By Graeme MacQueen
Aim Was to Sow Fear in the Public and Condition it to Support Wars of Aggression in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Recent reporting shows both FBI and CIA suppressed evidence and blamed “foreign Muslim extremists” and then “a lone nut”—even though they knew the anthrax came from our own CIA-contracted military labs?
Will justice (too long delayed) soon expose and punish the real criminals whose deceit helped launch 20 years of criminal wars in the Middle East that murdered millions in order to funnel trillions into our rogue military-industrial-intelligence complex?
Would you believe this ABC News Story?
A man walks into an office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Florida.[1] It is spring in the year 2000. Speaking to a loan officer, Johnelle Bryant, the man explains that he has come from Egypt via Afghanistan. He wants to fulfill his dream of becoming a pilot.
More specifically, he wants to acquire a crop-duster with which he can dust American crops. His name—he is careful to spell it for her—is Atta. He wants a loan of $650,000 with which to buy a two-engine, six-passenger aircraft. He wants to take this substantial plane and modify it so that it can be used as a crop-duster.
Unlike traditional crop-dusters, which are small and agile, Atta’s creation would, he explains, be able to hold a very large chemical tank. He is an engineer, he says, and will find it easy to modify the plane as required. With its extra-capacity tank, he would be able to do all the spraying required in one flight, not needing to land to refill his tank as he would with an ordinary crop-duster.
Bryant is confused by this requirement. Why does he need to do all his spraying in one flight?
Bryant continues to question Atta. Pouring cold water on his evident hope of quick and easy money, she explains that there are procedures for handing out funds. Even in the best of circumstances he would not be able to walk out of her office with $650,000. He would need to make an application.
Atta is not pleased. He points out that he could go around Bryant’s desk, cut her throat, and take the money from her safe. Untroubled by this suggestion, Bryant assures Atta that there is not much money in the safe and, in any case, she knows karate.
Bryant continues to pour cold water on her visitor, explaining that he is ineligible for a loan because he is not a U.S. citizen.
This does not bring an end to the conversation. In fact, when Atta sees an aerial photograph of Washington, D.C., on Bryant’s wall he is delighted and begins throwing down cash in an offer to buy it. The representation of important monuments, including the view of the Pentagon from the air, inspires his admiration. He inquires of Bryant what the security is like at these monuments. He wants to visit these monuments and hopes he will be given access.
Atta next tells Bryant of his desire to visit the World Trade Center in New York City. What is the security like at the Trade Center? he asks.
Not quite finished, Atta tells Bryant of an organization, al-Qaeda, with which, he implies, he is associated. He adds that there is a wonderful man named Osama bin Laden, who “would someday be known as the world’s greatest leader.”
Bryant parts on good terms with the man from Egypt, referring him to a bank where he might get his loan.
Here endeth the tale.
The gentleman seeking the loan was, according to these sources, none other than the famous Mohamed Atta, the alleged ringleader of the 9/11 attacks who, we are told, piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower. And the ABC News journalists who recounted this story were apparently serious and wanted us to believe their story.
I suggest that “Atta Seeks a Loan” is most definitely not a believable account of the actions of a leader entrusted with a top-secret, world-changing mission. It is either a yarn ungrounded in events or the recounting of a rehearsed drama in which the chief actor was an operative tasked with leaving a trail of monstrous breadcrumbs.
Atta’s exploits, as described by the mass media, include many similar incidents, of which the following are but samples:[2]
- Atta Annoys Airport Employees
- Atta Leaves Incriminating Evidence in his Luggage
- Atta Is Bitten by a Dog
- Atta Visits a Drugstore and Frightens an Employee
- Atta Gets Pulled over for Driving without a License (and has a warrant for his arrest issued after he fails to show up for his court hearing)
- Atta Abandons a Stalled Plane on the Runway
- Atta Gets Drunk and Swears at a Restaurant Employee
A strange list of exploits for this secret operative. But let us return to the Atta who went to get a federal loan in Florida. In this tale Atta had a quite specific aim. He wanted to spray large amounts of a mystery substance on U.S. soil. He was apparently as intent on this as he was on his coming suicide mission at the Trade Center.
If we are to believe the mystery substance was anthrax—and, as I shall argue, this fits the story—the famous 9/11 “hijackers” (meaning, in this article, the alleged hijackers) would appear to be implicated not only in the 9/11 attacks but in the anthrax attacks that immediately followed the 9/11 attacks.
