* 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)

                         

* Glenn Greenwald outlines the conscious spreading of lies to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and thus add another plank in the pattern of lies which the Bush/Cheney administration used to justify their “war of choice”

Glenn Greenwald wrote on Salon.com (8/4/08)  

• Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent — indispensably aided by ABC News — to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
• ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since — as ABC variously claimed — bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.”
• ABC News’ claim — which they said came at first from “three well-placed but separate sources,” followed by “four well-placed and separate sources” — was completely false from the beginning.
• That means that ABC News’ “four well-placed and separate sources” fed them information that was completely false — false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.
• It’s extremely possible — one could say highly likely — that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them.
• What we know for certain — as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax — is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims.
• Seven years later, as I’ve amply documented, those ABC News reports linking Saddam and anthrax penetrated very deeply — by design — into our public discourse and into the public consciousness.
• The Weekly Standard published a much lengthier and more dogmatic article in April, 2002 again pushing the ABC “bentonite” claims and arguing: “There is purely circumstantial though highly suggestive evidence that might seem to link Iraq with last fall’s anthrax terrorism.”
• The American Enterprise Institute’s Laurie Mylroie (who had an AEI article linking Saddam to 9/11 ready for publication at the AEI on September 13) expressly claimed in November 2001 that “there is also tremendous evidence that subsequent anthrax attacks are connected to Iraq” and based that accusation almost exclusively on the report from ABC and Ross (“Mylroie: Evidence Shows Saddam Is Behind Anthrax Attacks”).
• And then, when President Bush named Iraq as a member of the “Axis of Evil” in his January 2002 State of the Union speech — just two months after ABC’s report, when the anthrax attacks were still very vividly on the minds of Americans — he specifically touted this claim: The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade.
• Bush’s invocation of Iraq was the only reference in the State of the Union address to the unsolved anthrax attacks. And the Iraq-anthrax connection was explicitly made by the President at a time when, as we now know, he was already eagerly planning an attack on Iraq.
• There can’t be any question that this extremely flamboyant though totally false linkage between Iraq and the anthrax attacks — accomplished primarily by the false bentonite reports from ABC News and Brian Ross — played a very significant role in how Americans perceived of the Islamic threat generally and Iraq specifically.
• As but one very illustrative example, The Washington Post‘s columnist, Richard Cohen, supported the invasion of Iraq, came to regret that support, and then explained what led him to do so, in a 2004 Post column entitled “Our Forgotten Panic”: I’m not sure if panic is quite the right word, but it is close enough. Anthrax played a role in my decision to support the Bush administration’s desire to take out Saddam Hussein. I linked him to anthrax, which I linked to Sept. 11.
• Cohen — in a March 18, 2008 Slate article in which he explains why he wrongfully supported the attack on Iraq — disclosed this: Anthrax. Remember anthrax? It seems no one does anymore — at least it’s never mentioned. But right after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, letters laced with anthrax were received at the New York Post and Tom Brokaw’s office at NBC. . . . There was ample reason to be afraid.
• … The attacks were not entirely unexpected. I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.
• For this and other reasons, the anthrax letters appeared linked to the awful events of Sept. 11. It all seemed one and the same.
• Cohen’s mental process that led him to link anthrax to Iraq and then to support an attack on Iraq, warped as it is, was extremely common.
• Having heard ABC News in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attack flamboyantly and repeatedly link Saddam to the anthrax attacks, followed by George Bush’s making the same linkage (albeit more subtly) in his January, 2002 State of the Union speech, much of the public had implanted into their minds that Saddam Hussein was not just evil, but a severe threat to the U.S., likely the primary culprit behind the anthrax attacks. All along, though, the anthrax came from a U.S. Government/Army research lab.
• Critically, ABC News never retracted its story (they merely noted, as they had done from the start, that the White House denied the reports). And thus, the linkage between Saddam and the anthrax attacks — every bit as false as the linkage between Saddam and the 9/11 attacks — persisted.
• … the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government — from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves.
• Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade.
• ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and — as importantly — to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks.
• And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They’re allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.
• They’re not protecting “sources.” The people who fed them the bentonite story aren’t “sources.” They’re fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood.
• But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far. 
• See  about Richard Cohen’s admission that he was told before the anthrax attacks happened by a “high government official” to take cipro. Atrios writes: “now that we know that the US gov’t believes that anthrax came from the inside, shouldn’t Cohen be a wee bit curious about what this warning was based on?”
• Wouldn’t the most basic journalistic instincts lead them now — in light of the claims by our Government that the attacks came from a Government scientist — to wonder why and how their Government sources were warning about an anthrax attack?
• Then again, the most basic journalistic instincts would have led ABC News to reveal who concocted and fed them the false “Saddam/anthrax” reports in the first place, and yet we still are forced to guess at those questions because ABC News continues to cover up the identity of the perpetrators. 
• … it is not possible to overstate the importance of anthrax in putting the country into the state of fear that led to the attack on Iraq and so many of the other abuses of the Bush era.
• There are few news stories more significant, if there are any, than unveiling who the culprits were behind this deliberate propaganda.

