The 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States, (FBI case name Amerithrax), occurred over the course of several weeks beginning a week after the September 11 attacks. Letters containing anthrax spores were mailed to several news media offices and two U.S. Senators, Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy, killing 5 and infecting 17 others. The ensuing investigation, said by the FBI to have become “one of the largest and most complex in the history of law enforcement“, cost around $100,000,000 and blamed Bruce Ivins, a “lone nut” anthrax researcher. Richard Lambert, the FBI officer who was put in charge of the investigation, says that it suffered from intense compartmentalisation and lack of critical resources (such as bioweapons experts). He sued the FBI in 2015, alleging that they were concealing evidence that could have exonerated Ivins.[1][2]
Gloria Irish was a real estate agent in Boca Raton, Florida. She was also the wife of Michael Irish, an editor for the Sun newspaper (now the Tampa Bay Times) in Boca Raton. Some time before the 9/11 attacks, Gloria showed houses to two of its alleged perpetrators, Marwan al-Shehhi and Hamza al-Ghamdi[8]. On 5 October 2001, Robert Stevens, a journalist who worked for the same newspaper as Gloria’s husband, died as a result of pulmonary anthrax. His murder would be the first death attributed to the Amerithrax attacks.
Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country.
Even experts at the U.S. bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick think that the anthrax which was used in the 2001 attacks came from their facility:
“In an e-mail obtained by FOX News, scientists at Fort Detrick openly discussed how the anthrax powder they were asked to analyze after the attacks was nearly identical to that made by one of their colleagues.
“Then he said he had to look at a lot of samples that the FBI had prepared … to duplicate the letter material,” the e-mail reads. “Then the bombshell. He said that the best duplication of the material was the stuff made by [name redacted]. He said that it was almost exactly the same his knees got shaky and he sputtered, ‘But I told the General we didn’t make spore powder!’”
Indeed, 3 of the 4 suspects the FBI is investigating are employees of Fort Detrick, which is run by the Army.
This new information verifies that the anthrax came from the Fort Detrick military base (confirmed here ).
Some people are pretending that someone unconnected with the army bioweapons facility at Fort Detrick stole the anthrax. However, as the above-quoted article states:
“Fort Detrick is run by the United States Army. It’s the most secure biological warfare research center in the United States,” a bioterrorism expert told FOX News.”
It is not very likely that someone could steal anthrax from the most secure facility in the U.S., run by the Army.
Indeed, the FBI apparently knew in 2002 who mailed the anthrax letters. See this, this, and this.
And yet government investigators and prosecutors have covered up and refused to disclose who did it for 6 years. Initially, the FBI tried to frame an innocent man for the attacks.
More importantly, “The FBI has completely shut Congress out of its now five-year investigation into anthrax attacks on Capitol Hill and around the nation” . In other words, Congress — which legally has every right to know what really happened, and which was the main victim of the attack — is being kept in the dark. If the FBI really didn’t know who did it, and was really conducting an honest investigation, why would it stonewall Congress?
There is strong evidence that the anthrax attacks were a false flag attack. Indeed, the bioweapons expert who actually drafted the current bioweapons law (the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989) while working for President George H.W. Bush has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U…. . The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act . See also this.
Robert F. Kennedy was recently (2023) a guest on the Jimmy Dore Show and during his interview, he shared a wealth of knowledge about the 2001 anthrax attacks and the development of bioweapons in the United States. Kennedy shared that the letters were sent to both Sen. Leahy and Sen. Daschle because they were trying to block the Patriot Act in 2001. He went on to reveal the Patriot Act was a vicious attack against the US Constitution and “re-opened the bioweapons arms race that was shut down by Nixon in 1969.”
The son of the late US Attorney General Robert Kennedy then captivated Dore’s listeners by sharing that the FBI discovered anthrax in the letters originally “stemmed from a CIA lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland.”
