* Excerpts from “I Heard The Sirens Scream” by by Pulitzer Prize winning author Laurie Garrett

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Excerpts from “I Heard The Sirens Scream”

by Pulitzer Prize winning author Laurie Garrett

(sub-headings by LMW) …

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FBI’s misuse of non-FBI labs …

Twenty-nine non-FBI laboratories across America were engaged in the effort, with no direct communication or knowledge of each other’s findings permitted. The FBI investigators changed their strategies and notions of appropriate science fairly regularly, never allowing the academic, private or government laboratories that comprised the “team” to either provide guidance in plotting the scientific inquiry, or frankly clueing the researchers in on why any particular avenue of study was being pursued.

investigation by public humiliation … 

for years the key tactic used to elicit statements or confessions was public humiliation.

intense scrutiny of Ivins – until he took his own life …

The scrutiny of Ivins grew so intense, featuring overt 24-hour surveillance of his suburban Maryland home and questioning of his children, that Ivins’ already delicate psychological state rapidly deteriorated, until the microbiologist took his own life by swallowing a massive quantity of the headache remedy, acetaminophen.

strange circumstantial evidence …

The bulk of the evidence against Ivins was circumstantial, and every bit as strange as that the FBI had leveled against Hatfill and other persons of the agency’s interest.

destruction of Iowa Ames …

the University of Iowa and the State’s troopers had, with much fanfare, destroyed the original samples during the fall of 2001. Amazingly, the Justice Department had raised no objections at the time, failing then to appreciate how critically important the samples would prove to be for Amerithrax forensics.

silicate signature …

When the so-called “silicate signature” on anthrax samples obtained from other sources was compared to the 2001 envelope spores there were two critical differences: There was far less silicate, and none of the comparable samples had silicon inside the spores, as the Amerithrax samples did. The Sandia researchers had proved all of this before the spring of 2002, and experimentally demonstrated that the only way silicate got inside the spores was if the chemical was in the medium used to grow the bacilli.

silicon and tin …

During the 2001 early investigation the FBI tested samples from the letters and found both silicon and tin in the mailings to the New York Post and Senator Leahy, in both cases constituting less than 1 percent of the bulk weight of the samples. The early FBI silicon/tin findings were contradicted by the Sandia work, as well as testing at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. The early silicon/tin data from the FBI would not be disclosed to Congress or outside researchers for many years, and its significance or accuracy remained controversial ten years later.

no connection with Saddam … known before Colin Powell UN speech …

This 2002 Sandia finding, if accurate, had two profound implications: First, it disproved any alleged connection between chemicals on the anthrax spores and their purported production as WMD by Saddam Hussein or any other country. While the finding did not rule out the possibility that a foreign state actor grew the spores, there was no evidence that silicon, bentonite or any other chemical was used in the process to make the spores stay fluffy, un-clumped and therefore “weaponized.” The second implication was critical to the forensics, as the Sandia group basically told the FBI, “Find a guy that uses silicate in his bacterial growth medium, and you’ve got your culprit.”

Sadly, this information was kept secret until July 2008. There is no evidence in the public record that the FBI allowed the finding to be conveyed to those individuals inside the Bush Administration or CIA that were searching for links between the anthrax and the government of Iraq, nor does it appear the Justice Department allowed the information to be incorporated in any manner in the 2003 United Nations Security Council debate at which Secretary of State Colin Powell conveyed the case for war on Baghdad.

FBI investigation focused in wrong directions …

For years the FBI inquiry continued focusing on one incorrect suspect or lead after another.

RMR-1029 flasks …

In 2004 the FBI seized Ivins’ RMR-1029 flasks, having remarkably allowed them to remain in his possession for more than two years, while he was simultaneously on a list of some 200 anthrax scientists considered to be possible culprits. Those RMR-1029 samples were sent to Worsham, Keim and Fraser-Liggett to be submitted to their respective forms of analysis.