But before we get into these issues, a quick reminder of the main elements of the attacks may be helpful.
The Anthrax Attacks: A Refresher
Many people have only vague memories of the 2001 anthrax attacks. I do not think this is entirely due to the frailties of memory. These attacks have, due to the disastrous failure of the operation’s narrative, been ushered down the memory hole by the FBI.
Here are the key facts:
The first anthrax letters were mailed about a week after the 9/11 attacks. When the anthrax letters made their way to news agencies in those early days after 9/11, several people developed cutaneous anthrax, but it was not initially recognized as such.
The first anthrax diagnosis was made on October 3, 2001, when Robert Stevens, who worked for American Media Inc., the publisher of The National Enquirer tabloid in Boca Raton, Florida, was discovered to have pulmonary anthrax. He died two days after the diagnosis. The last victim died on November 21. At least 22 people were infected with either cutaneous or pulmonary anthrax and five died.
The first wave of attacks, where letters were sent to media outlets, were followed in early October by a second wave of attacks. These second wave anthrax spores were more sophisticated and deadly in their preparation. This time two elected representatives were the targets: Democratic Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.
The view that these were terrorist attacks by foreign enemies—the second blow, after 9/11, in a one-two punch against the United States—quickly became widespread. First, al-Qaeda was the chief suspect. Then Iraq was added to the suspect list. The Double Perpetrator hypothesis—Iraq supplied the anthrax to al-Qaeda foot soldiers—then began to make its way into a wide variety of news media.[3]
By the end of 2001, however, all stories of foreign terrorists had collapsed.[4] The nature of the spore preparations revealed the operation as an inside job—the spores came from one of three possible labs, all inside the U.S. and serving the military and the CIA.
The events were also a false-flag attack, since great care had been taken to deceptively pin the attacks on foreign Muslims. The FBI and the Office of Homeland Security, as it was then called, avoided both the expressions “inside job” and “false-flag attack,” but they could not avoid the realities to which these expressions refer.
Once the foreign Muslim story collapsed, the FBI got busy looking for a lone wolf perpetrator on whom to put the blame. The Bureau eventually settled on Dr. Bruce Ivins, an anthrax researcher at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Ivins died, allegedly by suicide, shortly before he was to be indicted.
The Failure of the FBI’s Hypothesis
In my 2014 book, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy, I outlined the reasons the Ivins’ hypothesis was already widely held in contempt.[5]
I argued, with other researchers, that labs at Dugway Proving Ground and Battelle Memorial Institute were much better suspects than those at USAMRIID, and that Bruce Ivins lacked the resources, skill, time and motives that would have made him a serious suspect.
There have been several developments since my book was written, two of which are especially important.
The first concerns Richard Lambert, who was for some years the Inspector in Charge of the FBI’s anthrax investigation. In 2015, after he had left the Bureau, Lambert brought a lawsuit against the FBI, claiming that the Bureau was retaliating against him—ruining his chances of employment—because of his criticism of the FBI and of its conduct of the anthrax case.[6]
Lambert said he had made repeated complaints that the Washington field office of the FBI was mismanaging the case. He said, moreover, that the case against Ivins was clearly weak. The circumstantial case against Ivins would not have resulted in a conviction had it gone to court.
He said that, “while Bruce Ivins may have been the anthrax mailer, there is a wealth of exculpatory evidence to the contrary which the FBI continues [2015] to conceal from Congress and the American people.”[7]
Strangely, these bombshell pronouncements did not rouse the mass media from their slumber.
The second development occurred in 2020, when the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry sent a petition to the U.S. Congress.[8]
(Disclosure: I was at that time a member of the Anthrax Attacks Investigation Committee established by the Lawyers’ Committee to prepare the petition.)
The petition requests that:
“Congress should initiate its own focused inquiries into the post-9/11 anthrax attacks, and should establish as well a properly staffed and funded independent commission to conduct a comprehensive inquiry into these attacks which used biowarfare agents against Congress and the free press and involved the attempted assassination of two United States Senators.”
The Lawyers’ Committee argues, in 76 pages and with 69 exhibits, that the FBI’s case against Bruce Ivins entirely lacks merit and that the FBI is guilty not merely of incompetence but of obstruction, cover-up and deliberate deception of both Congress and American civil society.
The petition concentrates on the physical evidence relating to the anthrax spores; and the labs of Dugway and Battelle, associated with the U.S. military and the CIA, emerge from this research as chief suspects for the source of the anthrax attack.
