wife. In 1999, Padilla left for Pakistan. Authorities detained him May 8, 2002 when he got off a plane at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The FBI has found no ties between Padilla and the September 11 hijackers, even though several of them had lived in Broward County.
While in Pakistan, Padilla had reported to KSM, the al Qaeda’s No. 3 leader who had anthrax production documents on his laptop when he was arrested. It appears that in April 2002, Khalid Mohammed dispatched Padilla to the United States, with several thousand dollars for a mission to disperse a radiological device that was still in the thinking stage. He was placed in a military brig in North Carolina and was held incommunicado for years, forbidden from contacting his family or attorney.
A Padilla acquaintance, Adham Hassoun, was detained in June 2002 in Sunrise by federal agents. His home had been searched in November 2001 but authorities laid back, not arresting him and hoping surveillance would lead to insights. Hassoun once served as distributor of a magazine published in Australia advocating Muslim holy war and was associated with one or more charities accused by the Bush administration of funding terrorists. Padilla reportedly had contacted Hassoun from overseas and was apparently en route to meet Hassoun when he was arrested. Investigators monitored the communication between Padilla and Hassoun and arrested Hassoun after he was called by a reporter from Miami about his acquaintanceship with Padilla. State records indicate that he was the Florida registered agent of the Chicago-based Benevolence International Foundation. The leader of the mosque across from Franklin Park was Awad, the Florida representative of Holy Land Foundation.
Hassoun had established Benevolence International Foundation in Plantation, Florida in 1992. In 1993, the headquarters was moved to Chicago area. A man named Mohammed Loay Bayazid was its president in 1993 and 1994. He was arrested while visiting Northern California in December 1994 along with Osama Bin Laden’s brother-in-law. Bayazid, according to authorities, had been looking to purchase enriched uranium for Bin Laden. On his driver’s license, his listed address was BIF headquarters. Thus, things had quickly come full circle for BIF to once again be involved in an investigation relating to Al Qaeda’s attempt to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
In late 2002, it was announced that authorities were urgently seeking a Florida pilot El Shukrijumah, who worshipped at this same Fort Lauderdale mosque across from Franklin Park and had possible ties to Adham Hassoun. The pilot El Shukrijumah is said to be at the level of Mohammed Atta and is thought to have been associated with Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT-trained biologist. Aafia Siddiqui reportedly also has a yet-undisclosed connection to Adham Hassoun. Mohammed Atta lived 11 miles away from this mosque across from Franklin Park, where these members of the Egyptian Islamic Group worshipped. Holy Cross hospital –where Dr. Tsonas treated Flight 93 hijacker Ahmad al-Haznawi for a suspicious leg lesion that he and other experts think was due to cutaneous anthrax — is only 7 miles from the mosque. Is it all a coincidence? Possibly.
Remember: Given that using the same address helps the second recipient receiving the letter to identify it and avoid opening it, the mailer would have no reason to use the same address unless he was communicating something and wanted to draw attention to it.
There was a detailed description at a June 1, 2004 press conference of Padilla’s plot and his relationship with Jafar the Pilot by a senior DOJ official. The official also described Padilla’s relationship with Atef, Zubaydah, KSM, and Ramzi Binalshibh. He emphasized that there is an urgent need to find Adnan (Jafar). Ali Al-Timimi’s mentor, Bilal Philips, was a good friend of Jafar the Pilot’s father.
7. Allusion to Both Atta and Genomic Sequencing of Ames Strain
The writing of the text of the letter is also interesting in that the “As” and “Ts” are double-lined — to suggest ATTA, the lead hijacker.
When the US Centers for Disease Control first identified that the Ames strain had been used in the mailing to Florida in October 2001, Keim and his colleagues at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) had nearly finished a project to sequence Bacillus anthracis— specifically, the chromosome of an anthrax isolate from a laboratory in Porton Down, U.K. Ayman had a microbiologist attending Porton Down-sponsored conferences at which presentations were made about the sequencing of Ames. The letter writer appears to have even double-lined A’s and T’s in the letters accompanying the anthrax possibly to simultaneously allude to Atta and the genomic sequence.
For an enlarged image of the letter with the A’s and T’s underlined, click here.