April 2007 … Ivins “not a target” … and then he is …

Though Ivins was questioned many times and underwent a lie detector test, he remained an active part of the investigation into 2007, and in April of that year received a formal letter from the Justice Department informing him that he was “not a target” of the Amerithrax search. … But just one month after receiving that “not a target” reassurance Ivins was called to testify for two days before a federal grand jury, where his handling of RMR-1029 was parsed in detail. Shaken by the proceedings, Ivins told colleagues he feared that he was being fingered as the murderer. He began to drink alcohol heavily and went on back on the anti-depressant Celexa, which he had ceased using years before.

FBI’s belligerent scrutiny of Ivins …

For the next eight months Bruce Ivins, his family and his closest colleagues at USAMRIID were subjected to increasingly overt and belligerent scrutiny by the FBI and eventually the media.

On June 9th the FBI questioned Ivins again, in the presence of his attorney, and the scientist appears to have been deeply shaken by the interrogation. Throughout the following month the FBI conducted undisguised surveillance of his home, and followed him wherever he drove or walked, spoke with his wife and children, and made their watchdog presence known. For Ivins – a man who was under psychiatric treatment for paranoia – the federal vehicles parked outside his suburban home must have left him unhinged.

Spertzel – “The FBI needs to explain” …

Richard Spertzel, who headed the biological weapons inspections for UNSCOM during the lead-up to the Persian Gulf War, wrote in the Wall Street Journal just days after the FBI named Ivins as the culprit, “The FBI needs to explain why it zeroed in on Ivins, how he could have made the anthrax mailed to lawmakers and the media, and how he (or anyone else) could have pulled off the attacks, acting alone. I believe this is another mistake in the [Amerithrax] investigation.”

Ivins’ group therapy with Jean Duley …

One month later, on July 9th Ivins allegedly made statements in his weekly group therapy session that were so alarming that the session convener feared he either intended to kill others, or himself. According to the counselor that chaired the session, Jean Duley (who was not trained in psychology) Ivins told the group he was angry about how the FBI and the government were treating him, and had become convinced that he faced the death penalty.

Would FBI case have led to conviction? …

Would all of this have resulted in conviction had Bruce Ivins lived to see his day in court? His lawyer, Paul Kemp doesn’t think so, and other legal experts have vouched that all the FBI evidence shows is that Ivins was a disturbed, paranoid individual, probably bona fide mentally ill. A case could be made that his mental illness preceded 9/11, but that still doesn’t prove that Bruce Ivins made, and mailed, the anthrax letters.

Weaknesses and omissions in FBI case …

• the FBI cannot prove that Ivins was in the State of New Jersey on the two days when the deadly letters were dropped in Trenton-area mailboxes.
• The FBI also failed to offer evidence that Ivins could produce handwriting, using either hand that resembled that penned on the letters and envelopes.
• the FBI couldn’t prove that Bruce Ivins managed to remove samples of wet bacilli from that flask, and turn them into dry, fluffy spores.
• whoever created the batch of dry spores must have contaminated the space in which he, or they, worked. But there was no evidence of such contamination at USAMRIID, or on any of the property owned by the Ivins family.
• Even if the RMR-1029 matched every one of the Amerithrax letters, there was still no proof that Bruce Ivins was the person that converted samples into dry spores, stuffed them into envelopes and mailed the deadly postage.

yet FBI Director Mueller insists Ivins acted alone …

18 months later, with the NRC conclusions still not reached, FBI Director Robert Mueller declared case closed, officially shutting down the Amerithrax investigation. Dr. Bruce E. Ivins acted alone, and was the anthrax killer, Mueller insisted.

