Kill Game: The Path Of Destruction From The Amerithrax Investigation

/in , , , , /by

"Have you no sense of decency, … at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" These prophetic words were spoken on June 9, 1954 by Joseph Welch, attorney for the United States Army, at the nadir of the shameful McCarthy hearings. It was a time of scurrilous persecution of all numbers and types of fellow humans, based mostly on sheer rumor, innuendo and manufactured evidence. The acts of a United States Government drenched in it’s own fears, drunk of it’s own hubris and looking for political scapegoats.

The result was an everlasting shame carried by a generation of Americans. To this day, the methods and tactics of the red baiting McCarthy investigators, and the hell they wrought on the ostracized and disavantaged targets, not to mention the devastation to their families, is taught to our children as a seminal lesson of the dark, malignant growth that can consume the American ethos when fear, ambition, unitary power and political malevolence intersect unchecked and unbalanced in the halls of power in Washington DC. It is a tragic intersection that seeks a target of convenience and finds it.

And so we advance fifty years to find our dark history repeating itself in the Amerithrax case. Once again we find a unified and unchecked power in the government fueled by, and fueling, fear and trolling for a target of convenience to scapegoat. This is now incontrovertible.

Sunday’s New York Times has an extended article, by William Broad and Scott Shane, on the hell that our Government hath wrought upon it’s citizenry in the Amerithrax investigation. It is chilling.

But along the way, scores of [individuals] — terrorists, foreigners, academic researchers, biowarfare specialists and an elite group of Army scientists working behind high fences and barbed wire — drew the interest of the investigators. For some of them the cost was high: lost jobs, canceled visas, broken marriages, frayed friendships.
…
The bureau began looking at biodefense insiders like Mr. Mikesell, an anthrax specialist who had worked in the 1980s and 1990s with Dr. Ivins at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Frederick. He had then joined Battelle, a military contractor in Columbus, Ohio, that became deeply involved in secret federal research on biological weapons.

In 2002, Mr. Mikesell came under F.B.I. scrutiny, officials familiar with the case said. He began drinking heavily — a fifth of hard liquor a day toward the end, a family member said.

“It was a shock that all of a sudden he’s a raging alcoholic,” recalled the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of family sensitivities.

By late October 2002, Mr. Mikesell, 54, was dead, his short obituary in The Columbus Dispatch making no mention of his work with anthrax or the investigation.
…
Another casualty was Kenneth M. Berry, an emergency room physician with a strong interest in bioterrorism threats. In August 2004, agents raided his colonial-style home and his former apartment in Wellsville, a village in western New York, as well as his parents’ beach house on the Jersey Shore.

In scenes replayed for days on local television stations, the authorities cordoned off streets as agents in protective suits emerged from the dwellings with computers and bags of papers, mail and books.

“He was devastated,” Dr. Berry’s lawyer at the time, Clifford E. Lazzaro, said in an interview. “They destroyed his marriage and destroyed him professionally for a time.”

The government has unequivocally admitted that it wrongfully targeted an individual, Steven Hatfill, for a period of six years with little to no basis in fact or evidence to do so. The result of that "most complex criminal case in bureau [FBI] history", and dedicated certainty by the Bush Department of Justice for six years, has been a lawsuit brought by Hatfill, a settlement with Hatfill, humiliation of the DOJ and, finally, a complete exoneration of Hatfill.

It is pretty clear that Hatfill would, in spite of all the evidence, still be the target of this persecution had he not fought back doggedly with every ounce of his being. The government relentlessly tried to get his civil case dismissed and to hide the ball. As with another infamous case of Bush Administration subterfuge, if not for the honesty and spine for justice on the part of Judge Reggie Walton, Hatfill would still be Read more →

Cheney and Your 3 Ounce Shampoo Bottles

/in /by

Remember Rashid Rauf? Because of him (and Dick Cheney, as I explain below), you’ve got to either try to squeeze your Tom’s of Maine down into 3 ounce tubes or use crappy sugar-sweet toothpaste when you travel.

