There WAS NO instantaneous 'free-fall' drop of the upper section onto the lower section resulting in tremendous dynamic forces being 'dropped' upon the lower section. That is a Fairy Tale.

The anthrax incidents of October 2001 must be regarded as an integral part of the entire
9/11 operation. The 9/11 terror attacks were highly effective in terrorizing urban
populations, since no one knew when another city might be struck, and with what means.
But what of the vast suburbs, and what of rural America? Here kamikaze aircraft, poison
gas and dirty bombs were hardly likely. But everyone in the country had a mailbox, and
now that mailbox could become the delivery system for a deadly disease. Even the most
humble and obscure person living in the most remote location could never be sure that a
piece of junk mail in the letterbox had not brushed up against an envelope teeming with
lethal anthrax spores. The most harmless daily routine, that of checking the mailbox,
suddenly became a tense encounter with the world of biological warfare.
The anthrax attacks also provided a most welcome pretext for the Bush administration
and the FBI to scale down and to slow down the ongoing probes into 9/11. The anthrax
letters provided a reason to re-assign FBI agents to the new danger, before they got
anywhere near unearthing the explosive secrets of 9/11. On October 10, FBI assets were
shifted away from the 9/11 investigation with the explanation that they were needed for
the anthrax emergency.
At the same time the anthrax attacks, if properly regarded, can become the Achilles heel
of the entire 9/11 operation, since it is here that the cause and effect relationship reaching
into the secure weapons labs and military facilities of the US federal government is the
most obvious. Anthrax cannot be synthesized by a bunch of rag-heads in a distant cave.
Weaponized anthrax can only be obtained at the US Army’s biological weapons facility
at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and at a very few other centers of the same type controlled by
other governments. The existence of weaponized anthrax is ipso facto a strong case for
US government collusion in terror attacks on this country.
The anthrax cases also provide a case study in FBI obstruction of justice. After the
anthrax letters were used as a pretext for paring down the 9/11 searches, the agents so reassigned
accomplished virtually nothing. For a long time the bureau pretended that any
microbiologist could have been the killer. But the pool of potential anthrax suspects was
of course much smaller – it numbered in the dozens, or less. But, in order to define a
realistic suspect pool, the FBI would have had to admit that the most likely source of the
anthrax attacks was the government labs themselves, and that was something the FBI
clearly did not want to do, lest this revelation be projected backwards onto 9/11. After a
while Stephen Hatfill, a supposedly disgruntled former biowar researcher with a sinister
resume and opinions, and thus a probable diversionary scapegoat, was identified as a
person of interest. He was vilified by FBI leakers, but never indicted. The FBI made a
Potemkin show of an investigation by draining a pond near Frederick, Maryland, but
Hatfill was never charged.
We may also note in passing that the US government response to the anthrax cases
pointed up the extent of oligarchical stratification in this society. Bush and the White
House staff started taking Cipro, an antidote to anthrax, before the attacks even started.
Members of Congress and congressional staffers got Cipro as soon as anthrax letters were
found on Capitol Hill, and their offices were shut down instantly. In the case of black
postal workers, the Postal Service expected them to keep working in tainted facilities,
while at the same time there was a marked reluctance to give out free Cipro to these
workers. The head of the USPS, a Bush appointee, said that any criticism of how he ran
his agency amounted to aid and comfort for terrorists.
We cannot exclude the hypothesis that the anthrax cases were intended to become a much
larger epidemic, one that might have claimed thousands of lives rather than just a few.
Finally, in the anthrax cases, we have a prima facie case for political targeting. The first
recipients of anthrax letters were a tabloid newspaper which had been prominent in
publicizing the disorderly and at times illegal conduct of Bush 43’s two substanceabusing
daughters. Other recipients, like Senators Daschel and Leahy, were possible
sources of opposition to the Patriot Act and other liberticide measures demanded by Bush
and Ashcroft.
Between October 10 and October 11, just one week after the first case of anthrax had
been reported, the FBI contacted the University of Iowa in Ames, Iowa. For seventy
years this university had maintained a comprehensive repository of samples of every
known strain of anthrax pathogen. This university was furthermore the source which
provided samples of anthrax pathogen to researchers seeking cures, and also to labs
seeking to weaponize the pathogen. Immediately after this phone call by the FBI, the
University of Iowa destroyed the Ames anthrax repository. While it is not difficult to
imagine the cover stories the FBI might have used to obtain this result, it is also clear that
the Ames repository could have been the key to definitively solving the anthrax letters
case. Analysis of the anthrax spores in the letters by chemical and DNA techniques
identified these spores as belonging to the Ames strain. With the help of the samples
collected in the repository, it would have been possible to identify with great precision
the specific batch from which the anthrax letters had been filled, along with a paper trail
leading to the agency to which the sample had been transferred. As the New York Times
reported:
Shortly after the first case of anthrax arose, the FBI said it had no
objection to the destruction of a collection of anthrax samples at Iowa
State University, but some scientists involved in the investigation now say
that collection may have contained genetic clues valuable to the inquiry.
Criminal investigators have not visited many of the companies,
laboratories, and scientific institutions with the equipment or capability to
make the kind of highly potent anthrax sent in a letter to Senator Tom
Daschle, the majority leader. Where investigators have conducted
interviews, they often seemed to ask general questions unlikely to elicit
new evidence, several laboratory directors said.

