* 911 Imam Awlaki’s Call From Grave: Attack With Bioweapons ; Awlaki Was Coordinating With Ali Al-TImimi Who Shared A Suite With the Leading DARPA-funded Ames Researchers
Posted by Lew Weinstein on May 4, 2012
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Posted by Lew Weinstein on May 4, 2012
This entry was posted on May 4, 2012 at 7:27 am and is filed under Uncategorized. Tagged: al Qaeda and anthrax, Anwar Awlaki. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
DXer said
Now it has oft been said that Al Qaeda has designs on using ricin but a half-assed ricin letter to a federal judge sounds more like a disgruntled litigant. Perhaps thef a letter to the Post Office further clarifies the motive. One Al Qaeda manual with a chapter on “Poisonous Letters” speciflcally urges that silicone sealant be used on the interior of the envelope so as to avoid hurting the mail carrier.
Yemen: Barack Obama warned that al-Qaeda planning ricin attack …
http://www.telegraph.co.uk › News › World News › Middle East › Yemen
Aug 13, 2011 – Counter-terrorism officials are said to have warned President Barack Obama that an al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen is trying to produce the deadly …
Qaeda Trying to Harness Toxin, Ricin, for Bombs, U.S. Says …
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/world/middleeast/13terror.html?…all
Aug 12, 2011 – According to classified reports, Al Qaeda’s Yemeni branch is trying to acquire castor beans for making ricin, a toxin so deadly that just a speck …
DXer said
Bin Laden’s 1996 Declaration of War focused not only on the imprisonment of Ali Al-Timimi’s mentor, dissident Saudi sheik al-Hawali, but also invoked the detention of the Egyptian sheik Abdel-Rahman, the so-called “the blind sheik.” Three years earlier, on July 4, 1993, United States Postal employee Ahmed Abdel Sattar had spoken to the press about Abdel Rahman’s arrest and said “we haven’t decided the time or place, but our Muslim community will demonstrate its outrage at the arrest of the Sheik.” In the indictment of the Staten Island Post Office employee who worshipped in Brooklyn, the United States government alleged that following his arrest, Abdel Rahman, in a message to his followers recorded while he was in prison, urged: “Oh Muslims! Oh Muslims! It is a duty upon all the Muslims around the world to free the Sheikh, and to rescue him from his jail.” Referring to the United States, he implored, “Muslims everywhere, dismember their nation, tear them apart, ruin their economy, provoke their corporations, destroy their embassies, attack their interests, sink their ships, and shoot down their planes, kill them on land, at sea, and in the air. Kill them wherever you find them.” His list is a pretty concise summary of the terrorist actions taken over the next decade. That same line from Blind Sheik Abdel-Rayman was quoted by Montreal cell-member Abderraouf Jdey in his 1999 letter explaining his reasons for seeking martyrdom in jihad.
The tactic of lethal letters delivered by the US Post Office — although not mentioned in this list by Abdel-Rahman — was not merely the modus operandi of the militant islamists inspired by Abdel-Rahman, it was their signature. The islamists sent letter bombs in late December 1996 from Alexandria, Egypt to newspaper offices in New York City and Washington, D.C. and people in symbolic positions. Musical Christmas cards apparently postmarked in Alexandria, Egypt on December 21, 1996 contained improvised explosive devices. The bombs were mailed on the Night of Decree or Night of Measures. It is known as the Night of Qadr. The letters were sent in connection with the earlier bombing of the World Trade Center and the imprisonment of the blind sheik. The former leader of the Egyptian Al-Gamaa al-Islamiya (”Islamic Group”), Abdel-Rahman was also a spiritual leader of Al Qaeda. There initially was an outstanding $2 million reward. Under the rewards for justice program, the reward now is up to $5 million. There was no claim of responsibility. There was no explanation. Once one had been received, the next ten, mailed on two separate dates, were easily collected. Sound familiar? Two bombs were also sent to Leavenworth, where a key WTC 1993 defendant was imprisoned, addressed to “Parole Officer.” (The position does not exist).
The FBI suspected the Vanguards of Conquest, a mysterious group led by Egyptian Islamic Jihad head Ayman Zawahiri. The group can be thought of as either the military wing of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad or perhaps just EIJ by another name. It is sometimes known as the New Jihad. Yassir Al-Sirri was the Egyptian Islamic Jihad/ Vanguards of Conquest publicist and worked out of his London-based home while on the public dole. Another group under suspicion for the mailings was the Egyptian Islamic Group. The blind sheik Abdel Rahman simultaneously was the spiritual leader of Al Qaeda, Egyptian Islamic Group and Egyptian Islamic Jihad/Vanguards of Conquest. The next month, on February 12, 1997, the Islamic Group, for its part, issued a statement: “The Islamic Group declares all American interests legitimate targets to its “jihad until the release of all prisoners, on top of whom is Abdel Rahman.” Abdel-Rahman’s friend, Ayman Zawahiri, was head of Al Qaeda’s biochemical program. The blind sheik’s son, Mohammed, was on Al Qaeda’s three- member WMD committee.
Another group committed to Abdel-Rahman’s release was Jemaah Islamiah (”JI”) in Indonesia. JI-member Yazid Sufaat was a member of Al Qaeda. The US-trained Malaysian biochemist Yazid Sufaat met with 9/11 plotters and two hijackers in January 2000. JI has ties with the Moro Front. Sufaat used his company called Green Laboratory Medicine to buy items useful to Al Qaeda. Zacarias Moussaoui, who had a crop dusting manual when he was arrested, stayed at Sufaat’s condominium in 2000 when he was trying to arrange for flight lessons in Malaysia. Yazid Sufaat provided Moussaoui with a letter indicating that he was a marketing representative for Infocus Technologies signed “Yazid Sufaat, Managing Director.” Sufaat had given Moussaoui an e-mail greenlab@usa.net that was accessed by authorities on September 19, 2001. The crop dusters were to be part of a “second wave.” Al Qaeda’s regional operative, Hambali, was at the key January 2000 meeting and supervised Sufaat. Khalid Mohammed’s involvement dates back to Bojinka, as did Hambali’s. The money for Bojinka, a plot to simultaneously bomb airliners and to assassinate the Pope, went from Bin Laden’s brother-in-law Khalifa to the Abu Sayyaf Group, Al Qaeda’s primary Philippine affiliate, and then on to the cell that included KSM. Yazid Sufaat, whose next court date is May 17, 2013, should forthrightly address these issues and should explain why Al Qaeda thought the use of anthrax was consistent with the hadiths.
Al-Kifah in Brooklyn had long since become the headquarters of Abdel-Rahman’s supporters in the US. After the anthrax mailings, the Amerithrax investigation naturally considered whether the solution to the mystery had its roots in Brooklyn. Abdel-Rahman was the spiritual leader of both Egyptian Islamic Group and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He was close to Ayman Zawahiri, known to be head of Al Qaeda’s anthrax project. FISA warrants were initiated immediately after 9/11 but did not prove fruitful. At Fitzgerald’s urging, a criminal investigation of the two charities, Benevolence International Foundation and Global Relief Foundation, was opened in October 2001. Down in Florida, the 5’4″ Adnan El-Shukrijumah was holding garage sales to raise money for Global Relief Foundation when he was not off to Afghanistan for training or in Saudi Arabia. The 9/11 Commission Report notes that in December 2001, “[t]hese plans were dramatically accelerated when CIA analysts, drawing on intelligence gathered in an unrelated FBI investigation, expressed concerns that GRF could be involved in a plot to attack the United States with weapons of mass destruction (WMD).”
On December 14, 2001, the FBI raided the charity offices of the two charities. BIF and GRF offices were raided in Illinois — a BIF office in Newark, New Jersey also was searched. Germs author and New York Times journalist Judy Miller (or her colleague) called the GRF office in Illinois the night before the search. Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald was furious. He had been the AUSA who handled the prosecution of Bin Laden earlier that year in the case involving the bombing of the 1998 embassy bombings. Authorities had planned on waiting and watching to see how the US charity personnel responded to a search of offices abroad, but their hand was forced when GRF officials in Illinois began shredding documents. At a White House press conference on December 17, 2001, Ari Fleischer said: “There is nothing that has been final that has been concluded. But the evidence is increasingly looking like it was a domestic source. But, again, this remains something that is not final, nor totally conclusive yet. I can just report to you the information that I’ve heard. I can’t give you the scientific reasons behind it. But you can assume that they’re based on investigative and scientific means.” He emphasized: “There’s a big difference between the source of it and who sent it, because the two do not have to be tied.” In March 2002, the FBI raided the offices of the Muslim World League at 360 Washington St., the small building that also housed Al-Timimi’s Dar Arqam Center.
DXer said
Ali Al-Timimi’s mentor, former Canadian imam Bilal Philips, was a good friend of Adnan El-Shukrijumah’s father. Philips wrote in his guestbook on the family website his son created about learning Arabic:
“He was one of my first teachers in Arabic and is a dear friend, though geography and world politics has separated us.
Tell him that, as always, I love him for the sake of Allaah. Was salaam, Bilal.”
Adnan’s family website also contained a picture of another “unindicted co-conspirator” of the ’93 bombing, Siraj Wahhaj, who would speak as the same Falls Church mosque as Al-Timimi.
In Saudi Arabia, Al-Timimi had been mentored by the Saudi-trained Bilal Philips.
Philips was Al-Timimi’s Islamic Studies teacher at Manaret Riyadh High School in the early 1980s. Al-Timimi adopted Philips’ view that “The clash of civilizations is a reality,” and “Western culture led by the United States is an enemy of Islam.” Between 1991 and 1993, Philips relocated to the Mindinao, Philippines, where he taught at an islamic school. In 1993, according to an interview he gave in a London-based Arabic-language magazine interview,
Philips ran a program to convert US soldiers to Islam stationed in Saudi Arabia during the first Persian Gulf War. Philips was made a proselytization official by the Saudi Air Force. Philips followed up in the US, with telephone calls and visits intended to recruit the veterans as potential members of Bin Laden’s network. He enlisted assistance from others based in the U.S. and members of Islamic centers all over the US. These conversion specialists financed pilgrimages for US veterans and would later send Muslim clerics in the United States to their homes. Bilal Philips encouraged some converts from this program to fight in Bosnia in the 1990s.
Blilal Philips enlisted WTC plotter Clement Rodney Hampton-El to help him with the program. Hampton-El was associated with the Al-Kifah center in Brooklyn — where Adnan El-Shukrijumah’s father was based. El-Shukrijumah’s served as a character witness for Clement Rodney Hampton-El. Hampton-El in trial testimony described a meeting at the Saudi embassy in 1992 at which Philips gave him a list of US Army personnel to approach. Bilal Philips was named along with Osama bin Laden and Bin Laden brother-in-law Khalifa as unindicted co-conspirators in the Day of Terror trial that sent the “blind sheik” to prison.
DXer said
“Make a bomb in the kitchen of your Mom” in the first issue of INSPIRE instructs on how a pressure cooker can be used to make a bomb. A pressure cooker was used to make the two bombs detonated at the Boston marathon this week.
Did Anwar al-Awlaki oversee that piece with Samir Khan editing? Were the ingredients used the same?
http://www.amerithrax.wordpress.com
DXer said
A Short Recent History of Pressure Cooker Bombs
“Authorities are now saying that the explosive devices in Boston were fashioned from pressure cookers. Yes, like the kitchen pot you might use to cook rice at home. As it happens, pressure cookers have a nefarious reputation in counterterrorism circles. In 2004, the Department of Homeland Security was concerned enough about pressure cooker bombs to issue an alert to federal and state security officials: “A technique commonly taught in Afghan terrorist training camps is the use/conversion of pressure cookers into IEDs,” the bulletin warned.
That bulletin cited several plots from 2002 to 2004 to use pressure cooker bombs in France, India and Nepal. But more recently there have been at least three other instances of would-be terrorists in the west, all of them Islamic radicals, in possession of pressure cookers for reasons that seemed not to involve having friends over for dinner. One was an Army private linked to the 2010 Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, who had reportedly been taking bomb-making tips from the al Qaeda’s short-lived (literally) magazine Inspire and had various weapons and explosives along with his cooking pot. (The magazine reportedly recommended pressure cookers as explosive devices.) A 2010 suicide bomber in Stockholm had rigged a pressure cooker bomb that failed to detonate. And as a newer DHS warning about the kitchen devices noted, the failed 2010 SUV bomb in New York’s Times Square was a pressure cooker device featuring 120 firecrackers. The same DHS memo refers to a March 2010 bombing with a pressure cooker at a western Christian aid agency in Pakistan that killed six people.”
Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/04/16/a-short-history-of-pressure-cooker-bombs/#ixzz2QfDptnO5
DXer said
Everyone clear on the recent decision relating anthrax vaccine and kids?
NPR (blog)
Panel: Thumbs down on anthrax vaccine test in kids
Fox News-5 hours ago
Test of anthrax vaccine in children gets tentative OK
Reuters-13 hours ago
Bioethics Panel Warns Against Anthrax Vaccine Testing On Kids
NPR (blog)-10 hours ago
US panel: Wait on anthrax vaccine testing for kids
Highly Cited-Los Angeles Times-4 hours ago
Panel urges limited tests of anthrax vaccine in kids
In-Depth-Detroit Free Press-4 hours ago
DXer said
Southern Medical Journal:
January 2013 – Volume 106 – Issue 1 – p 49–54
Healthcare System Preparedness
Use of Medical Simulation to Teach Bioterrorism Preparedness: The Anthrax Example
Olsen, Martin E. MD
Abstract: The 2001 anthrax bioterrorism attacks demonstrated vulnerability for future similar attacks. This article describes mechanisms that can be used to prepare the medical community and healthcare facilities for the diagnosis and management of a subsequent bioterrorism attack should such an event occur and the fundamentals of medical simulation and its use in teaching learners …
Comment: The full-text is available for free online.
DXer said
I consider book author and journalist Deb Scroggins to be the most quotable expert on Aafia. A lengthy, informative passage in her book on the subject can be found here.
http://www.vogue.com/culture/article/read-it-now-wanted-women-faith-lies-and-the-war-on-terror-the-lives-of-ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-aafia-siddiqui/#1
Did Aafia Siddiqui know KSM’s nephew Ramzi Yousef from Karachi?
Did Aafia know subtilis expert Walied Samarrai, who lived within 20 miles of the mailbox in 2001 and called the number associated with Ramzi Yousef up until the hour of Blind Sheik’s arrest?
Was Walied associated with Al-Kifah like his friends?
http://www.amerithrax.wordpress.com
Wanted Women—Faith, Lies and The War on Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui
by Megan O’Grady
http://www.vogue.com/culture/article/read-it-now-wanted-women-faith-lies-and-the-war-on-terror-the-lives-of-ayaan-hirsi-ali-and-aafia-siddiqui/#1
In February 1995, Pakistan had arrested Ramzi Yousef, chief planner of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Yousef came from a jihadi family with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. One of his uncles, Zahid Sheikh Mohammed, ran Mercy International, the charity whose video Aafia had volunteered to distribute in Karachi. Another was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the future planner of 9/11. In a press statement announcing Yousef’s arrest, the government of Benazir Bhutto asked the U.S. and other Western governments for help in combating religious extremism. Aafia sent around a copy of Bhutto’s remarks with a scornful note attached. “Pakistan has officially joined the typical gang of our contemporary Muslim governments . . . like Egypt, Algeria,” she wrote. She closed the e-mail with a quotation from the Quran that warns believers against taking Jews and Christians for friends.
DXer said
Aafia Siddiqui and WikiLeaks
By EditorialPublished: April 27, 2011
http://tribune.com.pk/story/157873/aafia-siddiqui-and-wikileaks/
Diehard supporters of Aafia Siddiqui have maintained her innocence from when she was arrested in Ghazi in 2008, where she was caught in possession of chemicals, through to her trial in New York City in 2010, where she was handed down an 86-year sentence for shooting at her US interrogators. However, the latest revelations from WikiLeaks show that she was part of an al Qaeda cabal plotting to smuggle explosives into the US, and that she volunteered to manufacture biological weapons. This is unlikely to dampen the ardour of her vociferous supporters, but for the rest of us it should now be abundantly clear that Aafia was deeply tied to al Qaeda.
Much of the information in the WikiLeaks files concerning Aafia comes from testimony from 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was waterboarded nearly 200 times in Guantanamo Bay. It is possible that he may have agreed with everything his interrogators demanded of him because of the torture methods employed. Still, the coincidences are far too damning to buy the story that Aafia was trapped in a web of US conspiracies. According to the cables, Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar Baluchi, who was allegedly married to Aafia, was the person who asked Aafia to work on manufacturing biological weapons. The file of Guantanamo detainee Saifullah Paracha, another cause celebre in Pakistan, says that Aafia opened a PO box in the US as part of a plan to smuggle explosives into the US. That Paracha’s son was in possession of the key to that box is again damning for Aafia.
This is not to say that the US has handled Aafia’s case according to international norms. Her whereabouts since her disappearance from Karachi in 2003 till she was arrested in 2008 in Afghanistan remain a mystery and she may well have been illegally detained by either the US or Pakistan. She has also never been charged with or tried for terrorism in a court. In the court of public opinion, however, she should now be considered guilty.
Published in The Express Tribune, April 28th, 2011.
DXer said
One of the blind sheik’s sons was on the AQ WMD Committee and was involved in recruiting specialists. He spoke alongside Ali Al-Timimi at a mid-1990s conference sponsored by the Ann Arbor-based charity IANA. As I recall, on the tape where Bin Laden and Zawahiri declared war on the US, the son could be heard “go to the spilling of blood.”
It was foolish not to view the anthrax mailings through the prism of what was known about Dr. Ayman’s anthrax planning and the announced plan by blind sheik lawyer Montasser Al-Zayat that Ayman would use anthrax against US targets to retaliate for the rendering of the blind sheik Abdel-Rahman and other senior EIJ leaders. The media never reported the announcement in Spring 1999 of Dr. Ayman’s plans.
http://www.amerithrax.wordpress.com
From today’s news:
“Abdullah, the son of the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, writes to request the US release his father, who has been serving a life sentence for allegedly planning the 1993 World Trade Centre attack in New York.
In the press statement released in Arabic on Saturday, Abdullah says: “The American administration’s arrogance and stubbornness towards one of the Muslim world’s scholars, Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, is putting the lives of its people at risk and costing them a lot.”
Abdullah goes on to justify violent attacks and the kidnapping of Americans by Islamist militants, such as Al-Qaeda, explaining that it is the US administration’s treatment of his father that “has pushed the Muslim youth to anger for the cleric.”
The murder of US ambassador Christopher Stevens to Libya in September during an attack by unknown armed men on the consulate in the city of Benghazi is one example Abdullah cites.
The attack on the US consulate in Libya took place on 11 September 2012 in the wake of massive, world-wide protests organised by Islamists to denounce a US-made film mocking the Prophet Mohamed.
Abdullah warns in his statement that although his family has chosen to protest peacefully others have seen that “the arrogance of the US is not to be dealt with in any other way except through violence and the killing of Americans.”
DXer said
Aafia Siddiqui is a very good speaker and quite appealing. Below is a rare 1991 video of her speaking in Houston.
Amidst the very sensible and articulate (albeit religious*) talk of women’s rights, she urges that women are equally good warriors — giving the example of the woman who killed 9 non-believers with a tentpole.
Towards the end, she bemoans that the muslim empire that had expanded to three continents was the third world.
It was announced she was transferring from Houston to study genetics. While she married KSM’s nephew post-911, she knew KSM from Karachi well before 911.
http://www.amerithraxwordpress.com
DXer said
It’s naive to think that Al Qaeda could not have obtained Ames just because it tended to be in labs associated with or funded by the US military. US Army Al Qaeda operative Sgt. Ali Mohammed accompanied Zawahiri in his travels in the US. (Ali Mohamed had been a major in the same unit of the Egyptian Army that produced Sadat’s assassin, Khaled Islambouli). Ali Al-Timimi was working in the building housing the Center for Biodefense funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (“DARPA”) and had access to the facilities at both the Center for Biodefense and the adjacent American Type Culture Collection. Michael Ray Stubbs was an HVAC system technician at Lawrence Livermore Lab with a high-level security clearance permitting access. That was where the effort to combat the perceived Bin Laden anthrax threat was launched in 1998. Aafia Siddiqui, who attended classes at a building with the virulent Vollum strain. She later married a 9/11 plotter al-Balucchi, who was in UAE with al-Hawsawi, whose laptop, when seized at the home of a bacteriologist, had anthrax spraydrying documents on it. The reality is that a lab technician, researcher, or other person similarly situated might simply have walked out of some lab that had it. What was NanoBio’s old street address? Why is Aafia Siddiqui associated with an address at 1915 Woodbury Drive in Ann Arbor? An Assistant United States Attorney has claimed in open court (in the opening argument in United States v. Paracha) that Aafia was willing to participate in an anthrax attack if asked.
DXer said
A decade ago the BOLO first issued for Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate Aafia Siddiqui (who was about 31 at the time). Majoring undergraduate in biology, anthropology and archaeology, she went on to get a PhD in neurology. She studied neurological science and has studied at the MIT and Brandeis University in Massachusetts, as well as at Houston, Texas. She is believed to have ties to a person from Florida thought to be poised to carry out a terrorist strike. Authorities were interested in suspected links between Siddiqui and alleged terrorist Adnan El Shukrijumah also known as “Jaffar the pilot.” Aafia’s sister Fowsia Siddiqui, a Harvard MD in neurology, also lived in the same high-rise.
After 911, Aafia’s family argues that it is her husband, Mohammed Khan, who made her look guilty — for example, by buying night goggles and a book on how to make explosives using her email account. But we now know that was a crock. After 911, she then married 911 plotter Al-Balucchi, KSM’s nephew. Aafia left for Pakistan on September 19 and so was not in the country at the time of the second anthrax mailing.
Aafia returned from Pakistan and set up a mailbox for an Al Qaeda operative. She was part of an active Al Qaeda conspiracy and operation.
She and her estranged husband, a Harvard-trained anaesthesiologists were officers of Institute of Islamic Research and Teaching Inc. In the mid-1990s, she worked for the United Islamic Organization (“UIO”), an education and relief organization of which her mother was President and her sister also volunteered. Through the group, for example, Siddiqui raised money for Bosnian refugees and the widows and orphans from that conflict. The organization was founded in Zambia in 1974 by Aafia’s mom, Ismat Siddiqui. Its head office was in Karachi, Pakistan and it had branches in the United States, Canada, and Saudi Arabia. Aafia knew KSM and his family from Karachi.
Ismat Siddiqui, Aafia’s mother, reports that a stranger came to her house and told her that her daughter was safe and that she should not raise a hue and cry for her release. A family member in the US has hired an attorney in the US who has inquired of the FBI as to Aafia’s whereabouts but the FBI reports that they do not have her in custody. Aafia has spent a lot of time in front of a keyboard and so has left quite a paper trail, to include a thumb drive containing correspondence with US-based operatives about past attacks in the United States. In 2003, her mother Ismaat blamed her son-in-law but the FBI’s interest was always in Aafia rather than her first husband. “You don’t know her like we know,” one agent is quoted as saying.
In 1995, Aafia wrote this:
“Pakistani govt. has officially joined the gang of our typical contemporary govts. of Muslim countries. I mean Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia and the likes of them….Here’s what I read in this friday’s issue of the “Muslim News,” something that was confirmed a few days earlier by some articles in local newspapers like The Boston Globe and the New York Times etc:
BENAZIR ASKS FOR THE WEST’S HELP AGAINST “EXTREMISM” Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan’s prime minister, called on the west to help her eradicate religious opposition. She said that Pakistan is a “moderate” Islamic country and it is the first defense line against “terrorism,” and hence needs international support. She added that the arrest of Ramzi Yousef and giving him to the United States is a simple proof. She added that Pressler’s amendment deprived Pakistan from U.S. aid and helped strengthen “religious violence.” Muslim opposition used this amendment to show the double standard as India has nuclear weapons and still gets aid from the U.S. In her answer to one of the questions, she said: One of the messages that I am sending to the American government is that your country likes “justice.” We were your allies and we need your help and assistance to support and strengthen the “moderate” forces in Pakistan.” …
After quoting the news item, Aafia closed:
———–
“O you who believe! Take not the Jews and Christians for protecting friends (auliyaa’). They are the protecting friends of one another. Whoever among you takes them for protecting friends is (one) of them. Indeed, Allah does not guide the wrongdoing people.” (Qur’an 5:51)
Aafia worked for the Boston branch of the Blind Sheik’s group which merely had changed its name after the WTC 1993 bombing and continued the same work.
DXer said
Source regarding connection to Blind Sheik’s group.
“E-mails Show MIT Grad Taught School While Raising Money for Terror-Linked Group”. Fox News. August 22, 2008.
Emails sent by Siddiqui while she at MIT show she was soliciting money for Al-Kifah Refugee Center — a known Al Qaeda charitable front tied to Usama bin Laden and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Al-Kifah was considered Al Qaeda’s U.S operational headquarters, a sort of underground railroad that was funneling funds and supplies to the terror group, according to government investigators. The U.S. government froze its assets shortly after the September 11 terror attacks.
