bobschacht, responded to you at bottom of last thread.

The “Ivins works late” stuff lacks context. Who else worked late? Anyone? No one? How often did others work late? Anyone showing up early?

From wiki:

September 21, 2001 postmark of letter accusing Ayaad Assaad

October 2, 2001 Robert Stevens admitted to hospital

October 3, 2001 Stevens diagnosed with anthrax

The Camel Club needs some scrutiny. They had no qualms about ruining a professional’s career, Ayaad Assaad. This was based on anti-arab hate. They worked at Detrick, in the lab. They had access to anthrax and other pathogens. Might they have decided to “frame” arabs (muslims) by mailing some death? What are few deaths to incite more hate, foment more war, and give the final straw to clear the way to war on Iraq. Besides, in a Bush administration it probably would get you promoted.

emptywheel–just wanted to say thanks for starting this timeline.

as i was reviewing some of the dumped documents, i wasn’t able to get a sense of what happened when; now with your timeline, it’s starting to come into/out of focus for me.

one suggestion: unsubstantiated claims made by the FBI in their dump should be marked; as it stands, it sure gives them more credibility than they deserve. i mean, we’re talking about evidence orchestrated by Jeffrey “Alberto Gonzales gave me this job” Taylor

Duley’s driving with no headlights is a metataphor for the FBI’s investigation and the insipid Jeff Taylor’s (USA District of Columbia appointed as interim by Bush) attempt to sell it selectively with handpicked tidbits and as Glenn Greenwald says no hard evidence.

Nice work as always on your timeline Marcy.

Glenn here:

Glenn’s Critique Today of Jeff Taylor’s Proffer

and as Nell says on the last thread:

The question is how long ago it left the mil labs, and where the spores were produced and refined. Without a lot more evidence and examination and discussion of the evidence by competent discussants, it’s pretty hard to say

.

From Glenn:

UPDATE II: What is most conspicuously absent from these FBI documents is any real forensic evidence linking Ivins to the anthrax that was sent. That’s particularly striking because the FBI took numerous swabs of Ivins’ residence, his office space, his laboratory devices (presumably including the lyothilizer he used), his locker, his cars. If they had discovered any anthrax traces that genetically matched what was sent in 2001, they certainly would have said so. But they don’t.

It’s long been claimed that the property that rendered so dangerous the anthrax sent to Daschle and Leahy was that it was airborne. At times it was even claimed that the anthrax was aerosolized. Under all circumstances, in order for it to be inhalation anthrax, it would have to disperse rather easily. Wouldn’t one expect that the FBI’s swabs would reveal traces of anthrax somewhere on the clothes, in the home or other physical surroundings of the anthrax attacker? Yet apparently those multiple swabbing episodes turned up nothing, at least based on the documents that were released today.

UPDATE: One of the pieces of circumstantial evidence which the FBI stressed most heavily and which has clearly impressed The New York Times is that Ivins, in a September 26, 2001 email to a colleague (which the FBI appears not to have released in full), wrote: “Osama bin Laden has just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans.” After citing that email, the FBI then claims in each of its Search Warrant affidavits (emphasis in original) that this is “language similar to the text of the anthrax letters postmarked two weeks later warning ‘DEATH TO AMERICA,’ ‘DEATH TO ISRAEL.’”

It’s hardly surprising — let alone shocking — that Ivins would use those phrases to argue why Islamic radicals were a threat. Indeed, those exact phrases had long been prominent in the news in connection with numerous reports of Islamic radicals. As but a few examples:

Everyone can decide for themselves how persuasive they find that, but “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” were hardly some exotic or unique phrases the use of which by both Ivins and the anthrax attacker would constitute anything incriminating. To the contrary, those phrases were very common, and routinely appeared in press reports, particularly around the time of 9/11, for obvious reasons:

After reading WaPo, TPM Muck, NYT, WSJ:

1) I haven’t seen anything definitive that confirms whethe the Anthrax linked to Ivins, so-called ” “RMR-1029″ liquid was 1.5 to 3 microns in diameter coated with a polyglass which tightly bound hydrophilic silica to each particle or not. I’ve seen people claiming it was or it wasn’t and I haven’t read the DOJ docs so if it confirms this let me know.