As explained at the Porton Down conferences attended by Ayman’s operative Rauf Ahmad, Keim’s research team eventually discovered 60 new ‘markers’ in the Bacillus anthracis genome—DNA sequences that may vary from one isolate to another. These include insertions or deletions of DNA, and short sequences that are repeated at different lengths in the genome known as VNTRs (variable-number tandem repeats). A decade earlier, it had been determined that one of three proteins comprising anthrax toxin, and the first nucleotide sequence to be reported from B. anthracis (by USAMRIID authors no less), had a consensus TATAAT sequence located at the putative -10 promoter site. It is greek to us but apparently something with meaning to the person who drafted the letter. Perhaps the sender was saying that the bacteria was pathogenic unlike what had been sent to the Canadian immigration minister six months earlier.
You can just imagine the same fictional CIA or FBI agents, or Postal Inspectors, plugging the underlined letter from the anthrax letters and wondering whether it pointed to the 1988 article “Sequence and analysis of the DNA encoding protective antigen of Bacillus anthracis” in the journal Gene by USAMRIID authors. The authors were from the Bacteriology Division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The abstract reads: “The nucleotide sequence of the protective antigen (PA) gene from Bacillus anthracis and the 5’ and 3’ flanking sequences were determined. PA is one of three proteins comprising anthrax toxin; and its nucleotide sequence is the first to be reported from B. anthracis. A consensus TATAAT sequence was located at the putative -10 promoter site.”
When authorities determined that the anthrax had not been genetically modified so as to be resistant to antibiotics, Condi Rice told the President: “That’s the best news you’ve had as president.” Years later, at trial for sedition, GMU microbiology grad student Ali Al-Timimi read “Genome Technology.”
***
The coded e-mail Faris wrote back to KSM suggesting that the idea of removing bolts from the span of the Brooklyn Bridge was not a viable idea was but one of many examples of the simple codes used by Al Qaeda operatives. Sometimes the code might be as simple as Adham Hassoun’s “stuff” for the local soccer team in places like Bosnia or his references to a young man who wanted to go out and get some “fresh air” [go join the jihad]. Sometimes it might be Iyman Faris’ reference to the weather or Ramzi Binalshibh’s “shirts” for Sally. Sometimes it might be a reference to Greendale School or a marriage proposal to Jenny such apparently in the case of the anthrax mailings. The CIA reports that wedding is Al-Qaeda-speak for an event. That, according to New York Times journalists, is why the CIA got so anxious to have the Buffalo boys arrested. Apart from an email about a “big feast,” the young men from Buffalo had started talking about a planned wedding. Interpreting such code is not without risk. The CIA kicked down the door in Bahrain and dragged him away from the altar to the horror of his bride-to-be.
But putting aside this question of nuptials, impending or annulled, the fact remains that the sender of the anthrax letters would have had no reason to use the same address on the second letter unless he was communicating something. That identical return address, in fact, helped authorities locate and intercept the letter to a Senator. All of the coding together may have served to tell the world, for example, that Mohammed Atta and the others were going to fly to paradise in a green bird and that the anthrax was courtesy of the Vanguards of Conquest. If you mistreat our prisoners or continue appropriations to Israel and Egyptian regimes, we may attack Washington, D.C. and New York City with aerosolized anthrax. You act at your peril. Zawahiri simultaneously framed the US Army by using the “Ames strain” while telling them who did it.
DXer said
“My concern is that select agents in B3 or B4 may have been taken or altered.” — Bruce Ivins
John Ezzell, the FBI’s anthrax specialist who first examined the finely powderized anthrax sent to the United Senators Leahy and Daschle, returned my call in July 2009 and confirmed that he made dry powdered anthrax at USAMRIID’s Ft. Detrick in 1996 for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”). The work was associated with work done at John Hopkins. DARPA (via FOIA officer Leslie Thomas) just responded to my FOIA on the subject by email, having acted with great efficiency. Beginning in 1996, Dr. Ezzell had worked for the FBI’s Hazardous Materials Response Unit.
Years later, Dr. Bruce Ivins later wrote an email to his colleague and friend Patricia Fellows saying that he had heard that the anthrax made by Dr. Ezzell for DARPA was the closest match to the anthrax mailed in Fall 2001 that Dr. Ezzell had examined. Dr. Ivins emailed a superior in December 2006 about what he heard about the FBI at a party and expressed concern that something might have been taken or altered from his B3 stocks. He was told by email from the superior to not talk about it — that the FBI situation was under control. But it turned out not to be under control. After his colleagues were ordered in November 2007 not to talk to him and he was removed from the base by armed escort, after a half year of forced ostracization by his friends, Bruce Ivins took his life in late July 2008. The trail of evidence that should have led Amerithrax investigators to the infiltration of DARPA and US biodefense and withdrawal from Dr. Ivins’ stock, however, dated back to the time of the mailings and was discernable from “open source” intelligence.