In the e-mails — sent to students through various Middle Eastern and European Islamic newsgroups — Siddiqui said that the funds were being raised on behalf of Bosnian orphans and widows, but she asked for checks to be cut to Al-Kifah.
In one thread entitled “women available for marriage” dated March 15, 1993, less than a month after the first World Trade Center bombing, Siddiqui wrote:
“Kindly fill the pledge form and return to Al-Kifah. If I don’t hear from you, I will assume that things are fine and taken care of.
“To those of you who had volunteered to find other sponsors within your community as well, kindly send at least one sponsor’s info. (if you have not already done so) so I can mail you one form initially which you can use to inform others and get more commitments.
“Please keep up the spirit and motivate others as well!!!!!! The Muslims of our Ummah need ALL the help we can provide them.”
She signed this e-mail, “humbly, your sister Aafia.”
Terrorism expert Steven Emerson, head of The Investigative Project on Terrorism, said he wasn’t aware of the e-mail but that the apparent link to Al Kifah fits, considering what’s known by federal investigators about Siddiqui’s role as the group’s fundraiser.
“She was active in trying to resuscitate Al Kifah after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing,” Emerson said. “After all the scrutiny from law enforcement, Al Kifah suffered a big hit then.”
In other e-mail, Siddiqui added a verse from the Koran about charity that stated:
“O you who believe! let not your riches or your children divert you fromthe remembrance of Allah. If any act thus, the loss is their own.
And spend something (in charity) out of the substance which We havebestowed on you, before Death should come to any of you and he should say,”O my Lord! Why did you not give me respite for a little while? I shouldthen have given (largely) in charity, and I should have been one of thedoers of good.”
But to no soul will Allah grant respite when the time appointed (for it)has come; and Allah is well acquainted with (all) that you do.”
(Qur’an, Surah Munafiqoon v.9-11)
In the mid 1990s, after graduating from MIT, Siddiqui continued her double life. She began a Ph.D. program in neuroscience at nearby Brandeis University, all the while raising funds for charity groups bankrolling Al Qaeda operations, according to government and court records.
According to Brandeis records, Siddiqui continued to teach at the university. In the spring of 1999, she taught 22 students General Biology Lab, a course required for undergraduate biology majors, pre-med and pre-dental students.
DXer said
It was Khalid Mohammed who told authorities about MIT-trained biologist Aafia Siddiqui, who at one time was thought to be traveling with a Florida “Atta level” pilot. All the Pakistani press was reporting that she was nabbed in Karachi after being spotted at the international airport on March 29 years ago. It was not until three weeks later that NBC, relying on an unnamed senior official, first reported her captured. For the longest time, no US newspaper had yet reported that she was captured and instead stories continued to state that the FBI is seeking her for questioning. If the sources relied upon by these journalists did not even know (or would not reveal) that Aafia had been caught, why did these reporters think they know what’s going on in the Amerithrax matter? Amerithrax was a confidential investigation. The Pakistan ISI and CIA rarely grant press interviews in connection with an ongoing manhunt. As agent Van Harp, then head of the Amerithrax investigation said at the time, the information coming from Khalid Mohammed was classified.
According to the Pakistan reports, she was spotted at the international airport and detained (after she was followed to a relative’s house. Some reports say she was coming from abroad, but the original report the others are all copying say she was coming from “upcountry.” (Karachi is in the south). She in fact was going to visit her uncle SH Faruqi up north. I have uploaded an account of his visit with Aafia in January 2008 that, as I best recall, he emailed me. His account is dramatically different than the account of Fowzia and Ismaat.
The reports at the time said she is suspected of having been a member of Al Qaeda’s “Chemical Wire Group.” Perhaps something got lost in the translation, but the phrase “Chemical Wire Group” has appeared in all the English Pakistan and India papers.
Officials have not publicly confirmed anything about the detention or interrogation. Reliable sourcing is difficult. The “Atta-level” Florida pilot that Siddiqui is thought to have known and been assisting is still at large. El-Shukrijumah is said by one FBI agent to be “very, very, very” dangerous. The United States can no longer allow themselves misconceptions about this doe-eyed jihadist.
DXer said
GAO, did the beautiful and pious Aafia Siddiqui have potential access to the virulent Ames strain at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston? She reports she was tasked by someone named “Abu Lubaba” to research germ warfare.
Veterinarian and anthrax expert Martin Hugh-Jones, a professor at Louisiana State University, has said: “It was like trading baseball cards.” Hugh-Jones reports he got most of his anthrax from Peter Turnbull at the Porton Down lab in Great Britain, one of those that had received the Ames strain directly from Ft. Detrick. Dr. Theresa Koehler at Houston and Hugh-Jones discussed the distribution of Ames on NPR in January 2002:
Ms. KOEHLER: Because Ames is used by investigators all over the world, does it matter if originally the strain came from Texas or came from Iowa? I don’t think so.
***
Mr. MARTIN HUGH-JONES (Louisiana State University): I think the most important point is that we didn’t have Ames in this country in anybody’s collection prior to 1980. I think that’s very, very clear. And I think that limits the list of possible suspects quite considerably.
***
KESTENBAUM: Martin Hugh-Jones also has an answer to the mystery of why one paper listed the Ames strain as dating back to 1932. He was an author on that paper. When his team got the Ames sample, it was labeled `10/32,’ which turns out to have meant `Sample number 10 out of 32.’ But they interpreted it as October 1932. David Kestenbaum, NPR News, Washington.
In 2001, Dr. Theresa M Koehler held a faculty appointment at the UT Graduate School of Biomedical Sciences. She was Associate Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics. She has had grants from the CIA, the National Institutes of Health, and others for her work on virulence. Her office was in the same complex, in the connected John Freeman Building. Aafia’s sister-in-law, Dr. Lubna Khawaja, had an office there. In Fall 2001, Dr. Koehler said she had taken the anthrax vaccine and that she got anthrax strains from Porton Down. In the Spring of 2003, Dr. Koehler explained that “It’s critical to use a genetically complete strain of the [anthrax] bacterium in experiments involving virulence.” A government study reported in April 2003 found that all of the labs that had received grants from the National Institutes of Health had unobstructed access to the floors with critical labs.
Ten million gallons of water were unleashed on the UT Medical School at Houston June 9, 2001 by Tropical Storm Allison. The basement, where the anthrax lab was located, was the hardest hit. More than 400 emergency personnel (internal and contracted) attempted to address the devastation. Throughout June, no equipment could be removed or powered up. Stairwell doors needed to be kept closed. By the first week of July 2001, the basement and ground floor was still off limits, and only one entrance was available. Ground floor occupants needed to continue to work at their temporary sites. Gross mold spore counts continued to be beyond acceptable limits in the basement, which was ventilated separately from the rest of the building.
The building was opened for business on July 11, 2001 but the ground floor and basement were construction remediation sites and off-limits except to access elevators to upper levels. Two entrances to the building were available: on the Webber Plaza side of the building near the circle drive and at the breezeway near the guard’s desk. Occupants were reminded in an employee newsletter not to block open stair well doors on any floor. The newsletter Scoop reported that in 2007, at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a new six-story research space completed in the aftermath of Tropical Storm Allison, “[m]any in the crowd were moved to tears as they recalled that day in June 2001. ‘All of the animals were drowned and there were $165 million in structural damages,’ President Willerson said. ‘It was a daunting task, but we didn’t give up.’”
Did the anthrax lab in the basement have virulent Ames anthrax strain, to include Ames? If so, what was done with the isolates during the devastation caused in the basement by the flood? At the time it was lawful to have virulent anthrax in its liquid form in a BL-2 facility, contrary to the occasional misperception; a hood is used in handling such isolates. A University President explained as much in a letter in connection with the incident when some live Ames spores were sent by Northern Arizona to Los Alamos in Fall 2001.
Members of the lab brought out the champagne at the lab in late 2001 when a special visa was granted to a research team member, who without it would have had to return to China. “We knew it was going to be risky,” said Dr. Koehler, a microbiologist at the school who for the past 20 years has studied the anthrax bacterium now being used as a terrorist weapon. “The question was whether current events would convince federal officials that [the researcher’s] skills are in the national interest or make them restrict workers from certain countries.”
“It is a horrible feeling to think that it could be someone I know, that the perpetrator is a microbiologist among us,” said Dr. Koehler. In September 2001, Dr. Koehler explained her anthrax research, how terrorists might deploy anthrax as a biological weapon and how physicians would treat it.
Aafia’s brother in 2001 was associated with addresses in Ann Arbor, Detroit, and Canton, Michigan — and even Harrison, NJ — in 2001. The ACLU attorney representing Aafia’s family advised me that it had been years since she was Houston — certainly before 2001 and maybe not since she was married. She added that if Aafia was there, it was to visit her brother, who has nothing to do with the med center.” The attorney reports: “there is no way they could have helped her get access to the necessary labs at the med center.”
On Research Day in 2003, the award winners for Biomedical Excellence included a graduate student working in Dr. Koehler’s lab, Melissa Drysdale, who worked on gene regulation in a virulent strain of bacillus anthracis.
Dr. Koehler received, for example, the Weybridge strain from Porton Down prior to the Fall of 2001. Did Dr. Koehler have virulent Ames from either Porton Down or somewhere else? (Her mentor was the eminent vaccine researcher Dr. Curtis Thorne who got samples directly from Ft. Detrick). Co-researcher Rick Lyons at UNM was fedexed virulent Ames from flask 1029 in March 2001 at the same time the Houston lab upgraded. This month, Dr. Lyons co-published with Dr. Koehler on virulent Ames in rabbits, along with former Houston grad student Melissa Drysdale, who is now at UNM with Dr. Lyons.
Remember: Khalid Mohammed, who told authorities about Aafia, had anthrax production documents on his assistant’s laptop (the guy working with Aafia’s future husband in UAE in the summer of 2001). She allegedly was associated with both KSM and “Jafar the Pilot” who is at large. She later married an Al Qaeda operative al-Baluchi who, like al-Hawsawi, had been listed as a contact for the hijackers and took over plots upon the arrest of KSM. Authorities have said that a Pakistani scientist , who they refused to name was helping Al Qaeda with its anthrax production program. Were they referring to bacteriologist Abdul Qudus Khan in whose home the Pakistan authorities claim KSM was captured? Was it Rauf Ahmad who Zawahiri sent to infiltrate UK biodefense? Was it the chemistry professor who met with Uzair Paracha in February 2003? Or was it Aafia who was alleged to be a “facilitator” who handled logistics. “Logistics” is handling an operation that involves providing labor and materials as needed. One government psychiatrist affidavit reports that she claims to have been tasked by an “Abu Luaba” to research germ warfare. According to a UN dossier reviewed by a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, in June 2001 she traveled to Liberia to meet Al Qaeda’s military commander, Atef, who had been head of the anthrax planning. One important mystery to resolve analysis is to determine whether the chauffeur who claims the lady was Aafia is lying or mistaken. A FBI memo from 2003 titled “Allegations Relating to al Qaeda’s Trafficking in Conflict Diamonds,” and a related 2004 presentation to the intelligence community, debunking the allegations relating to trafficking in conflict diamonds. The memo was declassified in 2006 and provided under FOIA in February 2008 to intelwire.com. If those documents represent the FBI’s current thinking, there is reason to think Aafia never went to Liberia in June 2001 — or at least that the FBI does not think she did.
The ACLU in a February 2004 publication called “Sanctioned Bias: Racial Profiling Since 9/11” described Aafia’s brother first encounter with the FBI. Muhammad A. Siddiqui is an architect in Houston and father of two young children. Someone with the same common name, as mentioned in the court record relating to Project Bojinka. United States of America v. Ramzi Ahmed Yousef et al, (August 26, 1996), page 5118. A letter was read into the record
“To: Brother Mohammad Alsiddiqi. We are facing a lot of problems because of you. Fear Allah. Mr. Siddiqi, there is a day of judgment. You will be asked, if you are very busy with something more important, don’t give promises to other people. See you in the day of judgment. Still waiting, Khalid Shaikh, and Bojinka.”
In addition to many people having this very common name, people often used aliases. The attorney, Dietrich Snell, at the time was under the impression it related to a solicitation for money. Attorney Snell was from the US Attorney’s Office. More recently, Snell acted as counsel for the 9/11 Commission. He served as Deputy Attorney General for Public Advocacy under Eliot Spitzer. What was the address of the recipient? Who was Muhammad Siddiqui with whom KSM corresponded?