Rauf is the Pakistani who was kibbitzing a bunch of British wannabe terrorists without passports, teaching them how to make bombs out of liquids in airplane bathrooms.

The story around Rauf’s arrest (and the subsequent fear-mongering about the purported plot) was always sketchy. As I wrote in 2006, news reports basically said he got arrested, without explaining how or by whom.

Here’s me reading the MSNBC scoop about the US launching the arrests before the Brits were ready:

Americans pushed the Brits to do two things they didn’t want to do. First, they pushed the Brits to arrest Rashid Rauf before they wanted to.

The British official said the Americans also argued over the timing of the arrest of suspected ringleader Rashid Rauf in Pakistan, warning that if he was not taken into custody immediately, the U.S. would "render" him or pressure the Pakistani government to arrest him.

British security was concerned that Rauf be taken into custody "in circumstances where there was due process," according to the official, so that he could be tried in British courts. Ultimately, this official says, Rauf was arrested over the objections of the British.

This passage is actually quite interesting. The US wanted Rauf arrested. The Brits wanted to wait–they wanted to wait until they could arrest Rauf in such a way that he could be tried in the UK. The US threatened to render him. The Brits tried to hold out, so they could prosecute him legally. And then … that’s where the article is less clear. Was Rauf arrested using due process? Will Rauf be a defendant and witness in the UK? Or did the US snatch him, making him useless for a legal prosecution and possibly endangering the larger case in the UK?

So to put Murray and MSNBC together, the US wanted Rauf arrested right away. The Brits wanted to wait so they could use due process. The US threatened to "render" Rauf. The Brits complained.

And then he got arrested.

But by whom, and in what way? As I suggested before, the MSNBC article just drops the whole question, making it clear that the US won that battle, somehow. But it doesn’t explain–was he rendered? Did the US force Pakistan to arrest him? Where is he now? Who has custody?

Read more →

Bioterrorism on a Grassy Knoll

/in /by

Joe Persichini, the Assistant Director of the DC FBI Field Office said of Bruce Ivins yesterday, "It appears, based on the evidence, that he was acting alone."

Yet he and DC US Attorney Jeff Taylor seem painfully aware that their evidence doesn’t add up to a compelling case. In particular, Taylor and Persichini dodged and weaved whenever asked about any hard evidence that tied Bruce Ivins to the mailing–rather than just the production–of the anthrax.

For example, Taylor made an incredibly misleading statement to suggest that the envelopes used in the attack were only available in Frederick Maryland. He claimed that,  "based on the analysis, we were able to conclude that the envelopes used in the mailings were very likely sold in a post office in the Frederick, MD post office in 2001." He continued to say that Ivins maintained a PO Box "at the post office from which these pre-franked envelopes were sold."

But the truth is that Frederick Maryland is just one of hundreds of post offices at which those envelopes would have been available:

Subsequent to the attacks, an effort was made to collect all such envelopes for possible forensic examination, including the identification of defects that occur during the envelope manufacturing process. As a result of this collection, envelopes with printing defects identical to printing defects identified on the envelopes utilized in the anthrax attacks during the fall of 2001 were collected fiom the Fairfax Main post office in Fairfax, Virginia and the Cumberland and Elkton post offices in Maryland. The Fairfax Main, Cumberland, Maryland, and Elkton, Maryland post offices are supplied by the Dulles Stamp Distribution Office (SDO), located in Dulles, Virginia. The Dulles SDO distributed "federal eagle" envelopes to post offices throughout Maryland and Virginia. Given that the printing defects identified on the envelopes used in the attacks are transient, thereby being present on only a small population of the federal eagle envelopes produced, and that envelopes with identical printing defects to those identified on the envelopes used in the attacks were recovered fiom post offices serviced by the Dulles SDO, it is reasonable to conclude that the federal eagle envelopes utilized in the attacks were purchased from a post office in Maryland or Virginia. [my emphasis]

Read more →

Ivins and the Anthrax Investigation

/in /by

As I showed in this post, the claim that Iraq was responsible for the anthrax attack developed in two phases. First, after the first and less lethal round of attacks, Neocons spread the story that Iraq had supplied anthrax to Al Qaeda. Then, after the more lethal attacks associated with the letters to Daschle and Leahy, ABC News reported that Ft. Detrick scientists had found bentonite in the anthrax samples.