The exhibits attached to the Petition include affidavits from several of Ivins’ colleagues. These go beyond character references. Several include specific reasons why these colleagues have never believed Ivins was the culprit.
In my view, the work of the Lawyers’ Committee lays the FBI’s case against Ivins in its grave.
And what are we to think of the FBI’s treatment of Bruce Ivins? The Bureau, aware of credible suspects, directed attention away from these suspects and onto an innocent man.
Aware of Ivins’ emotional vulnerability, the Bureau put extreme pressure on him, which resulted in his death. Then, after he died it publicly pronounced him the anthrax killer; said he had killed himself out of guilt; and closed the case. Ivins’ family was left in grief and shame to pick up the pieces of their lives.
The Lawyers’ Committee notes that the domestic parties responsible for the anthrax attacks are guilty of treason. The Committee holds out the possibility that certain FBI officials may also be guilty of treason.
The Lone Nut
As Lisa Pease points out in her volume on the RFK assassination, when intelligence agencies plan complex operations they plan both for the success of these operations and for their possible flaws and failures.[9]
There were plenty of failures in the 9/11 operation (such as the ill-timed destruction of Building 7), and there is evidence of rapid moves to conceal these failures. Although the anthrax operation failed in an even more thorough way than the 9/11 operation, those in control moved quickly and smoothly to repair the damage.
One of their first moves was to shift from a hypothesis of multiple attackers (multiple attackers were widely assumed prior to the collapse of the narrative) to a hypothesis of a single attacker.[10] The single attacker, or “lone wolf” hypothesis, is a common fallback position when an intelligence operation falters. Being alone, this wolf implicates others only weakly. He or she is ultimately uninteresting and raises few questions.
There is a subcategory of the lone wolf hypothesis that, for better or worse, is often called the “lone nut.” This narrative is extremely valuable for intelligence planners. A “lone nut”—a mentally unbalanced perpetrator—is even less interesting, in terms of connections and motives, than other types of lone wolves.
We may say that the lone nut’s story is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth). Since the tale signifies nothing, there is no need to look for rational motives, patterns, or links to groups and institutions.
The anthrax attacks had, during their early days, been blamed on insane (fanatical, suicidal, erratic) foreign Muslims. The shift was made, after the failure of this narrative, to an insane domestic individual. It was Ivins’ misfortune to have had mental health problems and to have been chosen for the role of perpetrator.
I have argued at length in my book that the anthrax operation was not carried out by a lone nut but by a rational group, and, without repeating that argument here, let me suggest we experimentally put the lone nut in storage and look for both connections and motive.
Restoring the Missing Connections
I will be content here to make one simple point: There was overlap in personnel in the 9/11 and anthrax operations. Because of this overlap it is clear that the two operations were planned by a single group.
Here are two sets of evidence of overlapping personnel:
(1) Locations[11]
There was a 71-mile strip along the coast of Florida where 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were active. Robert Stevens, the first anthrax victim, died in the middle of this strip.
If this fact were insignificant we would expect this to become clear as we examined the situation closely. We find the reverse. Connections come to light that cannot be accidental.
Anthrax victim Stevens was employed by a tabloid in Boca Raton called the Sun. The editor-in-chief of this tabloid, Mike Irish, had a wife, Gloria Irish, who was a real estate agent. In her professional capacity she had, in the summer of 2001, found apartments for two of the 9/11 hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi and Hamza al-Ghamdi.
Al-Shehhi is the man who supposedly piloted United Airlines 175 into the South Tower. He is said to have been a close friend of Mohamed Atta, his fellow martyr.
Gloria Irish had driven al-Shehhi and al-Ghamdi around town numerous times, and she remembered them well. Interviewed by the press, she said: “I mean, Marwan called me all the time.” She said they had a joking and friendly relationship.
But Gloria Irish had known anthrax victim Robert Stevens for 25 years and had helped him purchase a house. She was, therefore, the real estate agent of the first anthrax victim and of men alleged to have carried out the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, the hijacker-real estate connection went beyond al-Shehhi and al-Ghamdi. The apartment Irish found for them became home to four of the hijackers.
The links between Gloria Irish, the hijackers, and the anthrax attacks were reported in the media in October 2001.