Attorney General Ashcroft and Director Mueller made an on-the-record renewed push to find Aafia Siddiqui in a press conference on May 26, 2004 shortly after ACLU Attorney Annette Lamoreaux responded to my emailed inquiries about Aafia. Three days after the Pakistan Ministry of Interior claimed she had been handed over to US authorities in late March 2003.
There are the many questions surrounding the mystery of the disappearance of the lovely, intelligent and pious — and it turns out occasionally quite chatty — Aafia Siddiqui. Aafia once had an MIT alumni email account forwarded to umaisha@yahoo.com — which under one translation means lively mom. Aisha was the Prophet’s favorite wife. Maybe correspondence in that email account held the answers.
In a Pakistan news account, Attorney Whitfield Sharp reported that she didn’t know of any police report filed by the mom. In the same account, she reports that Aafia received job offer at both Johns Hopkins and the State University of New York (SUNY). It likely was SUNY downstate in Brooklyn where her sister had gone to school and lived. (Her mother Ismat is associated with addresses in Brooklyn, as well as Massachusetts, in Houston, and in Ann Arbor where Mohammad’s wife had a medical practice. Mohammad is associated with some Ann Arbor and Detroit-area addresses. Ann Arbor, coincidentally, was where IANA was located, as well as the President of Global Relief.
When he was captured, Al-Baluchi, Khalid Mohammed’s nephew and Aafia Siddiqui’s husband, “was in possession of a perfume spray bottle which contained a low concentration of cyanide when he was arrested.” He was the fellow who met with Majid Khan about using a textiles shipping container to smuggle an unidentified chemical into the country. Cyanide in perfume bottles had been suggested for use in nightclubs in Indonesia but Bin Laden reportedly nixed the plan as ineffectual.
The transcript from the Combatant Status Review Tribunal explains:
MEMBER [AL-BALUCHI]: While you were in Pakistan you describe the cyanide…
DETAINEE: [Interrupting the Member]
MEMBER: … you had in your possession, a small amount, as being textile, chemical-oriented.
DETAINEE: Yes.
MEMBER: Why would you have that on your person?
DETAINEE: Just I have. Wasn’t for specific purpose but I have. It’s ah…
MEMBER: Did you have an intent to use it once you got there? What were you going to do with it?
DETAINEE: No, no. Just ah, it’s use for clothing to remove the color. And something in Pakistan it’s something that they do. It’s bleach like kinda bleach but industrial bleach so.”
According to the DOD formal charges issued in February 2008, KSM would give the hijackers a chemical in an eye dropper to remove Pakistan visas from their passport. Perhaps the low concentration of cyanide in the perfume bottle used to remove stains just related to that — rather than consideration of a plot to spray cyanide in a nightclub that had been vetoed by Bin Laden.
But here’s a Helpful Heloise Tip. Before attempting to get that damn spot out, first get rid of that incriminating pocket litter. The transcript from the hearing on al-Baluchi’s status as an “unlawful combatant” continues: “The Detainee’s pocket litter included a letter from unidentified Saudi Arabian scholars to Usama bin Laden. The letter discussed al Qaida’s strategy in the War on Terror.” Upon her arrest in the summer of 2008, Aafia’s pocket litter included both documents about biological weapons and correspondencing with US-based cell members about attacks.
Will Aafia Siddiqui cooperate about other US-based operatives? Will Ali Al-Timimi?
Will GAO at least obtain all the unclassified documents relevant to its charge from Congress?
DXer said
According to witnesses, Brandeis neurologist Aafia Siddiqui was in Sierra Leone in June 2001 at the same time as Muhammed Atef, Al Qaeda’s military commander. When Glenn Simpson of the Wall Street Journal, however, broke the story, based on a UN dossier, I emailed the two attorneys who have represented Aafia’s family to ask if there was any information on her whereabouts in June 2001 that contradicted the report. I got no response. (In the past, ACLU Attorney Lamoreaux has been very quick to offer me evidence in conflict with reports in
the media. But I never saw any documents or heard any documents described that conflict with the Wall Street Journal report.) Until there is conflicting evidence, I think it remains very possible that Al Qaeda’s military commander met with Aafia in June 2001. I’m told her family forbade her family from cooperating with respect to the credit card receipts. Atef’s involvement is significant, not merely because he was Al Qaeda’s military commander, but because the group was claiming that the Operation “Winds of Black Death” was 90% complete used his name. Atef apparently was killed in a bombing raid in Fall 2001.
GAO and Army analysts:
I have discussed the Koehler lab in Houston and the doors being not only unlocked but actually propped open in June 2001. But did Aafia have potential access to the collection of anthrax strains at Brandeis? Did that long-held collection include Ames, the anthrax used in the Fall 2001 mailings? On March 11, 2002, the Brandeis General Counsel sent an email advising that the federal authorities had subpoenaed records in connection with the investigation of the anthrax crimes.
To: All Faculty/PIs/Scientists/Postdocs/Research Staff in Biology,
Biochemistry, Chemistry, Physics, Rosenstiel and Volen
From: Mel Bernstein, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic
Affairs
Judith R. Sizer, General Counsel
Date: March 11, 2002
Re: URGENT: Response to Federal Grand Jury Subpoena
A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C. has recently issued subpoenas
to a number of research universities, including Brandeis, in
connection with the ongoing investigation by the Department of Justice
into possible illegal use of bacillus anthracis (anthrax).
In its response to the subpoena, the University must disclose
information concerning every present and former faculty member,
employee or other person affiliated with Brandeis (e.g., post-doctoral
fellows, visiting scholars) who has maintained or worked with anthrax
at Brandeis in the last twelve years (or in the last twenty years, if
the anthrax, or an anthrax simulant, was in dry form).
In order to ensure the University’s timely response to this subpoena,
please advise us by Friday, March 15, 2002, whether or not you, or
anyone else to your knowledge, has ever maintained, handled, stored,
destroyed or transferred any strain of anthrax in any Brandeis
laboratory or facility on or after January 1, 1990 (or, in the case of
dry, powdered, dry aerosolized or weaponized anthrax or anthrax
simulants, such as bacillus thuringiensis, bacillus globigii, bacillus
cereus and bacillus subtilis, any use,production or manufacture or on
or after March 1, 1982).
PLEASE BE SURE TO RESPOND TO THIS INQUIRY, EVEN IF JUST TO CONFIRM
THAT YOU HAVE NO KNOWLEDGE OF ANY USE OF ANTHRAX OR ANTHRAX SIMULANTS
AS DESCRIBED ABOVE. You are welcome to respond to this message by
reply e-mail, if you wish. In order to provide a comprehensive
response to the grand jury, we need to hear from all members of the
Brandeis community who have received this message.
If you have any questions or comments, please contact Ms. _____ at
XXXX@brandeis or XXXXXX. Many thanks for your cooperation.
In late February 2002, William Broad of the New York Times explained:
“In an important step for narrowing the pool of anthrax suspects, the
Justice Department is sending subpoenas to microbiology laboratories
across the country for samples of the Ames strain of Bacillus
anthracis, the kind used in the letter attacks in the fall.
Scientists working for the federal government said they hoped that
studying the samples’ genetic fingerprints would help determine which
of 12 or more laboratories is the likely source of the bacteria in the
attacks.”
Scott Shane of the Baltimore Sun wrote on February 22, 2002 of the subpoenas:
“But even as investigators pursued possible links between military
research and the anthrax-laced letters, they were learning of more
laboratories that have had the Ames strain of anthrax used in the
attacks. At last count, 25 such labs were identified, including
facilities in at least five foreign countries — and investigators
think there are more, said sources familiar with the work.”
In November 2001, the Hazmat Team and the State Department of Health was called to Brandeis after three reseachers were doing research with anthrax and Administration officials were concerned there might be contamination. The scientists were confident all
scientific protocols had been followed but Hazmat was called nonetheless. The research had been done after the anthrax mailings in response — seeking means to detect anthrax spores. Anthrax was used that had been at Brandeis a long time, having been acquired at a time
before federal regulations in 1997 required that transfers be recorded. The lab was in the Kalman Building, which was part of the complex of buildings adjoining the Volen Center. Brandeis researchers Daniel Perlman and Inga Mahler had “decided to focus on developing a
solid growth medium for cultivating B. anthracis that might be usable in the field with a minimum of equipment. They further developed the growth medium for use at room temperature thereby obviating the need for equipment such as incubators for sustaining an elevated
temperature.” The pair obtained a patent issued March 2004 titled “Selective growth medium for Bacillus anthracis and methods of use.”
Dr. Perlman has been innovative on a wide range of consumer products, such as involving Vitamin E to milk; Dr. Mahler had published on the subject of gram positive and gram negative bacteria (the subject underlying the patent) in the Journal of Bacteriology in
1989. Dr. Mahler advises me by email that the strain of Bacillus anthracis they used in December 2001 was ordered by her group at Brandeis almost 40 years ago. It came from the American Type Culture Collection and was kept viable, together with other stock strains.
She explains that before 9/11 you could simply obtain the organism from culture collections or colleagues. Their offices are in Abelson-Bass-Yalem, adjoining the Volen Center where Aafia’s lab primiarly was located. Within the complex of buldings adjoining the
Volen Center, Abelson-Bass-Yalem was home to Biological Physics.
Years ago Dr. Mahler advised me that the strain used (referred to in the paper as MC 607) — MC stands for Rosenstiel Center — was Vollum. Vollum is a strain that like Ames is used to challenge vaccines; it is marginally less lethal but still was used by the Russians as their
strain of choice. Dr. Mahler forthrightly reported that she does know of any Ames on campus. Dr. Perle did not respond to my email query.
Aafia Siddiqui, for whom the FBI has issued an international alert, studied in the neurological sciences at Brandeis. She obtained her PhD in 2001, having graduated from MIT with a degree in biology in 1994. The Visual Lab at which Aafia worked had rules: “No Hitting, No
Punching, No Pushing, No Grabbing, No Biting.” Judging from its internet page, the lab seems to have been a pleasant place to work and emphasizes in its operating manual that if you don’t know “ask.” The lab’s work under Robert Sekuler, mainly funded by a grant from the
NIH, related to how we remember, forget, or misremember things. Her 2001 183-page thesis “Separating the components of imitation,” which concerns visual learning and visual discrimination, is very far removed from questions like the Palestinian conflict or creating a
fine powder using a mini-spraydryer. It was available online for purchase.
The university webpage, when I once accessed it, explained:
“The Neuroscience laboratories are housed within the Volen Center and
adjoining buildings, and this close proximity facilitates the high
degree of collaboration and exchange for which Brandeis has become
famous. There are presently 22 Neuroscience faculty found in six
participating departments (Biology, Biochemistry, Psychology, Physics,
Chemistry, and Computer Science). There are today approximately 35
Neuroscience Program Ph.D. students, who often work side-by-side with
Ph.D. students in the other Life Sciences graduate programs at
Brandeis.”
All students are expected to attend the regular Monday afternoon
Neuroscience seminars (3:30 pm), most of the Wednesday Life Sciences
seminars at 4:00 pm. and other relevant seminars in Neuroscience.
“In the first year of their Ph.D. program, students do 4 nine-week
rotations in different laboratories of their choosing. First-year
course work includes a core class in principles of neuroscience, and
intensive graduate level seminars that give students experience in
reading original research literature and making oral presentations.
Graduate research advisors are typically chosen at the end of the
first year.”
So one question is: what different labs did Aafia work in during her first year? We know she spent 6 months working as a lab technician at the request of a 911 plotter researching biological weapons. How skilled was she? When it suits their purpose her supporters argue that this person who went to the University of Houston was Pakistan’s top student. Other times we are told that would not have been talented at lab work.
Aafia is not a geneticist as reported yesterday by the Wall Street Journal although she had planned (see 1991 video) to major in genetics. Nor is it likely she is a “senior Al Qaeda leader” as reported today by the Financial Times. Although she was married to a key 911 plotter and certainly had relationships with top people (She wrote a paper on the role of women in islam which may provide insights, as does her 1991 video when she argues that woman historically have been as important warriors against non-believers).
While we collectively try to understand where Aafia is — and what her role was — perhaps we all can agree that she is indeed astonishing.”
DXer said
The report about Sierra Leone was from 2004. AP staff (August 8, 2004). “Al-Qaeda bought diamonds before 9/11″. USA Today. Associated Press, Dakar, Senegal.
“Special Court for Sierra Leone: Office of the Prosecutor: Profile, Aafia Siddiqui” (PDF). NEFA Foundation
As for the general mystery of the missing 5 years, Wikipedia has numerous hyperlinked sources and I will leave it to someone else to come up with the most reliable sourcing — or better yet new solid evidence — about who she spent the 5 years.