In comments, I suggested that it was possible the first round of accusations were just typical Neocon war-mongering, but that the second round was the culprit, playing on the Neocon attacks, inventing the bentonite claim as an alibi. In other words, after the attacks started killing people, the culprit may have spread the claim that the anthrax had to have come from Iraq as a way of throwing suspicion off him or his colleagues.

A couple of longer articles on Ivins make it clear that he was in a position to spread such disinformation. For example, the WaPo reports that Ivins was one of the scientists analyzing the anthrax for the FBI.

His expertise eventually earned him a front-row seat for the FBI’s investigation, as he was called upon to help the bureau with its analysis of the wispy powder used in the attacks.

[snip]

After the anthrax mailings in October 2001, the Fort Detrick labs went into a frenetic response, testing suspicious mail and packages virtually round-the-clock. Ivins was part of a team that analyzed the handwritten letter sent to Daschle, packed with Bacillus anthracis spores that matched the primary strain used in Fort Detrick research.

Creepier still, the WaPo reports that Ivins volunteered for the Red Cross as it supported FBI agents investigating Stephen Hatfil.

In fact, in early June 2003, when the FBI drained a pond in rural Maryland in search of clues to the perpetrator of the anthrax attacks, Ivins was one of the Red Cross volunteers who brought investigators coffee and donuts. Investigators, however, singled him out and asked him to leave "because he was somebody involved in the investigation," said Byrne, Ivins’s former colleague and fellow parishioner.

None of this, of course, means that Ivins was the killer–nor that he acted alone. Read more →

Who First Spread the Iraqi Anthrax Claim?

/in /by

Glenn’s asking some important questions about the anthrax story–mostly about who started the rumor in October 2001 that the anthrax might be from Iraq?

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax — tests conducted at Ft. Detrick — revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite.

As Glenn points out, those early ABC stories seem to point back to a Ft. Detrick source–which is where Bruce Ivins worked. In other words, Glenn suggests, the report that Iraq was responsible was probably sourced back to government researchers in the same lab where–news reports allege–the chief suspect for the anthrax terrorism worked. This raises the specter of researchers carrying out the attack to lay the ground-work for the Iraq War.

But the ABC News story Glenn cites was not, apparently, the first allegation that the anthrax came from Iraq. RawStory reports that the story first appeared in the Guardian, followed quickly by a story in the WSJ editorial page, then in a Richard Butler comment on CNN.

RAW STORY has found that, although there had been active online speculation about an Iraqi source for the anthrax by the first week of October, the first suggestion that official investigations were focusing on that nation appears to have come in an article published in the Guardian on October 14.

[snip]

The next day, the Wall Street Journal picked up the story, but without the Guardian’s skepticism, suggesting that the most likely suspect was al Qaeda using supplies obtained from Iraq.

[snip]

On the same day, CNN quoted former UN weapons inspector Richard Butler as saying, "What we’ve got to be certain about above all is whether it came from a country supporting these terrorists as a matter of policy, such as Iraq, which we know has made this stuff. And there’s a credible report, not fully verified, that they may indeed have given anthrax to exactly the group that did the World Trade Center. … It’s possible that many months ago anthrax, a small quantity of it, was handed over in Prague to Mohamed Atta … and the person who handed it over in Prague was an Iraqi."

Read more →

Suspect Anthrax Terrorist Apparently Kills Self

/in /by

I wonder if the news that the guy the FBI was about to charge as the anthrax terrorist committed suicide will dampen all the fun Patrick Leahy was having yesterday (recall that Leahy was pressuring Mukasey about the anthrax case earlier in July)? The LAT reports that Bruce Ivins, whom the FBI had just informed they were going to charge, apparently killed himself.

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government’s elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

The suspicion on Ivins appears to stem from his efforts to secretly clean up potential contamination in the same time frame as the anthrax letters were sent.

