Tomorrow I will be on the road all day and so my heart is a little broken that I’ll miss Joe Lieberman’s appearance on Meet the Press. He’ll be on there with John Kerry. If I were a Republican, I might even wonder why MTP has two Democrats on instead of a balanced guest list. What if they ask about the environment or something and both Kerry and Lieberman acknowledge that it exists?
We seem to have entered a stage of the campaign where race is an issue. And it’s not a subject that Obama can easily overcome. But, fortunately, the Sunday morning show lineup does not look set to further this lame narrative into next week. Tom Daschle and Lindsey Graham will be on FOX, Robert Rubin will be Face the Nation, Nancy Pelosi and Tom Ridge will be on This Week. Who knows what the hell they’ll be talking about. It should be anthrax, but that’ll never happen.
They’ll probably leave it to Cokie Roberts and George Will to explain the fine points of race relations in this country. Those are the rules…aren’t they?
What’s pissing you off?
Come on! Lieberman is a Democrat in name only.
Not even in name…
What’s pissing me off is the bumper sticker that I saw today in support of the dangerous xenophobe that currently represents me in our state legislature. Here he even looks like a d*ck.
The Wikipedia bio seems to have been written by his reelection committee. Time for some objective editing.
It does read that way. Editing sounds like a fine idea.
They forgot to mention he ESP abilities. A politician for “Legal Immigration” only either has ESP to tell who’s legal or not..or thinks all brown people are illegal.
someday i’ll learn to write coherently.
All those comments on Bruce Ivins’ alleged suicide and no one mentioned the obvious link to the 9/11 conspiracy. Anyone willing to sacrifice thousands of lives in the WTC disaster is not going to quibble over a few more people killed by highly weaponized anthrax spores.
This incident really shook up Congress people putting them in the right frame of mind to pass the Homeland Security legislation which most of them never even read. How simple can it be? Suspend the laws of physics, demolish three skyscrapers, blame it on the Moslems, terrify the population using the postal system (once considered sacrosanct), assault the Constitution, invade Afghanistan and, then Iraq, close down the anthrax investigation by the alleged suicide of the sole guy involved.
You people ever hear of Psy Ops? Blackwater? CIA? Death Squads? You know how easy it is to remove inconvenient witnesses/perpetrators. Or, maybe just a plain patsy.
My last question is if Ivins lacked the know-how to aerosolize the anthrax, and, it seems like he did, who provided this incredible expertise? Perhaps, a Democratic administration, if elected, might take a closer look. Richard Cheney, you are not out of the woods yet, you creep. God, what am I saying? If Obama has a large lead, might the elections be suspended With Cheney and Bush at the helm, anything might happen. You know, take down another major building etc.
Sorry this is off thread, but I had a computer problem last night.
One scared citizen.
ABC said it had four knowledgeable sources for its very wrong story. If he was one, who were the other three? ABC must know.
Don, get a good glimpse because that story is disappearing fast.
I did a little poking around the net and it looks pretty difficult to make anthrax fine enough to aerosolize it. So even if Ivins snuck some of this stuff out of the lab in his sock he still had to process it, which requires a technology people don’t have in the garage.
Reading Hatfill’s wiki bio, he was right in the wheelhouse for when South Africa was using anthrax as a bioweapon in Rhodesia. It’s not that surprising, I mean the lab is the U.S. Army’s, right? Hatfill seems to have arrived in the lab from black ops and Ivins arrived there through academia.
Here’s more on Hatfill:
“Hatfill served as an enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army in the late 1970s. (In 1999, he would tell a journalist during an interview that he had been a “captain in the U.S. Special Forces”, but in a subsequent investigation the Army stated that he had never served with the Special Forces[2].)