Suffice it to say that I don’t consider her sister Fowzia and mother Ismaat reliable witnesses given they in fact have no personal knowledge and are highly motivated to tell a narrative calculated to garner public support. I would also note that Aafia does not address the subject even though it would be in her interest to do so if Fowzia and Ismaat and Yvonne Ridley were correct.
“According to her ex-husband, after the global alert for her was issued Siddiqui went into hiding, and worked for al-Qaeda.[20][53][72] During her disappearance Khan said he saw her at Islamabad airport in April 2003, as she disembarked from a flight with their son, and said he helped Inter-Services Intelligence identify her. He said he again saw her two years later, in a Karachi traffic jam.[20][24] Media reports Siddiqui having told the FBI that she worked at the Karachi Institute of Technology in 2005, was in Afghanistan in the winter of 2007; she stayed for a time during her disappearance in Quetta, Pakistan, and was sheltered by various people.[3][12][73] According to an intelligence official in the Afghan Ministry of the Interior, her son Ahmad, who was with her when she was arrested, said he and Siddiqui had worked in an office in Pakistan, collecting money for poor people.[12] He told Afghan investigators that on August 14, 2008, they had traveled by road from Quetta, Pakistan, to Afghanistan.[38] Amjad Khan, who unsuccessfully sought custody of his eldest son, Ahmad, said most of the claims of the family in the Pakistani media relating to her and their children were to garner public support and sympathy for her; he said they were one-sided and in mostly false.[38][53] An Afghan intelligence official said he believes that Siddiqui was working with Jaish-e-Mohammed(the “Army of Muhammad”), a Pakistani Islamic mujahedeen military group that fights in Kashmir and Afghanistan.[12] Siddiqui’s maternal uncle, Shams ul-Hassan Faruqi, said that on January 22, 2008, she visited him in Islamabad.[20][24] He said that she told him she had been held by Pakistani agencies, and asked for his help in order to cross into Afghanistan, where she thought she would be safe in the hands of the Taliban.[20][24] He had worked in Afghanistan, and made contact with the Taliban in 1999, but told her he was no longer in touch with them. He notified his sister, Siddiqui’s mother, who came the next day to see her daughter. He said that Siddiqui stayed with them for two days.[74] Her uncle has signed an affidavit swearing to these facts.[38] Ahmad and Siddiqui reappeared in 2008.[12] Afghan authorities handed the boy over to Pakistan in September 2008, and he now lives with his aunt in Karachi, who has prohibited him from talking to the press.[12][20] In April 2010, Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Maliksaid that a 12-year-old girl who was found outside a house in Karachi was identified by a DNA test as Siddiqui’s daughter Mariyam, and that she had been returned to her family.[75]
When she shot the gun, she allegedly screamed “Death to America.” The talking heads argued that a supporter of Al Qaeda could not be involved in the mailings because they wouldn’t say “Death to America.” Go figure.
On her marriage to 911 operative Ammar Al-Baluchi, see generally
“Detainee Biography: Ammar al-Baluchi”.Announcements. U.S. Director of National Intelligence.
DXer said
The Difference in Responding to Natural and Unnatural Outbreaks
• Amesh A. Adalja
The response to natural and unnatural outbreaks share many elements. However, unnatural outbreak management will consist of several additional tasks: nuanced communication strategies, concomitant forensic investigations, consideration of altered pathogen features, and bioremediation concerns.
Comment: The piece cites
Martin GJ, Friedlander AM (2010) Anthrax as an agent of bioterrorism. In: Mandell GL, Bennett JE, Dolin R (eds) Mandell, Douglas, and Bennett’s principles and practice of infectious diseases, 7th edn. Churchill Livingstone, Philadelphia
Question for Dr. Friedlander: Even if Dr. Ivins is the one who had the correspondence and notes, why weren’t the 16 pages relating to this DARPA-funded research by a former Zawahiri associate obtained and faxed prior to Spring 2005?
http://www.amerithrax.wordpress.com
Why weren’t they faxed to the FBI in October 2001?
When were the lab notebook pages provided? What is the notebook number reflecting that research?
Where and when was the plague research done?
Question for the FBI: Why didn’t the FBI provide the lab notebook pages from 1998 reflecting this research?
DXer said
Bioterrorism and Hospital Preparedness, by J. Michael Kilby
http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=AH0V5b4UJagC&oi=fnd&pg=PT222&dq=anthrax+2013&ots=Am0mp6Yx2X&sig=lrx6hj-yjOgDnkoIQbg15fMucw4
DXer said
Zero Dark Thirty’s Wrong and Dangerous Conclusion
Posted: 12/21/2012 10:21 am
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alex-gibney/zero-dark-thirty-torture_b_2345589.html
Let me say, as many others have, that the film is a stylistic masterwork, an inspiration in terms of technique from the lighting, camera, acting and viscerally realistic production and costume design. Also, as a screen story, it is admirable for its refusal to funnel the hunt for bin Laden into a series of movie clichés — love interests, David versus Goliath struggles, etc. More than that, the film does an admirable job of showing how complex was the detective work that led to the death of bin Laden: a combination of tips from foreign intelligence, sleuthing through old files, monitoring signals from emails and cell phones (SIGINT) and mining human intelligence on the ground (HUMINT). It’s all the more infuriating therefore, because the film is so attentive to the accuracy of details — including the mechanism of brutal interrogations — that it is so sloppy when it comes to portraying the efficacy of torture. That may seem like a small thing but it is not. Because when we go to war, our politicians will be guided by our popular will. And if we believe that torture “got” bin Laden, then we will be more prone to accept the view that a good “end” can justify brutal “means.”
But torture did not lead us to bin Laden. For other analyses of the way the factual record diverges from Boal/Bigelow version, I recommend pieces by Jane Mayer and Peter Bergen, who are far more experienced journalists than I. In addition, one can also refer to the press release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program, which concludes that, following the examination of more than six million pages of records from the Intelligence Community, the CIA did not obtain its first clues about the identity of bin Laden’s courier from “CIA detainees subjected to coercive interrogation techniques.”
Comment: It seems that in approaching Amerithrax, the most important SIGINT to examine was historical before targets would have hardened. Sleuthing through old files. In approaching WTC 1993 the FBI didn’t even translate the files that had been seized.
DXer said
Biopreparedness and Public Health
NATO Science for Peace and Security Series A: Chemistry and Biology 2013, pp 209-220
Case Study – United States of America
Lisa D. Rotz, Marcelle Layton
Abstract
The United States (US) considers the intentional use of a biological agent a serious national security threat. Over the last decade, federal, state, and local governments in the US have made concerted efforts to enhance preparedness within the public health, medical, and emergency response systems to address this threat. These activities span a wide range of areas from the enactment of new legal authorities and legislative changes to significant financial investments to enhance multiple detection and response system capabilities and the adoption of a national command and control structure for response. Many of these investments, although prompted by the concern for bioterrorism, have served to strengthen public health, medical, and emergency response systems overall and have proven invaluable in responses to other large-scale emergencies, such as the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic.
http://www.amerithrax.wordpress.com
DXer said
Handbook of Operations Research for Homeland Security
International Series in Operations Research & Management Science Volume 183, 2013, pp 141-166
Mitigating the Risk of an Anthrax Attack with Medical Countermeasures
• Jeffrey W. Herrmann
This chapter presents a simulation model that can be used to prepare for a bioterrorism attack that releases anthrax spores and exposes thousands of persons to this deadly disease. The model predicts the expected number of deaths using information about the size of the population, the number exposed, the progress of the disease, the resources available for distributing medication and treating the ill, and the size of local medication stockpiles. The chapter also presents a risk management approach for allocating a limited medication stockpile to multiple cities to minimize the expected number of deaths. The results show that the optimal allocation can be quite different from allocations that are proportional to population size.
Within this Chapter
• Introduction
• MCM Modeling Approach
• MCM Model Results
• Discussion of MCM Model Results
• Multiple City Resource Allocation Problem
• Resource Allocation Results
• Discussion of Resource Allocation Results
• Conclusions
• References
• References
DXer said
Should children be used to develop an anthrax vaccine?
By John Dorschner
The Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues will hold an open meeting in Miami beginning Monday on the tough issue of whether children should be used in attempts to develop an anthrax vaccine.
The public is welcome to the meeting, to be held at University of Miami Hospital’s Seminar Center at 1400 NW 12th Ave., starting at 9 a.m. Monday and continuing to noon Tuesday.
The discussion concerns the scenario of terrorists creating weapons in which deadly bacteria could kill thousands of people. There’s discussion of developing a vaccine to counter such attacks, but could it proved to be effective for children if it were not tested on them? And what parents would permit such testing?
The panel is chaired by Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania. President Barack Obama created the commission in 2009 to advise him on bioethical issues.
A live webcast will be available at bioethics.gov.
http://www.amerithrax.wordpress.com
DXer said
Yazid Marwan Hadeed (Yazid Sufaat) writes:
“Exercise justice between your ears and your mouth. The only reason why you were blessed with one mouth and two ears is so you could listen more than you speak” – Abu Darda ra
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DXer said
http://www.uticaod.com/features/x2105856930/Oneida-County-tests-ability-to-cope-with-anthrax-attack
MARCY —
County tests ability to cope with anthrax attack.
Oneida County Health Department officials conducted an exercise Monday at SUNYIT to test their response capabilities in the event of an anthrax attack.
“The scenario we chose was anthrax and the purpose was to test our capacity to treat a large number of patients in a short amount of time,” said Ken Fanelli, health department public information officer.
Volunteers and health department employees assumed the roles of victims who, after undergoing a decontamination process, received medication (in the form of M&M’s), were provided information as to what they were exposed to and were administered mental health support, if needed.
“Our goal was to test our ability to treat 200 patients in an hour,” Fanelli said.
Comment:
Why is distributing Cipro to 200 patients in an hour sufficient in the event of an aerosol anthrax release?
Why make the people get out of their car — parking it in the SUNY IT parking lot — and then coming to go through a line in that large room?
Why not instead hand out Cipro to cars passing through along the access road? In the event of an aerosol release shouldn’t the County first responders aim to distribute to 2000 an hour? And shouldn’t they take into account that people will not want to expose themselves unnecessarily to waiting? County personnel doing these drills seem to approach an anthrax drill as if the situation will be like a flu clinic. I think they are underestimating the panic that would be associated with report of an aerosol release. Indeed, won’t the government instruct that people should stay indoors?
As a practical matter, anyone in Oneida County facing an anthrax aerosol release is going to want to grab their Cipro and then continue in their car out of the county. As for “mental health support “contemplated, it seems that they would be less likely to freak out if they could keep on driving.
A better test might be handing out M&Ms at the Jamesville balloon festival, the State Fair or the Jazz festival — or weekend shopping at Destiny USA before shopping. It seems that is the order of magnitude of traffic that might need to be processed.
http://www.uticaod.com/features/x2105856930/Oneida-County-tests-ability-to-cope-with-anthrax-attack?photo=0
DXer said
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/12/syria-chem-prep/
“There hasn’t been a chemical attack in the Middle East since Saddam Hussein gassed Iraqi Kurds at Halabja in 1988. Assad’s motivations remain unclear to U.S. officials, but according to Warrick, someone in the Syrian chain of command provided instructions to prep sarin for potential battlefield use about two weeks ago. Assad’s intentions are unknowable, but using sarin will most foreclose on the life-saving option of finding a foreign country willing to accept Assad for exile. Then again, an anonymous Mideastern intelligence official told Warrick, “If you’re a general and you think you’re not going to survive this, you might not care.”
Comment:
Wasn’t the means of delivery in the chemical attack in Iraq the combat-configured helicopters sold by one or two US companies?
Weren’t those helicopters illegally equipped with illegally-supplied TOW missiles? As evidenced by the ensuing indictment in Miami? (Eric Nadler attended the trial)
Wasn’t the public claim made by the Administration and Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz that they the helicopters were being sold to the Agriculture Ministry?
Weren’t they in fact equipped with quick-release mechanism for pesticide?
Wasn’t that cover story about the sale to the Ministry of Agriculture just a transparent crock?
Didn’t Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia arrange with arms trafficker Sarkis Soghanalian for the funding and purchase — with details worked out over a dinner at Beni Hani’s for which there is a transcript and audiotape?
When are we going to learn from history?
In the case of the gassing of the Kurds, rather than blow hot air about Saddam attacking his own people, we should follow the money — to include illegal bribes in violation of the FCPA.
The sales were at the height of the Iraq-Iran war and the Saudis were afraid that Iraq was going to be overrun by Iranian infantry.
So turning to today’s lesson:
Who armed Syria? Who profited? How many Americans can find Syria on a map?