Ali Al-Timimi’s current defense counsel, MSNBC commentator and First Amendment scholar Jonathan Turley, says the FBI considered his client an “anthrax weapons suspect,” and confirms that Al-Timimi worked with White House chief of staff Andrew Card. Ali worked alongside researchers at the DARPA-funded Center for Biodefense who invented a process to concentrate using silica in the culture medium which then was removed from the surface of the spore by repeated centrifugation. Professor Turley wrote: “Al-Timimi is the spiritual adviser to many Muslims across the country. He has worked with the government, including White House chief of staff Andrew Card, …” Remember that showdown between FBI Director Mueller and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card concerning warrantless wiretapping of Ali Al-Timimi and a broader Salafist network? Well, there was a lot adding to the tension of the moment. Amerithrax is a prime example of the perils of both warrantless wiretapping and politicization of justice at the US Department of Justice.
It was not until seven years after 9/11 that we even learned that MIT-graduate Aafia Siddiqui — post-9/11 — worked at Karachi Institute of Technology as a lab technician after being tasked to research germ warfare. She worked there even though the FBI had announced up to a $5 million reward for her capture. Dr. L. Thomas Kucharski, psychiatrist for the defendant, explained in his affidavit filed July 2, 2009 that a man known as “Abu Lubaba” had tasked her to research germ weapons. When Aafia Siddiqui was captured, her thumb drive had e-mail correspondence referencing US-based cells and prior attacks. Sometimes rather than being truly invisible or on the “dark side,” an enemy is merely hiding in plain sight — or hidden by inappropriate redactions or highly classified, compartmentalized, operations intended to avoid embarrassment to decision-makers or to further personal agendas. Most intelligence is “open source.” Sunshine is the best disinfectant. FOI officers may turn out to be responsible for solving Amerithrax where the intelligence analysts and postal investigators failed.
DXer said
My friend has written this website on the historical evidence of the first use of anthrax and espionage. German agents used anthrax in sugar cubes to infect horses in Finland.
“Anthrax Sabotage in Finland or Baron Von Rosen’s Sugar-Coated Anthrax Weapon,”
http://www.geocities.com/jamie_bisher/anthrax.htm
DXer said
All 1228 applications presented to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in 2002 were approved.
http://www.usdoj.gov/nsd/foia/reading_room/2002annualfisareporttocongress.htm
During calendar year 2001, 932 applications were made to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for electronic surveillance and physical search. The Court approved 934 applications in 2001.
http://www.usdoj.gov/nsd/foia/reading_room/2001annualfisareporttocongress.htm
Why did the White House perceive the FISA Court as such a roadblock?
STATEMENT OF KENNETH L. WAINSTEIN, ASSISTANT ATTORNEY GENERAL, NATIONAL SECURITY DIVISION DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE
http://www.usdoj.gov/nsd/testimony/WainsteinTestimony5-01-07SSCI.pdf
There was a November 2007 filing unsealed in the prosecution of Dr. Al-Timimi that discusses the USG’s suspicion of him regarding anthrax weapons. It copies the counsel of record who is the daughter of the Amerithrax prosecutor who was hyping the “POI” of the other Amerithrax squad.
“After this case was remanded for the specific purpose of allowing a review of withheld evidence collected under the NSA domestic surveilance program or any other undisclosed program, the government delayed consideration of withheld evidence until counsel received security clearances. Once security clearances were activated, however, the government refused to allow the counsel to review a single piece of withheld evidence or any of the in camera submissions to the Court — not even redacted or summary versions of the evidence or in camera submissions.”
***
“Despite repeated requests for an explanation from the government of why counsel cannot have access to material or review redacted or summary copies, the case has devolved into little more than a private conversation between the Court and shadow counsel.”
“The Court should reject the current posture of secrecy as preposterous and abusive. The government should have cleared counsel of record making these motions. The government should also explain why opposing counsel cannot have access under traditional classification rules or receive redacted or summary versions of these documents.”
Dr. Al-Timimi’s counsel continued:
“In his discovery letter, Dr. Al-Timimi, by counsel, gave the government a detailed request covering a limited number of individuals. Besides material on him and obvious members of the “Virginia Jihad” associated by the government with the Dar Al-Arqam Islamic Center, Dr. Al-Timimi requested material related to only eight individuals ***
***
“The government’s prior position was that any statements recollected or recorded by Dr. Al-Timimi on peace or war or Islamic duties were material. Thus, whether he was quoted or recorded on subjects of his views of religion or the United States, such statements were relevant to the question of whether “Timimi counseled and induced his followers to support terrorist groups that sought to destroy America.”