Evidence Disappears

Last month, after consulting with the FBI, Iowa State University in Ames
destroyed anthrax spores collected over more than seven decades and kept
in more than 100 vials. A variant of the so-called Ames strain had been
implicated in the death of a Florida man from inhalation anthrax, and the
university was nervous about security. Now, a dispute has arisen, with
scientists in and out of government saying the rush to destroy the spores
may have eliminated crucial evidence about the anthrax in the letters sent
to Congress and the news media.
If the archive still existed, it would by no means solve the mystery. But
scientists said a precise match between the anthrax that killed four people
and a particular strain in the collection might have offered hints as to when
the bacteria had been isolated and, perhaps, how widely it had been
distributed to researchers. And that, in turn, might have given investigators
important clues to the killer’s identity.
No matter how scientifically illiterate they might be, the reflex response of any real
detective would be to veto the destruction of anything remotely resembling evidence, or
even of a key to interpreting evidence. But this time around, the FBI was pleading
ignorance. According to Bill Tobin, a former forensic metallurgist who had worked at the
infamous and scandal-ridden FBI crime laboratory in Washington DC, “The bureau was
caught almost as unaware and unprepared as the public was for these events. It’s just not
realistic to ask 7,000 agents to overnight become sufficiently knowledgeable about
bioterrorist agents [sic] and possible means of theft of those items and how they might be
disseminated lethally to an American public.”
Dr. Martin Jones, an anthrax expert at Louisiana State University, commented: “If those
cultures were still alive they could have helped in clearing up the muddied history” of the
spores found in the letters. Ronald M. Atlas, the president-elect of the American Society
of Microbiology, the world’s largest group of “germ professionals,” saw large legal
implications in the destruction of evidence. “Potentially,” he said, “it loses evidence that
would have been useful” in the legal investigation. (New York Times, “Experts See FBI
Missteps Hampering Anthrax Inquiry,” November 11, 2002) The FBI was obviously out
to sabotage its own investigation. Here is yet another case of manifest obstruction of
justice by the FBI molehill. The 9/11 commission ignores both the anthrax affair overall
and the obstruction of justice by the FBI.


Starting about a week after 9/11, anthrax letters began to arrive at the offices of The Sun,
a supermarket tabloid based in Florida, of Senators Daschle and Leahy, NBC News, and
the New York Post. On October 5, Bob Stevens, photo editor of The Sun, died of anthrax.
A number of postal workers in Washington DC also succumbed. A total of five people
died. The anthrax spores found in the letters were the product of very sophisticated
milling, and were coated with a chemical, silica, that is unique to US laboratories, Iraqi
anthrax, by contrast, is coated with bentonite, a mixture of silica and aluminum.



