American Buddhist Net

It's reached the point now where almost anyone can see that the case against Ivins is not strong. It does not come near proving that he acted alone, let alone acted at all. It also does not in any way prove that he stole the anthrax--to which some 100 people had access--or that he had the means or the skills to convert it to the very sophisticated weapon it was when mailed. Furthermore, the FBI has not established a credible motive. So, opportunity has been established, but the means and the motive are far from having been proved. Beyond that, the evidence shows that Ivins, like so many humans, could be a bit weird and that he was sensitive, a trait that likely drove him to kill himself. So the question now becomes why the rush to close the investigation? Is it because Bush's term is nearing an end and this is yet one more thing they need to cover up? ABN
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Handwriting analysis also failed to tie Ivins to letters
August 07, 2008
© 2008 WorldNetDaily

Bruce Ivins
Casting further doubt on the FBI's anthrax case, accused government scientist Bruce Ivins passed two polygraph tests and a handwriting analysis comparing samples of his handwriting to writing contained in the anthrax letters, U.S. officials familiar with the investigation say.

The Justice Department yesterday closed the case, announcing the late "Dr. Ivins was the only person responsible for these attacks."

Ivins passed the first polygraph to satisfy a security requirement prior to working with the FBI as part of a team of scientists at the Fort Detrick, Md., lab who originally helped analyze the anthrax letters. He passed a second exam after he became a suspect.

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People like Hamdan are usually not even tried for war crimes. This sentence seems appropriate, if he is let go on time, and more fitting to the image of the USA as a great nation than the life sentence proposed by the prosecution. It's not much but it is the first glimmer of sanity we have seen in some time over these detainees. ABN
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By WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: August 7, 2008

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the convicted former driver for Osama bin Laden, was sentenced Thursday to 66 months in prison by the military panel that convicted him of a war crime Wednesday.

The unexpectedly short sentence was far less than military prosecutors had sought. Through more than five years of legal proceedings against Mr. Hamdan, prosecutors had pursued a life sentence, and earlier in the day, faced with Mr. Hamdan's acquittal on the most serious charge against him, prosecutors recommended a sentence of at least 30 years and said life may be appropriate.

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Bruce Ivins wrote in a September 26, 2001 email that he "heard tonight" that Bin Laden has anthrax and sarin gas.

Major report from that day:

Bin Laden terror group tries to acquire chemical arms
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 26, 2001

"Intelligence officials say classified analysis of the types of chemicals and toxins sought by al Qaeda indicate the group probably is trying to produce the nerve agent Sarin, or biological weapons made up of anthrax spores"

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Last night we received the message below in an email from a very reliable source. Today, we found confirmation here. Since this is all coming from Mike Whitney, it is surely very reliable information. ABN
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My friend Tom Feeley is in Big trouble. He runs the web site informationclearinghouse.info which updates "news you won't find in the corporate media" every day. The site is strongly anti-war. Tom has gotten his share of death threats over the years, but what happened this week is a lot more serious. Two days ago, Tom's wife found three well dressed men in their kitchen. The man who did all the talking, told Tom's wife (I won't give her name) that Tom must "Stop what he is doing on the Internet, NOW!" As crazy as it sounds, he pulled back his lapel and showed her a gun of some kind which she could not identify.

SEP 04, 2001
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
by Judith Miller, Stephen Engelberg and William J. Broad.

Over the past several years, the United States has embarked on a program of secret research on biological weapons that, some officials say, tests the limits of the global treaty banning such weapons.

The 1972 treaty forbids nations from developing or acquiring weapons that spread disease, but it allows work on vaccines and other protective measures. Government officials said the secret research, which mimicked the major steps a state or terrorist would take to create a biological arsenal, was aimed at better understanding the threat.

The projects, which have not been previously disclosed, were begun under President Clinton and have been embraced by the Bush administration, which intends to expand them.

...Earlier this year, administration officials said, the Pentagon drew up plans to engineer genetically a potentially more potent variant of the bacterium that causes anthrax, a deadly disease ideal for germ warfare.

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Thursday, August 07, 2008

NEW YORK — Guantanamo waterboarding as a Coney Island sideshow — that's what one political-minded artist has created on the Brooklyn seashore.

The "Waterboard Thrill Ride," by Steve Powers, is a stone's throw from Coney Island's famed Cyclone roller coaster and Nathan's hot dog stand.

For a dollar, visitors get to look through a barred window on a Guantanamo-like interrogation, enacted by animated robots. The hooded figure leans over a man in an orange jumpsuit, his face covered with a towel and his body tethered to a tilted plane.

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Nass has written some good stuff on this case and her blog is worth following. About the evidence presented, Ivins' lawyer also puts it well: “It was an explanation of why Bruce Ivins was a suspect,” said Paul F. Kemp, who represented the scientist for more than a year before his death on July 29 at age 62. “But there’s a total absence of proof that he committed this crime.”