.@RobertKennedyJr tells @jimmy_dore anthrax was mailed to the two senators trying to block the Patriot Act in 2001, and the FBI discovered that the anthrax came from the CIA lab in Fort Detrick:
“By the time they figured it out, they had already passed the Patriot Act, and we… https://t.co/O4QOrPMykZ pic.twitter.com/Y1EPcSfh6n
— kanekoa.substack.com (@KanekoaTheGreat) March 14, 2023
No one was ever convicted of the 2001 Anthrax attack but the FBI labeled Bruce Ivins a scientist at the US Biodefense lab in Fort Detrick as a suspect. Ivins was never convicted of any crimes but instead was found dead in 2008 and his death was ruled a suicide.
Later in the interview, Kennedy would take aim at Dr. Anthony Fauci. Robert Kennedy, Jr. stated ‘Dr. Anthony Fauci has been in charge of developing bioweapons for the Pentagon since 2002.’
Preparation
In June 2001 Operation Dark Winter a two day “terrorism exercise” was staged “wherein senior former officials would respond to a bioterrorist induced national security crisis”.[9]
As “a precaution”, according to the Washington Post, Cipro was administered to Dick Cheney and his close staff on the evening of 9/11 as the Vice President was secreted off to an undisclosed location, days before the first anthrax letters were mailed.[10], on the advice of Jerome Hauer. Bush’s reactions to the anthrax mailings were, at best, slow and he took every opportunity to invoke “Osama Bin Laden” in the rhetoric he employed in his public utterances about them.
HEAD of the FBI’s Anthrax Investigation Says the Whole Thing Was a SHAM
April 17, 2015
Agent In Charge of Amerithrax Investigation Blows the Whistle
The FBI head agent in charge of the anthrax investigation – Richard Lambert – filed a federal whistleblower lawsuit calling the entire FBI investigation bullsh!t:
In the fall of 2001, following the 9/11 attacks, a series of anthrax mailings occurred which killed five Americans and sickened 17 others. Four anthrax-laden envelopes were recovered which were addressed to two news media outlets in New York City (the New York Post and Tom Brokaw at NBC) and two senators in Washington D.C. (Patrick Leahy and Tom Daschle). The anthrax letters addressed to New York were mailed on September 18, 2001, just seven days after the 9/11 attacks. The letters addressed to the senators were mailed 21 days later on October 9, 2001. A fifth mailing of anthrax is believed to have been directed to American Media, Inc. (AMI) in Boca Raton, Florida based upon the death of one AMI employee from anthrax poisoning and heavy spore contamination in the building.
Executive management at FBI Headquarters assigned responsibility for the anthrax investigation (code named “AMERITHRAX”) to the Washington Field Office (WFO), dubbing it the single most important case in the FBI at that time. In October 2002, in the wake of surging media criticism, White House impatience with a seeming lack of investigative progress by WFO, and a concerned Congress that was considering revoking the FBI’s charter to investigate terrorism cases, Defendant FBI Director Mueller reassigned Plaintiff from the FBI’s San Diego Field Office to the Inspection Division at FBI Headquarters and placed Plaintiff in charge of the AMERITHRAX case as an “Inspector.” While leading the investigation for the next four years, Plaintiff’s efforts to advance the case met with intransigence from WFO’s executive management, apathy and error from the FBI Laboratory, politically motivated communication embargos from FBI Headquarters, and yet another preceding and equally erroneous legal opinion from Defendant Kelley – all of which greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation.
