* the plot thickens … what is the cover up of the failed FBI anthrax investigation really about?

Lew recently wrote (as part of my update on Congressional progress getting the FBI to answer questions) …

FBI & DOJ announce CASE CLOSED (Aug 08)

• “I have been told that Brian Downey (at the Senate Finance Committee) is the person to talk to, and yesterday I left yet another message for him. I don’t know why the Finance Committee has oversight responsibility in this matter, but that’s what I’ve been told.”

Ike Solem responded …

• Wow!
• The reason I say wow is that the Senate Finance Committee is the one that played the starring role in ejecting Daschle from the HHS post, where he would have had oversight of the anthrax contracts handed out by that department (Health and Human Services).
• So, is the Senate Finance Committee up to their neck in this? Why would that be…
• Right. $6 billion in funding for Project Bioshield programs – that must have to go through the Senate Finance Committee, and I’m guessing some of them want to see this issue buried forever.
• Pull a thread, and the whole cloth unravels.

Ike wrote again …

• Brian Downey was staffer to Bill Frist, retired 2007 (from Tennessee). Tennessee is where Battelle operates the ‘heavily guarded’ Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That’s also where the anthrax spore cleanup team (Camp Dresser Mckee) that cleaned up the Hart Senate Office Building operates out of.
• Bill Frist was a big Project Bioshield backer:
• Tennessee (Oak Ridge) is also the new jurisdiction of FBI agent Richard Lambert, who sidetracked the FBI investigation towards Steven Hatfill from 2002 onwards after replacing the first FBI team (Harp, Eberhart, Hess, Wilson)
• Sandia – well, that’s where the bogus finding of “natural silica” was manufactured.
• Maybe Bill Frist is in this as deeply as Robert Mueller is.
• So, here you have a host of labs, all financed by massive government biowarfare budgets, trying to tell us that:
• 1) Their labs were not the source of the anthrax in the letters, regardless of what person(s) carried out the attacks. This is false; we know that the U.S. biowarfare program was the source of the material.
• 2) They should continue to recieve billions in funding from the federal government, and continue to expand their biowarfare program.
• Do people lie to the public in order to protect their government funding stream? Well, it has been known to happen.

LMW COMMENT …

Let’s start with the failed FBI anthrax investigation. It seems inexplicable that the FBI, with all of its resources, could not solve a case where there was a small number of potential suspects in a handful of labs, almost all in the U.S.

In my novel CASE CLOSED, I explore the premise that the FBI didn’t solve the case because they were told not to. I related that to the desire of Bush/Cheney to prop up their case for a war of choice in Iraq.

Ike offers a broader context that involves huge government expenditures for biodefense, or as many suspect, for bioweapons. If he’s right, this connects several companies and several members of Congress to the cover up.

It also suggests why Senator Grassley has apparently failed to followup on his excellent questions of September 2008, and why other initiatives, such as Congressman Holt’s call for a Congressional commission to investigate the 2001 anthrax attacks and the federal government’s response and investigation of the attacks seems to be going nowhere. In the absence of transparency, all of this is truly frightening.

President Obama, who was not involved in any of these events, has much on his plate, but perhaps there is some way for him to add a push to full disclosure of the role of the FBI and others in not solving the 2001 anthrax case.

Meanwhile, you can read CASE CLOSED for one (fictional) theory of what might have happened, a theory that many early readers, including one well placed source in the Intelligence Community, find  to be “all too plausible.”

* purchase CASE CLOSED (paperback)

                         

* DXer: recommended reading on the anthrax attacks and subsequent FBI investigation