2) As has been pointed out the description of the filter process he might have used is an umbrella term, so we don’t really know how many other people could have had access t ways to make dry powder out of liquid in the vial. I don’t think we know if the culprit particles were given a weak electrical charge or not as was described by DHS on the cleanup of the Daschle particles in D.C.

3) The DNA genotyping doesn’t restrict Ivins as the only individual that had access to this anthrax originally in liquid form anyway.

4) The strain is ubiquitous on cattle trails accross the country and at the Pastuer institute. A number of individuals had access to it but it would have been damn hard taken some ingenuity to make the fine powder out of what was in the vial, and Ivins was far from the only one who could.

5) KKG–in high school we had a sorority named that and they were hot. But as a driving motive and circumstantial evidence here it just sucks.

6) Letters to Congress–gee no one from the EW or FDL group of blogs ever gets moved or encouraged to write those do they.

7) The “Death to Israel” rhetoric and the Eagle paper–just ridiculous as to specificity. Too many people could use it.

Nothing presented by the asshole DC USA Jeff Taylor and the FBI Dean of Fuckups is compelling enough to even indict with a grand jury of minimal intelligence.

9) The flask of anthrax as Gerald Posner told KO proves absolutely fucking nothing. There was worldwide access to that anthrax–it wasn’t confined to Detrick.

10) The DNA genotyping they used may wow the public, but it’s not precisely geared to nail microbes nor state of the art. This is meant to wow the public–50% of whom don’t know what party theoretically is in control of Congress although they may be the smarter 50% the way Congress has comported itself.

11) The FBI spent months trying to reverse engineer this Anthrax and couldn’t get it done.

12) From Muckraker Schmuckraker quoting Taulor:

It was a flask that was “created and solely maintained” by Dr. Bruce Ivins, the key suspect who killed himself last week. Others at the lab also had access to the flask, officials said.

And Taylor has proved this how? Because I didn’t hear him offer proof I don’t care how many affidavits he has unsealed that say it.

Taylor said Ivins gave him a bogus anthrax. And he establishes this how? How does Taylor rule out anthrax that was the same strain from the Pastuer institute?

13) After convincing themselves Ivins didn’t give them the correct strain which they say was RMR-1029 and Ivins says he gave them given their suspicion and what they call erratic behavior that they think is outside the scope of someone whose buttons they are continually pushing and given the ways they stalked Hatfill why does it take them two years to get a warrant from a cowed and compliant D.C. district court judge to search Ivins’ home? That’s a long frigging time for this type investigation or anything the Federal Bunglers of Investigation is mucking with.

14) The so-called lympholizer is a generic umbrella term; it’s not the only way to make fine power and prooves very little if anything.

Might want to check out Justin Raimondo’s piece calling attention to the “Camel Club” and their racial/ethnic harassment of Dr. Ayaad Assaad. Assaad was an American citizen born in Egypt, an employee of USAMRIID working on a ricin vaccine, who was basically stalked and harassed from his job, and upon whom suspision fell immediately. A letter to “Town of Quantico Police” accused Assaad of planning a bio terror attack on American soil, posted after the first anthrax letters were postmarked but before the first anthrax letters were opened. I’d look at people in the ‘camel club’ Philip Zack and Marion Rippy more suspiciously than Ivins. Investigators found:

“Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was observed entering the lab building at night was Langford’s predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack’s, according to a report filed by a security guard.”

Leveymg has an interesting back story on BioPort.

I still think it interesting that on October 12th, 2001 Cheney was on the News hour saying:

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: We’ve got continued reporting that really led us to believe that the threat level had gone up – that is to say it’s fairly precise in terms of time, although not location or anything like that. And all of that’s obviously of concern. We’ve had this ongoing disclosure now of anthrax problems, now extending to NBC in New York, and nobody’s made a direct link yet but at this stage you have to be concerned about that sort of thing, the possibility. Are they related? We don’t know. We don’t have enough evidence to be able to pin down that kind of connection. But, on the other hand, these kinds of activities that we saw in Florida, now perhaps in New York, we have to be suspicious.

and then

VICE PRESIDENT DICK CHENEY: No. What we do know – we know a number of things. We know that Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaida Organization clearly have already launched an attack that killed thousands of Americans. We know that for years he’s been the source of terrorist attacks against the United States overseas, our embassies in East Africa in ‘98 — the USS Cole last year, probably, in Yemen. We know that he has over the years tried to acquire weapons of mass destruction, both biological and chemical weapons. We know that he’s trained people in his camps in Afghanistan, for example; we have copies of the manuals that they’ve actually used to train people with respect to how to deploy and use these kinds of substances. So, you start to piece it altogether. Again, we have not completed the investigation and maybe it’s coincidence, but I must say I’m a skeptic.