the NRC’s damning report  …

• In November 2010 the NRC completed its investigation, based on 9,600 pages of documents and hundreds of hours of testimony and oral evidence, drafting a damning report that was submitted to the FBI for security review prior to publication.
• The FBI was not pleased with the scientists’ findings, and produced 641 pages of previously withheld documents for additional NRC scrutiny.
• The exhausted 16 scientists and judicial experts on the NRC panel had little interest in poring over additional evidence, but agreements were reached, the Department of Justice agreed to add funds to the NRC budget. The panel reconvened until February 2011.
• The FBI’s mysteriously withheld 641 pages of evidence did little to sway the NRC, which issued its damning and final conclusions on February 15, 2011.
• The NRC was not convinced by the FBI’s primary evidence against Bruce Ivins, the RMR-1029 flask of Ames strain anthrax.
• Two assertions are in the FBI version of events:
• Ivins was in possession of the culprit anthrax, contained in flask RMR-1029.
• And he behaved in a manner that showed he was trying to hide the incriminating evidence from Special Agents.
• The NRC disputed both assertions.
• “It is not possible to reach a definitive conclusion about the origins of the B.anthracis in the mailings based on the available scientific evidence alone,” the NRC concluded. “The results of the genetic analyses of the repository samples were consistent with the finding that the spores in the attack letters were derived from RMR-1029, but the analyses did not definitely demonstrate such a relationship.”
• the NRC panel was never convinced that the FBI’s registry truly contained every sample of Ames strain in the world.
• And none of the panel members could shake the hunch that the evil-doer would never have turned over sample to the FBI.

two al-Qaeda blockbusters in the NRC report …

• First, among the bodies recovered from the United Flight 93 crash site were those of Ziad Jarrah, Ahmad Al Haznawi and the two other al-Qaeda hijackers thwarted by brave passengers in their attempts to crash the jet into the White House. PCR analysis was performed in 2001 on the hijackers’ tissues, testing positive for Bacillus anthracis. This possible anthrax finding was especially interesting because Ahmad Al Haznawi was the al-Qaeda member that sought medical help in the emergency room of the Ft. Lauderdale Holy Cross Hospital on June 22, 2001. Dr. Christos Tsonas treated Al Haznawi with antibiotics for a black crusty sore on his hand, which was after 9/11 retrospectively diagnosed as a possible case of cutaneous anthrax infection.
• The other revelation in the 641 pages was evidence related to three 2004 searches for anthrax spores carried out by the FBI and “other intelligence partners” in an “overseas location” used in 2001 by al-Qaeda. Though the location is classified, it appears to have been in Afghanistan, where U.S. Special Forces found two al-Qaeda related laboratories, one in Kabul and the other in Tora Bora, where Osama bin Laden successfully dodged American capture in December 2001. The three different rounds of swabbing, soil sampling and testing yielded contradictory results, some positive for anthracis, some negative. Adding to the confusion, another unnamed U.S. intelligence agency scoured the location before the FBI first reached the site, not only finding anthrax, but the Ames strain. The Ames-type Bacillus anthracis is a form of the bacterium never previously found in Asia. Further details of the possible al-Qaeda role in Amerithrax remain classified, and were not provided to the NRC.

possible al-Qaeda involvement deserves a more thorough review …

The entire issue of possible al-Qaeda involvement in the 2001 anthrax attacks “deserves a more thorough scientific review,” the NRC said.

attack anthrax was made on at least two separate occasions …

• Whoever made the Ames anthrax apparently did so, on at least two separate occasions. Though the samples mailed in September to media outlets in Florida and New York were generally the same as those found in the October letters to Leahy and Daschle, the appearance of the samples are clearly different.
• There were subtle genetic differences among the anthracis spores, from letter to letter, giving further support to the notion that the culprit(s) manufactured two separate quantities of anthrax, possibly in two different locations.
• Far from providing a “smoking gun” linking the Amerithrax letters to RMR-1029, the mutants could have arisen from years of growing the bacilli in various types of fluids, in a variety of settings.

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* Noah Shachtman writes: Did the Anthrax Attacks Kickstart the Iraq War? … Congressman Holt is quoted in Shachtman’s article saying: The anthrax attacks “made it possible to manufacture the argument that there was WMD in Iraq and links to Al-Qaeda” … LMW adds: Here are extracts from my novel CASE CLOSED regarding the potential linkage of “Saddam’s anthrax” to the invasion of Iraq

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Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN on Feb 5, 2003

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Noah Shachtman writes for WIRED (3/29/11) …

• Did the Anthrax Attacks Kickstart the Iraq War?
• On February 5th, 2003, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell went to the United Nations, to make the case for war in Iraq.
• A central plank of his presentation: the anthrax attacks that killed five people and helped send the country into a panic in the days after 9/11.
• “Less than a teaspoon-full of dry anthrax in an envelope shut down the United States Senate in the fall of 2001. This forced several hundred people to undergo emergency medical treatment and killed two postal workers just from an amount just about this quantity that was inside of an envelope,” Powell said.
• “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..”
• By the end of the following month, the invasion of Iraq was underway.