Ivins, employed as a civilian at Ft. Detrick, earlier had attracted the attention of Army officials because of anthrax contaminations that Ivins failed to report for five months. In sworn oral and written statements to an Army investigator, Ivins said that he had erred by keeping the episodes secret — from December 2001 to late April 2002. He said he had swabbed and bleached more than 20 areas that he suspected were contaminated by a sloppy lab technician.

"In retrospect, although my concern for biosafety was honest and my desire to refrain from crying ‘Wolf!’ . . . was sincere, I should have notified my supervisor ahead of time of my worries about a possible breach in biocontainment," Ivins told the Army. "I thought that quietly and diligently cleaning the dirty desk area would both eliminate any possible [anthrax] contamination as well as prevent unintended anxiety at the institute."

From the silence of DOJ, I get the feeling we may never have a public accounting of what FBI believes happened (perhaps not surprisingly, since they just had to pay out a chunk of money to Stephen Hatfill because of their earlier blabbing). Even given the appearance that Ivins may have been trying to hide extracurricular work with this strain of anthrax, what of the mention of a technician? Read more →

Yeah, What ABOUT that Anthrax Terrorist?

/in /by

Call me crazy. But after viewing this very creepy exchange between Patrick Leahy and Michael Mukasey regarding the anthrax killer, I got the feeling that both of them know exactly who sent those anthrax-laden letters almost seven years ago.

Leahy uses the recent settlement between Hatfill and DOJ to raise the issue. As he raises it, he notes that he is privy to classified information about the anthrax killer, and because of that he has refrained from even discussing the case.

Leahy: I almost hate to get into the case of Steven Hatfill. I’ve refrained from discussing this, I’ve refused to discuss it with the press. I’ve told them some aspects of it I was aware of were classified so of course I could not discuss it but also, considering the fact that my life was threatened by an anthrax letter, two people died who touched a letter addressed to me I was supposed to open, I’m somewhat concerned.

What happened?

Mukasey: That case …

Then Leahy makes s curious statement: we’re paying Hatfill, which means that the guy who committed the crime is going free.

Leahy: We’re paying Hatfill millions of dollars, the indication being the guy who committed the crime went free.

I’ll let you sort through the logic of that sentence. But know that Mukasey doesn’t like it–not at all.

Mukasey: Well, um, I don’t understand, quote, the guy who committed the crime, unquote, to have gone free. What I do understand is…

Leahy: Nobody’s been convicted.

Mukasey: Not yet.

Leahy: And five people are dead.

Mukasey: Yes, um…

Leahy: And hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent.

Eventually, it seems that Muaksey concedes that he, too, has very specific knowledge about the case.

Mukasey: That case is under active investigation and I need to be very careful about what I say.

Which Leahy seems to confirm. Read more →

The FISA Fix and Obama’s Profile In Courage Leadership Moment

/73 Comments/in , , , , , , , /by

Whether by design or random chance, there is so much information, on so many and diverse subjects, flooding the politically astute citizen currently that it is hard to keep track. It seems like we are drawn from one crisis and seminal issue to another with the passing of not every day, but with the passing of every hour. And yes, they are all pretty much that important; but there are some that portend not just how we do in our lives, but who we are and what we stand for in the first place. Chief among those is the question of whether we are a nation of men freelancing in the public trough of goodwill, or a nation of laws in which men operate within the rule of law and under the edicts and guidance of our founding fathers and the Constitution they bequeathed us.

One of these issues has been at the forefront of out conscience for nearly a year now; the issue of how to improve the Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act (FISA) for the future we face and how to address the criminal violations of FISA we have suffered in the past. How we resolve FISA will go a long way indeed in indicating whether we are a nation of admirable laws or, alternatively, of mere opportunistic men.

The three critical parts of FISA that are the subject of the heated and protracted fight over reform are exclusivity, minimization and retroactive immunity. Simply put, exclusivity refers to the relative degree in which the resulting FISA law will control this area of the law. The original FISA statute was designed to be the

…exclusive means by which electronic surveillance … and the interception of domestic wire, oral and electronic communications may be conducted.