Here’s a question: Where’s the anonymously written letter received at Quantico in 2001? Has it been adduced/dumped?

[Assistant Director Michael A. Mason] said he couldn’t discuss an anonymous letter received by the FBI in the weeks before the anthrax attacks, which accused an Egyptian-born scientist at the Environmental Protection Agency of plotting biological warfare against the United States.

The Times reported last week that the FBI recently had questioned at least one other EPA scientist about the anonymous letter, which accused EPA toxicologist Ayaad Assaad of being a religious fanatic with the means to use bioterrorism weapons.

Asked whether the FBI was investigating any connection between the anthrax mailings and the anonymous letter, Mr. Mason told The Times: “I just can’t talk about that. I can’t talk about that letter.”

Pressed about the significance of the anonymous letter, given to the FBI after it had been sent to police in Quantico, Va., in October 2001, Mr. Mason said flatly that “the letter is not a priority.”

From Anthrax articles in the Washington Times

It is interesting to note that somewhere between August and October of 2001 the Republicans gained access to the confidential files of Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The shockingly unscrupulous Manuel Miranda spied on Democratic strategies for dealing with judicial appointments on the explicit instructions of Mr._______. He shamelessly shared his secret findings with both the GOP and the press for years, yet he got little more than a slap on the wrist. He is now Director of Legislative Statecraft at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad.

A 2004 Senate investigation into the matter stated that the anthrax incident had nothing to do with compromising security. Hmm.

C. The Anthrax Incident in October 2001
Some of those who were interviewed for this investigation speculated that the involvement of the SAA during the anthrax incident in October 2001 may have resulted in the relaxation of security controls for the Committee. According to the ASAA-CIO, the Judiciary Committee computer systems were unaffected by the Anthrax incident on October 15, 2001. During the temporary relocation of some Judiciary Committee staff to the Postal Square Building from November 2001 through January 2002, the SAA provided access to the Judiciary Committee network from Postal Square to accommodate workstations that were set up there for the use of the Judiciary Committee staff. This involved setting up a separate subnet for the Committee’s workstations in Postal Square and then giving that subnet access through the Senate network routers to the Judiciary Committee subnet. The setup did not include, or require any changes to the host-based security on the Judiciary Committee servers. Anyone who wanted to access a resource on the Judiciary Committee network still had to log on to the server with a valid user name and password and have the appropriate permissions.
It is also important to note that the Nominations Unit, located at this time in the Dirksen building, did not require relocation. Mr. _____ worked at his same workstation throughout the incident. Additionally, because the Committee’s servers were located in the Dirksen Building, the System Administrator still had physical access to the server to perform whatever administrative tasks needed to be done.

I’m not understanding something basic here. Is there some reason why the fact that there was a genetic match between the anthrax in the letters and the anthrax in Ivins’ lab conclusively proves the letter anthrax actually came from that lab? Because I would think a totally valid alternate explanation could be that they were just both descendants of the same, common ancestor culture. And if that were true, then in that case the letter anthrax could have been grown and processed somewhere other than Ivins’ lab. What if anything has the FBI shown that would rule that out? If the only given reason is the existence of a mutation, then why couldn’t that mutation have been introduced at the ancestor stage rather than in Ivins’ lab?

WHO DOSED IVINS WITH LSD? HOW FREQUENTLY? DID THE DELUSIONAL EPISODES AND THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION BOTH COMMENCE IN THE SAME TIMEFRAME? GOT PLANNING?

LSD leaves a metallic taste in the user’s mouth

Among the federal documents are excerpts from Ivins’ e-mails to a friend detailing his battles with mental illness. They include parts of an August 2000 email about “one of [his] worst nights in months” and his “paranoid, delusional thoughts.”

“I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind,” the e-mail read, according to a federal affidavit. “It’s hard enough sometimes controlling my behavior. When I’m being eaten alive inside, I always try to put on a good front at work and at home, so I don’t spread the pestilence.”