“Hatfill then settled in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where his claimed military associations included work with the United States Army’s Institute for Military Assistance, the Rhodesian SAS, and the Selous Scouts. He stayed on to study medicine (1978-84) at the Godfrey Huggins Medical School [3] in Salisbury (now Harare), graduating (after failing in 1983) in 1984. In that year he also took a board certification in hematological pathology from South Africa. The South African government recruited him to be medical officer on a one-year (1986) tour of duty in Antarctica. He then served (1987-1990) as an Emergency Medical Officer at the Conradie General Hospital, Cape Town, South Africa. A medical residency (1991-93) at the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, resulted in a Master’s Degree in Medicine and board certification in hematopathology.”
Interesting that he said he was in Special Forces but the Army claims he wasn’t. That doesn’t mean the Army is telling the truth. People are hidden all over the place in the Army, usually when they are doing something bad. I knew an Army Ranger who was TDY in Vietnam for a year and he showed up on the books as being in Fort Benning all that time. Special Forces also has a long and cherished relation with the CIA.
The U.S. Army’s School For Military Assistance in Rhodesia? The late seventies were the last years for white-ruled Rhodesia. That was when the South Africans were sprinkling anthrax over the Rhodesian countryside.
I’m going to go into my old stacks to find that article on anthrax in Zimbabwe.
Good luck to you, Bob, on your quest. I would like to know what you find, even if you don’t find much. Thanks for your data on Hatfill who has such a fascinating background. Special forces, knowledge of anthrax, employment at Fort Derrick, early suspect in case. Background in Rhodesia. Wow.
Many decades ago, I worked at NSA. I learned then that many times, yea, most of the time, reality and appearance are separate entities. I wonder can you feel all the people all of the time? I sure hope not.
Keep digging.
I found it, Don. It was in Covert Action Quarterly (formerly known as Covert Action Information Bulletin), a publication which tracked, well, covert action.
It was in the Winter 1992-93 (Number 43)issue. There were two articles on the dirty war against Zimbabwean independence. The first, “Zimbabwe’s Poisoned Legacy: Secret War in Southern Africa” by Jeremy Brickhill, is an overview of the war; the second article, “Zimbabwe’s Anthrax Epizootic” by Meryl Nass, is a study of the upsurge in anthrax in guerrilla areas of Rhodesia/Zimbabwe towards the end of the war of independence. Irregular units in the Rhodesian army, the Selous Scouts, often operating in blackface in these areas, functioned as death squads. They apparently also spread anthrax as a weapon to kill both cattle and humans.
It’s been awhile since I read the articles thoroughly, but here’s some highlights to chew on. The Nass article gives evidence for the intentional use of anthrax as a weapon. For example, the marked increase in anthrax infections. Prior to 1979 there was an average of 13 cases a year in Rhodesia, but in 1979-80, at the end of the war, there were 10,738 documented human cases of anthrax (182 people died). Also, the distribution of anthrax cases was only in rebel strongholds, not neighboring white areas, or in areas just across international borders from infected areas within Zimbabwe.
Like in 2001 the anthrax outbreaks in Zimbabwe worked more potently as a psychological weapon than as a killer.
But for our purposes, the most important thing is that it was the Selous Scouts who were connected to delivering the anthrax to the rural areas. From wiki:
“Hatfill served as an enlisted soldier in the U.S. Army in the late 1970s… Hatfill then settled in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) where his claimed military associations included work with the United States Army’s Institute for Military Assistance, the Rhodesian SAS, and the Selous Scouts.”
So Hatfill claims to have been in the very unit in Rhodesia which is implicated with murdering civilians with anthrax. Maybe he killed civilians while he was wearing blackface. What a coincidence that he ended up in the same lab as that “psychotic maniac killer” Ivins who was alleged to have killed civilians with anthrax! Think of the odds.
Why hasn’t anyone in the media mentioned this? Is my library bigger than the one at the New York Times?
I’ve been poking around about the Army’s “Institute for Military Assistance,” and it apparently was the name at that time for the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center (suffer the irony, folks).