On July 6, 2006, Plaintiff provided a whistleblower report of mismanagement to the FBI’s Deputy Director pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 2303. Reports of mismanagement conveyed in writing and orally included: (a) WFO’s persistent understaffing of the AMERITHRAX investigation; (b) the threat of WFO’s Agent in charge to retaliate if Plaintiff disclosed the understaffing to FBI Headquarters; (c) WFO’s insistence on staffing the AMERITHRAX investigation principally with new Agents recently graduated from the FBI Academy resulting in an average investigative tenure of 18 months with 12 of 20 Agents assigned to the case having no prior investigative experience at all; (d) WFO’s eviction of the AMERITHRAX Task Force from the WFO building in downtown Washington and its relegation to Tysons Corner, Virginia to free up space for Attorney General Ashcroft’s new pornography squads; (e) FBI Director’s Mueller’s mandate to Plaintiff to “compartmentalize” the AMERITHRAX investigation by stove piping the flow of case information and walling off task force members from those aspects of the case not specifically assigned to them – a move intended to stem the tide of anonymous media leaks by government officials regarding details of the investigation. [Lambert complained about compartmentalizing and stovepiping of the investigation in a 2006 declaration. See this, this and this]
This sequestration edict decimated morale and proved unnecessary in light of subsequent civil litigation which established that the media leaks were attributable to the United States Attorney for the District of the District of Columbia and to a Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI’s National Press Office, not to investigators on the AMERITHRAX Task Force; (f) WFO’s diversion and transfer of two Ph.D. Microbiologist Special Agents from their key roles in the investigation to fill billets for an 18 month Arabic language training program in Israel; (g) the FBI Laboratory’s deliberate concealment from the Task Force of its discovery of human DNA on the anthrax-laden envelope addressed to Senator Leahy and the Lab’s initial refusal to perform comparison testing; (h) the FBI Laboratory’s refusal to provide timely and adequate scientific analyses and forensic examinations in support of the investigation; (i) Defendant Kelley’s erroneous and subsequently quashed legal opinion that regulations of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) precluded the Task Force’s collection of evidence in overseas venues; (j) the FBI’s fingering of Bruce Ivins as the anthrax mailer; and, (k) the FBI’s subsequent efforts to railroad the prosecution of Ivins in the face of daunting exculpatory evidence.
Following the announcement of its circumstantial case against Ivins, Defendants DOJ and FBI crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt. These efforts included press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions. Plaintiff further objected to the FBI’s ordering of Plaintiff not to speak with the staff of the CBS television news magazine 60 Minutes or investigative journalist David Willman, after both requested authorization to interview Plaintiff.
In April 2008, some of Plaintiff’s foregoing whistleblower reports were profiled on the CBS television show 60 Minutes. This 60 Minutes segment was critical of FBI executive management’s handling of the AMERITHRAX investigation, resulting in the agency’s embarrassment and the introduction of legislative bills calling for the establishment of congressional inquiries and special commissions to examine these issues – a level of scrutiny the FBI’s Ivins attribution could not withstand.
After leaving the AMERITHRAX investigation in 2006, Plaintiff continued to publicly opine that the quantum of circumstantial evidence against Bruce Ivins was not adequate to satisfy the proof-beyond-a-reasonable doubt threshold required to secure a criminal conviction in federal court. Plaintiff continued to advocate that while Bruce Ivins may have been the anthrax mailer, there is a wealth of exculpatory evidence to the contrary which the FBI continues to conceal from Congress and the American people.
Exonerating Evidence for Ivins
Agent Lambert won’t publicly disclose the exculpatory evidence against Ivins. As the New York Times reports:
[Lambert] declined to be specific, saying that most of the information was protected by the Privacy Act and was unlikely to become public unless Congress carried out its own inquiry.
But there is already plenty of exculpatory evidence in the public record.
- Handwriting analysis failed to link the anthrax letters to known writing samples from Ivins
- No textile fibers were found in Ivins’ office, residence or vehicles matching fibers found on the scotch tape used to seal the envelopes
- No pens were found matching the ink used to address the envelopes
- Samples of his hair failed to match hair follicles found inside the Princeton, N.J., mailbox used to mail the letters
- No souvenirs of the crime, such as newspaper clippings, were found in his possession as commonly seen in serial murder cases
- The FBI could not place Ivins at the crime scene with evidence, such as gas station or other receipts, at the time the letters were mailed in September and October 2001
- Lab records show the number of late nights Ivins put in at the lab first spiked in August 2001, weeks before the 9/11 attacks
As noted above, the FBI didn’t want to test the DNA sample found on the anthrax letter to Senator Leahy. In addition, McClatchy points out:
After locking in on Ivins in 2007, the bureau stopped searching for a match to a unique genetic bacterial strain scientists had found in the anthrax that was mailed to the Post and to NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, although a senior bureau official had characterized it as the hottest clue to date.
