Top US scientist commits suicide?

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

I explained to you how they were used to get the Patriot Act and win acceptance of the Iraq attack.

You chose to ignore the points and go off on rekilling the messenger tangents as usual.

They so obviously advanced the Bush Agenda that I.... wait why am I typing to you?

[Len Colby]

I explained to you how they were used to get the Patriot Act and win acceptance of the Iraq attack.

Nate I went back over your posts and I couldn’t find one where you “explained to [me] how they were used to get the Patriot Act and win acceptance of the Iraq attack” you certainly haven’t produced any evidence to support these claims. The Patriot Act is more complicated, I will spell out why I think there was little if any cause and effect in a few days but the Iraq thesis seems absurd on its face. Iraq was only briefly discussed as a suspect and long before the attack the US authorities publicly started focusing on home grown suspects especially Hatfield.

You chose to ignore the points and go off on rekilling the messenger tangents as usual.

No, you are making false accusations as usual, where have I tried to kill or ‘rekill the messenger’ here? The question of whether or not the supposed culprit (i.e. the Bush Administration) had any real motive is not a tangential point but central to the whole debate.

They so obviously advanced the Bush Agenda that I.... wait why am I typing to you?

The “it is so obvious it isn’t worth going into” ploy is one normally used by someone with no good answers.

[Bob Goodman]

....What interests me more is the theory that the attacks were some sort of government plot. ...

How come, Len? Why are you interested in putting out that particular fire?

....My main problem with that theory is that they don`t seem to have SIGNIFICANTLY advanced the Busho-con agenda...

Taking the measure of things again. What is it with you and numbers, Len? What a silly thing to argue. Arguments like that just go round and round and lead nowhere. You must know that. Could you explain why you like to dwell on stuff like that even though you're smart enough to know it's not a resolvable issue? It distracts from the thread, don't you think? It really doesn't contribute anything new or give an orginal perspective, nor does it shed any additional light on the life and death of Dr. Ivins, does it? John led off the thread with great promise, subsequent posts were insightful. I want more information and perhaps a fresh perspective of the case. All given on good faith, I'd hope. I'm interested in the psychological ramifications of the attacks on the American psyche and their collective response to it. What do you want? To put out fires? You say "What interests me more is the theory that the attacks were some sort of government plot". Not, I assume to bring evidence to support that contention, but to draw out that idea in someone and then argue the negative, right? What purpose could that possibly serve, Len? What can be learned from that? I just don't see what is gained by that and why you would be doing something like that in the first place. But, it's really none of my business, I guess. Everyone likes something different. I don't like smugness or frothy emotional arguments that draw out the passions and therefore the worst in people. It's repellent. I'm just curious, that's all. Don't mean to pry.

[Craig Lamson]

I explained to you how they were used to get the Patriot Act and win acceptance of the Iraq attack.

Is that what you did? Looks more like you made some claims without basis and are now calling them fact.

Another thing to add to the list along with your inability to be consistant.

[Craig Lamson]

I know I am setting myself up for a scolding, not to mention a whupping by responding to you, Len, but look, you don't have to believe me that everything wasn't rosey anymore in the ole US of A after the Anthrax attacks. Here's something from the August 15, 2008 article in The American Conservtive in which I will embolden the specfic clues...err....points! Yeah, points. This well-written article gives a little more insight into the details of the operation, or whatever ((they ask some good questions (if you take my meaning...read carefully)...Take the time to read...Wink!)) as they stand now. The embolds are mine, enjoy:

August 15, 2008

The Anthrax Files

The FBI claims to have caught the killer. But so much evidence has been neglected or mishandled that many experts still have doubts.

Christopher Ketcham

Seven years after the anthrax attacks shut down Congress, sowed panic nationwide, killed five, sickened 17, and allowed neocon propagandists to variously blame al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, the FBI claims to have gotten its man.

( (you see the sowed part? Just read a little, my man, and you can find plenty more ...especially in the older stuff...From here on, I enboldened some of the parts of the puzzle. Where do they go? You tell me...please...(bg))

But the official story doesn’t fully accord with the facts. Any reasonable assessment of the evidence suggests that the same powerful interests that might have been served by prolonging the investigation would have had a stake in finally bringing it to a tidy conclusion. That doesn’t mean that the killer was caught.

