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April 8, 2002
Gavin Keeney
Bush and the Middle East:
Mouth Wide Shut
Edward
Said
The
Future of Palestine
April 7, 2002
Beth Daoud
Accompanying Ambulances
in Bethlehem
Nancy
Stohlman
After
the Invasion:
The Search for Bread
Among the Ruins
Thomas Mountain
"Yellow Peril" In Hawai'i:
Judge Orders Chains and Shackles for Chinese Witnesses
Tariq
Ali
Who
Killed Daniel Pearl?
April 6, 2002
Philip Farruggio
War, Snake Oil and Circuses
Viktor
Litovkin
Russian
Generals Raise Questions About Pentagon Victories in Afghanistan
Patrick Cockburn
CIA Survey of Iraqi Airfields
May Herald Attack
Walt Brasch
Oil
Slick George:
Bush-whacking the Environment
Ralph Nader
Campaign Finance Sham
Sam Bahour
The
Blind Leading the Criminal
Bill Christison:
A Former CIA Official on
Oil and the Middle East
April 5, 2002
Charmaine
Seitz
In
Ramallah: The Grueling Reoccupation Grinds On
Nancy Stohlman
The Invasion of Bethlehem
and Our Tax Dollars at Work
Beth Daoud
The
Siege of Bethlehem:
"What Do You Mean God Is Punishing Me?"
Fareed Marjaee:
Demonizing Iran
Mokhiber
/ Weissman
Philip
Morris to Canada:
"Drop Dead"
Alex Lynch
Tampa Campus Mirrors
Middle East Strife
Alexander
Cockburn
Sharon's
Wars: How the
News Gets Through
April 4, 2002
Ray Hanania
Sharon's Latest Lie About the Church
of the Nativity
Mike Leon
Rightwing
Assault on Madison Progressives Misfires
Tom Turnipseed
Stop the Killing Now!
Nancy
Stohlman
An
American Under Siege in a West Bank Refugee Camp
Christopher Reilly
Kissinger, Chile and Justice
at Long Last?
M. Shahid
Alam
The
Lies of Thomas Friedman
April 3, 2002
Don Henley
Dear Loathsome Trade Hacks
Bernard
Weiner
An
American Jew Talks
About His Shame
David Vest
Sting of Stings
Tzaporah
Ryter
Under
Fire: an American Student in Ramallah
Gabriel Ash
America's Bravest
John Chuckman
Of
War, Islam and Israel
Robert Fisk
The Siege of Bethlehem
Alexander
Cockburn
The
Sins of the Church
April 2, 2002
Uri Avnery
Murdering Arafat?
Jeff Chang
Is
Protest Music Dead?
Lev Grinberg
Israel's State Terrorism
Norman
Madarasz
Bullying
Brazil
Robert Fisk
Farce and Terror
in Ramallah
Steve
Perry
Let's
Roll! ®:
The Marketing of Lisa Beamer
April 1, 2002
Stanton / Madsen
America's War Inc.
Rep. Dennis
Kucinich
Peace
and Nuclear Disarmament: a Call to Action
Bahour / Dahan
Bloodshed in Palestine:
A Way Out
Molly
Secours
Tennessee's
Kangaroo Court
Phyllis Pollack
The Making of Exile
on Main Street
Dave Marsh
DeskScan:
This Week's
Top 10 CDs
Francis Boyle
The Big Lie:
Palestine, Palestinians
and International Law
March 31, 2002
Jordan
Flaherty
Last
Night the Israeli
Military Tried to Kill Me
Kristen Schurr
Live from Bethlehem
Maha Sbitani
The
Israeli Army Took Over My House
Robert Fisk
Lies Leaders Tell When
They Want to Go to War
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April 8, 2002
Anthrax
and the Agency
Thinking the Unthinkable
By Wayne Madsen
Now that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
has officially put the anthrax investigation on a back burner,
it is time for Americans to think the unthinkable: that the
FBI has never been keen to identify the perpetrator because
that perpetrator may, in fact, be the U.S. Government itself.