A great deal of publicity was given to a series of reports by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a
former government official and microbiologist at the State University of New York who
was also working for the Federation of American Scientists. Rosenberg’s work was
enthusiastically supported by the Stockholm International Peace Institute (SIPRI), and the
radical ecologists of Greenpeace. The FBI orchestrated a series of derogatory leaks about
Rosenberg, suggesting that a gang/counter-gang operation might be in progress.
Rosenberg’s basic thesis was that the anthrax attacks were the work of a disgruntled lone
assassin who had once worked for the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious
Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland, near Frederick, but had subsequently
been laid off. Naturally, the lone assassin approach tended to rule out an action by a more
extensive network of moles in the federal government, which seems much more probable.
Whenever extremely complicated and demanding operations are attributed to a
disgruntled loner, we should be on guard against disinformation fabricated by the
intelligence community. For example, the terrorizing impact of the anthrax letters was
vastly increased by their synchronization with the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Was this
a mere coincidence, or did the authors of the anthrax operation have advance knowledge
that 9/11 was coming? How could Hatfill have been able to coordinate his supposed
actions with 9/11? Once again, the rogue networks of the invisible government, and not
any disgruntled loner, emerge as the prime suspects.
And there were other disinformation operations. Former CIA Director James Woolsey, a
neocon who worked for a law firm representing Achmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National
Congress, began a vigorous campaign to blame the anthrax attacks on Iraq. In addition,
an anonymous letter was sent to police, apparently in September, accusing an Egyptianborn
American scientist who had been laid off by USAMRIID of being a terrorist. The
FBI questioned him and said that he was innocent. Details of the letter have not been
released. Rosenberg thought it likely that this letter had been sent by the perpetrator.
According to Rosenberg’s January 2002 statement,
The FBI has surely known for several months that the anthrax attack was
an inside job. A government estimate for the number of scientists involved
in the US anthrax program over the last five years is 200 people.
According to a former defense scientist the number of defense scientists
with hands-on anthrax experience and the necessary access is smaller,
under 50. The FBI has received short lists of specific suspects with
credible motives from a number of knowledgeable inside sources, and has
found or been given clues (beyond those presented below) that could lead
to incriminating evidence. By now the FBI must have a good idea of who
the perpetrator is. There may be two factors accounting for the lack of
public acknowledgement and the paucity of information being released: a
fear that embarrassing details might become public, and a need for secrecy
in order to acquire sufficient hard evidence to convict the perpetrator.
As for the anthrax, Rosenberg agreed that there was no doubt that the spores came from a
US government lab:All letter samples contain the same strain of anthrax, corresponding to the
AMES strain in the Northern Arizona University database (which has been
used for identification)…..Contrary to early speculation, there are no more
than about 20 laboratories known to have the Ames strain. The names of
15 of these have been found in the open literature. Of these, probably only
about four in the US might possibly have the capability for weaponizing
anthrax. Those four include both US military laboratories and a
government contractor.
Rosenberg based these conclusions on a technical analysis of the anthrax spores:
The extraordinary concentration (one trillion spores per gram) and purity
of the letter anthrax is believed to be characteristic of material made by the
optimal US process…..The optimal US weaponization process is secret—
Bill Patrick, its inventor, holds five secret patents on the process and says
it involves a combination of chemicals. There is no evidence that any
other country possesses the formula. Under the microscope, the letter
anthrax appears to be unmilled. Milled anthrax spores are identifiable
because they contain debris. The optimal US process does not use milling.
The Daschle sample contains a special form of silica used in the US
process. It does not contain bentonite (used by the Iraqis). A “coating” on
the spores in the letter sample, indicative of the secret US process, has
been observed.
Rosenberg’s thesis was that the sender of the anthrax letters had been familiar with a
study about using a scenario of this type for a terror attack which had been conducted by
anthrax weaponization expert Bill Patrick of USAMRID a couple of years earlier:
A classified report dated February, 1999 discusses responses to an anthrax
attack through the mail. The report, precipitated by a series of false
anthrax mailings, was written by William Patrick, inventor of the US
weaponization process, under a CIA contract to SAIC. The report
describes what the US military could do and what a terrorist might be able
to achieve…..the report predicted about 2.5g of anthrax per envelope (the
Daschle letter contained 2g) and assumed a poorer quality of anthrax than
that found in the Daschle letter. If the perpetrator had access to the
materials and information necessary for the attack, he must have had
security clearance or other means for accessing classified information, and
may therefore have seen the report and used it as a model for the attack.
Rosenberg offered the following portrait of the anthrax killer: “Insider in US biodefense,
doctoral degree in a relevant branch of biology; Middle-aged American; Experienced and
skilled in working with hazardous pathogens, including anthrax, and avoiding
contamination; Works for a CIA contractor in Washington, DC area; Has up-to-date
vaccination with anthrax vaccine; Has clearance for access to classified information;Worked in USAMRIID laboratory in the past, in some capacity, and has access now;
Knows Bill Patrick and has probably learned a thing or two about weaponization from
him, informally; Has had training or experience in covering evidence; May have had an
UNSCOM connection; Has had a dispute with a government agency; Has a private
location where the materials for the attack were accumulated and prepared; Worked on
the letters alone or with peripheral encouragement and assistance; Fits FBI profile; Has