The acknowledged certainty is that the anthrax letters weren’t the work of Islamists or Iraqis. The attacks were perpetrated by someone with high-level access to U.S. government supplies of the deadly bacteria. Ground zero of the investigation has long been the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. But the lab had dropped from the headlines until recently, much as the FBI had seemingly allowed its investigation to languish.

The first week of August, the popular press got back in the game, reporting the apparent suicide of USAMRIID scientist Bruce E. Ivins, alleged to be the sole operator behind the anthrax letters. The Associated Press reported that Ivins, who is said to have killed himself on July 29 with an overdose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, was “one of the government’s leading scientists researching vaccines and cures for anthrax exposure.” According to the AP, he was “brilliant but troubled.” His lawyer, Paul Kemp, says that Ivins..... passed a pair of polygraph tests....... and that the grand jury investigating the case was weeks from returning an indictment. Yet within days of his death, the bureau announced that it was beginning the ...shutdown.... of its “Amerithrax” investigation. “Anthrax Case a Wrap,” blared the Daily News on Aug. 4.

In April, it was reported that the FBI had been focusing on as many as four suspects. Fox News identified them as a “former deputy commander,” presumably in the U.S. Army, a “leading anthrax scientist,” and “a microbiologist.” .....The fourth suspect was given no description...... Now the bureau is “confident that Dr. Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks,” according to the assurances of the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.

The Ivins news came close on the heels of a far quieter announcement on June 27 that the FBI’s investigation of the previous top anthrax suspect, Steven Hatfill, also a USAMRIID bioresearcher, ended not with a trial and conviction but with a $5.8 million settlement effectively admitting that the bureau had the wrong guy. Hatfill had been hounded by investigators for three years, his career and reputation ruined.

Ivins was subjected to similar treatment. According to the AP, he complained to friends that agents had “stalked” him and his family. They offered his son $2.5 million and “a sports car of his choice” to rat out his father. They approached his hospitalized daughter to turn evidence on him, plying her at bedside with pictures of the murdered anthrax victims and telling her, “This is what your father did.” W. Russell Byrne, Ivins’s supervisor at USAMRIID, told the AP that Ivins, 62, was emotionally broken by the FBI’s behavior: “One person said he’d sit at his desk and weep.”

Francis Boyle, a professor of law at the University of Illinois who drafted the 1989 Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act signed by President George H.W. Bush, advised the FBI in its initial investigation of the anthrax letters. Along with several other American bioweapons experts—among them Jonathan King, professor of molecular biology at MIT, and Barbara Rosenberg, who studied biowarfare with the Federation of American Scientists—Boyle warned early on that the spores issued from inside a U.S. research operation, possibly one that was classified. He provided the FBI with lists of scientists, contractors, and laboratories that had worked on anthrax projects, but he is skeptical of Ivins as the lone killer: “The Feds pursued the same strategy against Ivins as they did against Hatfill—persecute him until he broke, which Ivins did and Hatfill did not. Dead men tell no tales.”

Ivins, says Boyle, just doesn’t fit the bill. “It does not appear that he had the technological sophistication to manufacture this super weapons-grade anthrax, which would have included aerosolization, silicon coating, and an electrostatic charge.” Jeffrey Adamovicz, who directed the bacteriology division at Fort Detrick in 2003 and 2004, told McClatchy that the anthrax mailed to Sen. Tom Daschle was “so concentrated and so consistent and so clean that I would assert that Bruce could not have done that part.”

Following the release of the FBI’s public case against Ivins, the New York Times editorialized that “there is no direct evidence of his guilt” and decried the “lack of hard, incontrovertible proof.” The Washington Post called the case “admittedly circumstantial.” Investigators failed to place Ivins in New Jersey on the dates in September and October 2001 when the letters were reportedly mailed from a Princeton location. They swabbed his residence, locker, several cars, the tools in his laboratory, and his office space, but found no trace of anthrax that genetically matched the bacteria in the letters. Indeed, some of the evidence—all circumstantial, none forensic—was downright laughable. Ivins at one time maintained a mailbox under an assumed name where he received pornographic magazines. He had once been “obsessed” with a Princeton sorority because of a failed college romance, and the Princeton mailbox where one of the letters originated was located within 100 yards of a storage facility used by the sorority—in a location Ivins apparently last visited 27 years ago. He drank. He made homicidal statements to a mental-health support group. He wrote rambling letters to the editor of his local paper. How any of this motivated Bruce Ivins to kill fellow Americans with a bioweapon is not established.

