It turns out that he had a reason to think he wouldn't be caught. As the Army's top expert on anthrax, he was the guy that they were going to send the evidence to for analysis, and they did. So when he wanted to "prove" that somebody other than him did it, he tainted the samples with a particular chemical, bentonite, that was only used by Iraqi biowarfare specialists. What undid him, ultimately, was better-quality DNA analysis showed that even if the bentonite was Iraqi, the actual anthrax spores were the descendants of ones that were in his lab. Glenn Greenwald's point is this: during the run-up to the Iraq War, lots of politicians and journalists were citing anonymous high-ranking government sources about the evidence linking the 2001 anthrax attacks to Iraq. Some of them were doing so long before this guy had released his "official" analysis, the one with the bentonite in it. Greenwald even cites one reporter as saying he'd been warned by his anonymous high-ranking government source that Iraq might try an anthrax attack on US journalists, before any such attacks had happened. And Greenwald is asking all of those people to answer one question: was Ivins your source? Was this one guy the one who spread all the anthrax rumors, as well as all the anthrax? Because if he wasn't? If somebody else was doing this too? We've either got one heck of a creepy coincidence on our hands, or one heck of an even creepier conspiracy.
I brought this up with
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
teflonspyder when he dropped by for dinner. And in passing, I showed him, from Greenwald's article, one of the hand-written notes that accompanied the anthrax spores:
... and I mentioned that, at the time, I wasn't buying the foreign terrorist story. As soon as I saw the notes and the envelopes, I was pretty sure that we were dealing with an American who wanted us to believe it was a Muslim. The date format is wrong; no Muslim country, even the ones that use our calendar, writes it as MM-DD-YY. Hardly any countries anywhere in the world do, the normal format almost anywhere other than the US is DD-MM-YY or YY-MM-DD. The use of boldface in lieu of capitalization in an all-upper-case block of text is a largely US typographic convention, not least of which because most non-European languages don't use capitalization the way we do. The translation of Allahu akbar, at the end, seems off to me, too. TeflonSpyder also pointed out that someone whose native language used non-Latin lettering would still use Arabic numbering, but the carefully shaky hand-writing is the same for the date and the text. He also expressed doubt that someone literate in Arabic would write something with the baseline as sloppy as the baseline in that note. So, between us, in a matter of seconds, we came up with 5 bits of evidence just from this one note suggesting a US source.
And that's the point at which he came up with something so obvious, in hindsight, that I'm embarrassed I didn't think of it myself first. One set of evidence (the bentonite) "proves" it came from Iraq, the other set of evidence (trivial handwriting analysis, if nothing else) "proves" it came from the US. How was it not obvious that the guy handling the evidence was crooked? As he put it, "anyone with above a high school education" who would have examined this note should have been in a position to contradict the Iraq link -- where were they? In TeflonSpyder's opinion, this has to have been looked at by at least three or four whole layers of such people before, as he just put it to me, "it got obfuscated to the point where people stopped looking at it." How did this pass as long as it has?
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Don't you get it? Am I the only one who gets it?
Thank you for this. The subject upsets me quite a bit and the laughter you provided was much appreciated.
And also, mixed with water to drop on fires, from airplanes?
Have a look a this from a suspicious Constitutionalist perspective.
See riverdog.typepad.com.
You don't have to be a lefty to distrust those guys in the D. of C.
All the best, rnk35.
I think it has lots of uses. I seem to remember it being an ingredient in ceramic glaze too. Or am I thinking of something else?
also, not all Arabic writers use the type of Arabic numbers that we use:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Ar
At a guess, because the US administration found it convenient for their plans to invade Iraq, whether or not they were involved in the anthrax attacks.
To paraphrase Theresa Nielsen Hayden, the Bush admin makes anyone actually following things feel like a tinfoil-hat wearing conspiracy loon.
(edited to make sense ;-) )
(edited agin to put the link back ... sorry)
Report: Therapist feared anthrax researcher
~M~
I had no idea about date conventions in Arab countries, and "Allah is great" kept making me twitch, but I couldn't put a finger on why.
Is there someplace where it's normal to make it "09" rather than "9"?
I was actually thinking that it had been brought to some random scientist who had been told in no uncertain terms what his results would be before he ran the tests ... the fact that, in retrospect, that viewpoint seems naive to me is the most deeply frightening part for yours truly.
Where'd you get that from? According to Greenwald, there never WAS any bentonite in the anthrax. ABC just made that up, as far as anybody can tell.
At the moment, I'm fifty/fifty on this being a shadowgov asset cleanup (if he's dead he can't testify) or being just another stalking horse who took the quick way out because he thought he was gonna get hung for something he didn't do.