•  9/11 Commission report : final report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (2004)
• Anonymous [Michael Scheuer], Imperial hubris : why the West is losing the war on terror, (2004)
• Azzam, Shaykh Abullah, Defense of the Muslim Lands: (2002).
• Bar, S. Warrant for terror: The fatwas of radical Islam and the duty to jihad, (2006)
• Bell, S. 2005. The martyr’s oath: The apprenticeship of a homegrown terrorist. Mississauga, Ont.: John Wiley & Sons, Canada
• Bergen, Peter, Holy War Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (2001)
• Bergen, Peter , Osama bin Laden I know : an oral history of al-Qaeda’s leader (2006)
• Breeze, R. G., B. Budowle, and S. E. Schutzer, Microbial forensics. (2005)
• Byman, Daniel, The Five Front War: The Better Way to Fight Global Jihad (2007)
• Clark, William, Bracing for Armaggedon (2008)
• Clarke, Richard, Against All Enemies : Inside America’s War on Terror, (2004)
• Cole, Leonard, The Anthrax Letters: A Medical Detective Story (2003)
• Draper, Dead Certain (2007)
• Emerson, Steven The Terrorists Living Among Us (2002)
• Ervic, C. Open target: Where America is open to attack. (2006)
• Gabriel, Mark A. , Journey Into The Mind Of An Islamist Terrorist: Why They Hate Us And How We Can Change Their Minds (2006)
• Ganor, Boaz, The Counter-Terrorism Puzzle: A Guide for Decision Makers (2005)
• Gertz, Bill, Breakdown : How America’s intelligence failures led to September 11 (2002)
• Graysmith, Robert, Amerithrax: The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer (2003)
• Gross, Emanuel, The Struggle of Democracy Against Terrorism: Lessons from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Israel (2006)
• Gunaratna, Rohan Inside Al Qaeda: Global Network of Terror (2002)
• Gurr, and Cole, The New Face of Terrorism: Threats from Weapons of Mass Destruction (2002)
• Hamid, Tawfik, Inside Jihad: Understanding and Confronting Radical Islam (2007)
• Harmon, Christopher C., Terrorism Today (2007)
• Hoge, Jr., & Rose, ed., Understanding the War on Terror (2005)
• Holbein, James R, ed., 9/11 Commission : Proceedings and Analysis (2005)
• Hulnick, A. Keeping us safe: Secret intelligence and homeland security., (2004)
• Ibrahim, Raymond The Al Qaeda Reader (2007)
• Jenkins, B. Unconquerable nation: Knowing our enemy, strengthening ourselves, (2006)
• Katona, Peter et al., (ed) , Countering Terrorism and WMD: Creating a Global Counter-Terrorism Network (2006)
• Katz, S. Jihad in Brooklyn: The NYPD raid that stopped America’s first suicide bombers. (2005)
• Kellman, Barry, Bioviolence (2004)
• Kessler, Ron, The Terrorist Watch: Inside the Desperate Race to Stop the Next Attack (2007)
• Kessler, Ronald, The Terrorist Watch (2007)
• Koehler, Theresa M., Anthrax, (2002)
• Kohlmann, Evan F, Al-Qaida’s Jihad In Europe: The Afghan-Bosnian Network (2004)
• Kouziminov, Alexander, Biological Espionage: Special Operations of the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West. (2005)
• Kushner, H., and B. Davis, Holy war on the home front: The secret Islamic terror network in the United States. New York: (2004)
• Lance, Peter, Triple X (2007)
• Leitenberg, Milton, The Problem With Biological Weapons (2004)
• Leitenberg, Milton, Assessing the biological weapons and bioterrorism threat [electronic resource] (2005)
• Lia, Brynjar, Architect of Global Jiihad, (2008)
• Lichtblau, Eric, Bush Law: The Remaking of American Justice (2008)
• Lustick, I. Trapped in the war on terror, (2006)
• McCarthy, Andrew C, Willful Blindness (2008)
• McDermott, Terry, Perfect Soldiers (2005)
• Mansfield, Laura, His Own Words: Translation and Analsysi of the Writings of Dr. Ayman al Zawahiri (2006)
• Roth, John, National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States: Monograph on Terrorist Financing, (Staff Report to the Commission). (2004)
• Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, Countering Biological Terrorism In The U.S.: An Understanding Of Issues and Status (1999)
• Preston, Richard, The Demon in the Freezer (2002)
• Preston, Richard, The Hot Zone (1994)
• Ranstorp, Magnus (ed.), Mapping Terrorism Research: State of the Art, Gaps and Future Direction, (2007)
• Ḍiyāʼ Rashwān, The Spectrum of Islamist Movements  (2007)
• Rice, Condoleeza, “Introductory Remarks,” in The New Terror: Facing The Threat of Biological and Chemical Warfare (1999)
• Roy, Olivier, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (2004)
• Sageman, M,.Understanding terror networks, (2004)
• Scheuer, Michael, Through Our Enemies’ Eyes: Osama bin Laden, Radical Islam, and the Future of America (rev. ed. 2007)
• Sheehan, Michael, Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Defeating Ourselves (2008),
• Shenon, Philip, The Commission: The Uncensored History of the 9/11 Commission (2008)
• Shoebat, W. Why I left jihad: The root of terrorism and the rise of Islam (2005)
• Sperry, Paul, Infiltration (2005)
• Suskind, Ron, One Percent Solution (2006)
• Tenet, George, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, (2007)
• Thompson, Marilyn W., The Killer Strain: Anthrax and a Government Exposed, (2004)
• Tibi’, Bassam, Political Islam, World Politics and Europe: Democratic Peace and Euro-Islam versus Global Jihad (2007)
• Weaver, Mary Anne, A Portrait of Egypt, (1999)
• Weaver, Mary Anne, Pakistan: In the Shadow of Jihad (2002)
• Weimann, Gabriel, Terror on the Internet: The New Arena, the New Challenges (2006)
• Weisberg, Jacob, The Bush Tragedy (2008)
• Wenger, Andreas and Wollenmann, Reto, ed. Bioterrorism : Confronting a Complex Threat, (2007)
• Wright, Lawrence, The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006)
• al-Zawahiri, Ayman, Al Hasad al-Murr: al-Ikhwan al-Muslimoun fi Sittin Aman, The Bitter Harvest: The Muslim Brotherhood in Sixty Years (1999)
• al-Zawahiri, Ayman, Knights Under the Prophet’s Banner, serialized in the London-based Al Sharq Al Awsat newspaper, December 2001.
• al-Zayyat, Montasser The Road To Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden’s Right-Hand Man (2003)
• al-Zayy¯at , Muntasir, al-Jam¯a`¯at al-Isl¯am¯iyah : ru’yah min al-d¯akhil (2005)