Moreover, his former colleagues have repeatedly told the media that, as far as they are aware, ....Ivins didn’t know how to weaponize anthrax........... He was a vaccine specialist, not a weaponizer. The assumption is that Ivins kept his weaponizing skills secret from his coworkers. But how did he learn those skills? Perhaps colleagues at Ft. Detrick provided the help in casual conversation. Yet there’s not the slightest indication that during his years at Ft. Detrick Ivins even once asked fellow scientists about weaponizing techniques.

Nor is it clear why Ivins—a registered Democrat—would single out Sens. Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle to receive lethal letters. Interestingly, both had been critical impediments to passage of the Patriot Act. The first wave of anthrax mail, sent Sept. 18, 2001, targeted major media; the second round, posted Oct. 9, went to Congress. On Oct. 25, amid widespread panic, the act passed. Yet it is improbable that a mad scientist would specialize in such targeted political activity—or that he personally benefited from the repercussions. Many others did, however.

“In the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event,” Salon’s Glenn Greenwald writes. “It was really the anthrax letters that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years … that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.”

By Oct. 28, ABC was reporting, “four well-placed and separate sources have told ABC News that initial tests on the anthrax by the U.S. Army at Fort Detrick, Maryland, have........ detected trace amounts of the chemical additives bentonite and silica”.........—bentonite being a hallmark of the Iraqi weapons program. (In 2007, ABC admitted that no bentonite was ever detected but refused to unmask its sources.) “Some are going to be quick to pick up on this as a smoking gun,” Peter Jennings said at the time.

The administration’s acolytes did not disappoint. William Kristol and Robert Kagan complained, “What will it take for the FBI and the CIA to start connecting the dots here? A signed confession from Saddam?” “The leading supplier suspect has to be Iraq,” the Wall Street Journal opined, “The government has to do everything possible to destroy the anthrax threat at its state-sponsored source.” Added Laurie Mylroie in National Review, “Iraqi intelligence was intimately involved in the 9/11 attacks and [the] military grade anthrax sent to Senators Leahy and Daschle almost certainly came from an Iraqi lab.” As late as 2007, long after it became apparent that the anthrax was homegrown, outlets like Fox News continued to insist on a Middle Eastern link.

Those making the case for war in Iraq and seeking to advance the administration’s domestic security agenda had good reason to resist a swift resolution to the case—especially one involving an American perpetrator. Whether by suggestion or as a result of its own incompetence, the FBI obliged.

As early as November 2001, the New York Times was reporting that the bureau’s “missteps” were “hampering the inquiry.” Indeed, from the beginning, the FBI has been in possession of a key piece of evidence that it apparently ignored.

Among the first suspects to come into the FBI’s sights was an Egyptian-born ex-USAMRIID biologist named Ayaad Assaad. He appeared on the radar because of an anonymous letter sent to the bureau identifying him as part of a terrorist cell possibly linked to the anthrax attacks. Yet, according to the Hartford Courant, the FBI did not attempt to track down the author of the letter, “despite its curious timing, coming a matter of days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known.”

Assaad was quickly exonerated by FBI investigators, and the matter swiftly dropped—though the letter may have provided the best piece of evidence in the case. It was sent prior to the arrival of the anthrax letters, suggesting foreknowledge of the attacks, and its language was similar to that of the deadly mail. Moreover, it displayed an intimate knowledge of USAMRIID operations, suggesting that it came from within the limited ranks of Fort Detrick researchers —a relatively small group with access to and expertise in weaponized anthrax.