Evidence is mounting that the source of the anthrax was a top
secret U.S. Army laboratory in Maryland and that the perpetrators
involve high-level officials in the U.S. military and intelligence
infrastructure.
FBI Debunks
Anthrax-Hijacker Link
Coming shortly after the hijacked airliner
attacks on New York and Washington, the anthrax attacks on the
U.S. Congress, major media outlets, and the U.S. Postal System
were, at first, blamed by the Bush administration on Al Qaeda
or Iraq. However, on March 23, the FBI officially announced that
"exhaustive testing did not support that anthrax was present
anywhere the hijackers had been." This statement came after
a rather weak story based on conjecture appeared in The New
York Times. The article reported that a Fort Lauderdale emergency
room doctor treated Saudi hijacker Ahmed Alhanzawi in June 2001
for a cutaneous anthrax lesion on his leg. Although the doctor,
Christos Tsonas, did not think the lesion was caused by anthrax
at the time he cleansed and treated the wound, he later changed
his mind after realizing Alhanzawi was one of the hijackers.
Although Tsonas' theory was rejected
by the FBI, it was supported by Johns Hopkins University's Center
for Biodefense Strategies. Johns Hopkins has its own peculiar
link to anthrax. President Bush recently named as the Director
of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Dr. Elias Zerhouni,
an Algerian-born professor at Johns Hopkins University and notorious
Pentagon yes-man on anthrax bio-defenses. As a member of the
National Academy of Sciences' Institute of Medicine, Zerhouni
and his colleagues, serving on a National Academy of Sciences
Institute of Medicine special committee, gave a green light
to the Pentagon's use of a questionable anthrax vaccine on military
personnel. According to Dr. Meryl Nass, a member of the Federation
of American Scientists who spent three years studying the world's
largest recorded anthrax epidemic in Zimbabwe from 1979 to 1980,
the report generated by Zerhouni and his colleagues "relies
on ignoring many pieces of crucial information, and its recommendations
give the Department of Defense everything it could have wanted.
The report appears to be 'spun' to support a number of DOD initiatives,
and it provides the needed justification for restarting mandatory
anthrax vaccinations over the objections of many in Congress."
U.S. Link to
Anthrax No Conspiracy Theory
Forget unfounded conspiracy theories.
The evidence is overwhelming that the FBI has consistently shied
away from pursuing the anthrax investigation, in much the same
way it avoided pursuing leads in the USS Cole, East Africa U.S.
embassies, and Khobar Towers bombings.
On April 4, ABC News investigative reporter
Brian Ross broadcast on ABC World News Tonight that after six
months the FBI still had hardly any clues and no suspects in
its anthrax investigation. A Soviet defector, the former First
Deputy Director of Biopreparat from 1988 to 1992 and anthrax
expert, Ken Alibek (formerly Kanatjan Alibekov), now a U.S.
government consultant, made the astounding claim that the person
who is behind the anthrax attacks may, in fact, been advising
the U.S. government. After having passed a lie detector test,
Alibek was cleared of any suspicion.
Interestingly, Alibek is President of
Hadron Advanced Biosystems. On October 2, 2001, just two days
before the first anthrax case was reported in Boca Raton, Florida
and a week and a half before the first anthrax was sent through
the mail to NBC News in New York, Advanced Biosystems received
an $800,000 grant from NIH to focus on very specific defenses
against anthrax. Hadron has long been linked with the CIA. The
links include charges by many former government officials, including
the late former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, that the
company's former President, Earl Brian, illegally procured a
database system called PROMIS (Prosecutors' Management Information
System) from Inslaw, Inc. and used his connections to the CIA
and Israeli intelligence to illegally distribute the software
to various foreign governments.