How many innocents are going to die because reporters didn’t follow the money?
DXer said
Here are many documents with people who might have insight into Awlaki’s detention in 2010-2011 and his subsequent killing by a drone.
GAO: Was he questioned about Amerithrax? If so, what did he say?
http://www.scribd.com/doc/114624904/Anwar-al-Aulaqi-Docs-Combined#page=75
DXer said
Errata – Awlaki, I believe, was detained in 2006 and 2007, as evidenced by these privacy forms releasing information about his detention under FOIA to the specified individual dated November 14, 2006, and the other July 2, 2007.
DXer said
AKI recently posted confirming her belief in her father’s innocence. She was being harsh toward factually baseless points being made in support of an Ivins Theory.
DXer said
DHS releases guidance on protecting first responder health during anthrax attack
October 21, 2012 | By David Perera
http://www.fiercehomelandsecurity.com/story/dhs-releases-guidance-protecting-first-responder-health-during-anthrax-atta/2012-10-21
The Homeland Security September 2012 ” Guidance for Protecting Responders’ Health During the First Week Following A Wide-Area Aerosol Anthrax Attack” contains the following assumptions of an attack:
Appendix 1. Scenario, Impact, and Response Assumptions
This guidance is intended to facilitate planning for one particular scenario, a wide-area aerosol anthrax attack. This scenario is based on a number of assumptions about the nature of the attack and the resulting environmental contamination. These parameters may vary in a real event, particularly as the event evolves and further characterization of the extent of the attack and other specific information is gained. Furthermore, the guidance may change based on changes in our understanding of the behavior of the contaminant, availability of monitoring and analytic technologies, and our understanding of the availability and efficacy of the protective measures recommended. The most important of the assumptions associated with this guidance are listed below:
Assumptions regarding attack scenario: (NOTE: assumptions are made for planning purposes and might not hold in a specific future incident)
The attack involves only a single threat agent, B. anthracis. This guidance applies to a scenario in which a quantity of B. anthracis spores in a liquid or dried preparation is disseminated as a small-particle aerosol generated by a spraying device. The release is outdoors, contaminating a wide area, using B. anthracis. Wide-area environmental contamination is possible; this contamination will be spotty and not accurately predicted by models. The strain of B. anthracis used in the attack has not been modified or engineered to express resistance to oral antimicrobial drugs. To date, naturally occurring strains of B. anthracis are susceptible to ciprofloxacin and doxycycline. The aerosol attack is covert; initial notification will occur after environmental sensors, disease manifestation, or credible forensic intelligence provide evidence of or detect the presence of B. anthracis spores.
Assumptions regarding ability to characterize environmental distribution: BioWatch or other detection systems may not recognize the attack. Environmental monitoring and forensic efforts will be unable to provide timely information regarding the release, source strength, and scope/area of risk. Modeling is unable to accurately predict the specific area of risk from primary aerosol exposure but will be of value to incident commanders attempting to characterize the scope of the attack. Uncertainty about the extent of contamination and associated risk for the first week (or more) exists owing to the complexity of the problem and current (and foreseeable) capacity for sampling and testing. Travel within the geographical area could increase the likelihood of additional aerosol exposure by inadvertent entry into areas of high contamination or susceptibility of spore re-aerosolization. People transiting into and out of the potentially affected area will complicate risk assessment and potentially increase the spread of contamination.
September 2012 17
Demand for oral antimicrobial drugs and vaccine will likely extend beyond the geographic boundaries of the affected area. Environmental hazard mapping will be undertaken immediately, but may not be able to fully assess the potential contaminated area. Changes in environmental conditions, such as wind and rain, may complicate risk assessment and the potential spread of contamination.
Assumptions regarding impact to the population suspected to be exposed:
By the time an attack has been recognized, regardless of detection mechanism, people may have been traveling in and out of affected areas for 36 hours or more. Everyone within the suspected area of contamination is considered to be at some level of risk of exposure (either primary or secondary) for the entire duration of their presence in the area, although the specific risk is not predictable. A large number of people in a broad geographical area will inhale B. anthracis spores but it will not be possible to determine specifically which people are exposed and will develop an infection; therefore, all people suspected of exposure will require a post-exposure regimen of 60 days of appropriate oral antimicrobial PEP, and should be considered for a three-dose regimen of anthrax vaccine.
Assumptions regarding response:
The emergency use of certain medical countermeasures will be authorized under EUAs following specific steps by the Secretaries of HHS, DHS, or Department of Defense (DOD) to make a specific emergency determination; by the HHS Secretary to make a declaration justifying the emergency use of the product; and by the FDA to issue each EUA. (An EUA for oral formulations of doxycycline products for PEP of inhalation anthrax was issued by FDA in July 2011, to facilitate anthrax preparedness and response efforts.) Modalities (e.g., public health PODs, retail PODS, employer PODs) will be activated following an attack to dispense oral antimicrobial drugs to the at-risk population as quickly as possible. The immediate dispensing of oral antimicrobial drugs to the at-risk population may also rely on a venue-specific Postal Plan that involves postal carrier volunteers with law enforcement escorts delivering oral antimicrobial drugs or other “push” options under local jurisdictional consideration. Many responders originate from inside the at-risk geographic area, and therefore will have been at risk of exposure from the primary aerosol. All transportation in and proximal to the aerosol release will be affected. Responders who originate from outside the affected geographic area will be moving from a status of essentially no likely exposure into an area that places them at increased risk for exposure to B. anthracis spores through secondary aerosolization. In addition to traditional “first responders,” a number of other responders will be critical during the first week following an anthrax attack, including essential employees across critical infrastructure sectors who must provide uninterrupted.
DXer said
It amuses me to read studies about algorithms relating to predicting a bioattack and related theses from GMU PhD students — when the efforts might better be spent obtaining relevant interviews… such as Ali Al-Timimi who shared a suite with the DARPA-funded Ames anthrax researchers at GMU, the ones who developed a patent to grow anthrax in silica in March 2001.
In one recent PhD thesis, the student explains:
“With the rapid expansion of scientific technology brought on through increasing globalization, the prospect of incorporating the use of chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) weapons into their tactics is becoming increasingly feasible and likely. As these radical groups become more energized, they may resort to using CBRN. In order to avert a disaster from a terrorist-CBRN (T-CBRN) event, it is important to study the likelihood of these groups employing CBRN. Analysts continue to search for sound methodologies in assessing the risk of such groups pursuing CBRN. Psychological and mathematical modeling attempts have been made in discerning terrorist’s propensities for CBRN Asal (2010), Sullivan and Perry (2004), Post (2002), Tucker (2000) etc., but there still remains considerable gaps in these areas.
Because of the deficiencies in analytical methodologies and controversial techniques used for modeling T-CBRN, we proposed the questions: can a more accurate predictive model of T-CBRN use be developed? And, when compared against past event data, would such a model reliably predict the amount of ” Relative Risk ” of a terrorist that would elect to use CBRN?
This study entailed the development of an algorithm linked with statistical software (ProStat Version 5.5, Poly Software International) for predicting the Relative Risk of a terrorist seeking CBRN. This was achieved through four phases. Phase I involved searching open literature and proposing independent-variables associated with T-CBRN. Phase II entailed the construction of a ” Random-Nations Matrix ” representing the T-CBRN universe. This matrix was then used for correlating variables suspected of being associated with T-CBRN. Phase III involved the construction of a multivariate model from the variables which met our correlation criteria with T-CBRN. The final phase, Phase IV, entailed the construction of an algorithm derived from the model design, for predicting the amount of Relative Risk of a terrorist seeking, acquiring and or using CBRN, and the Relative Risk of T-CBRN occurring in a specific country. Probability was measured by the strength of the relationship indicated by the p-value.
The study drew primarily from the following databases: the Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism (2007), the U.S. Department of State (2010), Globalsecurity.org (2010), the Global Terrorism Database (2010), the Central Intelligence Agency World Fact Book (2009-2010), the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies/Monterey WMD Terrorism Database (2010), the Center for Defense Information (2009), the Freedom House Center for Systemic Peace (2009) and the McDonald’s Corporation’s list of worldwide McDonald’s restaurants (2010).
A Random Nations Matrix was developed for determining the two independent-variables that correlated with our dependent-variable “Terrorist-CBRN “. This matrix was constructed from the random selection of 74 countries and/or locations from the CIA World Fact Book (2009-2010). Thirty-nine of the same variables were measured for each of the seventy-four selected countries or locations compiled in the matrix. The 39 variables selected for each country or location, were correlated with each other and the T-CBRN variable for determining correlative significance. A multivariate-model was developed with 67.3 percent predictive power for T-CBRN using the independent-variables: ” Political Violence Per Capita ” and ” Number of Terrorist-CBRN Technical Experts “. Average lag-times between terrorist’s interest and use of CBRN were also calculated for the various classifications of terrorist-groups.”
DXer said
Ft. Hood Whitewash
Last Updated: 11:34 PM, July 21, 2012
Posted: July 22, 2012
After a more-than-two-year review, a report released last week accuses the FBI of having dropped the ball when it investigated the Fort Hood jihadist before the 2009 massacre.
So — how many people will be fired?
Exactly . . . none.
That’s right: The agency might have been able to prevent the killing of 13 people by a home-grown Islamic fundamentalist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan — but failed to do so.
And yet, not a single FBI official will lose his or her job.
Comment:
I disagree with the NY Post though i can understand the reaction. People should be fired for wrongdoing, not missteps.
Wrongdoing, for example, includes continued withholding of documents that would shed light on missteps in analysis.
An approach focused on firing people for mistakes just creates an incentive for withholding of documents and information. FBI Director Mueller would point out it is bad for morale (which is important for an organization’s performance of its mission).
Everyone should be given an incentive to come forward with documents and information — even at this late date. When they do, we should compliment them for their candor and courageousness and drop the criticism relating to the missteps (or conflict of interest).
Those still withholding documents and information are naive in thinking that the information won’t eventually come out. If they are not the ones to come forward with it, they will just be on the wrong side of the wrongdoing vs. misstep line.
ANTHRAX AND AL QAEDA: THE INFILTRATION OF US BIODEFENSE, July 21, 2012 draft
http://www.blurb.com/books/3381343
DXer said
Release Fort Hood intelligence report
Editorial Board
http://www.statesman.com/opinion/release-fort-hood-intelligence-report-2417359.html
DXer said
FBI Tracking 100 Suspected Extremists In Military
by Dina Temple-Raston
http://www.npr.org/2012/06/25/155710570/fbi-checking-100-suspected-extremists-in-military
The FBI and Department of Defense call these cases “insider threats.” They include not just active and reserve military personnel but also individuals who have access to military facilities such as contractors and close family members with dependent ID cards.
I was surprised and struck by the numbers, they were larger than I expected.
- Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who co-chaired a hearing on internal threats to the military
Officials would not provide details about the cases and the FBI would not confirm the numbers, but they did say that cases seen as serious could include, among others things, suspects who seem to be planning an attack or were in touch with “dangerous individuals” who were goading them to attack.
DXer said
Infiltration played a key role in Amerithrax.
Among the supporters of these militant islamists were people like US scientist Ali Al-Timimi and Pakistan scientist Rauf Ahmad who blended into society and were available to act when another part of the network requested it. Two letters — one typed and an earlier handwritten one — written by a scientist named Rauf Ahmad detailed his efforts to obtain a pathogenic strain of anthrax. He attended conferences on anthrax and dangerous pathogens such as one in September 2000 at the University of Plymouth co-sponsored by DERA, the UK Defense Evaluation and Research Agency. In October 2009, historian Christopher Andrew published an official history of MI5 in which he reported that MI5 had found money and equipment in Rauf Ahmad’s luggage as he left the September 2000 conference.
A handwritten letter from 1999 is written on letterhead of the oldest microbiology society in Great Britain. The 1999 documents seized in Afghanistan by US forces by Rauf describe 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; a conference he attended on dangerous pathogens cosponsored by UK’s Porton Down and Society for Applied Microbiology, and the need for vaccination and containment. Rauf had arranged to take a lengthy post-doc leave from his employer and was grousing to Zawahiri that what the employer would be paying during that 12-month period was inadequate.
One typed memo reporting on a lab visit, which included tour of a BioLevel 3 facility, where there were 1000s of pathogenic samples. The memo mentioned the pending paperwork relating to export of the pathogens. The documents were provided to me by the Defense Intelligence Agency (”DIA”) under the Freedom of Information Act.