But the paragraph you quoted of Brad Hicks is definitely wrong: the source of the bentonite story doesn't seem to have told his superiors about bentonite, only ABC. If he had told his superiors, I'd think they'd have told us at this point, at least if he were Ivins.
There's the issue of the lone Ivins vs ABC's 4 sources. Greenwald just doesn't think it's Ivins, so that doesn't bother him.
But I'm as puzzled at the others about why bentonite would be considered an Iraqi signature or anything out of the ordinary at all.
When in doubt, do a web search. This post has a bit more of the ABC news quote: "Despite a last-minute denial from the White House, sources tell ABCNEWS the anthrax in the tainted letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite. The potent additive is known to have been used by only one country in producing biochemical weapons — Iraq."
"Potent additive"? "Laced" with bentonite? <LOLcat>Oh, noes! Saddam is attacking us with kitty litter!</LOLcat> I'm willing to believe that Saddam Hussein's bioweapons makers used bentonite as a binding agent or some such, but those expressions make it sound as if the ABC news reporters didn't do the most elementary fact checking.
Yes, and the downstroke in "9" is usually rounded, not straight as in the note.
Which reminds me ... whatever happened to the cutaneous anthrax sufferer in -- was it Florida? -- suspected of cooking up the crap-grade crude culture anthrax that could only kill somebody if they mistook it for heroin and snorted a line?
I've had the displeasure of having to work with that 3-5 micron C18 silica before. Static electricity will launch the powder off of a spatula into the air, never to be seen again. It can travel for miles before settling out. Bentonite makes a nice adsorbent and can be very finely powdered, but it doesn't have the surface properties to get really good loft. It's definitely second rate. Whole post offices wouldn't have been contaminated if the stuff had been on bentonite.
I was but 17 - a pup - in the 9-11 and anthrax days, but it seemed then like the elephant in the room was the fact that liberals (and mainstream media outlets perceived by the far-right as liberal) were being specifically targeted, with the intent to either kill liberals or scare them into submission.
That's why, in light of the suicide of the case's now most likely perpetrator, the first thing that came to mind when I heard the news was the Unitarian shooting last week, and your thoughtful and nuanced article on the subject.
What I'm desperate to know in the end is: what were the politics of Bruce Ivins? Was he another listener of Limbaugh and reader of Coulter who took it upon himself to help create the panic needed to create their vision of a perfect world? Or was he a more practical monster, one facing substantial financial and political gain? (News has come to light that he had a patent on a potent anthrax vaccine and stood to benefit from a national panic.)
Either way, the more I hear about this case, the more I can't help but wonder about how big a role "eliminationism" played in the decision to paralyze the mail system and instill fear into the American psyche.
Some think that the Oklahoma City bombing was a sting gone bad, in that the BATF knew about it in advance, and were going to swoop in at the last minute and stop it, but they fucked up.
All the best, rnk35.
P.s. I think Lee H. Oswald did it for his own reasons, but there were so many people who were hoppin' mad at Jack Kennedy that everything got kinda confused. There was an excellent Red Dwarf episode about the Kennedy assassinatio
In it, he explains what the deal with the (non)existence of bentonite. In short, the Soviet recipe for weaponizing anthrax uses bentonite to keep the spores from clumping, while the US recipe uses something else. The Iraqis were alleged to have obtained their recipes for WMD from the Soviets, so a tenuous link to the Soviet recipe could be used as a causus belli for war with Iraq.
Further, when one analyzes who was sent anthrax tainted letters, who was not sent them, and to whom is this difference important, one can only conclude that the source of the anthrax letters were domestic and right wing terrorists. The only politicians to be mailed anthrax tainted letters were Democrats, and no Republicans were sent any. Further, the occupants of the White House were taking Cipro starting Sep 12, 2001. Cipro, like other antibiotics, would only be useful on US weaponized strains of anthrax, and completely useless on Soviet weaponized strains of anthrax (see Biohazard, by Alibek for more details).
One should not forget Coulter's comments: the only thing Tim McVeigh did wrong was that he didn't go to the NY Times building. Well, the anthrax terrorist followed the coultergeist's advice this time.
A review of the book that I posted is at: http://www.graffe.com/forums/showth
And a damning application for a restraining order at TheSmokingGun.com:
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/ye
Anyway, all of the things you cite are strongly suggestive, but even as a whole, they're not conclusive; Reasonable professionals could still have been convinced of the note's authenticity, despite all that was wrong with it, if there was other supporting evidence. Which we now know there wasn't, of course. But still.
~M~