Ross reported that U.S. military and
intelligence agencies have refused to provide the FBI with a
full listing of the secret facilities and employees working
on anthrax projects. Because of this stonewalling, crucial evidence
has been withheld. Professor Jeanne Guilleman of MIT's Biological
Weapons Studies Center told ABC, "We're talking here about
laboratories where, in fact, the material that we know was in
the Daschle letter and in the Leahy letter could have been produced.
And I think that's what the FBI is still trying to find out."
But the FBI does not seem to want to
pursue these important leads.
CIA Testing
Anthrax and the U.S. Mail
The first major media outlet to accuse
the FBI of foot dragging was the BBC. On March 14, the BBC's
Newsnight program highlighted an interview with Dr. Barbara
Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists. After claiming
the CIA was involved, through government contractors, in secret
testing of sending anthrax through the mail, Rosenberg, someone
with close ties to the biological warfare community, has been
attacked by the White House, FBI, and, not surprisingly, the
CIA.
The BBC also interviewed Dr. Timothy
Read of the Institute of Genomic Research and a leading expert
on the genetic characteristics of anthrax. Read said of the
two strains, "They're definitely related to each other ...
closely related to each other." However, Read would not
go so far as to suggest the Florida strain, known as the Ames
strain, and that developed at the U.S. Army's top secret Fort
Detrick biological warfare laboratory - officially known as
the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases
-- were one and the same.
William Capers Patrick III was part of
the original Fort Detrick anthrax development program, which
"officially" ended in 1972 when President Nixon signed,
along with the Soviet Union and United Kingdom, the Biological
Weapons Convention. Nixon had actually ordered the Pentagon
to stop producing biological weapons in 1969. It now seems likely
that the U.S. military and intelligence community failed to
follow Nixon's orders and, in fact, have consistently violated
a lawful treaty signed by the United States.
Cuba certainly accused the United States
of using biological war weapons against it during the 1970s.
In his book, Biological Warfare in the 21st Century, Malcolm
Dando refers to the U.S. bio-attacks against the Caribbean island
nation. The American covert campaign targeted the tobacco crop
using blue mold, the sugar cane crop using cane smut, livestock
using African swine fever, and the Cuban population using a
hemorrhagic strain of dengue fever.
Last December, the New York Times claimed
Patrick authored a secret paper on the effects of sending anthrax
through the mail, a report he denies. However, Patrick told
the BBC that he was surprised that as an expert of anthrax (he
was a member of the UN biological warfare inspection team in
the 1990s), the FBI did not interview him right after the first
anthrax attacks.
The BBC reported that Battelle Memorial
Institute (a favorite Pentagon and CIA contractor and for whom
Alibek served as biological warfare program manager in 1998)
conducted a secret biological warfare test in the Nevada desert
using genetically-modified anthrax early last September, right
before the terrorist attacks. The BBC reported that Patrick's
paper on sending anthrax through the mail was also part of the
classified contractor work on the deadly bacterial agent.
But would the U.S. Government knowingly
subject its citizenry to a dangerous test of biological weapons?
The evidence from past tests suggests it has already done so.
According to Dando, in the 1950s, the military released uninfected
female mosquitoes in a residential area of Savannah, Georgia.
It then checked on how many entered houses and how many people
were bitten. In 1956, 600,000 mosquitoes were released from
an airplane on a bombing range. Within one day, the mosquitoes
had traveled as far as two miles and had bitten a number of
people. In 1957, at the Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah, the
Q-Fever toxin discharged by an airborne F-100A plane. If a more
potent dose had been used, the Army concluded 99 per cent of
the humans in the area would have been infected. In the 1960s,
conscientious objecting Seventh Day Adventists, serving in non-combat
positions in the Army, were exposed to airborne tularemia. In
addition to Dando's revelations, a retired high-ranking U.S.
Army civilian official reported that the Army used aerosol forms
of influenza to infect the subway systems of New York, Chicago,
and Philadelphia in the early 1960s.
From Fort Detrick
With Love
The Hartford Courant reported last January
that 27 sets of biological toxin specimens were reported missing
from Fort Detrick after an inventory was conducted in 1992.