 read the entire post at … http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/index.html

LMW COMMENT …

One of the crucial questions raised in my just-published novel CASE CLOSED is why the FBI failed to solve the anthrax case.

My premise in the novel is that the FBI was told not to solve the case.

Who would have the power to divert an FBI investigation into a major terrorist attack which killed 5 people and threw our country into a panic? Why would anyone high in the government want to keep the FBI investigation OFF THE TRACK?

One reason might be the Bush/Cheney obsession with invading Iraq, and thus the need to keep the anthrax investigation open and to keep Saddam Hussein as a potential culprit … even though the FBI seems to have known at the time that any link between Saddam and the anthrax attacks was pure fantasy.

These questions form an important part of my fictional account in which the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) re-investigates the FBI’s anthrax investigation.

Do I believe that CASE CLOSED presents what actually happened in the anthrax attacks and subsequent FBI investigation? Of course not. It’s a novel!

But … many early readers, including a well placed source in the Intelligence Commnity, have told me that my story is, unfortunately, all too plausible.

* purchase CASE CLOSED (paperback)

* see CASE CLOSED VIDEO on YouTube

* Bush admits torture to gain information regarding the anthrax attacks

Eartha Jane Melzer of the Michigan Messenger writes (5-29-09) …

• Former President George W. Bush, in a nearly 90-minute-long unscripted address to the local economic development club in this down-trodden southwest Michigan city (Benton Harbor), said Thursday evening he was honored to have served during “some unusual times,” making repeated references to the challenges he faced as commander in chief amid the “fog of war.”
• … the former president spoke indirectly of his administration’s authorization of the use of torture against detainees captured during the War on Terror, avoiding the words “torture” and “abuse.”
• “You have to make tough decisions,” Bush said. “They’ve captured a guy who murdered 3,000 citizens … that affected me … They come in and say he may have more information
•  …and we had an anthrax attack … and they say he may have more information. What do you do?“
• Bush was firm and defended his record as president: “I will tell you that the information gained saved lives.”

read the entire article at … http://michiganmessenger.com/19945/bush-on-his-presidency-there-is-such-a-thing-as-the-fog-of-war

LMW COMMENT …

It sure seems like former President Bush has admitted torturing a prisoner to gain information about the anthrax attacks.

How can this be reconciled with the FBI’s determination, very early on, that the anthrax used in the attacks came from a U.S. lab? Or the FBI’s current insistence that USAMRIID scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the 2001 attacks?

What Bush (and Cheney) were doing, in my view, was trying desperately to tie the anthrax attacks to Saddam Hussein, in order to add another justification for invading Iraq.

If this is true, Bush and Cheney tortured, not to save lives, but to justify a war of choice that has so far killed over 4,ooo Americans and many tens of thousands of Iraqis, while advancing no discernible national interest.

Questions that cry out to be answered.

Who was tortured in connection with the anthrax attacks?

Who did the torturing? (FBI Director Meuller has said the FBI did not torture anyone)

What questions were asked? What information was gained?

Was the information obtained by torture shared with the FBI (assuming it wasn’t them doing the torturing)? 

What was done with that information?

In my new novel CASE CLOSED, I present a fictional scenario to explain why the FBI failed to solve the 2001 anthrax case. My theory is that the FBI failed to solve the case because they were told not to. Who would have the power to squelch an FBI investigation in a mass murder carried out in a terrorist fashion? Why?

* Keith Olbermann: anthrax, silicon, Iraq … government scientist conveniently changes his mind

 

Keith Olbermann

Keith Olbermann on Countdown …watch the Olbermann video at … http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP60

GOVERNMENT CLEARLY NOT FORTHCOMING ABOUT ANTHRAX INVESTIGATION

LMW COMMENT …

The original government position was that silicon was added to the anthrax by the person who prepared the powder for mailing.

