* “911 imam” Anwar Awlaki spoke alongside “anthrax weapons suspect” Ali Al-Timimi in England in August 2001
Posted by Lew Weinstein on August 2, 2012
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Posted by Lew Weinstein on August 2, 2012
This entry was posted on August 2, 2012 at 11:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized. Tagged: *** 2001 anthrax attacks, *** Amerithrax, *** FBI anthrax investigation, Al Qaeda & anthrax, Ali al-Timimi, 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
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/16/al-qaeda-magazine-pressure-cooker-bomb-directions/2088109/
Pressure-cooker bomb instructions in al-Qaeda magazine
Ray Locker, USA TODAY
Instructions to make bombs out of pressure cookers similar to those believed the source of two explosions in Boston on Monday were published two years ago in Inspire, an online magazine tied to al-Qaeda and the late U.S.-born cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, an analysis of the magazine shows.
The article, “How to Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” by “the AQ Chef” instructed would-be bombers to glue shrapnel to the inside of a pressure cooker and then “fill in the cooker with the inflammable material.”
Would-be bombers, the article said, should use gloves to prevent their fingerprints from being found on the bomb fragments and to “put you [sic] faith in Allah and pray for the success of your operation.”
DXer said
Do not forward or repeat the FoxNews report below without also adding J.M. Berger’s incisive rebuttal based on his examination of the same documents.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/01/03/did_awlaki_really_help_the_911_hijackers
Mr. Berger persuasively writes:
” There are only two problems with this story.
First, there’s a paragraph of type redacted in between the mention of Awlaki and the mention of the hijackers.
Plenty of room there to start another heading.
Second, all three tickets are attributed to known debit cards held by the hijackers that do not match the card number given for Awlaki in Judicial Watch’s bombshell-smoking-gun-gate FOIA document.
The attributions appear in an FBI chronology of the hijackers’ activities also obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, by this reporter, as part of a collection of 9/11 documents posted online years ago and featured by Fox News itself in a special on 9/11 a while back.
That chronology was assembled long after the Sept. 26, 2001, document obtained by Judicial Watch. So even if the document says Awlaki bought the tickets — and it’s by no means clear that it does — it would still represent a very early lead, compared to the 2003 chronology, by which time mistakes would have been weeded out.
Awlaki’s links to Sept. 11 certainly bear further investigation, but when you investigate, you have to be prepared for the possibility that the truth will be a big letdown.
DXer said
The FBI suspected within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that the American Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki may have purchased tickets for some of the hijackers for air travel in advance of the attacks, according to newly released documents reviewed exclusively by Fox News.
The purpose of these flights remains unclear, but the 9/11 Commission report later noted that the hijackers had used flights in the lead-up to the attacks to test security and surveillance.
The heavily redacted records – obtained by Judicial Watch through a Freedom of information Act request – suggest the FBI held evidence tying the American-born cleric to the hijackers just 16 days after the attack that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.
“We have FBI documents showing that the FBI knew that al-Awlaki had bought three tickets for three of the hijackers to fly into Florida and into Las Vegas, including the lead hijacker, Mohammad Atta,” Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, told Fox News.
He added that the records show the cleric, killed in September 2011 by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, “was a central focus of the FBI’s investigation of 9/11. They show he wasn’t cooperative. And they show that he was under surveillance.”
***
One FBI investigative report known as a 302 summarizes the bureau’s investigation of Al-Awlaki’s Visa transactions. While heavily redacted, the document indicates a credit transaction for “Atta, Mohammed — American West Airlines, 08/13/2001, Washington, DC to Las Vegas to Miami,” the document says.
***
Fox News asked the FBI for comment on the documents, specifically how the Awlaki lead was pursued in September 2001. Bureau spokeswoman Kathleen Wright responded by saying, “The FBI cautions against drawing conclusions from redacted FOIA documents. The FBI and investigating bodies have not found evidence connecting Anwar al-Awlaki and the attack on Sept. 11, 2001. The document referenced does not link Anwar al-Awlaki with any purchase of airline tickets for the hijackers.”
In response, Judicial Watch said, “the document speaks for itself.” The organization “encouraged the FBI to release the document in its entirety, without redactions, for full transparency.”