In Florida, The St. Petersburg Times noted, when speaking of the apartment Gloria Irish had found for the hijackers:
“The Delray apartment is central to a massive federal investigation into the terrorist attacks. Investigators trying to piece the puzzle together created a diagram that includes photos of the 19 hijackers who seized control of four airplanes on Sept. 11.”
The journalist continued: “It is clear that the apartment was a meeting ground for terrorists, authorities say. Now they must determine whether unit 1504 was also a hatching ground for the anthrax attacks.”
Reporting all of this openly was not only permitted at the time but, I believe, encouraged.
This is because the insiders responsible for the anthrax attacks were then assuming the attacks would successfully be pinned on al-Qaeda and Iraq. Revealing the anthrax attacks to have been perpetrated by the parties responsible for 9/11 was part of the plan.
We were all to have followed the trail of gigantic breadcrumbs and concluded that the connected sets of 2001 attacks were the result of a collaboration between al-Qaeda and its sponsor, Iraq.
Though few remember the Florida connections today, they have not gone away. And if we choose to ignore them we are extremely poor sleuths.
(2) Crop-dusters[12]
On September 23-24, 2001, all crop-duster planes in the U.S. were grounded.
Attorney General John Ashcroft explained to Congress that crop dusters could be used to “distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction.” He added that the ubiquitous Mohamed Atta “had been compiling information about crop-dusting before the Sept. 11 attacks.”
But there was more. Groups of “Middle Eastern men” had apparently visited an airport in Belle Glade, Florida—“about an hour’s drive from Delray Beach, the coastal community where some of the alleged hijackers are believed to have lived”—to inspect and inquire about crop dusters.
Willie Lee, “general manager of South Florida Crop Care,” said the men described themselves as flight students. The apparent leader of the group was especially visible and aggressive. Employee James Lester identified this man as Mohamed Atta.
“I recognized him because he stayed on my feet all the time. I just about had to push him away from me,” Lester said.
Atta supposedly visited twice more over the following months, while a variety of other Middle Eastern men came back repeatedly, taking photographs and video footage of the planes. To say they made themselves visible and unforgettable is to understate the case. Willie Lee said, “They were asking the types of questions that other people didn’t ask.” They were such a pain in the neck that Lee asked the police to “run them off.”
As with the related tale of Atta’s visit to the office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Florida, we are offered a trail of breadcrumbs.
But what is the significance of crop-dusters? If they played a role in the theater of 2001, what do they signify? The answer is that they signified anthrax, and anthrax signified Iraq.
Iraq had possessed, at one time, an anthrax program, and it had experimented with aerial dispersion. The program had been shut down after the 1991 Gulf War and the materials destroyed, but U.S. planners were able to befog the issue and keep alive the fear of aerial dispersion by Iraq. One Western news story revealingly referred to crop dusters—a kind of poor man’s aerial dispersion technology—as Saddam Hussein’s “doomsday option.”[13]
During his spectacularly deceptive performance for the UN Security Council in 2003, preparing the world for the U.S.-led assault on Iraq, Colin Powell covered all the bases.[14]
He held up a vial of simulated anthrax, talked about how an equivalent amount of anthrax had closed down the Hart Senate Office Building in 2001, discussed Iraq’s anthrax program, and showed photos of Iraqi aerial dispersion planes.
He thereby narratively (not evidentially) connected anthrax to aerial dispersion and therefore WMD, to Iraq, and to the 2001 anthrax attacks on the U.S. homeland and Congress. There was little work to be done to lasso crop dusters into the field of guilt.
The crop-duster stories of the time remain extremely important today for sincere researchers, even though they are largely forgotten. They reveal the anthrax-9/11 connection.
They also, of course, show the false links being made to Iraq. Crop-duster stories were but one of the methods of implicating Iraq in the anthrax attacks. The idea that the anthrax in the attacks had come from Iraq was pushed vigorously in the media in the weeks after the first anthrax diagnosis.
The phrase repeatedly used in the press was (with some variations): “they aren’t making this stuff in caves.” What this meant was: al-Qaeda foot soldiers evidently have delivered this material, but these guys could not have manufactured such a sophisticated bioweapon in caves in Afghanistan—they must have had a state supplier.
And that supplier, went the story, was Iraq. ABC News went so far as to claim repeatedly that the spores in the attack letters had been coated in bentonite—the Iraqi method of weaponization.[15]
But this was just more fiction: The claims went up in smoke when unbought scientists examined the spores. Far from being weaponized with bentonite, they were weaponized (here I speak of the sophisticated spores sent to the senators) in a far more complex way that had the signature of U.S. domestic military/intelligence labs.