SInce Iraq was one of 3 countries with that capability (the U.S. and Russia are the others), the silicon addition allowed suspicion to fall on Iraq and add another plank in the case for invading Iraq in the Bush/Cheney war of choice. See Colin Powell at the U.N. waving a vial of anthrax and warning that Iraq had bioweapons and the ability to deliver them to the eastern shores of the U.S.

Now, however, Dr. Bruce Ivins has been identified by the FBI as the sole perpetrator, and there seems to be a concensus that Ivins did not have the capability or wherewithall to add silicon.

OOPS!

Suddenly, the government scientist has changed his view. How convenient.

DkbpCTo

* Ames anthrax and the 1943-1969 U.S. biowarfare program

Ike Solem posted a comment earlier today on one of the posts having to do with Marcia Chambers’ story of what she saw at Iowa State University in 1990. Here are some extracts from Ike’s comment …

• The claim since the (2001 anthrax) attacks is that the Ames strain was isolated from a cow in Texas in the early 1980s, and then it was sent to Fort Detrick, where it was found to be quite virulent and was thus chosen as the “anthrax vaccine challenge strain” – i.e., guinea pigs, rabbits and rhesus macaque monkeys would be vaccinated and then exposed to the Ames strain.  Ames is still the anthrax challenge strain, by the way.
• In 1969, Nixon shut down the entire program after anthrax spores killed 3000 sheep on the edge of the Dugway Utah biowarfare test center.  Everything was to be flushed, and supposedly it was.
• You can see the problem, however… if the Ames strain was really isolated in the 1950s, perhaps that means that the biowarfare program was not really shut down – just put on ice, transferred to a friendly country like Britain, or something similar.
• This then leads into other troubling questions – like who was it, precisely, that set Saddam Hussein up with a biological weapons program in the early 1980s when he was fighting our sworn enemies, the Iranians?
• If the Ames strain came from the 1943-1969 U.S. biological warfare program, which had been ‘entirely dismantled’, then we have a whole new set of difficult questions to ask – for example, did Britain keep their biowarfare operation running?  Is that how Saddam got his hands on anthrax?
• They do have that official secrets act, which they use to muzzle their press on such issues, so it is hard to say.
• the trail of odd suicides,
• from Frank Olson (a Detrick microbiologist who joined the program in the 1940s and later decided it had been a terrible mistake)
• to David Kelly (UK WMD scientist who died in 2003 after being accused of complicity in the alleged “sexing up” of Iraqi WMD intelligence.)
• to Bruce Ivins (accused by the FBI of being the sole perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax attacks after he committed suicide in 200committed suicide in 2008).  
• Recall Colin Powell waving the little tube of anthrax around at the UN, as well, as he was drumming up support for an invasion of Iraq.
• This mess is going to be exposed to strong sunlight – which is one of the more effective methods of destroying germs – and all the surveillance and harassment in the world won’t stop that from happening.

* Seymour Hersh: selective intelligence from the OSP (5-12-03)

Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker (5-12-03) …

• They call themselves, self-mockingly, the Cabal—a small cluster of policy advisers and analysts now based in the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans.
• In the past year, according to former and present Bush Administration officials, their operation, which was conceived by Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, has brought about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community.
• These advisers and analysts, who began their work in the days after September 11, 2001, have produced a skein of intelligence reviews that have helped to shape public opinion and American policy toward Iraq.
• “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off. They’re running Chalabi. The D.I.A. has been intimidated and beaten to a pulp. And there’s no guts at all in the C.I.A.”
• According to the Pentagon adviser, Special Plans was created in order to find evidence of what Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true—that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States.
• Rumsfeld and his colleagues believed that the C.I.A. was unable to perceive the reality of the situation in Iraq. The goal of Special Plans, he said, was “to put the data under the microscope to reveal what the intelligence community can’t see.
• For example, many newspapers published extensive interviews with Adnan Ihsan Saeed al-Haideri, a civil engineer who, with the I.N.C.’s help, fled Iraq in 2001, and subsequently claimed that he had visited twenty hidden facilities that he believed were built for the production of biological and chemical weapons.
• One, he said, was underneath a hospital in Baghdad. Haideri was apparently a source for Secretary of State Colin Powell’s claim, in his presentation to the United Nations Security Council on February 5th, that the United States had “firsthand descriptions” of mobile factories capable of producing vast quantities of biological weapons. The U.N. teams that returned to Iraq last winter were unable to verify any of al-Haideri’s claims.
• In a statement to the Security Council in March, on the eve of war, Hans Blix, the U.N.’s chief weapons inspector, noted that his teams had physically examined the hospital and other sites with the help of ground-penetrating radar equipment. “No underground facilities for chemical or biological production or storage were found so far,” he said.
• … they were using the intelligence from the C.I.A. and other agencies only when it fit their agenda. They didn’t like the intelligence they were getting, and so they brought in people to write the stuff. They were so crazed and so far out and so difficult to reason with—to the point of being bizarre. Dogmatic, as if they were on a mission from God.” He added, “If it doesn’t fit their theory, they don’t want to accept it.”
• In interviews, former C.I.A. officers and analysts described the agency as increasingly demoralized. “George knows he’s being beaten up,” one former officer said of George Tenet, the C.I.A. director. “And his analysts are terrified. George used to protect his people, but he’s been forced to do things their way.”
• The Defense Department and the Office of the Vice-President write their own pieces, based on their own ideology. We collect so much stuff that you can find anything you want.”