the necessary expertise, access and a past history indicating appropriate capabilities and
temperament; Has been questioned by FBI.” (Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, “Analysis of the
Source of the Anthrax Attacks,” January 17-31, 2002)
During the autumn of 2001, the FBI blanketed central New Jersey with leaflets showing a
sample of the anthrax killer’s handwriting. The FBI also sent questionnaires to 32,000 US
microbiologists, most of whom worked in fields that had nothing to do with the
government’s anthrax labs. This was clearly busy work designed to avoid making the
government the prime suspects in the attacks. George Monbiot of The Guardian mocked
this farce as “kind of ‘investigation’ which might have been appropriate for the
unwitnessed hit and run killing of a person with no known enemies. Rather than homing
in on the likely suspects, in other words, it appears to have cast a net full of holes over the
entire population.” Monbiot reported that he had telephoned an FBI spokesman about this
issue. “Why, I asked, when the evidence was so abundant, did the trail appear to have
gone cold? ‘The investigation is continuing,’ the spokesman replied. ‘Has it gone cold
because it has led you to a government office?’ I asked. He put down the phone.”
Monbiot speculated that the reticence had to do with covering up US violations of
international biowarfare treaties, since “the army's development of weaponized anthrax,
for example, directly contravenes both the biological weapons convention and domestic
law. So does its plan to test live microbes in ‘aerosol chambers’ at the Edgewood
Chemical Biological Center, also in Maryland. So does its development of a genetically
modified fungus for attacking coca crops in Colombia, and GM bacteria for destroying
materials belonging to enemy forces. These, as the research group Project Sunshine has
discovered, appear to be just a tiny sample of the illegal offensive biological research
programmes which the US government has secretly funded. Several prominent scientists
have suggested that the FBI's investigation is being pursued with less than the rigour we
might have expected because the federal authorities have something to hide. The FBI has
dismissed them as conspiracy theorists. But there is surely a point after which
incompetence becomes an insufficient explanation for failure.” (The Guardian, May 21,
2002)
This would appear to have been Barbara Hatch Rosenberg’s line as well. In a sympathetic
profile in the March 18, 2002 New Yorker, Nicholas Lemann reported that Rosenberg
believes that the American bioweapons program, which won't allow itself to be
monitored, may be in violation of the 1972 Biological Weapons convention. If the
anthrax attacks were the work of a lone, disgruntled, mad scientist, the case for
strengthening international safeguards would be enhanced. Rosenberg’s basic demand
was that this program be monitored. Fair enough, but not the whole story.Towards the end of June, 2002 the FBI obtained a search warrant to examine the
Maryland home of Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, 48, a bio-defence researcher who had worked at
Fort Detrick, Maryland. Hatfill said at once that he was the victim of a witch-hunt. When
he lived in Rhodesia, Hatfill once studied close to a school which bears the same name as
the bogus address on the envelopes containing the fatal doses of anthrax. (The Guardian,
June 28, 2002)
On July 2, New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof referred to Hatfill as “Mr. Z”
and strongly suggested that the FBI should jail him as the anthrax terrorist. “If Mr. Z
were an Arab national, he would have been imprisoned long ago. It's time for the FBI to
make a move: Either it should go after him more aggressively, sifting thoroughly through
his past and picking up loose threads, or it should seek to exculpate him and remove this
cloud of suspicion.” In essence, the FBI did neither.
Kristof and the other journalists hostile to Hatfill claimed that in the late 1970s,
Rhodesian special forces attacked black-owned farms with anthrax, and sought to link
Hatfill to these attacks. Hatfill held a press conference on August 12, 2002 in which he
once again denied everything. In late August 2002, a paid two-page advertisement in the
Washington Times argued that the anthrax killer had to be a member of the US military,
probably someone with access to the U.S. off-budget, secret biological-warfare
laboratories, or else someone with access to the Science Applications International Corp.
(SAIC) report on anthrax-mailing. The author of the ad was a certain Pete Velis. Velis
asserted that Steven Hatfill was not the perpetrator. Velis maintained that the evidence
indicated that the mailings were probably prepared beginning two years earlier, and that
the purpose was political -- to scare the U.S. into a domestic security/wartime response --
and not to kill a lot of people. He noted that the targets were among the strongest
potential opponents of “Executive Branch/Homeland Security Wartime Powers
expansions,” citing, for example, the mailing to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman
Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.). The SAIC report, which Velis says contained “the exact
specifications of the anthrax mailed” would suggest that the mailers came from a group
of military officers with access to the SAIC report. (Washington Times, August 26, 2002)
A day earlier Hatfill and his lawyer held a second press conference, which received
exceptionally broad media coverage, denouncing the FBI and Attorney General John
Ashcroft for the tactics used in their investigation.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, after having been interviewed by the FBI, said that the agents
had asked repeatedly whether a team of government scientists could be trying to frame
Hatfill. “They kept asking me did I think there might be a group in the biodefense
community that was trying to land the blame on Hatfill,” she told the press. (Washington
Times, August 3, 2002)
Whatever the gyrations of the FBI, it was clear that the anthrax came from the US
government, and that the FBI had deliberately flubbed the investigation. The pond
draining of 2003 changed nothing in this picture. By the summer of 2004, it was evident
that the FBI would never solve the anthrax case because it did not want to awaken the US
population to the reality that terrorism can come, and indeed does come, not out of a distant cave, but out of a US government lab on a military base. As for Hatfill, he was
most probably a fall guy. If the FBI was incompetent before 9/11, and incompetent in its
first major test thereafter, what then is the likely truth value of the statements made by the
FBI about 9/11 itself?