There were other Iraq tales circulated. One of the most famous was the tale of Mohamed Atta meeting in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent.[16] The story was supposed to support the idea that Iraq had sponsored al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, but it was also used to suggest that Atta was arranging to get chemical or biological weapons from Iraq.
“Some federal officials have wondered whether chemical or biological weapons might have been a subject of discussion when Mohamed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, met last year with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. Iraq is known to have worked on the development of such weapons.”
Widely spread by the media, this story turned out to be yet another piece of misinformation. No such meeting ever took place.
To sum up: The story promoted in the fall of 2001 was that the hijackers allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks were, in the lead-up to that event, also preparing to attack the U.S. with anthrax. Being simple fellows with limited technological expertise, they were exploring the idea of using U.S. crop-dusters, and in the end they chose an even more crude method—sending the spores in letters. But the anthrax spores were not their own preparation: They came from Iraq, al-Qaeda’s sponsor.
Thus were two military invasions, that of Afghanistan and that of Iraq, simultaneously justified in advance.
Restoring the Missing Motives
The lone nut may have no rational motive, but the group of insiders who planned the two-part psychological operation of the fall of 2001 were definitely rational, and many of their motives are easily discerned.
As just indicated, they wished to lay the foundation for the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. More broadly, however, they wished to supersede (not entirely replace, but temporarily supersede) the Cold War with the Global War on Terror.
Remember that each of these global conflict formations, the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, was designed to force nations, and even individuals, to make a choice between two antithetical positions.
Each global conflict formation supported numerous specific hot wars, high military spending, a drastic diminution in the sophistication of human thinking, and the overall health of the war system with its primitive and outgrown moral foundations.
The chief method of recruiting people to the Global War on Terror was fear. The anthrax attacks contributed mightily, being used to evoke anxiety and panic.[17]
“Anthrax Anxiety at Home,” “Widespread Anxiety in New York,” “Anxiety Grows in South Florida,” “Anxiety over Bioterrorism Grows” are a few of the headlines of the time. Immediately after the death of Robert Stevens, The Washington Post reported that “jittery” citizens were “on their knees begging for drugs.”
By October 15 we were told that the “anthrax scare” was spreading around the world. By October 18 we were informed that “the fear of anthrax has become inescapable,” and shortly before the congressional votes on the USA PATRIOT Act, Americans were said to be suffering “primordial terror” in “a national anxiety attack.”
The 9/11 attacks were more dramatic but the anthrax attacks were more intimate. Anyone, anywhere in the country, could innocently pick up their daily mail and get pulmonary anthrax.
We should not assume, of course, that Americans, or people of the world in general, were really experiencing the level of fear reported by the media. Who knows? What is obvious is that such fear as existed was to a great extent the result of inflammatory media coverage.
This fear was the soil in which Islamophobia was cultivated. If the false narratives of the fall of 2001, as well as the spread of fear by the mass media, are left unmentioned, the term “Islamophobia” is no more than a distraction.
Although the Global War on Terror was sketched broadly enough to include non-Muslim individuals and nations when necessary (North Korea was the main case), it was aimed chiefly at Muslims.
The fear evoked in the fall of 2001 was a fear of Islam and the “craziness” or “nuttiness” that supposedly led Muslims to unleash violence on the United States.
This was a deliberate propaganda campaign fueled by a two-part psychological operation that initiated what may be called the Crazy Muslim franchise, a narrative series that will continue as long as there is an interested audience and profits to be made.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak explained it all on BBC television about 11:28 AM on 9/11, shortly after the attacks in new York and Washington:[18]
“The world will not be the same from today on. It’s an attack against our whole civilization … I believe that this is the time to deploy a globally concerted effort led by the United States, the UK, Europe and Russia against all sources of terror.”
Notwithstanding the complete absence of evidence, Barak, repeatedly given air time by the BBC during the day, did not hesitate to name specific nations (Iran, Iraq, and so on) as targets of the new “globally concerted effort.”
The use of fear in such psychological operations is typically meant to support a powerful clenching of the in-group, where the group that feels attacked draws together in tight formation to defend itself against the dangerous Other.
And this clenching results not merely in striking out against the alleged foe but squeezing out domestic civil rights. Freedom to think for oneself, to debate, to dissent is in these cases increasingly regarded with suspicion, and legislation is passed by intimidated legislatures that cast dissenters into the outer darkness.