The anthrax attacks “made it possible

to manufacture the argument that there was WMD in Iraq

and links to Al-Qaeda,” Rep. Rush Holt said.

• And long after any links between Iraq and the killer spores were disproven, the Bush administration used the mystery surrounding the anthrax mailer to press its case for war.
• a few government officials (most notably, Sen. John McCain) publicly suggested that the Saddam Hussein regime may have been behind the anthrax letters.

read the entire article at … http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/03/did-the-anthrax-attacks-kickstart-the-iraq-war/#

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LMW COMMENT …

• I have long thought that the anthrax attacks, the invasion of Iraq, and the failed FBI investigation of the anthrax attacks … may in fact be linked.
• Like my characters in the excerpts from my novel CASE CLOSED, written in 2008 … the DOJ/FBI press conference sounded so implausible that it started me thinking about what might have happened.
• I am not making any accusations. My novel is fiction.
• But I do believe it is a possibility worth investigation, because it explains the otherwise inexplicable failure of the FBI to solve a case that should have been solved and then subsequently accusing Dr. Bruce Ivins without any of the evidence that would have been needed to convict him, had he been alive to defend himself.

Here are extracts from my novel CASE CLOSED

regarding the potential linkage of “Saddam’s anthrax”

to the invasion of Iraq

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… “After the nationwide panic caused by the anthrax mailings settled down, pretty much nothing happens in the FBI’s anthrax investigation. The next we hear about anthrax is in February 2003, when Secretary of State Abner Grant goes to the United Nations and holds up a vial of something – it wasn’t actually anthrax – claiming that Saddam can deliver weapons of mass destruction to the eastern seaboard of the U.S.

… Of course, we learn later that Saddam had neither WMD nor any way to reach our shores.

… U.N. arms inspector Blix said something much like that a few days before we invaded Iraq.

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… “What do we know so far?” Hamilton began, ticking off the points on the fingers of his large hand. “One, the FBI took seven years and never proved who prepared and sent the anthrax letters. Two, the President wanted to invade Iraq and was seeking justification. Three, the threat of anthrax from Iraq was used to justify the invasion.

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… “The very best police force in the land is assigned to track down the person or persons who prepared and mailed the lethal envelopes. But even before any evidence is obtained, the great leader announces the desired result – there may be some possible link to Saddam, he says; I wouldn’t put it past him.

“The great vice-leader also chimes in, saying that Saddam had henchmen who were trained how to deploy and use these kinds of substances, so you start to piece it all together.

“I would ask you to note that these instantaneous, unsupported allegations are directed at Saddam; Osama, who sent the planes, is not mentioned.

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… “Time passes. A truly massive investigation is put into ponderous motion by the greatest police force in the land. Although some think there are only a few real suspects who should be investigated, namely those people with the means and the access to actually prepare and send the anthrax laced letters, the best police force in the land looks everyplace but where these suspects are known to be. Not surprisingly, no arrests are made.

“Now why would the best police force in the land look in all the wrong places? You can answer, Aryeh.”

Kauffman answered with a question. “Because they don’t want to solve the crime?”

“Right!” Hamilton said. “At least not until the unsolved anthrax attack can be used to support an invasion of the country still ruled by Saddam. The case for invasion is made from many factors, with WMD first among them; anthrax is prominently mentioned among the supposed weapons of mass destruction. Why, the great and respected Secretary of State even goes to the U.N. and waves what looks like a vial of anthrax, scaring the shit out of everybody.

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… “You can’t prove that the FBI didn’t want to solve the case,” Kauffman said.

“Not yet,” Hamilton said.