The paper reported that among the specimens missing was the
Ames strain on anthrax. A former Detrick laboratory technician
named Eric Oldenberg told The Courant that while at Detrick,
he only handled the Ames strain, the same strain sent to the
Senate and the media. The Hartford Courant also revealed that
other specimens missing included Ebola, hanta virus, simian
AIDS, and two labeled "unknown," a cover term for classified
research on secret biological agents.
Steven Block of Stanford University,
an expert on biological warfare, told The Dallas Morning News
that, "The American process for preparing anthrax is secret
in its details, but experts know that it produces an extremely
pure powder. One gram (a mere 28th of an ounce) contains a trillion
spores . . . A trillion spores per gram is basically solid spore
. . . It appears from all reports so far that this was a powder
made with the so-called optimal U.S. recipe . . . That means
they either had to have information from the United States or
maybe they were the United States." (author's emphasis).
Block also told the Dallas paper, "The
FBI, after all these months, has still not arrested anybody
. . . It's possible, as has been suggested, that they may be
standing back because the person that's involved with it may
have secret information that the United States government would
not like to have divulged."
And what the government would not want
divulged is the fact that the United States has been in flagrant
violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. Article
1 of the convention specifically states: "Each State Party
to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstance to develop,
produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain: 1. Microbial
or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or
method of production, of types and in quantities that have no
justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful
purposes. 2. Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed
to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed
conflict."
The Death of
Dr. Wiley: Murder They Wrote
The one person who was in a position
to know about the origin of the anthrax sent through the U.S.
Postal Service met with a very suspicious demise just a month
after the attacks first began.
The reported "suicide" and
then "accidental death" of noted Harvard biophysics
scientist and anthrax, Ebola, AIDS, herpes, and influenza expert,
Dr. Don C. Wiley, on the Interstate 55 Hernando De Soto Bridge
that links Memphis to West Memphis, Arkansas, was probably a
well-planned murder, according to local law enforcement officials
in Tennessee and Arkansas.
On November 15, Wiley's abandoned 2001
Mitsubishi Galant rental car was strangely found in the wrong
lane, west in the eastbound lane of the bridge. The keys were
still in the ignition, the gas tank was full, the hub cap of
the right front wheel was missing, and there were yellow scrape
marks on the driver's side of the vehicle, indicating a possible
sideswipe.
Wiley had last been seen four hours earlier,
around midnight, before his car was found around 4:00 AM on
the bridge. He was last seen in the lobby of Memphis' Peabody
Hotel, leaving a banquet of the St. Jude Children's Research
Hospital, on whose advisory board he served. Police quickly
"concluded" that Wiley committed suicide by jumping
off the bridge into the Mississippi River. It appears the early
police conclusion, decided without a full investigation, was
engineered by the FBI. On December 20, Wiley's body was recovered
in the river in Vidalia, Louisiana, 320 miles south of Memphis.
After Wiley's friends and family discounted claims of suicide,
the Memphis coroner concluded on January 14, 2002 that Wiley
had "accidentially" fallen over the side of the bridge
after a minor car accident.
Not so, say seasoned local law enforcement
officials who originally assigned homicide detectives to the
case. Memphis police claim there was only 15 minutes between
the last time police had checked the bridge and the time they
discovered Wiley's abandoned vehicle. They suspected Wiley
was murdered. However, the local FBI office in Memphis stuck
by its story that Wiley's death was not the result of "foul
play." A Memphis police detective said, "the newspaper
account of Wiley's accident did not clear anything up for me,"
adding, "everything attributed to the 'accident' could
also be attributed to something else."
However, according to U.S. intelligence
sources, Wiley may have been the victim of an intelligence agency
hit. That jibes with local police comments that the FBI and
"other" U.S. agencies stepped in to prevent the local
Memphis police from taking a closer look into the case. Employees
of St. Jude's Childrens' Hospital in Memphis, on whose board
Wiley served, were suddenly deluged with unsubstantiated rumors
that Wiley was a heavy drinker and despondent.