The FBI has refused to make a copy of the letter publicly available—or even to give one to Assaad himself. It did, however, share the contents with a Vassar College professor and language forensics expert named Don Foster, who famously fingered Joe Klein as the anonymous author behind Primary Colors and helped to catch the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber. After reading news reports, he requested a copy of the letter, and, following his review of documents written by “some 40 USAMRIID employees,” Foster “found writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match,” according to an article he authored in the October 2003 Vanity Fair. When he brought this seemingly crucial clue to the attention of the FBI’s anthrax task force, however, the bureau declined to follow up. According to Foster, the senior FBI agent on the case had never even heard of the Assaad letter. (For the record, Foster isn’t an unimpeachable source. He strayed from his area of professional expertise and published unrelated circumstantial evidence in his Vanity Fair piece that wrongly fingered Hatfill, who sued the magazine, which settled on undisclosed terms.)

..................“The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor I work on, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live,” .............Assaad told reporter Laura Rozen. Since he was almost immediately cleared, attempting to frame him served no purpose, except to indulge a personal enmity. To that end, Assaad suggested that the FBI question the pair of USAMRIID colleagues most likely to carry a grudge against him, Marian Rippy and Philip Zack, who years earlier had been reprimanded for sending Assad a racist poem. Though the Courant reported video evidence of Zack making after-hours trips to labs where pathogens were stored, there is no record of the FBI ever investigating him or Rippy, a colleague with whom he was having an extramarital affair.

The FBI’s failures don’t end there. The anthrax used in the terror attacks has been identified as similar to strains held at laboratories in Ames, Iowa. The Ames database, maintained and overseen by Iowa State University, was a comprehensive culture collection of some 100 vials gathered since 1928. It listed all parties, agencies, and labs that acquired its anthrax strains. When researchers, fearful of terrorists breaching the lab, offered to destroy the anthrax cultures, the FBI did not object. “This was an astonishing thing to do,” Francis Boyle tells me. “It should have been preserved as evidence. This was a roadmap of everybody and anybody that had gotten access to develop the super-strain that hit Leahy and Daschle.”

Questions about the Ames database point to a bigger concern: where was the weapons-grade anthrax in the letters produced? If the FBI had an airtight case that the anthrax killer worked at Ft. Detrick—thanks to new DNA techniques supposedly linking the spores to that lab—surely the Assaad letter would be a key piece of evidence in the case against Ivins. At the very least it would have to be explained away rather than ignored.

Another possibility is that the attacks didn’t originate at USAMRIID at all, and the FBI has once again accused an innocent man. Ironically, it was Ivins who, among other investigators, was initially tasked by the FBI with analyzing the anthrax in the letters. Dr. Gerry Andrews, a professor of microbiology at the University of Wyoming and former colleague of Ivins at Ft. Detrick, wrote in the New York Times, “When [ivins’s] team analyzed the powder, they found it to be a startlingly refined weapons-grade anthrax spore preparation, the likes of which had never been seen before by personnel at Fort Detrick.” Granted, Andrews has an interest in exonerating his former lab, but he goes on to make an astonishing allegation: “It is extremely improbable that this type of preparation could ever have been produced at Fort Detrick, certainly not of the grade and quality found in that envelope.”

If the scientists at Fort Detrick did not have the capacity to produce this kind of anthrax, who did? Boyle suggests an answer in his book, Biowarfare and Terrorism. He alleges that the evidence in the anthrax spores, if properly pursued, would have “led directly back to a secret but officially sponsored U.S. government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal, in violation of [the] Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989.” This might be easily dismissed as conspiracy theory except that a source no less reputable than the New York Times published a similar charge on Sept. 4, 2001: “the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons that, some officials say, tests the limits of the global treaty banning such weapons. … earlier this year, administration officials said, the Pentagon drew up plans to engineer genetically a potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax.”

Boyle suggests possible perps: the Pentagon, the CIA, or perhaps private sector scientists acting under covert contract with the government. According to a 2002 BBC report, the CIA may indeed have been investigating “methods of sending anthrax through the mail which went madly out of control.” “The shocking assertion,” offered the BBC, “is that a key member of the covert operation may have removed, refined and eventually posted weapons-grade anthrax.” Boyle theorizes that the FBI’s investigation was purposely bungled as part of a cover-up. He argues that the legal process ensuing from a thorough investigation “would, in a court of law, directly implicate the United States government, its agencies, its officials, and its agents, in conducting illegal and criminal biowarfare research.”