read the entire article at … http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/05/12/030512fa_fact

* Seymour Hersh: Bush & Cheney corrupted the Iraq intelligence (10-27-03)

Seymour Hersh wrote in the New Yorker (10-27-03) …

• Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered.
• Part of the answer lies in decisions made early in the Bush Administration, before the events of September 11, 2001. In interviews with present and former intelligence officials, I was told that some senior Administration people, soon after coming to power, had bypassed the government’s customary procedures for vetting intelligence.
• The vetting process is especially important when one is dealing with foreign-agent reports—sensitive intelligence that can trigger profound policy decisions.
• … what the Bush people did was “dismantle the existing filtering process that for fifty years had been preventing the policymakers from getting bad information. They created stovepipes to get the information they wanted directly to the top leadership. Their position is that the professional bureaucracy is deliberately and maliciously keeping information from them.
• There was also a change in procedure at the Pentagon under Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-Secretary for Policy.
• Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had long complained about the limits of American intelligence.
• After he became Secretary of Defense, a separate intelligence unit was set up in the Pentagon’s policy office, under the control of William Luti, a senior aide to Feith. This office, which circumvented the usual procedures of vetting and transparency, stovepiped many of its findings to the highest-ranking officials.
• The State of the Union speech was confounding to many members of the intelligence community, who could not understand how such intelligence could have got to the President without vetting.
• The former White House official told me, “Maybe the Secretary of Defense and his people are short-circuiting the process, and creating a separate channel to the Vice-President. Still, at the end of the day all the policies have to be hashed out in the interagency process, led by the national-security adviser.” What happened instead, he said, “was a real abdication of responsibility by Condi.”

             

LMW COMMENT … The separate Pentagon office which produced so much misinformation about Iraq and its ability to produce and deliver anthrax to the eastern U.S., is featured in my novel CASE CLOSED, to be published in the summer of 2009.

                

            

            

            

             

                       

 read the entire article at … http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/10/27/031027fa_fact

* Frank Rich: linking Iraq and anthrax (4-26-09)

Frank Rich writes in the NYT (4-26-09) …

• Maj. Paul Burney, a United States Army psychiatrist assigned to interrogations in Guantánamo Bay that summer of 2002, told Army investigators: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and we were not being successful.”
• As higher-ups got more “frustrated” at the inability to prove this connection, the major said, “there was more and more pressure to resort to measures” that might produce that intelligence.
• In other words, the ticking time bomb was not another potential Qaeda attack on America but the Bush administration’s ticking timetable for selling a war in Iraq; it wanted to pressure Congress to pass a war resolution before the 2002 midterm elections.
• But there were no links between 9/11 and Iraq, and the White House knew it.

LMW COMMENT …

Frank Rich is so right. President Obama might prefer not “looking back,” but he really has no choice. As constitutional law professor Jonathan Turley has stated so clearly and often, to be a nation of laws we must enforce the law.

The laws that were broken, purposely and knowingly, by the Bush administration are not trivial matters. Bush and Cheney and their cabal broke laws in order to convince the American people to support an invasion of Iraq which Bush and Cheney had long before determined as their war of choice.

Linking Saddam and Al- Qaeda was one part of the Bush/Cheney strategy. Linking Saddam and anthrax was another part of the infuriating pattern of lies that led us to Iraq and all of the horrific consequences that then flowed.