These processes, starkly visible in the medical martial law forced on the world as I write these lines, were prefigured in the 2001 two-part operation.
The attack on Congress in the anthrax attacks, an obvious part of the plan to discipline U.S. civil society and its representatives, is well known, but I can add some flesh to the bones that are our usual fare.[19]
By the time anthrax fears began spreading in the U.S., Congress was already reeling from the 9/11 attacks. Concrete barriers blocked road access to Congress, while senators and representatives were discouraged from wearing congressional pins or displaying distinctive license plates lest their identities be known and they become targets.
But the possibility remained that members of Congress would recover their senses and begin to resist the legislation that had been placed before them—the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, or USA PATRIOT Act. Only if Congress remained frightened and intimidated would it remain obedient to those in the Executive branch fighting for rapid passage of the Act.
During the intense days of September 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft repeatedly harangued the Democrats in the Senate to pass the USA PATRIOT Act quickly.
As Daschle later put it, Ashcroft “attacked Democrats for delaying passage of this bill. In this climate of anxiety the attorney general was implicitly suggesting that further attacks might not be prevented if Democrats didn’t stop delaying.”
The Republicans had a generous majority in the House that would do the Executive’s bidding and pass the bill but, in the Senate the Democrats had a majority of one. A slim majority, but potentially enough to block the new bill.
Patrick Leahy, a Democratic senator, was Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, a key body in the process of considering and approving the USA PATRIOT Act. While Leahy was generally supportive of the bill, he drew the line on October 2: He insisted he would not support the bill without changes.
Daschle was Senate Majority Leader and was the most powerful Democrat in the Senate. His support of the bill was essential to its passage. Although he had signaled in various ways his indignation at the 9/11 attacks and had offered the President his support, he was not ready to give Bush carte blanche either to attack any nation he wished or to bully the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress.
While he had been willing to introduce the resolution on the use of force that gave the President legal cover for war (September 14, 2001), Daschle did so only after toning down the astonishingly imperial version of the resolution written by the White House.
On October 2 he supported Leahy in resisting immediate passage of the new USA PATRIOT bill.
But Vice President Cheney had chosen October 5 as the date by which he wanted the bill passed. Due to the stubbornness of these two Democratic senators, Cheney’s schedule was now unachievable.
Some time between October 6 and 8, two anthrax letters were put in the mail. They were addressed to Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.
The event was embellished with a spectacular case of mass media precognition. On October 15, Roll Call, a Washington newspaper that reported Capitol Hill news, headlined its issue with:
“HILL BRACES FOR ANTHRAX THREAT.”
Right on schedule, later that day Grant Leslie, an intern of Senator Tom Daschle, opened a letter to find a hand-printed threat accompanied by shockingly aerosolized anthrax spores. The spores floated out of the envelope, contaminating not just Leslie but the entire Hart Senate Office Building, which had to be closed and sanitized.
Here is the text of the letter:[20]
I hold that this text, considered with the text sent to Tom Brokaw, is one of the most important documents of the 21th century. (My assertion is based on an interpretation of the text that takes into account the spores that accompanied the text as well as the 9/11 attacks to which the text of the letter makes a clear reference.)
The Daschle and Brokaw letters indicate that their implied authors:
(1) are identical with, or related to, the crew responsible for the 9/11 attacks (“09-11-01” at the top of the letter)
(2) are bent on homicide (“you die now”)
(3) are, because of their 9/11 connection, also prepared to commit suicide
(4) are crude (the printing) and stupid (in the Brokaw letter “penicillin” is spelled wrong, indicating the authors are not bright enough to use a dictionary or spell-check.)
(5) are Muslim (“Allah is Great”)
(6) regard the United States and Israel as of comparable importance and as forming a unified target (“Death to America. Death to Israel.”)
(7) are determined to achieve their goals through fear (“Are you afraid?”)
(8) are taunting the U.S. Congress as powerless (“You can not stop us”)
(9) are prepared to use a weapon of mass destruction on the U.S. Congress (the spores are weaponized and the letters are addressed to Senators Daschle and Leahy).
(10) are in a position to access some of the most sophisticated weaponized anthrax ever seen, presumably from their state sponsor (this we conclude from an analysis of the spores).
This is a message that loses none of its importance when we realize that its real authors, who are entirely different from its implied authors, are domestic groups within the U.S. Military-Industrial-Intelligence-Complex, possibly assisted by counterparts in one or more allied countries.
