* excerpts from an NPR interview (8/26/11) of Laurie Garrett … the FBI completely botched the anthrax investigation … there’s so much evidence that al-Qaeda was behind the anthrax mailings … bin Laden’s Tora Bora cave twice tested positive for the same Ames anthrax strain as was found in the letters.

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Excerpts from Ira Flatow’s NPR interview of Laurie Garrett (8/26/11) …

more than three years ago, I decided that the entire FBI investigation was not only, you know, Three Stooges writ large but that they – that they had been steered onto a targeting that was 100 percent incorrect.

So the model became oh, we have somebody like the Ted Kaczynski inside of the biological programs that are run by the U.S. military or are secondary to the U.S. military, and that’s who’d done it.

And then they went through one after another after another within that apparatus. You know, before Bruce Ivins becomes the named culprit, named after he’s dead and cannot defend himself, there were 10 others. And in every case, their lives were completely destroyed by the FBI investigation, by being named.

They were deported and have never been allowed back in America, or they were driven to suicide, or they were publicly humiliated, lost their careers, lost marriages, everything imaginable because the FBI never had a way of doing an investigation that would end up in a courtroom.

I get outraged because the FBI completely botched the investigation on the anthrax.

I get outraged because there’s so much evidence that al-Qaida was behind the anthrax mailings and that at least as strong a circumstantial case as was made against Bruce Ivins can be made against al-Qaida even stronger.

We now know, for example, that one of the hijackers of Flight 93, the jet that was crashed into Pennsylvania, tested positive for anthrax, his body did. And he’s the same fellow who went to an emergency room in Florida when they were all down there getting flight training, seeking treatment for a strange black wound on his hand that was at the time diagnosed as a possible spider bite. But after the 9/11 incident, the FBI re-interrogated the ER physician, who said: You know what? It could have been anthrax. What was he doing messing with anthrax?

We also now know, thanks to the documents that were only handed over by the FBI to the National Academy of Sciences in December of 2010, we now know from those documents that the cave, the famous Tora Bora cave where they almost caught Osama bin Laden in December 2001 but then Donald Rumsfeld refused to order a airstrike – and that’s another whole story – we now know that that Tora Bora cave twice tested positive not only for anthrax but for the same strain, Ames anthrax, as was found in the letters.

There are members of Congress that want the anthrax investigation reopened. There are members of Congress that feel it is possible that it was a singular event, the attacks of 9/11 and the anthrax mailings, carried out by the same people all as a continuum. And when you get into my book, you’ll see more and more reasons that that is a reasonable way to approach how you view the situation.

http://www.npr.org/2011/08/26/139972661/a-look-back-at-9-11-in-i-heard-the-sirens-scream

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