 

read Rich’s entire column at … http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/26/opinion/26rich.html

 

* they lied about supposed Saddam-al Qaeda links, and they lied about anthrax in Iraq (4-22-09)

Jonathan Landay writes in McClatchy Newspapers (4/22/09) …

• The Bush administration applied relentless pressure on interrogators to use harsh methods on detainees in part to find evidence of cooperation between al Qaida and the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s regime, according to a former senior U.S. intelligence official and a former Army psychiatrist.
• Bush and his top lieutenants charged that Saddam was secretly pursuing nuclear, biological and chemical weapons in defiance of a United Nations ban, and had to be overthrown because he might provide them to al Qaida for an attack on the U.S. or its allies.
• In fact, no evidence has ever been found of operational ties between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network and Saddam’s regime.
• … “for most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there.”
• It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document.
• “Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”
• “I think it’s obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq),” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin said in a conference call with reporters. “They made out links where they didn’t exist.”

LMW COMMENT … There is much evidence to prove that George Bush and Dick Cheney were intent on invading Iraq before the 9/11 attacks. After the 9/11 attacks, they were desperate to find reasons to justify their already planned invasion. When the reasons did not exist, they made them up. After 9/11, they lied that there were links between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. After the anthrax attacks, they lied that there was anthrax in Iraq and that Saddam had the means to deliver biological weapons to the U.S. And they used torture to try to develop evidence that didn’t exist. For this, over 3,000 Americans and tens of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives. It is impossible for me to express my revulsion at the despicable manner in which Bush and Cheney acted, although I tried in my novel CASE CLOSED, to be published in the summer of 2009.

Read the entire article at … http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/66622.html

 

* Powell claims Saddam has anthrax and the means to deliver it

February 5, 2003 … Secretary of State  Colin Powell … Address to the United Nations Security Council (Extracts)

“My second purpose today is to provide you with additional information, to share with you what the United States knows about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction as well as Iraq’s involvement in terrorism.

“My colleagues, every statement I make today is backed up by sources, solid sources. These are not assertions. What we’re giving you are facts and conclusions based on solid intelligence.

“We know from sources that a missile brigade outside Baghdad was disbursing rocket launchers and warheads containing biological warfare agent[s] to various locations, distributing them to various locations in western Iraq.

“The gravity of this moment is matched by the gravity of the threat that Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction pose to the world.

“First, biological weapons …      

“Iraq declared 8,500 liters of anthrax, but UNSCOM estimates that Saddam Hussein could have produced 25,000 liters. If concentrated into this dry form, this amount would be enough to fill tens upon tens upon tens of thousands of teaspoons.

“The Iraqis have never accounted for all of the biological weapons they admitted they had and we know they had. And they have not accounted for many of the weapons filled with these agents such as there are 400 bombs. This is evidence, not conjecture.

This is true. This is all well-documented.

“Dr. Blix told this council that Iraq has provided little evidence to verify anthrax production and no convincing evidence of its destruction.

“One of the most worrisome things that emerges from the thick intelligence file we have on Iraq’s biological weapons is the existence of mobile production facilities used to make biological agents. In a matter of months, they can produce a quantity of biological poison equal to the entire amount that Iraq claimed to have produced in the years prior to the Gulf War.

“…  a fourth source, an Iraqi major, who defected, confirmed that Iraq has mobile biological research laboratories, in addition to the production facilities I mentioned earlier.

“Ladies and gentlemen, these are sophisticated facilities. For example, they can produce anthrax and botulinum toxin. In fact, they can produce enough dry biological agent in a single month to kill thousands upon thousands of people. And dry agent of this type is the most lethal form for human beings.

“By 1998, U.N. experts agreed that the Iraqis had perfected drying techniques for their biological weapons programs. Now, Iraq has incorporated this drying expertise into these mobile production facilities.

“We know from Iraq’s past admissions that it has successfully weaponized not only anthrax, but also other biological agents, including botulinum toxin, aflatoxin and ricin.

“The Iraqi regime has also developed ways to disburse lethal biological agents, widely and discriminately into the water supply, into the air.

“There can be no doubt that Saddam Hussein has biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more. And he has the ability to dispense these lethal poisons and diseases in ways that can cause massive death and destruction.

“Let me talk now about the systems Iraq is developing to deliver weapons of mass destruction, in particular Iraq’s ballistic missiles and unmanned aerial vehicles, UAVs.

“There is ample evidence that Iraq has dedicated much effort to developing and testing spray devices that could be adapted for UAVs.

“The linkages over the past 10 years between Iraq’s UAV program and biological and chemical warfare agents are of deep concern to us. Iraq could use these small UAVs which have a wingspan of only a few meters to deliver biological agents to its neighbors or if transported, to other countries, including the United States.

And the record of Saddam Hussein’s cooperation with other Islamist terrorist organizations is clear … Al Qaida continues to have a deep interest in acquiring weapons of mass destruction.

“Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world.