When we are awake to the deception practiced here, we can read these letters as a charter of the Global War on Terror spelled out in childish block printing.
The attacks on Congress were, of course, successful. Congress was disciplined and meekly passed the Act.
The mass media reported excitedly on the associated anxiety and panic.[21]
“A handful of anthrax particles sent through the mail to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D- S.D.) has sent Capitol Hill into an orbit of jitters and confusion …”
Or again:
“the perpetrators of the anthrax terror hit pay dirt in Washington. They’ve managed to accomplish what the British tried to generate with their burning of the White House, the Capitol and other government buildings in 1814—what Lee Harvey Oswald couldn’t deliver in 1963—and what the Pentagon attackers sought to but couldn’t provoke on Sept. 11: a sense of vulnerability and danger so great that it disables and fundamentally alters the way the nation’s capital does its business.”
When we look with clear eyes at the connections and motives noted above, having dismissed the lone nut theory and the Crazy Muslim theory, we see that the United States was subjected to a domestically produced two-part psychological operation of overwhelming importance in the fall of 2001.
Breadcrumbs and Blockheads
I have chosen not to attempt in this article to relate the 2001 anthrax attacks to our current nightmare—briefly, the endeavor to establish a global “reset” through what I believe is a weaponized virus[22] accompanied by injections that are unneeded, ineffective and very dangerous.[23]
Many lines of continuity between the 2001 anthrax attacks and the current deception have been pointed out by researchers.[24] But I would add that attention must also be paid to discontinuities. The 2001 attacks had specific geopolitical aims, the stigmatizing of specific nations, cultures and states, and the establishment of a particular global conflict framework that would revitalize the war system in a way that would favor particular parties. It is not yet clear to me how the transition has been made to the different aims that appear to drive the current operation.
In any case, the 2001 anthrax attacks remind us that a trail of monstrous breadcrumbs is effective in leading us to the perpetrators’ desired endpoint only as long as we are blockheads.
When we make the decision to be intelligent, critical adults, the breadcrumbs become much worse than useless for the perpetrators’ ends: now they lead us to the den of the true criminals. I am confident that the researchers who have taken on the puzzle of connecting the two-part 2001 operation to the current operation will, by critically following the recent trail of breadcrumbs, be able to solve this puzzle.
- “Face to Face with a Terrorist—Worker Recalls Atta Seeking Funds Before 9/11,” ABCNEWS.com, June 6, 2002. ↑
- Graeme MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2014), 78. ↑
- Ibid., 72 ff. ↑
- Ibid., 77 ff. ↑
- Ibid., Chapter 5. ↑
- UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE EASTERN DISTRICT OF TENNESSEE. April 2, 2015. Richard L. Lambert Plaintiff Pro Se. ↑
- Ibid. ↑
- The Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry, Inc., “Before the Congress of the United States: Petition Pursuant to the First Amendment of the United States Constitution Seeking Redress for Government Misconduct Concerning the Post-9/11 Anthrax Attacks of 2001.” October 15, 2020.
https://www.lawyerscommitteefor9-11inquiry.org/lawyers-committee-anthrax-petition/ ↑
- Lisa Pease, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy (Port Townsend, WA: Feral House, 2018), p. 413. ↑
- MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, Chapter 5. ↑
- Ibid., 134 ff. ↑
- Ibid., 154 ff. ↑
- Ibid., 159-160. ↑
- Ibid., 166-168. ↑
- Ibid., 80-81. ↑
- Ibid., 84-85. ↑
- Ibid., pp. 44 ff. ↑
- Barak’s remark was made at about 11:28 a.m. See BBC News archives, accessible at:
https://archive.org/details/911/day/20010911 ↑
- MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, 49 ff. ↑
- Consult the FBI website:
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/history/famous-cases/anthrax-amerithrax/amerithrax-investigation ↑
- MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Deception, p. 57. ↑
- See lawyer Reiner Fuellmich’s interview with Dr. David Martin:
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x82untb ↑
- There are many experts who agree on these points. As an example, consult the website of Doctors for COVID Ethics: http://doctors4covidethics.org/ ↑
- For example: Whitney Webb and Raul Diego, “All Roads Lead to Dark Winter,” The Unz Review, April 1, 2020, and Richard Ramsbotham, “Interlocking Histories, 9/11, the Anthrax Attacks and Covid-19,” New View, Issue 100, Summer 2021. ↑
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