Here’s a description of the patch issued:
“The lamp placed in the center of the shield refers to the U.S. Army Special Warfare Center (predecessor unit). The lamp also alludes to the U.S. Army Special Warfare School and the three tongues of flames to the three prime areas of instruction for which the School is responsible: Psychological Operations, Counter Insurgency, and Unconventional Warfare. The unconventional outline of the lamp, in simulating the shape of the Greek letter “Psi,” refers symbolically to psychology – the traits, feelings, actions and attributes, collectively, of the mind; the tongues of flame implying the spoken and written words which are major tools of Psychological Warfare. The three flame sprouts at the top of the lamp simulate the heraldic delineation “embattled” – to array for battle. The two crossed arrows refer to the silence and stealth with which our early frontiersmen fought for the new found freedom in the New World, as well as the ingenuity, courage and survival by the usage of wasplike, yet devastating, attacks through the employment of irregular tactics, techniques and logistical support. The arrow, straight and true, thus characterizes the Special Forces of today. The color black signifies wisdom and prudence, the white perfection and faith, and the yellow constancy and inspiration. The black and white also allude to the “degrees” of propaganda used by Special Warfare units, a “gray degree” resulting from the admixture of black and white.”
If you cut through the happy hokum, you get “Psychological Operations, Counter Insurgency, and Unconventional Warfare.” And Hatfill was the guy who was the first target of the FBI. Gee, I wonder why.
I can imagine the poor Feeb who first went after Hatfill. “Damn you, Smithers, you’ve got the right man!”
Remember, when Robert Mueller, who covered up GHW Bush’s history with Noriega and moved the Pan Am 103 focus away from PFLP-GC and Monzer al-Kassar (who was both the biggest heroin supplier to the US at the time AND a weapons supplier for Ollie North’s Enterprise, took over the FBI, he switched the FBI’s focus from this guy (Hatfill) and switched to Ivins.
Just saying.
Here’s what appears to be a shorter, rewritten version of the Nass article:
http://www.anthraxvaccine.org/zimbabwe.html
Good job, Bob. This Hatfill guy looks more and more suspicious. His huge, recent payment from the government plus Ivins’ suicide might write finis to this whole case thus tying down another loose end. If it wasn’t so tragic and involve such deep security issues, I think the whole situation would be labeled a farce. But, what’s at stake is our constitutional democracy and nothing could be more important than that.
I wonder if any of the talking heads on TV and any of our esteemed journalists will start doing some honest investigating. Or are they completely in thrall to the military-defense-petroleum arm of our national government? They sure act like it.
Why do I feel so profoundly sad?
Here is a great article by Don Foster in 2003 for UCLA’s School of Epidemiology centering on Hatfill:
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/Bioter/messageanthrax.html
Read it and see if your suspicions about Hatfill aren’t aroused; and that he or anyone else couldn’t have done it alone.
Of course, the article has nothing to say about Ivins. But read Foster’s article and see how contrived the case against Ivins appears in comparison.
And if, in fact, Ivins is a homicidal maniac AND the lab also hired Hatfill, who worked in a Rhodesian army unit that murdered civilians with anthrax back in the seventies, you have to wonder who’s running Fort Detrick’s Department of Human Resources.
Article was originally published in Vanity Fair but republished at the UCLA website.
Apparently, Hatfill sued him too.
Compromise.
clik image to supersize
That sad old man John McCain and his Republican idiot friends.
The “independent” voters who have fallen for McCain’s slime campaign and are ‘questioning’ Obama in regards to “celebrity” status.
The moronic Dems in the House and Senate who cave to anything and everything.
1-If you understand this…and apparently you do, at least in your saner moments…how can you remain a “Democrat”?
2-If you understand this…how can you even bear to turn on a so-called news program in America?
I do not understand you, Booman.
I really don’t.
We need new rules.
And we are not getting them.
It’s gonna be our asses, Booman.
Time’s getting short…
We ALL have to wake the fuck up.
Or of course passively prepare for the long, long sleep.
Bet on it.
AG
maureen dowd’s sunday times column.
she sucks.
Finding out that Evan Bayh will be Obama’s VP.