It is a classic intelligence agency ploy
to spread disinformation about "suicide" victims after
their murders. The favorite rumors spread include those about
purported alcoholism, depression, homosexuality, auto-erotic
asphyxia, drug addiction, and an obsession with pornography,
especially child pornography.
According to the local police, it would
have been easy to determine if Wiley was a heavy drinker and
that would have shown up in his autopsy. The police also reckon
that if Wiley left the Peabody under the influence, four hours
later he should have been sober enough not to have fallen over
the side of the bridge. Also, the bridge railing is high enough
that event the 6' 3" Wiley could not have accidentally
fallen over it without assistance. Add that to the fact that
no one in the history of the bridge had fallen over the side.
Police also feel that even at 4:00 AM,
there should have been someone else on the bridge who would
have called the police about a person who was driving down the
interstate the wrong way. Due to the fact that access is restricted
to the bridge, one would have to have driven a long way on the
wrong lane. Some police are of the opinion Wiley was stuck with
a needle and that one reason he was dumped into the fast-moving
Mississippi is that with the length of his time in the water
(one month), the needle mark evidence would have largely disappeared.
And in yet another strange twist, on
March 14, a bomb and two smaller explosive devices were found
at the Shelby County Regional Forensic Center, which houses
the morgue and Medical Examiner's Office that conducted Wiley's
autopsy. Dr. O.C, Smith, the medical examiner, told Memphis'
Commercial Appeal, "We have done several high-profile cases
from Dr. Wiley to Katherine Smith (a Department of Motor Vehicles
employee mysteriously found burned to death in her car after
being charged in a federal probe with conspiracy to obtain fraudulent
drivers' licenses for men of Middle East origin) but there has
been no indication that we offended anyone . . . we just don't
know if we were the attended target or not."
Knowledgeable U.S. and foreign intelligence
sources have revealed that Wiley may have been silenced as a
result of his discovery of U.S. government work on biological
warfare agents long after the U.S., along with the Soviet Union
and Britain, signed the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention.
A South African
Connection
The death of Wiley may be also linked
to revelations recently uncovered in South Africa. His expertise
on genetic fingerprints for various strains may have led him
to particular countries and their bio-warfare projects.
The South African media has been abuzz
with details of that nation's former biological warfare program
and its links to the CIA. The South African bio-chemical war
program was code-named Project Coast and was centered at the
Roodeplat Research Laboratories north of Pretoria. The lab maintained
links to the US biowarfare facility at Fort and Britain's Porton
Down Laboratory. The head of the South African program, Dr.
Wouter Basson, was reportedly offered a job with the CIA in
the United States after the fall of the apartheid regime. According
to former South African National Intelligence Agency deputy
director Michael Kennedy, when Basson refused the offer, the
CIA allegedly threatened to kill him. Nevertheless, the U.S.
pressured the new President Nelson Mandela to turn over the
records and fruits of Basson's work. Much of this work was reportedly
transported to Fort Detrick.
Basson also claimed to have been involved
in a project called Operation Banana, which, using El Paso,
Texas as a base with the CIA's blessing, was designed to transport
cocaine to South Africa from Peru. The cocaine, hidden in bananas,
was to be used in developing a new incapacitating drug.
One of the South African's secret projects
involved sending anthrax through the mail. Among the techniques
that fell into the hands of the Americans was a method by which
anthrax spores were, with deadly effect, incorporated on to
the gummed flaps of envelopes.
Other South African bio-chemical weapons
allegedly transferred to the CIA included, in addition to anthrax,
cholera, smallpox, salmonella, botulinum, tularemia, thallium,
E.coli, racin, organophosphates, necrotising fasciitis, hepatitis
A, HIV, paratyphoid, Sarin VX nerve gas, Ebola, Marburg, Rift
Valley hemorrhagic fever viruses, Dengue fever, West Nile virus,
highly potent CR tear gas, hallucinogens Ecstasy, Mandrax, BZ,
and cocaine, anti-coagulant drugs, the deadly lethal injection
drugs Scoline and Tubarine, and cyanide.