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… Marilyn Sowickey spoke first. “So you think the anthrax letters were a purposeful part of the President’s deception to justify the invasion of Iraq, that he intimidated the FBI so they didn’t solve the anthrax case, and that Dr. Ingram was subsequently murdered by our government in order to finally close the case when it no longer suited the President’s need to keep it open.”

“I’m not saying that’s what did happen,” Hamilton said. “I’m suggesting it could have happened, that it’s a hypothesis worth investigating.”

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* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *

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* Colin Powell blames others for his own disgraceful conduct in promoting the Bush/Cheney “war of choice” in Iraq

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see prior post …

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

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CBSNews reports (2/16/11) …

• in an interview with The Guardian, Former U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell has called on the CIA and Pentagon to explain why they failed to notify him of unreliability of a key source who claimed knowledge of Saddam Hussein’s bio-weapons capability.

source: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/16/501364/main20032561.shtml

LMW COMMENT …

• Colin Powell had every reason to doubt the information pandered by the Bush/Cheney crowd, and he was certainly positioned to find out for himself.
• The best spin on the matter is that Powell did not have the courage and the independence to investigate.
• The worst spin is that he knew the truth – no WMD, no anthrax – and supported the call for war anyway.
• This is the most disgraceful episode of Powell’s otherwise mostly distinguished career and he compounds the problem now by blaming others for his own shortcomings and moral inadequacies.

It is a premise of my novel CASE CLOSED,

fictional as I wrote it but I believe worthy of investigation,

that the Bush/Cheney crowd did not want the anthrax case to be solved

because it was a valuable component in their case of lies

to convince Congress and the American people

to support their “war of choice” in Iraq.

Colin Powell’s disgraceful testimony at the UN

was a major part of making that case.

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CASE CLOSED is a novel about the FBI’s failed investigation

of the 2001 anthrax attacks

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read the opening scene of CASE CLOSED …

* CASE CLOSED – opening scene … the DIA re-investigates the FBI’s failed case

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* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *

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* who benefitted from the FBI failure to solve the 2001 anthrax mailings case? … first to benefit … the Bush/Cheney plan to invade Iraq

Secretary of State Colin Powell waving a vial of "anthrax" at the UN on Feb 5, 2003

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on February 5, 2003, Secretary of State  Colin Powell

addressed the United Nations Security Council …

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

“… 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.”

NOTE: 6 weeks later, Iraq was invaded

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LMW COMMENT …

• This was perhaps Colin Powell’s worst moment in an otherwise distinguished career. Virtually none of what he said at the UN turned out to be true. Saddam had no anthrax, no means to make anthrax, and no means to deliver anthrax to the US.
• But making us afraid that he did was one of the important false props in the Bush/Cheney false case for invading Iraq.
• If the FBI had by  then (which was 15 months after the anthrax attacks) solved the case, and it wasn’t Saddam, at least one of these false props would have disappeared, and perhaps we would never have invaded Iraq.

The FBI’s case against Dr. Ivins is clearly bogus: no evidence, no witnesses, an impossible timeline, science that proves innocence instead of guilt.

So what really happened? And why doesn’t the FBI offer America a credible story?

I can imagine only 3 possible “actual” scenarios …

1. The FBI has more evidence against Dr. Ivins but is, for some undisclosed reason, withholding that evidence … POSSIBLE BUT NOT SO LIKELY
2. The FBI, despite the most expensive and extensive investigation in its history, has not solved the case and has no idea who prepared and mailed the anthrax letters that killed 5 Americans in 2001 … EVEN LESS LIKELY
3. The FBI knows who did it (not Dr. Ivins) but is covering up the actual perpetrators, for undisclosed reasons … THE MOST LIKELY SCENARIO

It is this third scenario that leads me to try to show

who might have benefitted from not solving the case.

I am making no accusations,

but it is surely appropriate in an unsolved case

to look at those who might want to keep it unsolved.

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The “fictional” scenario in my novel CASE CLOSED has been judged by many readers, including a highly respected official in the U.S. Intelligence Community, as perhaps more plausible than the FBI’s unproven assertions regarding Dr. Ivins.

* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *

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* If it had become known that the Administration had allowed this infiltration — the Bush Administration would never have won a second term

.

The New York Times says the FBI’s anthrax case has “too many loose ends.” Find out where some of those looses ends might have originated in my novel CASE CLOSED. Sure it’s fiction, but many readers, including a highly respected member of the U.S. Intelligence Community, think my premise is actually “quite plausible.”

* buy CASE CLOSED at amazon *

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Al-Timini, Bailey, Card ... Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld

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from DXer’s comment …

• Al-Timimi had been Andrew Card’s assistant.
• He had a letter of commendation from the White House for classified work for the Navy while at the contractor SRA at the same time as Battelle consultant Charles Bailey (the former deputy USAMRIID Commander who turned prolific co-author of Ames research).
• If it had become known that the Administration had allowed this infiltration — the Bush Administration would never have won a second term.
• Al-Timimi’s dad worked at the Iraqi embassy in Washington.

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* Glenn Greenwald … the case against Ivins doesn’t hold up, the anthrax attacks contributed to the war of choice in Iraq, and there is little apparent interest in learning the truth

CASE CLOSED is a novel which answers the question “Why did the FBI fail to solve the 2001 anthrax case?” … Here’s an excerpt from the CASE CLOSED story; an early discussion by the (fictional) DIA team investigation the FBI anthrax investigation …

“Let’s start with the assumption the Bureau is not dumb,” Sowickey began. “So that can’t be the excuse for the lamebrain way they conducted this supposedly high priority investigation. Nor can it explain the way they failed to establish links between pieces of information they clearly had. Nor why they hinted for years that Farmer (ie, Hatfill) was the perp and then gave him $5.8 mil to go away. There was, by the way, even less evidence implicating Dr. Farmer than there was on Dr. Ingram (ie, Ivins), which is close to nothing. After seven years.”

*** click here to buy CASE CLOSED by Lew Weinstein

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the case against Ivins doesn’t hold up,

the anthrax attacks contributed to the war of choice in Iraq,

and there is little apparent interest in learning the truth

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Glenn Greenwald writes for Salon (11-27-09) …

• Yesterday, the British Ambassador to the U.S. in 2002 and 2003, Sir Christopher Meyer (who favored the war), said attitudes towards Iraq were influenced to an extent not appreciated by him at the time by the anthrax scare in the US soon after 9/11.
• On 9/11 Condoleezza Rice, then the US national security adviser, told Meyer she was in “no doubt: it was an al-Qaida operation” . . .
• the anthrax scare “steamed up” policy makers in Bush’s administration and helped swing attitudes against Saddam
• the anthrax attack was exploited by leading media and political figures to gin up intense hostility towards Iraq.
• The case against Ivins is so riddled with logical and evidentiary holes that it has generated extreme doubts not merely from typical government skeptics but from the most mainstream, establishment-revering, and ideologically disparate sources.
• Even our leading mainstream, establishment-serving media outlets — and countless bio-weapons experts — believe that we do not have real answers about who perpetrated this attack and how.
• And there is little apparent interest in investigating in order to find out.

read the entire article at … http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2009/11/27/anthrax/index.html

LMW COMMENT …

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My novel CASE CLOSED is all about the FBI’s purposeful failure to solve the anthrax case, specifically in order to allow it to be used as another lie in the argument for the war of choice in Iraq.

Is my story true? It’s a novel, but here’s what readers have to say …

• “CASE CLOSED is entirely too plausible and is probably just the tip of the iceberg on what else was covered up.”
• “Fiction?? Maybe?? But I don’t think so!! More likely an excellent interpretation of what may have really happened.”
• CASE CLOSED is a must read for anyone who wondered … what really happened? … Who did it? … why?” … and finally, why didn’t they tell us the truth?”
• “Please tell me it’s not true!”

Meanwhile, in the real world, the case remains unsolved, and the FBI remains intransigent.

Maybe when President Obama gets a minute to take on yet another issue, he will consider just how important it is to know who conducted a bio-terrorist strike at the U.S. and why the case remains unsolved.