Taliban supporter Al-Timimi was a graduate student in the same building where famed Russian bioweapon Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey worked at George Mason University. The three worked at the secure facility at Discovery Hall at the Prince William 2 campus. Dr. Alibek and Dr. Bailey headed a biodefense program funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (”DARPA”). In the US, to infiltrate the military all one needed to do was to go to graduate school. Al-Timimi had a top security clearance and had worked for SRA International doing mathematical support work for the Navy. In 2000 and 2001, Timimi was a graduate student in computational sciences. His field was bioinformatics.
Al-Timimi tended to travel to give speeches on interpretation of the koran during semester breaks. Al-Timimi’s speeches are widely distributed on the internet and tend to focus on religious rather than political issues. A district court judge would say that Al-Timimi’s later speeches tended to favor violent jihad. After 9/11, they reportedly were removed from the website of the Center he had founded. The night of 9/11, he got in a heated debate with some colleagues. He said while islamically impermissible, the targeting of civilians was not impermissible where they were used as a shield. Others thought that it was reckless to say that so soon after the 9/11 attack when emotions were so inflamed.
Years earlier, the blind sheik’s son, Mohammed Abdel-Rahman was scheduled to come from Afghanistan to speak at the IANA 1993 conference alongside Ali Al-Timimi and former EIJ member Gamal Sultan. Al-Timimi was scheduled to speak alongside the blind sheik’s son again in 1996, the year Bin Laden issued his Declaration of War against the United States. In July and August 2001, Ali was scheduled to speak in Toronto and London alongside “911 imam” Anwar Awlaki and unindicted WTC 1993 “unindicted co-conspirator” Bilal Philips. His wife Ziyana, when I spoke to her by telephone, was very gracious. Absent consent of Ali’s counsel, however, she could not answer the substantive question why Ali had a high security clearance for SRA in 1999 for work for the Navy. He received a letter of commendation from the White House for his work.
Malaysian Yazid Sufaat, who told his wife he was working for a Taliban medical brigade when he went to Afghanistan, got the job of anthrax lab director instead of Rauf. Yazid Sufaat tells me that what he did was for the love of Islam. He says that the plan “is on the way.” He explains that he was part of the Malaysian biological weapons program before that country signed the nonproliferation treaty. He did not tell interrogators because he felt he had been betrayed by his country.
DXer said
AP Exclusive: Al-Qaida trains Norwegian to attack
By KARL RITTER, Associated Press
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hZCrdGVfxkc5BkN9MJRjLo3rrGcg?docId=d6679bb2854141d6b030c48eb298eb7e
So an angry, unidentified Norwegian is poised to attack. “You know how that will go.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2012/feb/06/entertainment/la-et-lilyhammer-20120204
Mullah Krekar was convicted in March. He knows things He reportedly wanted to set up a base of operations in the US. That concern was at the root of the Albany stinger case judging from the sentencing memo.
DXer said
Mullah Krekar was the former head of Ansar Al-Islam.
What does Mullah Krekar know about Al Qaeda’s anthrax planning? Michael Scheuer says it is certain that experiments were done by Ansar al-Islam involving anthrax. The CIA’s Scheur, the key fellow on Zawahiri Task Force, unsuccessfully urged to President Bush that the US bomb Ansar Al-Islam and send more troops to Tora Bora — rather than invade Iraq.
We saw how effective the FBI was in questioning Yazid Sufaat, the Al Qaeda anthrax lab head. He was captured in December 2001 and the FBI first briefly questioned him in November 2002. He politely pled the Fifth in the interview, which took no more than 30 minutes.
Did the FBI ever question Mullah Krekar about anthrax planning?
A subtilis expert from Iraq (to include mutations due to nutrient starvation) was in telephone contact with the number associated with KSM’s nephew, Ramzi Youssef, who was the lead WTC 1993 plotter. The number was Abdul Yasin’s apartment. After WTC 1993, Abdul Yasin fled to Iraq. The subtilis expert from Iraq lived in the Princeton area in 2001, just miles from the mailbox from where the anthrax was mailed.
Ansar Al-Islam, although not widely known, was a group formed by four senior EIJ leaders sent by Dr. Ayman. It was formed in 2001 by an amalgamation of several salafist-jihadi groups in Northern Iraq.
The Bush Administration pointed to Ansar Al-Islam’s presence in Iraq in suggesting that Saddam had the anthrax and bad intentions — when it was actually the former assistant of the White House Chief of Staff in the Washington DC area, an operative in the US, who had likely access to virulent Ames due to sharing a suite with the DARPA-funded Ames researchers. Convicted seditionist and jihadi supporter Ali Al-TImimi, whose family was from Iraq, was the lead speaker for the US-based charity, IANA, based in Ann Arbor. If this had become known, Bush perhaps would never have won a second term. Bush national security officials like Jeffrey Taylor played out the storyline to Dr. Ivins’ bitter end. He argued that the Federal Eagle stamp was only sold in Dr. Ivins post office — dutifully reported by the AP — when in fact it was sold throughout Virginia. He argued that Dr. Ivins had the lyophilizer to use when it was known to not have been where Dr. Ivins was those nights.
Faced with the prospect of being seen as having driven an innocent, fragile and troubled man to his suicide, someone at the DOJ withheld all documents relating to Dr. Ivins’ work with rabbits to make it look like his time in the lab was unexplained. The woman Dr. Ivins wanted to kill was the female scientist who contrary to the documentary evidence spun his time as unexplained — when she in fact knew better. Her civil deposition on these issues has been shredded by an agency that calls itself The Department of Justice. That same scientist, Dr. Ivins says, destroyed anthrax before leaving to join Southern Research Institute in Frederick. SRI in Frederick is where the work with virulent Ames was done for the DARPA researchers whose suite Iraqi salafist Ali Al-TImimi shared.
The central witness underlying an Ivins Theory was Dr. Ivins first counselor, Judith McLean. Dr. Ivins first counselor in a 2009 book says that she was psychotic and that her principal delusion was that an alien controlled her actions through a microchip implanted in her butt. Her chief paranoid fear was that there murderous astral entities — including those attached to her patients such as Dr. Ivins — trying to kill her. She annotated the psychiatrists’ notes. See EBAP report. Her notes were given to the counselor in July 2008 and that then led to his commitment.
The government psychiatrists and an accomplished Pulitzer Prize winning author eagerly seize on that first counselor as their key witness — without ever acknowledging that she is not a reliable witness as to events in 2000. To err is part of the human condition. To not correct the mistake in a matter such as this is really, really wrong.
Their chief supporter is a pornographer who insists a First Grader wrote the letters.
It took the FBI nearly a year to question Yazid Sufaat — and the chatty Yazid politely declined to tell them that he had been part of Malaysia’s bioweapons program. Do you imagine that they fruitfully questioned Abdul Yasin who the police had let leave the country even though they knew that he had direct and extensive knowledge of the 1993 bombers? Or Ramzi Youssef? How fruitful and usefully targeted was the questioning of Ramzi Youssef at the Supermax? AUSA Lieber was forbidden from even visiting Al-Timimi in jail because a deal was cut. When she went anyway, she was reprimanded.
So don’t fault AUSA Lieber, GAO. Prosecutors are charged with being zealous and it was a difficult mystery. But find out who tried to prevent her from even visiting Ali in jail and why. Was he made a Top Echelon informant? Is that what explains why Amerithrax went so seriously off track and stayed there?
Do you imagine that they fruitfully questioned Jdey? Jdey was detained at the same time as Moussaoui. He was a trained pilot. Moussaoui had the cropduster manuals while Jdey had the biology textbooks.
If the FBI does not effectively mine the intelligence from the operatives detained, don’t be surprised when they don’t fare much better at getting information from operatives who are footloose and fancy free.
Of course, it’s perhaps not possible to get someone like Yazid Sufaat or Mullah Krekar to talk — no matter how garrulous they are by nature.
And so it is not the fault of the FBI when suspects and jihadists don’t voluntarily disclose information.
And FBI Director went to Malaysia precisely to try to gain access to Sufaat.
But let’s try to get better cooperation from allies being given millions and millions of dollars.
Let’s try to avoid invasions and occupations that just make religious cultists mad at us.
And at least let’s get the story right by the time the history books are written.
Because you can’t learn from history unless you know it.
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+WQ+E-2003-0920+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN
Subject: Release by the Netherlands authorities of Mullah Krekar
Answer(s)
Is the Commission aware that the Netherlands authorities have released Mullah Krekar, leader of the international Islamic organisation Ansar al-Islam?
Is the Commission aware that Mullah Krekar, who was arrested at Amsterdam airport after being expelled from Iran is currently in Norway where he has refugee status?
Is the Commission aware that the terrorist organisation headed by Mullah Krekar is said to have produced and tested chemical and biological weapons, including ricin, a lethal toxin for which there is currently no vaccine?
What action will the Commission take to counteract Mullah Krekar’s activities and prevent him from ever entering the European Union, thereby ensuring that in future he is unable to move around within the EU as he did in the years leading up to his arrest?
What action will the Commission take to ensure that Norway keeps a watchful eye on the activities of Mullah Krekar’s and his organisation, which seems to be recruiting many of the Al-Qa’ida members who escaped from Afghanistan?
DXer said
New Book: Axelrod, Holder Close to Blows in West Wing
Saturday, 02 Jun 2012 07:33 PM
By Martin Gould
http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Axelrod-Hodler-brawl-Jarrett/2012/06/02/id/441013
After bin Laden’s death, Klaidman says Obama became obsessed with killing Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who was taken out in a drone attack in Yemen in September last year.
“I want Awlaki. Don’t let up on him,” Klaidman quotes the president as saying during a weekly counterterrorism meeting.
DXer said
Ill worker fights postal service over toxic mail reportedly from Yemen.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/12/2794988/ill-worker-fights-postal-service.html#storylink=cpy
http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/05/12/2794988/ill-worker-fights-postal-service.html
DXer said
Excellent reporting by the Florida Center for investigative Reporting. I look forward to seeing the documents that they will succeed in obtaining under FOIA. They have obtained and uploaded a copy of the February 4 email Jeffrey sent.
Pro bono computer forensics on the email would also be useful — as well as any other emails sent by the other employee or by Jeffrey. Even a telephone bill evidencing the February 4 call to Rochester would flesh things out further.
Meanwhile, intel on the substances known to be used by Al Qaeda in Yemen might be checked against expert understanding of what could cause that effect upon mere breathing. Tubes? Wires?
After Package From Yemen, Questions About Worker Illness and Government Response
http://fcir.org/2012/05/13/after-package-from-yemen-questions-about-worker-illness-and-government-response/
DXer said
Thanks to the excellent reporting by the Florida Center For Investigative Reporting, we have the actual letter response by the Post Office.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/354943-2012-03-09-chuzi-1.html
If the Post Office disputes the 2/4 incident occurred, then the attorney should explain what she found when the inbox of the recipient was examined. If the email was deleted due to the passage of time, it is a simple matter to recover the email. But the lawyers should get on the same page — literally.
DXer said
1. While US government focuses on Anwar Al-Aulaqi, the media continues to overlook Aulaqi’s connection to fellow Falls Church imam, “anthrax weapons suspect” Ali Al-Timimi
Posted by Lew Weinstein on May 25, 2010
http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/05/25/while-us-government-focuses-on-anwar-al-aulaqi-the-media-continues-to-overlook-aulaqis-connection-to-fellow-falls-church-imam-anthrax-weapons-suspect-ali-al-timimi/
2. In Spring 2001, Nawaf Al-Hazmi Associated With Both Anwar Awlaki And Ali Al-Timimi, Who Shared A Suite With The Ames Researchers
Posted by Lew Weinstein on January 27, 2012
http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2012/01/27/in-spring-2001-nawaf-al-hazmi-associated-with-both-anwar-awlaki-and-ali-al-timimi-who-shared-a-suite-with-the-ames-researchers/
3. The head of the Amerithrax prosecution Daniel Seikaly pled the Fifth Amendment about leaking the hyped Hatfill stories that derailed the Amerithrax investigation for 7 years. His daughter later came to represent “anthrax weapons suspect” (to borrow defense counsel’s phrase) Ali Al-Timimi pro bono. GAO: Was an apparent conflict of interest avoided on the grounds that her representation began after her father left DOJ? Or was there a continuing appearance of a conflict of interest?
Posted by Lew Weinstein on September 3, 2011
http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/09/03/the-head-of-the-amerithrax-prosecution-daniel-seikaly-pled-the-fifth-amendment-about-leaking-the-hyped-hatfill-stories-that-derailed-the-amerithrax-investigation-for-7-years-his-daughter-later-ca/
4. In Amerithrax, the leaker of the hyped Hatfill stories was the father of the lawyer who later represented “anthrax weapons suspect” Al-Timimi pro bono
Posted by Lew Weinstein on April 3, 2010
http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/04/03/in-amerithrax-the-leaker-of-the-hyped-hatfill-stories-was-the-father-of-the-lawyer-who-later-represented-anthrax-weapons-suspect-al-timimi-pro-bono/
5. Who does former lead Amerithrax prosecutor Daniel Seikaly and his daughter, Ali Al-Timimi’s former defense counsel, think is responsible for the anthrax mailings of Fall 2001?