But if such a program exists, why would anyone associated with it risk exposure by sending crude anthrax letters? Perhaps for the oldest motive in the world: money. In the wake of the postal terror, biowarfare funding under the rubric of “biodefense” received a major shot in the arm. By a vote of 99-0, the Senate passed the BioShield Act of 2004, which, on top of $22 billion for civilian biowarfare-related “defense work” funded between 2001 and 2005, allocates $5.6 billion through 2014 “to purchase and stockpile vaccines and drugs to fight anthrax, smallpox, and other potential agents of bioterror.” Critics claim that BioShield is a form of covert offensive biowarfare planning.

Such research could come at a high price—beyond the billions Congress readily rubber-stamped. “The bioterror programs are far more likely to generate new risks to public health, rather than to provide additional protections,” MIT microbiologist Jonathan King says. Programs such as BioShield are “also generating a network of small and large companies planning to profit.”

Hillel W. Cohen, associate professor of epidemiology and population health at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, offers a similar assessment. “Before 2001, some of us in public health described bioterrorism as an exaggerated threat,” Cohen says. “No one had ever died from bioterrorism, and we warned that the proliferation of laboratories studying anthrax and other biological weapons agents was a terrible mistake, diverting money from real health needs and dangerously multiplying the number of people with access. After the 2001 anthrax letters, our warnings were buried in an avalanche of fear-mongering.” Today, Cohen says, “billions are being spent to support many more such labs.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley is calling for a Congressional investigation, but.......................................... we may never know the identity of the anthrax killer. ...........................................................................Was it the uninvestigated Ft. Detrick letter-writer with compelling foreknowledge? The dead scientist the FBI initially asked to investigate the attacks then later turned against? .............Or some other individual or group, with access to high-grade strains, ......

(((Or.......who apparently were willing to ...(omg, can you believe it)....take the risk of being locked up on a Burglary charge!!!!!!!!!!!!!!...Always worked before.. (B.G. here.. sorry, jumped into the article and added that which you see within these parantheses here) Oh well, back to the article)))...

....who stood to benefit from a bioterror scare? We know who didn’t put anthrax in the mail: Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden. Beyond that, all we know is that the FBI’s conduct—whether by bureaucratic bungling or some kind of cover-up—makes it unlikely this case will ever be definitively closed.

THE END

ok..this is me now...You see. In .........MY AMERICA ....MY AMERICA....(ahhh..Patriotism, the last refuge, don't you know)...well, in My America, we had families. We loved someone. We had those who loved us, for real. We worried about every danger to those we loved. We took into our Calculus any possiblity of danger to them. That's what normal people do, you know. Again, this was and ACTIVE event. Not a passive event. Kind of like everybody collecting cans and scrap metal to benefit the war effort in WW2. It engaged the public and galvinized the war effort. Oh, not the Anthrax Attacks, silly! The cans and stuff, if you know what I mean. Incredible psychological power those Active events, don't you know. No? Well, look into it a little, won't take much time. You have a good day now. Always remember that an idle mind is the Devil's workshop, not to mention sometimes it's also stealing from the Public Treasury. I kinda lost count on the paranthesis, sorry. Alright boys, back to work now.

Aside from the fact that this article is yet another parrot of Greemwald, there is little to support the claim that the anthrax attacks upped the anty so to speak. In MY AMERICA anthrax was but a sideshow. But in the interest of fairness I started asking friends and family about the anthrax attacks. No one I've spoken with agrees with Greenwalds statement. It was 9/11, not anthrax.

[Len Colby]

....What interests me more is the theory that the attacks were some sort of government plot. ...

How come, Len? Why are you interested in putting out that particular fire

It not about putting out a fire but rather in figuring out what happened. I’m not especially interested in whether it was Ivins or one of his co-workers. The idea that it was some sort of evil plot by the PTB however is undermined by the lack of a concrete motive.

My main problem with that theory is that they don`t seem to have SIGNIFICANTLY advanced the Busho-con agenda...

Taking the measure of things again. What is it with you and numbers, Len? What a silly thing to argue. Arguments like that just go round and round and lead nowhere. You must know that. Could you explain why you like to dwell on stuff like that even though you're smart enough to know it's not a resolvable issue?