As Marcy Wheeler has pointed out however, the Bush Administration performed a terminally disingenuous end run around the exclusivity mandate of FISA via one of John Yoo’s made to order faux legal opinions. The exclusivity provisions must be made impervious to such sophistry and with sufficient teeth to insure future compliance by the executive branch.

Minimization is the word for the procedures the government uses to

remove and (eventually) delete any data from US persons collected incidentally in the course of surveilling someone overseas. If we could be guaranteed that minimization procedures are sound, then the whole debate over Read more →

Can’t Gitmo Dirty – The Penultimate Straw

/132 Comments/in , , , , , /by

Marcy is in Minneapolis at the Wide Stance Film Festival National Conference for Media Reform (a really cool program I might add, the link is worth a look) and Ted Stevens clogged my tubes last night, but things look to be A-OK this morning.

Guantanamo The Showcase is starting to seep into the conscience. Marcy has pointed out the rather curious intersection of the right wing family value of hating on same sex marriage, and those who would wish to practice it, with military commission procedure. By far and away, the best national reporting on the Guantanamo Show is, and has long been, done by Carol Rosenberg at the Miami Herald. Marcy thinks it is Pulitzer Prize good; by the time the year is out, I’ll bet she may be right. Our friend drational has done a couple of posts reminding us that the Gitmo Showcase is much more than a macabre puppet play for the Cheney/Bush torture fiends, it is also a big campaign commercial for the "law and order" set at the GOP.

But I want to bring attention to something that really sank in for me yesterday morning and that a few people are starting to pick up on, but not many, and not nearly enough. Rosenberg laid out the background on the day long arraignment proceedings for the detainees at Gitmo at the link cited above:

But the day was remarkable — a 9 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. court session, including two prayer breaks — in which each man rejected the two to four military and civilian attorneys sitting beside him.

The director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Anthony Romero, watched from the spectators gallery in a fury. He had been building a death penalty defense fund and pool of criminal defense lawyers to help the military lawyers.

”It was one of the saddest days in American jurisprudence,” he said. ‘The word `torture’ was used so abundantly and the legal process continued.”

He blamed Pentagon haste to get the men to trial before the end of the Bush administration. Defense lawyers were not given sufficient time to forge attorney-client relationships ”with men who were tortured for five years,” before Thursday’s arraignment, he said.
…
Some of the men rejected the legitimacy of commissions, in which U.S. military officers serve as judge and jurors. Saudi Mustafa Hawsawi, who allegedly funneled funds for the terror plot, went last and appeared to be echoing the others who came before him.
…
At one point, after Read more →

The BAE Bribes Funded Covert Ops

/108 Comments/in /by

Man, this is one big paragraph. Makes you want to, um, breathe.

But here’s the key point of the paragraph–the description of how BAE bribes to Bandar bin Sultan and others were laundered through some offshore accounts and then used to fund covert ops.

Remember, that the real story behind the BAE "Al Yamamah" scandal is that, under the arms-for-oil barter deal, the British accumulated well-over $100 billion, in off-the-books, offshore funds, that have been used to finance covert operations, for the past 23 years (the deal was first signed in 1985, and has been regularly updated ever since).

After which said long breathless paragraph goes onto insinuate that the BAE bribes might be tied to 9/11.

The other nagging matter around the BAE case is that Prince Bandar "inadvertently" helped finance the 9/11 attacks, through funds provided by him and his wife to two Saudi intelligence operative in California, who, in turn, bankrolled two of the hijackers.

Now, before we focus too closely on the 9/11 insinuation, first let’s consider a few other details. 1985, when these funds were set up, was actually before BCCI, the Pakistani bank that both the CIA and the Saudis used to launder money for covert ops, folded. I’m curious whether any of the "usual hedge funds, etc. in places like the Cayman Islands, BVI" in which the Saudis dumped their bribe receipts were BCCI accounts? And did they move from there to Riggs Bank, where the Saudis and General Pinochet were subsequently laundering their money?

Read more →