Wright said she was not aware of any plans by the FBI to do so at this time.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/01/03/exclusive-al-awlaki-booked-pre-11-air-travel-for-hijackers-fbi-documents-show/
DXer said
Shelby County Health Department tests medicine delivery to prepare for bioterrorism attack
http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2012/oct/30/shelby-county-health-department-tests-medicine/?CID=happeningnow
Health Department takes bioterrorism test door-to-door
• By Sara Patterson
• Posted October 30, 2012 at 6:20 p.m.
***
After a volunteer crew of about 60 completed the test in Lakeland, SCHD Emergency Response Director Kasia Smith-Alexander said the group made “phenomenal” time delivering the faux medicine, first-aid kits and questionnaires to more than a thousand residences.
And residents, who were told of the drill via postcard last week, were asked to fill out the questionnaire to help the department evaluate the exercise and citizens’ comfort level with door-to-door delivery.
“It will give us an idea of whether or not this is something people would like us to do,” said Smith-Alexander. “Do they trust us to come to the door? Stuff like that.”
Comment: “Those damn revenooers are at the door again, Milly.” I wouldn’t think there would be trust issues any more than there is with the daily delivery of the mail. But I guess it only takes one angry man with a shotgun — and there seem to be enough of them to go around. (Though they may not tend to be the survey filling-out type)
DXer said
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21528825.300-detecting-a-subway-bioterror-attack.html
IT’S 3 am, and the subway station has long since shut for the night. As I watch, a small group of people move along the platform in the eerie quiet, their anticipation palpable as they prepare to release a cloud of bacteria into the tunnels beneath the densely populated Boston area.
Among them is a woman holding an array of translucent green nozzles, ready to release the agent. Her radio crackles to life: “The train has just left; we’re a go.”
Anne Hultgren isn’t a terrorist: in her hands she holds a batch of dead Bacillus subtilis bacteria which, when dispersed, will form nothing more than a harmless cloud. It’s all part of an experiment by Hultgren’s employer, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Her team is testing whether its new detection equipment could work as an early warning system if a deadly agent like anthrax was released into a city’s metro network.
The faint rumble of the inbound train gets louder, and Hultgren starts spraying. Almost immediately, the cloud begins to waft through the tunnel towards downtown Boston, pushed by a column of air in front of the train.
As the train pulls in to the station we watch and wait to see if the sensors at the next stop down the line will detect the bacteria.
At our station, several bulky grey sensor boxes called triggers are slung on metal racks at four points along the platform. The triggers were installed around a year ago and since then have been measuring background levels of biological material – one of the keys to avoiding the false positives that have dogged previous biosensing systems. Hultgren can’t go into detail about the technology inside, but similar commercially available systems count biological particles as they pass through a beam of light inside the box.
Anything over the background level will send a signal that activates a bright red box at the end of the station. Hultgren calls it a confirmer, and says it is the real novel technology in this test.
Hultgren and her team were brought in to improve the beleaguered BioWatch programme (see “Crying wolf on terrorism”), and the confirmer is the result. She says that her team has miniaturised the equipment needed for a process commonly used to identify DNA, called the polymerase chain reaction.
“Previous biodetection programs relied on continuous daily testing,” Hultgren says. “Air filters would be collected every day by hand, and brought to a lab for analysis.”
That lab analysis has now been engineered into a suitcase-sized box, and happens on site whenever the triggers detect unusual quantities of a biological agent. “We are aiming to do in 20 minutes what used to take two days,” Hultgren says.
A few days after the test, Hultgren tells me the system worked as planned, both detecting and identifying the bacteria. “The confirmer collected a sample and about 30 minutes after the release we had a positive detection of the material at a station over a mile away down the track,” she says.
The tests will continue for five months, helping the DHS understand how biological agents move around the subway when the weather is colder, for instance.
Janet-Martha Blatny, who runs a similar biosensing project for the European Commission, says that tests like this are crucial to improving biodetection systems.
“Trials resembling real-life conditions have been lacking and are one of the major causes explaining the high rate of false alarms of current biodetectors,” Blatny says.
Crying wolf on terrorism
In the wake of 9/11, letters laced with anthrax bacteria began showing up, delivered through the US postal system. Five people died in the attacks. In response, the government launched an anti-bioterror programme in 2003 called BioWatch.
BioWatch has sensing systems in major cities across the country. Since its deployment, it has been plagued by false alarms and has never spotted an instance of terrorism. Lawmakers have grown critical that the $1-billion programme risks desensitising officials, who may not react if the system detects a real attack.
Congress is currently deciding whether to spend an extra $3.1 billion over the next five years to keep the programme going.