Why is not resolvable? If a group of conspirators were responsible one should be able to ID a motive that stands up to scrutiny. Odd that you suggest that I’m fixated on numbers didn’t you recently make a post concerning the numbers of civilians killed in South Ossetia? I made no reference to numbers in my post above. Motive or lack there of is obviously relevant in determining who did it.

I'm interested in the psychological ramifications of the attacks on the American psyche and their collective response to it.

Then present evidence indicating what they were rather than just your 7 year-old recollections.

I don't like smugness or frothy emotional arguments

Which one of us is engaging in those? Look in a mirror, if there isn’t one nearby the reflection on your screen will do.

that draw out the passions and therefore the worst in people.

It seems that having their views contradicted unfortunately draws “out the passions and therefore the worst in people” as John pointed out if their views are valid they should be able to withstand critical examination.

It's repellent.

I think initiating insults on a forum like this one is repellent, unfortunately you don’t seem to feel that way. Our exchanges will end if such behavior continues.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

I explained to you how they were used to get the Patriot Act and win acceptance of the Iraq attack.

Nate I went back over your posts and I couldn’t find one where you “explained to [me] how they were used to get the Patriot Act and win acceptance of the Iraq attack” you certainly haven’t produced any evidence to support these claims. The Patriot Act is more complicated, I will spell out why I think there was little if any cause and effect in a few days but the Iraq thesis seems absurd on its face. Iraq was only briefly discussed as a suspect and long before the attack the US authorities publicly started focusing on home grown suspects especially Hatfield.

You chose to ignore the points and go off on rekilling the messenger tangents as usual.

No, you are making false accusations as usual, where have I tried to kill or ‘rekill the messenger’ here? The question of whether or not the supposed culprit (i.e. the Bush Administration) had any real motive is not a tangential point but central to the whole debate.

They so obviously advanced the Bush Agenda that I.... wait why am I typing to you?

The “it is so obvious it isn’t worth going into” ploy is one normally used by someone with no good answers.

----

before continuing your list of ploys why not answer my question on post 14 of this thread which you never did. Then you come back to the same issue and you pretend it was never discussed. PLOY! As for your part of that question, the answer is "none" because of your use of the word "concrete". Of course one cannot speak of a "concrete" effect when speaking of the psychological effects of timeing and two different acts of psychological warfare. Does that mean there are no effects? Does it depend on what is is?

[Len Colby]

I explained to you how they were used to get the Patriot Act and win acceptance of the Iraq attack.

Nate I went back over your posts and I couldn’t find one where you “explained to [me] how they were used to get the Patriot Act and win acceptance of the Iraq attack” you certainly haven’t produced any evidence to support these claims. The Patriot Act is more complicated, I will spell out why I think there was little if any cause and effect in a few days but the Iraq thesis seems absurd on its face. Iraq was only briefly discussed as a suspect and long before the attack the US authorities publicly started focusing on home grown suspects especially Hatfield.

You chose to ignore the points and go off on rekilling the messenger tangents as usual.

No, you are making false accusations as usual, where have I tried to kill or ‘rekill the messenger’ here? The question of whether or not the supposed culprit (i.e. the Bush Administration) had any real motive is not a tangential point but central to the whole debate.

They so obviously advanced the Bush Agenda that I.... wait why am I typing to you?

The “it is so obvious it isn’t worth going into” ploy is one normally used by someone with no good answers.

----

before continuing your list of ploys why not answer my question on post 14 of this thread which you never did.

There were no unanswered questions from that post. The only question posed was rhetorical one about 9/11 which you saw fit to answer. Besides that you made several, mostly erroneous, unsupported statements. See below the full text of the post minus the earlier posts "quoted" in it.

Post 14:

"9/11 being the final straw to convince the US population to go onto a war on terror. Well, no doubt there had been a lot of prep work. Did US intelliegence have a lot of warnings? Yep far more than they cared to admit. Buy you are wrong if you imply that the public in general was talking a lot about Islamic terror during the summer of 2001. They needed 9/11 and and the anthrax attacks were fit into the islamic pattern, to induce a broad surrender of liberties, and cash for a war that was aimed on a country that had nothing to do with 9/11. Now the extent to which the anthrax letters were part of the overall islamaphobe campaign is being minimized by the corporate war media."