anthrax  note 1

THE WASHINGTON DC AREA SNIPER
In the fall of 2002, a series of sniper murders once again immersed the Washington DC
area in fear and terror. These started in Montgomery County, Maryland, and soon spread
south into Virginia. Here again the suspect pool was defined as snipers, and snipers are
trained by the military services and certain police units. Any competent investigation
would have started with lists of snipers trained by the government, especially recently
retired or disgruntled ones. But this would once again have made the government into the
prime suspect, and again the FBI refused to do this. The investigation was supposedly
placed under the control of Montgomery County police chief Charles Ramsey, who
ignored the imperative of sifting through the sniper pool, and instead acted as if the
shooters could have been any casual passerby. Ramsey announced that telephone tip lines
were being set up, and that he would rely on information from the citizenry to catch the
felons. Weeks went by. After every sniper attack, road blocks were set up to encircle the
entire surrounding area, but nothing was ever found. Local radio stations featured
interviews with trained snipers who argued that real snipers were humanitarians who
would never fire on unarmed civilians. Finally information arrived which permitted the
identification of the vehicle used by the shooters, who were caught while sleeping at a
rest stop on I-270. Sure enough, the older of the two shooters had been trained as a
sharpshooter by the US Army. He and his younger partner were quickly categorized as
lone itinerant psychopaths. This affair served to terrorize the national capital area,
including Congress, the Supreme Court, and the executive departments, for the best part
of two months. It refreshed and revived the horror generated by 9/11, and provided the
immediate backdrop for the November 2002 election. That time around, al Qaeda and its
mythical apparatus were not needed.
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/regions/lon.../07/317435.html

adoucette Posted on Oct 26 2005, 12:53 PM :Could this be a "govt disinformation/conspiracy" a la Northwoods? Yes, this one is of the scope and limited lethality that I could see getting done by somewhat "rogue" agents, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11, when the Govt was trying to focus attention on the dangers of AQ and OBL.

The existence of weaponized anthrax is ipso facto a strong case for
US government collusion in terror attacks on this country.

I am a little perturbed by the suggestion that "limited lethality" and "2 grams of weaponized anthrax"  are mutually inclusive.

Whether the culprits are "rogue agents" as you suggest, (the strikingly obvious and I believe, correct culprit) or not, a gram of weaponized anthrax is capable of killing thousands, that´s why I believe that America would be "more secure" with the people responsible for these henious crimes (whether or not it was in an undercover/disinformation/intelligence role) because without accountability, there is no justice.