***
“The government concedes that any interceptions of Dr. Al-Timimi would have to be disclosed, but insists that it has done so. It, however, limits this representation to “all communications in which he was a party that were intercepted by the NSA. *** There is every reason to believe that he was subject to interceptions given the government statements that it long suspected him of ties to Al Qaeda and bin Laden as well as his numerous international calls from inside and outside the country. [redacted passages] At trial, FBI Agent John Wyman testified that “the investigation were conducting, we know of extensive ties between Timimi, Hawaali, and other elements of the broader Al Qaeda network.” Wyman Transcript at 1172.
Ali Al-Timimi’s counsel Turley said in a interview. “It’s possible that prosecutors had no idea of the origin of this evidence.” Former WTC 1993 prosecutor Andrew McCarthy has noted, “When, moreover, there is any dispute about whether a sensitive piece of information needs to be disclosed, the decision ends up being made by a judge on the basis of what a fair trial requires rather than by the executive branch on the basis of what public safety demands.” McCarthy explained in connection with the earlier prosecution relating to the bombing of the World Trade Center: ”Much of the CIA’s knowledge, particularly that drawn from its covert operations, is top-secret intelligence. When an Agency analyst gives the kind of briefing I needed on Afghanistan, it is certain to be based on at least some classified information, including intelligence from deep-cover operatives, from foreign countries, and from electronic surveillance the CIA was lucky enough to set up on just the right telephone or meeting place. Such intelligence is sometimes confined to a circle so tight its revelation would blow its source.”
Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond, told The New York Times that a question of balance would be central in how judges rule on the scope of the spying program. “I would expect the government to say that it is highly sensitive material, but we have legal mechanisms to balance the national security needs with the rights of defendants,” Tobias told the Times. “I think judges are very conscientious about trying to sort out these issues and balance civil liberties and national security.”
Eric Lichtblau’s BUSH’S LAW: The Remaking of American Justice (2008) is extremely good. But what one learns from the book is that not even the DOJ #2 (who was in charge of signing off FISA requests) knew of the NSA’s wiretapping. Only Ashcroft knew and White House people. In the Al-Timimi prosecution, what was needed was certification by the head of NSA regarding the production. The DOJ prosecutor Kromberg, otherwise, is in the position of being dependent on what he is being told by his client. Al-Timimi’s Turley was always top-flight but under the New Administration and as a regular guest on the influential Rachel Maddow show, he was an especially formidable opponent. Given the way the Administration misstated the facts in urging the NYT not to publish about NSA wiretapping, it would not be surprising to learn that they did not merely intercept incoming calls of international interest but instead captured all of the target’s calls. It would not be surprising to learn it started 9/11 rather than 10/7 after President Bush signed an executive order.
The issue all relates back to anthrax, actually, given that the Administration knew US biodefense had been infiltrated but had reason to be embarrassed by the close connection of the White House Chief of Staff to the surveillance target. It put the Administration in an untenable and politically embarrassing position — it made their position on Iraq and WMD a house of cards. In mid-December 2008, senior 56-year-old Department of Justice employee Thomas Tamm, identified himself as a key whistleblower in a cover story in Newsweek. He first became troubled in connection with working on the capital case of Zacarias Moussaoui (which was before the same judge as Al-Timimi). He became increasingly troubled when in a new position he was reading CIA cable traffic that seemed to suggest that officials knew that suspects rendered to particular countries were being tortured. That is precisely part of the reason, the leaders of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the lawyer for the Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman explained,that Ayman Zawahiri was going to use anthrax against US targets.
The Department of Justice is finding it hard to face up to the infiltration that was allowed to happen under the watch of the prior Administration(s). It is far easier to blame the anthrax mailings on the dead guy who is not here to defend himself.
DXer said
John Ezzell told me he had prepared the dry powdered Ames at DARPA’s request for work done at John Hopkins.
What sort of work was done at John Hopkins?
Well, that is where NanoBio Corporation decontamination product was tested (in addition to Dugway).
http://cfpub.epa.gov/si/si_public_record_report.cfm?dirEntryId=131109
In December 1999, the U.S. Army tested a broad spectrum nanoemulsion and nine other biodecontamination technologies in Dugway, Utah, against an anthrax surrogate, Bacillus globigii. Nanoemulsion was one of four technologies that proved effective and was the only nontoxic formulation available. Other tests against the vaccine strain of B. anthracis (Sterne strain) were conducted by the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and by the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research.