*** click here to buy CASE CLOSED by Lew Weinstein

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* U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald calls the idea of a government cover-up of a terrorist attack “fantastically paranoid.” Really?

Lew’s new novel CASE CLOSED

explores the FBI’s failed investigation of the 2001 anthrax case …

* see CASE CLOSED VIDEO on YouTube

* purchase CASE CLOSED (paperback)

* U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald calls the idea

of a government cover-up  of a terrorist attack

“fantastically paranoid.”

… Really?

Cliff Kincaid writes (6/18/09) …

• A journalist has been threatened with a lawsuit by powerful U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.  
• A five-time Emmy Award winner formerly with ABC News, Peter Lance is one of the few journalists with mainstream press credentials still raising the hard questions about how al-Qaeda agents were able to prepare terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, even while some of them were under surveillance here and abroad by various U.S. government agencies.
• Lance argues in his book that Fitzgerald and other senior Department of Justice and FBI officials failed to properly follow up on hard evidence about al-Qaeda activities on U.S. soil and that information was discounted and suppressed about the planning and nature of some of the terrorist attacks.
• Fitzgerald is threatening Lance and publisher HarperCollins with legal action
• Fitzgerald calls the idea of a government cover-up of a terrorist attack on TWA 800 “fantastically paranoid.”

read the entire article at … http://www.sodahead.com/question/441007/an-honest-journalist-threatened-for-exposing-cover-ups/

http://www.1115.org reports on the same story …

• In the past year and a half, Fitzgerald has written four letters to HarperCollins—owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.—demanding it “cease publication” and “withdraw” copies of Triple Cross, a 2006 book by ex–TV newsman Peter Lance that criticizes Fitzgerald’s handling of terror cases in New York in the 1990s.

read the entire article at … http://www.1115.org/2009/06/15/peter-lance-triple-cross-patrick-fitzgerald/

Rory O’Connor writes in the Huffington Post (6/10/09)

• in an article titled “Patrick Fitzgerald’s Private Jihad”
• Fitzgerald, who must have too much time on his hands now that Scooter Libby has been freed and Rod Blagojevich indicted, spent much of the last year and a half going after another journalist, Peter Lance, in an attempt to kill a new edition of Lance’s investigative book Triple Cross by threatening to sue both the author and his publisher for libel.
• Fitzgerald’s stab at censorship is especially chilling coming from such a powerful prosecutor.

read the entire post at … http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/patrick-fitzgeralds-priva_b_213807.html

LMW COMMENT …

This is a chilling story.

Is this what happens when you criticize the DOJ and the FBI?

In the face of an obvious government cover-up of the FBI’s investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, how credible can Fitzgerald be to call even the idea of a cover-up of the investigation into a terrorist attack paronoid?

Related Comments by DXer …

• DXer on * lack of control … A Cairo Medical school alum was Zawahiri’s tour guide on his last US tour.
• DXer on * lack of control ... Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an eye-opening profile of Khalid Dahab, a Cairo Medical School drop-out who recruited US operatives for Al Qaeda.
• DXer on * lack of control ... The “insider” problem was addressed in Peter Lance’s important “Triple Cross” which is again is in today’s news.

* 4 Congressional offices don’t seem to care if the FBI ever answers Congress’s questions about the 2001 anthrax attack

Lew’s new novel CASE CLOSED

explores the FBI’s failed investigation of the 2001 anthrax case …

* see CASE CLOSED VIDEO on YouTube

* purchase CASE CLOSED (paperback)

* Congressional offices don’t seem to care …

So far, Congress seems to be just as secretive as the FBI regarding what really happened in the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

I have called the offices of …

• Senator Charles Grassley
• Congressman Rush Holt
• Congressman Jerrold Nadler
• Congressman John Conyers

I have left detailed messages in all 4 offices. My questions were quite simple …

• has the FBI answered the questions your Senator/Congressman asked during 2008?  … YES? NO?
• if so, can you share those answers with me … YES? NO?
• if the FBI has not answered, what is your Senator/Congressman doing about it?  … SOMETHING? NOTHING?