Anthrax vaccine expert Meryl Nass. M.D., notes:
The FBI’s alleged motive is bogus. In 2001, Bioport’s anthrax vaccine could not be (legally) relicensed due to potency failures, and its impending demise provided room for Ivins’ newer anthrax vaccines to fill the gap. Ivins had nothing to do with developing Bioport’s vaccine, although in addition to his duties working on newer vaccines, he was charged with assisting Bioport to get through licensure.
The FBI report claims the anthrax letters envelopes were sold in Frederick, Md. Later it admits that millions of indistinguishable envelopes were made, with sales in Maryland and Virginia.
FBI emphasizes Ivins’ access to a photocopy machine, but fails to mention it was not the machine from which the notes that accompanied the spores were printed.
FBI Fudged the Science
16 government labs had access to the same strain of anthrax as used in the anthrax letters.
The FBI admitted that up to 400 people had access to flask of anthrax in Dr. Ivins’ lab. In other words, even if the killer anthrax came from there, 399 other people might have done it.
Moreover, even the FBI’s claim that the killer anthrax came from Ivins’ flask has completely fallen apart. Specifically, both the National Academy of Science and the Government Accountability Office – both extremely prestigious, nonpartisan agencies – found that FBI’s methodology and procedures for purportedly linking the anthrax flask maintained by Dr. Ivins with the anthrax letters was sloppy, inconclusive and full of holes. They found that the alleged link wasn’t very strong … and that there was no firm link. Indeed, the National Academy of Sciences found that the anthrax mailed to Congressmen and the media could have come from a different source altogether than the flask maintained by Ivins.
Additionally, the Ft. Detrick facility – where Ivins worked – only handled liquid anthrax. But the killer anthrax was a hard-to-make dry powder form of anthrax. Ft. Detrick doesn’t produce dry anthrax; but other government labs – for example Dugway (in Utah) and Batelle (in Ohio) – do.
The anthrax in the letters was also incredibly finely ground; and the FBI’s explanation for how the anthrax became so finely ground doesn’t even pass the smell test.
Further, the killer anthrax in the letters had a very high-tech anti-static coating so that the anthrax sample “floated off the glass slide and was lost” when scientists tried to examine it. Specifically, the killer anthrax was coated with polyglass and each anthrax spore given an electrostatic charge, so that it would repel other spores and “float”. This was very advanced bio-weapons technology to which even Ivins’ bosses said he didn’t have access.
Top anthrax experts like Richard Spertzel say that Ivins didn’t do it. Spertzel also says that only 4 or 5 people in the entire country knew how to make anthrax of the “quality” used in the letters, that Spertzel was one of them, and it would have taken him a year with a full lab and a staff of helpers to do it. As such, the FBI’s claim that Ivins did it alone working a few nights is ludicrous.
Moreover, the killer anthrax contained silicon … but the anthrax in Ivins’ flask did not. The FBI claimed the silicon present in the anthrax letters was absorbed from its surroundings … but Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories completely debunked that theory. In other words, silicon was intentionally added to the killer anthrax to make it more potent. Ivins and Ft. Detrick didn’t have that capability … but other government labs did.
Similarly, Sandia National Lab found the presence of iron and tin in the killer anthrax … but NOT in Ivins’ flask of anthrax.
Sandia also found that there was a strain of bacteria in one of the anthrax letters not present in Ivins’ flask. (The bacteria, iron, tin and silicon were all additives which made the anthrax in the letters more deadly.)
The Anthrax Frame Up
Ivins wasn’t the first person framed for the anthrax attacks …
Although the FBI now admits that the 2001 anthrax attacks were carried out by one or more U.S. government scientists, a senior FBI official says that the FBI was actually told to blame the Anthrax attacks on Al Qaeda by White House officials (remember what the anthrax letters looked like). Government officials also confirm that the white House tried to link the anthrax to Iraq as a justification for regime change in that country. And see this.