Many of Dr. Wiley's family and friends
doubt he would have committed suicide. The fact that he was
certainly in a position to know about the origination of various
viruses and bacteria -- which could have led to the U.S. government
-- would have made him a prime target for a government seeking
to cover up its illegal work in biological warfare.
Wiley's Anthrax
Research
And Wiley had a significant connection
to anthrax research. Wiley was not only a professor at Harvard
but also conducted research at the Chevy Chase, Maryland Howard
Hughes Medical Center, which does work for the National Institutes
of Health. On October 1, 2001, just three days before the first
reported anthrax case in Florida, the Hughes Center announced
that a joint Harvard-Hughes team had identified a mouse gene
that made mice resistant to anthrax bacteria. Although the media
failed to play it up later, that research involved using Wiley's
expertise on the immune system. The new gene, identified as
Kif1C, located in chromosome 11 of a mouse, enhanced the defense
systems of special immune cells, called macrophages, against
the destructive effects of anthrax bacteria.
Wiley's was not the only suspicious death
of a scientist with knowledge of biological defenses. Just three
day before Wiley's death, Dr. Benito Que, a Miami Medical School
cellular biologist specializing in infectious diseases, died
in a violent attack. The Miami Herald reported Que died after
"four men armed with a baseball bat attacked him at his
car." A week after Wiley died, Dr. Vladimir Pasechnik,
a former scientist for Biopreparat, the Soviet Union's biological
weapons production factory, was found dead from an alleged stroke
in Wiltshire, not far from Britain's Porton Down biological warfare
center. Pasechnik had defected from the Soviet Union in 1989
and was an expert on the Soviet Union's anthrax, smallpox, plague,
and tularemia programs. While at Biopreparat, Pasechnik worked
for Alibek, who defected three years later. When he died, Pasechnik
was assisting the British government's efforts in providing
bio-defenses against anthrax.
Anthrax and
Operation Northwoods
For those who disbelieve the possibility
that the U.S. Government is the number one suspect in the anthrax
attacks, they are directed to James Bamford's book on the National
Security Agency, Body of Secrets. The book reveals that in 1962,Chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Lyman Lemnitzer was planning, along
with other member of the Joint Chiefs, a virtual coup d'etat
against the administration of President Kennedy using acts of
terrorism carried out by the military but to be blamed on the
Castro government in Cuba. The secret pan, code-named Operation
Northwoods, entailed having U.S. military personnel shoot innocent
people on the streets of American cities, sink boats carrying
Cuban refugees to Florida, and conduct terrorist bombings in
Washington, DC, Miami and other cities. Innocent people were
to be framed for committing bombings and hijacking planes. If
John Glenn's liftoff from Cape Canaveral in February 1962 were
to end in an explosion, Castro would be blamed. Plans were made
to shoot down civilian aircraft en route from the United States
to Jamaica, Guatemala, Panama, or Venezuela and then blame Cuba.
The U.S. military also planned to attack Jamaica and Trinidad
and Tobago, both British colonies, and make it appear that the
Cubans had done it in order to bring Britain into a war with
Cuba.
So far, the Bush administration has refused
to support a full and independent Congressional investigation
into the events of September 11 and the later events involving
anthrax. It seems it and the three-letter agencies the administration
is so fond of praising, and funding, know more about the source
of the anthrax attacks than they are admitting. If the saying,
"where there's smoke, there's fire," has any basis
of truth, the United States is in the midst of a raging inferno.
Who will answer the fire alarm?
Wayne Madsen
is an investigative journalist based in Washington, DC. He can
be reached at: WMadsen777@aol.commailto:WMadsen777@aol.com
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