So far, not one of these offices has given me the courtesy of any response at all.

It seems to me that the Congressional noise about the FBI’s investigation may be just that – noise.

Ask the questions, grab a few headlines … forget about it. And I think that’s a disgrace.

In 2001, someone carried out a mass murder using anthrax. Five people died, 17 more were infected, the country was thrown into panic.

There seems to be a general concensus on this blog and elsewhere that the FBI has not solved the case, that Dr. Bruce Ivins is not the sole perpetrator and perhaps not involved at all.

Congress doesn’t seem to care.

This complete lack of response from 4 Congressional offices makes me think that the premise I proposed in my just-published novel CASE CLOSED may be even more plausible than I supposed when I constructed my fictional scenario.

My premise in CASE CLOSED is that the FBI didn’t solve the case because it was told not to.

Wouldn’t it be absolutely terrifying if what I wrote as fiction turns out to be true?

And how will we ever know, since Congress doesn’t seem to care if it ever gets answers to the (excellent) questions it has raised?

* purchase CASE CLOSED (paperback)

* see CASE CLOSED VIDEO on YouTube

* 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)

                         

* amazon customer reviews of CASE CLOSED

the following customer reviews of CASE CLOSED have recently appeared on amazon.com …

a good tale … Case Closed reads fast and well. It could have happened just the way the author said. Full of intrigue mixed in with almost current events. The real people are just behind the fictional ones.

Is it really fiction? … The author states loud and clear that this book is fiction. But, anyone who has witnessed the last eight years of American history sees great similarities in the underhanded way the last Administration dealt with issues and the way this “fictional” Administration worked. I never have given much credence to conspiracy theories but the investigation of the Anthrax attacks makes one stop and really think about it. Weinstein raises some very interesting and disturbing theories. If it was not meant to make one think about the real situation, the book would still be a great read. It is suspenseful and a real page turner. Please tell me it’s not true!

 An action/thriller that makes you think … The writing is sparse, driven by a plausible plot that allows the reader to think through the crime/mystery along with the protagonist. Despite the troubling reality of the subject matter, it is a thoroughly enjoyable and illuminating read. The writer acknowledges that the novel is fiction, but provides sufficient factual context to sustain his theory on how this dramatic historical footnote could have played out as it did. Even if you do not believe that the Bush Administration repeatedly allowed politics and manipulation of public sentiment to trump fact and law, you will have to acknowlege that the sheer scale of the protocol violations in the Anthrax investigation suggest political motives. Responsible Americans who believe in holding our government accountable for its actions should read Case Closed to be more informed of the facts of the case, regardless of whether they come to agree with the author’s theory. More investigation is needed. 

* purchase CASE CLOSED (paperback)

Fast Moving and “real” intrigue … When you realize that the book is based on real facts, it makes it that much more exciting. At times it seems unreal that we actually lived through these times. It makes it really close to home. The whole Anthrax episode is unquestionably a dark moment in American history. But what makes it fascinating is how it was handled (or should I say mishandled) by the administration and the various agency involved. The book is a must read for anyone who wondered “what really happened? Who did it? and why?” and finally, why didn’t they tell us the truth. Enjoy!

You will not want to stop reading … Lew Weinstein addresses this case with the pen of a highly skilled investigator. As the facts develop, and the characters weigh in, the story becomes an engaging and thought provoking ride that you will want to stay on until you know the truth. The questions asked here stretch the seams of terror with unbelievable possiblilities. A must read for anyone wondering how the anthrax scare could have happened in our own back yard.

* purchase CASE CLOSED (Kindle)

Attack from Within … This scary scenario is as close to truth as fiction can come. The plot is about anthrax attacks, a biological insurgency that doesn’t involve guns, bombs, or armies. Lew Weinstein is a meticulous researcher and a determined storyteller. This book will keep you up at night — reading, then worrying.

Case Closed – great read … Case Closed takes headline events and weaves a credible scenario around the anthrax scare and govt depts working under the radar. Definitely kept me turning the pages

* see CASE CLOSED VIDEO on YouTube