People don’t remember now, but the “war on terror” and Iraq war were largely based on the claim that Saddam and Muslim extremists were behind the anthrax attacks (and see this and this)
And the anthrax letters pushed a terrified Congress into approving the Patriot Act without even reading it. Coincidentally, the only Congressmen who received anthrax letters were the ones who were likely to oppose the Patriot Act.
And – between the bogus Al Qaeda/Iraq claims and the FBI’s fingering of Ivins as the killer – the FBI was convinced that another U.S. government scientist, Steven Hatfill, did it. On 2011-07-15, the Justice Department lawyers acknowledged in court papers that the sealed area in Ivins’ lab — the so-called hot suite — did not contain the equipment needed to turn liquid anthrax into the refined powder that floated through congressional buildings and post offices in the fall of 2001. These statements were retracted 8 days later. The government had to pay Hatfill $4.6 million to settle his lawsuit for being falsely accused.
Ivins’ Convenient Death
It is convenient for the FBI that Ivins died. The Wall Street Journal points out:
No autopsy was performed [on Ivins], and there was no suicide note.
Dr. Nass points out:
FBI fails to provide any discussion of why no autopsy was performed, nor why, with Ivins under 24/7 surveillance from the house next door, with even his garbage being combed through, the FBI failed to notice that he overdosed and went into a coma. Nor is there any discussion of why the FBI didn’t immediately identify tylenol as the overdose substance, and notify the hospital, so that a well-known antidote for tylenol toxicity could be given (N-acetyl cysteine, or alternatively glutathione). These omissions support the suggestion that Ivins’ suicide was a convenience for the FBI. It enabled them to conclude the anthrax case, in the absence of evidence that would satisfy the courts.
Indeed, one of Ivins’ colleagues at Ft. Deitrich thinks he was murdered.
Whether murder or suicide, Ivins’ death was very convenient for the FBI, as dead men can’t easily defend themselves.
On September 11, 2001, Jerome Hauer advised the White House to begin taking Cipro, an antibiotic which is effective against anthrax. Mr. Hauer’s advice was not made public. Its value may have been underestimated at the time, but it was clearly demonstrated a week later, when the first anthrax letters appeared, and again three weeks after that, when anthrax appeared in letters to Democratic Senators Daschle and Leahy. The obvious question is: Did Jerome Hauer know about the anthrax attacks in advance?
Jerome (Jerry) Hauer managed the NIH response to the anthrax attacks. The anthrax used in the attacks was identified as an Ames strain, which means it had to have come from the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland.
Jerome Hauer received relatively good information for tracking down the origin of the anthrax. He even got a list of people from various institutes, including USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. But his response was slow and hidden behind a public relations campaign spreading Orwellian claims like “Suspects are Osama bin Laden and his Al-Q’aeda network and sympathizers to US right wing extremists“.
Why would he act so slowly, and in such an inappropriate fashion? Perhaps because Jerome Hauer knew someone whose name was on that list? Stephen Hatfill, at one time considered a prime suspect in this still-unsolved case, had worked for USAMRIID at Fort Detrick. Strangely, perhaps, he had also worked with Jerome Hauer, for Scientific Applications International Corporation, at the Center for Counterterrorism Technology and Analysis.
On September 11, 2001, in addition to his job with the NIH, Jerome Hauer was also Managing Director of Kroll Associates, a well-established security firm serving clients in the military and the US government. The head of security at the WTC on September 11, 2001, was former FBI counter-terror specialist John P. O’Neill, who was the world’s foremost expert on Osama bin Laden. O’Neill was the biggest obstacle to blowing the cover of Osama bin Laden as the culprit for the attacks of 9/11.
BioONE, a company founded by Rudy Giuliani, cleaned up some of the sites affected by the Amerithrax attacks.[4, 5]
Sources:
- Wikispooks
- https://organicconsumers.org/article_13353/