Posted on May 22, 2011
http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/05/22/who-does-former-prosecutor-daniel-seikaly-and-his-daughter-ali-al-timimis-former-defense-counsel-think-is-responsible-for-the-anthrax-mailings-of-fall-2001/
6. floor plan of suite at GMU’s Discovery Hall in 2001 with Ali Al-Timimi and leading anthrax scientists
Posted by Lew Weinstein on February 7, 2010
http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/floor-plan-of-suite-at-gmus-discovery-hall-in-2001-with-ali-al-timimi-and-leading-anthrax-scientists/
7. Catherine Herridge’s NEXT WAVE: Anwar Awlaki, Ali Al-Timimi and why FBI Agent Wade Ammerman wanted to allow Anwar Awlaki to meet with Ali Al-Timimi in October 2002
Posted by Lew Weinstein on June 21, 2011
http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/catherine-herridges-next-wave-anwar-awlaki-ali-al-timimi-and-why-fbi-agent-wade-ammerman-wanted-to-allow-anwar-awlaki-to-meet-with-ali-al-timimi-in-october-2002/
8. How was the FBI able to exclude Abderraouf Yousef Jdey as the mailer if the FBI doesn’t know where he was and, according to former top CIA analyst Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Jdey was released before the mailings? Did Jdey know Aafia? Did Jdey know Al-Timimi? Did Jdey know Slahi?
Posted by Lew Weinstein on April 27, 2011
http://caseclosedbylewweinstein.wordpress.com/2011/04/27/how-was-the-fbi-able-to-exclude-abderraouf-yousef-jdey-as-the-mailer-if-the-fbi-doesnt-know-where-he-was-and-according-to-former-top-cia-analyst-rolf-mowatt-larssen-jdey-was-released-before-the/
DXer said
Emergency coordinators discuss anthrax medication drill
http://www.myfoxtwincities.com/story/18135129/emergency-experts-plan-anthrax-medication-drill
DXer said
• http://aapnews.aappublications.org/content/33/1/28
• NEWS AND FEATURES
AAP calls attention to unique needs of children in anthrax attack
• Steven E. Krug, M.D., FAAP and
• John S. Bradley, M.D., FAAP
In 2001, Bacillus anthracis spores were distributed intentionally through the U.S. postal system, causing 22 cases of anthrax, including five deaths. Among these cases was a 7-month-old child, who was suspected of being exposed during a visit to an office where an anthrax-tainted package was delivered. The child was hospitalized and fully recovered.
This incident reflects that children’s needs must be considered in the event of an act of bioterrorism.
***
Concern has been increasing at the federal level regarding adequate MCMs for children in the event of a chemical-biological terrorism attack. The Academy was given the opportunity to respond to questions posed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of the Assistant Secretary for Preparedness and Response regarding the use of anthrax antimicrobial postexposure prophylaxis in children. Given the extraordinary morbidity of inhalation anthrax, the overarching AAP recommendations are as follows:
• The SNS or other pre-deployed cache should always include an adequate supply of medication (e.g., doxycycline/ciprofloxacin) in liquid/suspension form. Guidelines for extemporaneous oral liquid formulation of crushed solid tablets or opened capsules could be developed and tested as alternatives to current pediatric formulations.
• Ciprofloxacin and doxycycline tablets should be manufactured in smaller tablet sizes to facilitate accurate milligram/kilogram dosing in small children.
• Pediatricians should receive adequate public health training about the approved protocols for administering countermeasures to children.
• An approved written protocol for MCM distribution should undergo prospective simulated testing to ensure that it achieves efficient and accurate administration to children during a disaster.
• Development of semi-solid or other liquid formulations of medication for the SNS should be explored (e.g., a gel or paste, powder, chewable or orally disintegrating tablets, or orally dissolving film strip).
• DPAC and Anthrax Work Group experts will continue working with federal agencies to ensure the needs of children are considered with regard to medical countermeasures.
DXer said
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/22/armed-drones_n_2527242.html?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmain5%7Cdl19%7Csec1_lnk1%26pLid%3D260435
Armed Drones Could Target President: Former U.S. Intelligence Chief
WASHINGTON — As the technology for arming drones spreads around the
world, terrorists could use the unmanned, missile-firing aircraft to
attack and kill the president and other U.S. leaders, the former chief
of U.S. intelligence said Tuesday.
Retired Adm. Dennis Blair, who served as President Obama’s first
director of national intelligence, told reporters he was concerned
that the proliferation of armed drones — a potential outgrowth of the
U.S. reliance on drones to attack and kill terrorists — could well
backfire.
“I do fear that if al Qaeda can develop a drone, its first thought
will be to use it to kill our president, and senior officials and
senior officers,” Blair said during a conference call with reporters.
“It is possible without a great deal of intelligence to do something
with a drone you cannot do with a high-powered rifle or driving a car
full of explosives and other ways terrorists now use to try killing
senior officials,” he said.
Comment: I used to have lunch on a balcony at Hotel Washington that overlooked the White House — and worked in a building in the adjacent blocked in a building that towered over the WH.
I always thought it was ridiculous that you could bring a bazooka concealed in a cello up the elevator to lunch and it seemed no one would notice. There have been a number of active plots by Al Qaeda operatives involving drones and remote control vehicles (three occur to me without googling).
DXer said
The drone lecture was enjoyable. One aspect of the contest is to design an App helpful in drone journalism (that takes into account the legal and ethical constraints). I am hoping to team with a new friend from Indonesia I met there who knows how to write apps.
The take-home? Don’t use a drone on the national mall. In journalism, don’t use it near people or buildings — or over 400 feet. Also, if you are using it to expose a pigeon shoot, expect it to be shot down. Privacy is a big issue. Perception too.
During the demonstration, at a key point there was some sort of interference with the wi-fi signal that shut down the demonstration. Perhaps it was just the University not permitting generation of a signal. Or perhaps it was someone demonstrating an app that could terminate the flight of any drone. Now that would be a cool app.
http://www.amerithrax.wordpress.com
DXer said
U of C researcher raises alarm about risks of drones in hands of public
BY JASON VAN RASSEL, CALGARY HERALD JANUARY 24, 2013
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/news/calgary/researcher+raises+alarm+about+risks+drones+hands+public/7869421/story.html
Columbus senator targets drones
http://columbustelegram.com/news/local/columbus-senator-targets-drones/article_c3916cf0-6671-11e2-8034-001a4bcf887a.html
Comment:
At the local Brookstone, the sales clerk tells me a Police Chief was in recently to buy a drone to use to look for pot plants. I met someone this week from a rural part of the county who said the same thing — noting that the sheriff’s department typically used a helicopter to look in their corn field. They expected drones would be next. (He said it was not uncommon for pot to be found).
Are drones lawful for hobbyists to use in city/county/state parks in NYS/US? I don’t even know. It wasn’t mentioned by the professor at the SU lecture.
I would prefer a camera on the street (at a key intersection) that could check for cars passing shortly after an armed robbery.
Should we object to warrantless aerial surveillance by law enforcement? Would you rather the local FBI have to pay $600-800 an hour to rent a helicopter?
Locally, the greatest usefulness might be seeing over a pool fence to check for underage drinking. I imagine that would be very upsetting to the nude sunbather. But there commonly will be pros and cons of new technology.
What is the proper balance between the right to privacy and the public’s need for security?
I believe the issue of “plain view” is the subject of at least dictum in Supreme Court decisions under the 4th Amendment. My friend, clerking for Chief Justice Burger, told me that he had dropped a footnote in 1986 at the time that would afford room to argue against certain warrantless aerial surveillance. But I’ve never looked at the case law.
Given Al Qaeda has been researching (and even experimenting) with payloads of drones, isn’t there a very real possibility that Al Qaeda will strap on explosives to a drone and fly the drone into a crowd? In one plot, the plotters were planning to attack servicemen gathered at a shopping mall. In another plot, in Columbus, Ohio as I vaguely recall, the research concerned a remote controlled boat.
Of course, powder weighs a lot less than explosives.
In these County anthrax drills, if the news reports that anthrax was aerially dispersed by a drone, how likely is it that people will want to get out of their car to go into the school gymnasium to be counseled on their options for antibiotics?
DXer said
The boss authorized purchase of the drone and I have a meeting Monday with top area coders.
But here is a cautionary tale from DC in which the FCC shut down a planned drone smackdown within a 15-mile radius of DC.
In that case, in addition to being shut down by the FCC, the competitor drones were shut down due to a disabling of unsecured wi-fi network.
The writer, in discussing the low weight that can be added as payload, seems unaware perhaps what 2 grams can do if it is powderized anthrax.
And if they don’t realize that Al Qaeda was working with virulent anthrax, then they are not paying close enough attention.
http://www.amerithrax.wordpress.com
One programming tweak that has already been done is that a course can be set using WayPoints. So if an Al Qaeda operative were killed, that would not necessarily affect the drone’s course.
https://www.washingtonian.com/blogs/capitalcomment/local-news/faa-grounds-drones-inside-washington-dc.php
“Having reported a lot on drones recently, I’ve concluded that a future of robot-filled skies is inevitable. And eventually, these drones won’t be controlled by human pilots at all. They’ll be largely autonomous. As silly as it seemed for the FAA to keep us from flying a few toy planes around a park on a Sunday afternoon, I understand the basis of their anxiety. Drones are the future. And we’re really not ready for them.
As it happened, even after we moved the Smackdown to Virginia, just outside the restricted zone, our hopes of intense aerial combat were dashed—not by regulators, but by hackers.
With the help of some expert computer coders, Wittes’s 11- and 14-year-old children got into the competing drones’ wi-fi networks and disabled their controls. The human pilots, who were steering their ill-fated aircraft with an iPhone app, found themselves cut off from their drones or unable to control them once they (barely) got off the ground. The Wittes kids delighted in their digital shenanigans, which, they explained to more than one baffled adult, were quite simple really: The competitors had all left their networks open and undefended.
Two lessons there: 1) Ignore basic cybersecurity at your peril. 2) Children are the future. Also robots.”
DXer said
Of course, some dance moves would be nice too.
DXer said
The development company outdid my brainstormed pie-in-the-sky list. Before the 2/23 deadline, they are going to test:
The ability to control an UAS using a gesture interface (leapmotion.com) and an operator’s hand. Afford the user the ability to precisely manage the altitude, roll, pitch, and yaw of an UAS.
DXer said
1. States propose limiting use of drones by police
MATT GOURAS | February 5, 2013 02:48 PM EST |
HELENA, Mont. — Lawmakers in at least 11 states are looking at plans to restrict the use of drones over their skies amid concerns the unmanned aerial vehicles could be exploited to spy on Americans.
2. City in Virginia Becomes First to Pass Anti-Drone Legislation
Resolution bans all municipal agencies from buying or leasing drones
February 5, 2013
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/02/05/city-in-virginia-becomes-first-to-pass-anti-drone-legislation-
Comment:
I have my first “hacks and hackers” meeting and “hacking journalism” seminar tomorrow. I may learn from some of the programmers what ideas there have been for hacking the Parrot 2.0 drone. I don’t have an opinion on the policy issues raised by proposed legislation. I just want to take unusual aerial shots. I’ve enjoyed using the revolutionary Lytro camera this winter. The Lytro permits you to focus after the fact — more like a computer than a camera. Imagine Lytro technology (once it is further advanced) on a drone. It would be like google earth but in real-time.
DXer said
A Knight-Mozilla Fellow, Dan Schultz, who did his graduate work at MIT’s Media Lab, presented an enjoyable presentation on “Hacking Journalism: Using The Internet To Save The World”
I’m a bit old-fashioned. I think the best bit of journalism along these lines elating to Amerithrax was pretty straight-forwardly done by ProPublica (but at considerable effort and expense). ProPublica and its partners for the story uploaded voluminous documents and even permitted annotation of the documents.
Frederick News-Post also had an commendable early effort to upload documents.
I’d love to see a good interactive spider analysis of WIKILEAKS detainee assessments, organized by key word.
http://www.amerithrax.wordpress.com
Dan discusses a number of journalistic innovations that are being tried out.
It was streamed here (after a 30 second commercial).
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/hackj
DXer said
PACER, too, strikes me as a huge potential resource ripe for harvesting by innovative use of computer applications.