Then you come back to the same issue and you pretend it was never discussed. PLOY!

I don't consider making unsupported statements discussion at least not MEANINGFUL discussion. I next said it wasn't discussed but rather that my questions remain unanswered. I asked Bob and you to provide evidence that the attacks significantly forwarded the Bush/Neo-Con etc etc agenda. So far neither of you has done so.

As for your part of that question, the answer is "none" because of your use of the word "concrete". Of course one cannot speak of a "concrete" effect when speaking of the psychological effects of timeing and two different acts of psychological warfare.

You are conflating my original and yet unanswered questions to Bob and you with one of my subsequent replies to him. You might well be right that the psychological effects were something nebulous and unprovable but then the fault lies with the person who offered them as evidence. If he he can't provide evidence in support of his claims he is essentially asking us to take them on faith - the theology forum is next door.

Does that mean there are no effects? Does it depend on what is is?

Fine produce evidence for them contemporaneous or retrospective articles essays etc would be an obvious source for evidence of the psychological effects. As for your contentions they made the invasion of Iraq and Patriot Act possible there should be plenty of evidence out there if they were correct.

[Nathaniel Heidenheimer]

Len: my geopolitical bad; the original question was in post ten but It was also repeated in post 14:

Will get on it Len: but first a quick question before you and Craig are named Cochairs of the FCC:

What percent of the US population would you estimate read about and discussed (with at least 1 fellow citizen) the AL Q. attacks of the Cole or others on

Sptember 10th 2001?

Same question for that Anthrax letters following September 11th? A rough estimate would suffice. I know you are in one the fairer corners of Brazil, but you seem to keep up with US public opinion.

[Len Colby]

Len: my geopolitical bad; the original question was in post ten but It was also repeated in post 14:

Will get on it Len: but first a quick question before you and Craig are named Cochairs of the FCC:

What percent of the US population would you estimate read about and discussed (with at least 1 fellow citizen) the AL Q. attacks of the Cole or others on

Sptember 10th 2001?

To be frank I didn’t think that was a serious question. Presumably the “percent of the US population [that] read about and discussed (with at least 1 fellow citizen) the AL Q. attacks of the Cole or others on September 10th 2001” was relatively small but I would guess a majority of Americans did so some time during the months leading up to 9/11. During that period US newspapers averaged a story a day about the Cole, AQD,OBL or terrorism . That number of course made a huge jump starting the next day. The anthrax attacks which were never definitively tied to Arab or Islamic terrorism were necessary for people to make these connections.

I happened to have done some research into this and I discovered that Al Qaeda were very much on the minds of Americans or at leat American newspapers in the year preceding 9/11. A search of the News Library database for 9/11/00 - 9/10/01 for the keywords qaeda OR bin laden OR terrorism resulted in 62647 hits that comes out to 171.6 hits a day. The databank supposedly includes over 2000 periodicals including specialized ones but unfortunately not some of the main US newspapers, namely the NY Times, LA Times, Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Chronicle.

http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archives

I did a 2nd search limiting the results to those from CNN and 23 major papers (see list below). This resulted in 9061 hits or 24.8 a day, so the typical American newspaper had an average of an article a day that contained at least one of those keywords. Actually they might well have had more if they didn’t put every wire service article they printed online or in the database. But what about the “newspaper of record”?

Unfortunately the OR operative doesn’t work on the NYT archive. A search for 9/10/00 - 9/11/01 (Newsbank uses datelines, the NYT publication dates) for “bin Laden”, “Qaeda” and “terrorism” resulted in 283, 54 and 1489 hits respectively. So the paper’s readers had an average of 4 stories a day about terrorism and 5 - 6 a week that mentioned bin Laden or his group.

So even before 9/11 this was a topic garnering considerable coverage

http://query.nytimes.com/search/alternate/query?#top

As for the question of the USS Cole a search limited to 6 newspapers from different parts of the country from 06/01/2000 - 9/10/2001 (Nate specified summer in another post) resulted in 55 hits for the 102 day period or an average of almost an article every 11 days (per paper) even though the attack had taken place 7 ½ - 11 months earlier so it had hardly faded from memory either.