“Occasionally I get this tingling that goes down both arms,” read an e-mail sent by Ivins on April 3, 2000. “At the same time I get dizzy and get this unidentifiable ‘metallic’ taste in my mouth. (I’m not trying to be funny, [redacted] … It actually scares me a bit.) Other times it’s like I’m not only sitting at my desk doing work, I’m also a few feet away watching me do it. There’s nothing like living in both the first person singular AND the third person singular!”

“Remember when I told you about the ‘metallic’ taste in my mouth that I got periodically? It’s when I get these ‘paranoid’ episodes … Ominously, a lot of the feelings of isolation — and desolation — that I went through before college are returning. I don’t want to relive those years again.”

PROBABLY JUST A MASSIVE COINCIDENCE THAT YET ANOTHER SCIENTIST WORKING WITH ANTHRAX “SUICIDES HIMSELF” AFTER SHOWING CLASSIC SYMPTOMS OF LSD CONSUMPTION IN THE EXACT TIMEFRAME THAT CHENEY AND RUMSFELD REAPPEAR IN POWER.

Baltimore Sun Staff
Originally published August 9, 2002

It was here in the Olson family back yard in 1975 that the world first learned the name of a man who, the story went, had been unwittingly drugged with LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency 22 years earlier and then jumped to his death from a 10th-floor hotel room.

Reporters heard that family patriarch Frank Olson, ostensibly an Army scientist, had committed suicide in 1953. But that explanation left the family – Eric Olson in particular – with many questions about Frank Olson’s life and death.

“I feel satisfied,” said Olson, a Harvard-educated clinical psychologist. “We’re where we want to be – we know what happened.”
What Olson says he knows is this: His father was not a civilian scientist at nearby Fort Detrick, as the family had been told. Instead, he worked for the CIA, running the Special Operations Division at Detrick, which Olson says was the government’s “most secret biological weapons laboratory,” working with materials such as anthrax.

He says the evidence he has gathered over the years shows that Frank Olson didn’t suffer a nervous breakdown, as the family initially was told, and didn’t commit suicide because he had had a negative drug experience, as they learned in the 1970s. Instead, the son says, his father was killed by the CIA because officials there feared he would divulge classified information concerning the United States’ use of biological weapons in Korea.

Now the family has learned that the Ford administration was keeping information from the family, concerned that family members would ask questions about the scientist’s work that the government was unprepared to answer. Among those who advocated keeping quiet were Dick Cheney and Donald H. Rumsfeld, now the vice president and defense secretary, the Olsons learned from memos and other papers received last year from the Gerald R. Ford Library.

CHENEY + RUMSFELD + LSD + ANTHRAX?

Code Name Artichoke (CIA Secret Experiments On Humans)

Rumsfeld is enriched by his stock in Gilead while Cheney is enriched by his stock in Halliburton…while the Oil Industry acquires resources, Israel acquires territory, the Military Industrial Complex reaps untold riches and the Crown and the Banksters (see Rockefeller) attain their “new world order” and total control in the aftermath of the economic collapse that they intentionally caused.

Got Motive, Means & Opportunity?

Got PATSY?

The CFR is laughing their asses off.

”We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10…..ssuserland

BEHOLD THE FOREST

I also think it’s interesting that Ivins was put back on the special immunization program 4 days before 9/11.

And what happened that he was taken off? Why did they decide to put him back on?

Contrast the FBI stuff with this: 200 mourners show at a memorial service for Dr. Ivins at Ft. Detrick. Many Army staff remember what a helpful and humorous mentor he was.

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/a…../808070399

It doesn’t add up. Much more convincing information (not statements from FBI) is needed.

I believe October 2 was the first time “inhalational anthrax” was in the news in this case. I remember feeling sick to my stomach hearing that phrase wrt terrorism. Interesting that’s when judyjudyjudy’s book came out. It’s all about catapulting the propaganda.

So what else was in the Aspens letter besides bioweapons and Iraq and Iran, there was some fourth thing they were supposed to hype.

I have heard a couple of times that Ivins traveled to many mail sites to send correspondences. Since there has been no mention of Anthrax being found in his car, I assume FBI did not find any? Any auto records of where his car was (or the mileage) during the time frame? Sometimes people slip up even when they are trying to be careful. On the other hand, it may indicate that he did not travel to the Princeton campus.