By contrast for 9/11/2001 - 9/17/2001 there were 46 hits for USS Cole in the same 6 papers which comes out to an average of more than one article a day per paper more than 12X the frequency over the preceding months so it obviously didn’t take the anthrax attacks for Americans or at least American journalists to connect the events of 9/11 with earlier ALQ terrorist attacks.

Most Americans get there news from TV but unfortunately the Newsbank archive doesn’t include transcripts for 2001, nor was I able to locate any online sources of them.

Searched publications, the 6 papers for the USS Cole search are marked with an asterisk.

CNN,

Arizona Republic, The (Phoenix, AZ),

San Francisco Chronicle *

Denver Post,

Washington Post *

Miami Herald *

Atlanta Journal-Constitution,

Chicago Sun-Times*

Indianapolis Star

Times-Picayune, The (New Orleans, LA)

Times-Herald (Baltimore, MD)

Boston Globe *

Detroit Free Press,

Star Tribune: Newspaper of the Twin Cities (MN),,

St. Louis Post-Dispatch,

Star-Ledger, The (Newark, NJ),

New York Daily News,

Charlotte Observer (NC),

Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH),

Philadelphia Inquirer,

Dallas Morning News,

USA TODAY,

Seattle Times*

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

http://nl.newsbank.com/nl-search/we/Archiv...sort=YMD_date:D

Same question for that Anthrax letters following September 11th? A rough estimate would suffice. I know you are in one the fairer corners of Brazil, but you seem to keep up with US public opinion.

Not that it is really relevant but close to 100%

[Mark Vernon]

This is an obvious farce.

[Len Colby]

Lets see anthrax didn't lead to the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq nor did it get the Patriot Act passed nor was it necessary for people to make the obvious connection between 9/11 and earlier AQD attacks.So how exactly did it help advance the Bushocon agenda?

[William Kelly]

After Congressional Breifing fails to convince Congressman and scientists, FBI to present the real evidence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/washingt...tml?ref=science

So what happened to the FBI's evidence and case?

This post was hijacked by those who want to debate about Truthers, while I would like to determine who was responsible for the Anthrax attacks.

What about the handwriting on the envelops, why isn't that being used as evidence?

And who desposited the letters in the Princeton mailbox?

Do the suspect's gas credit cards indicate their whereabouts, as that's how they got Bundy?

And doesn't anyone else find it peculiar that the Anthrax suspects were narrowed down to the same small Ft. Detrick, Md. bio warfare lab where Col. Jose Rivera worked?

BK

[William Kelly]

After Congressional Breifing fails to convince Congressman and scientists, FBI to present the real evidence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/washingt...tml?ref=science

So what happened to the FBI's evidence and case?

This post was hijacked by those who want to debate about Truthers, while I would like to determine who was responsible for the Anthrax attacks.

What about the handwriting on the envelops, why isn't that being used as evidence?

And who desposited the letters in the Princeton mailbox?

Do the suspect's gas credit cards indicate their whereabouts, as that's how they got Bundy?

And doesn't anyone else find it peculiar that the Anthrax suspects were narrowed down to the same small Ft. Detrick, Md. bio warfare lab where Col. Jose Rivera worked?

BK

[Len Colby]

After Congressional Breifing fails to convince Congressman and scientists, FBI to present the real evidence.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/16/washingt...tml?ref=science

So what happened to the FBI's evidence and case?

This post was hijacked by those who want to debate about Truthers, while I would like to determine who was responsible for the Anthrax attacks.

What about the handwriting on the envelops, why isn't that being used as evidence?

And who desposited the letters in the Princeton mailbox?

Do the suspect's gas credit cards indicate their whereabouts, as that's how they got Bundy?

And doesn't anyone else find it peculiar that the Anthrax suspects were narrowed down to the same small Ft. Detrick, Md. bio warfare lab where Col. Jose Rivera worked?

BK

Sorry for hijacking the thread Bill.

The handwriting question is a good one but my understanding is that it is hard to positively ID block letter writing. As for the mailbox and credit cards Princeton is probably only 2 - 3 hours from Ft. Detrick so Ivins or someone else could have gone there and back without refilling their tank and have left few traces that would have lasted 7 years.