Which brings us back to the even bigger question of why the rush to close this case now? It hardly seems to have been "solved" as the FBI claims. In the spirit of their rush to condemn Ivins, are we not permitted the same leeway in our speculation about their timing? To wit, is this case being closed now because Bush's term is coming to an end and someone does not want the matter pursued further under the next administration? Does anyone else see a pattern here with other things like telecoms, domestic spying, torture, attorney hirings and firings, executive privilege, fake WMDs, GITMO trials, and so on? ABN
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August 6, 2008
Meryl Nass

U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said at a Justice Department news conference, "We regret that we will not have the opportunity to present evidence to the jury."

Everybody else regrets it too--since what came out today was another pastiche of innuendo and circumstantial evidence, with an awful lot of holes. Time for the FBI to present all of what it has to the court of public opinion, don't you think? A major benefit for the FBI of sharing its case would be restoration of confidence in the US' system of justice, the Justice Department and its FBI.

I worked all day at the hospital, but want to get something out tonight, in a hurry, regarding the strength of some of the evidence presented today. I'll no doubt have more to say once I have read the rest of the "evidence".

Here goes:

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One of the biggest questions in this case is why the rush to close it? Some say the FBI is trying to clean up its reputation and put the anthrax business and the embarrassment of having aggressively pursued Hatfill behind it, but "solving" a case on purely circumstantial evidence--and in the same week that the Hamdan trial ended with such a dubious verdict--is not going to accomplish that. Far from it. So why the rush? Is it not possible--and this speculation is no less far-out than the FBI's speculation about Ivins--that the agency is rushing to close this case because Bush's term is nearly over and they do not want the investigation to be continued under the next president not because there is nothing more to be found but because there is? ABN
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By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: August 6, 2008

WASHINGTON — The Federal Bureau of Investigation on Wednesday outlined a pattern of bizarre and deceptive conduct by Bruce E. Ivins, an Army microbiologist who killed himself last week, presenting a sweeping but circumstantial case that he was solely responsible for mailing the deadly anthrax letters that killed five people in 2001.

After nearly seven years of a troubled investigation, officials of the F.B.I. and the Justice Department declared that the case had been solved. Jeffrey A. Taylor, the United States attorney for the District of Columbia, said the authorities believed “that based on the evidence we had collected, we could prove his guilt to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Some survivors of the attacks and members of Congress said they were persuaded by the evidence against Dr. Ivins, laid out in hundreds of pages of applications for search warrants unsealed for the first time. But some independent scientists, friends and colleagues of Dr. Ivins remained skeptical, noting that officials admitted that more than 100 people had access to the supply of anthrax that matched the powder in the letters.

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FBI'S ALLEGATION THAT IVINS WAS "SOLE CUSTODIAN" IS FALSE

August 7, 2008

Now that was a real nail-biter. The court designed by the White House and its Congressional enablers to guarantee convictions of high-profile detainees in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba — using evidence obtained by torture and secret evidence as desired — has held its first trial. It produced ... a guilty verdict.

The military commission of six senior officers (whose names have not been made public) found Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who worked as one of Osama bin Laden’s drivers until 2001, guilty of one count of providing material support for terrorism.

...It is impossible, in any case, to judge the evidence against Mr. Hamdan because of the deeply flawed nature of this trial — the blueprint for which was the Military Commissions Act of 2006, one of the worst bits of lawmaking in American history.

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This excellent essay provides an in-depth look at the various modes of resistance we unknowingly or half-knowingly employ when faced with new information. Some of the stuff detailed here will be disturbing to those who see themselves as being guided, at least most of the time, by the light of reason. But why hold on to false notions? As Buddhists, we should be constantly striving to understand the inner workings of our own minds. Robyn
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June 2007
Laurie Manwell

Imagine for a moment that you are trying to discuss the 9/11 truth movement with a family member, friend, or even a colleague, and are met with remarkable resistance (of course if you are reading this, you most likely do not need to use your imagination). On the rare occasion, perhaps you’ve heard, “Hmm, that’s interesting, tell me more.” More likely though, merely the mention of alternative theories of the events has of 9/11 drawn dismissal, joking, or even ire: “I don’t listen to conspiracy theories,” “Yeah I’ve heard some really crazy stories that the government did it,” or “How dare you mock the victims of 9/11!” You begin to wonder, why are some people less willing to examine all of the events of 9/11 than others? Is it really because they are obstinate or in denial? Is it because they are apathetic or judiciously lazy? Or perhaps is it because they are uninformed or purposely misinformed? Are there any other explanations? These are all very important questions to be explored if all of the properly investigated facts and evidence of 9/11 are ever going to reach the forefront of public consciousness.

...How much conscious, intentional control then does an individual have over the processes that govern his or her decisions and behaviors? In a review of the automaticity of mental processes, Bargh and Chartrand (1999) present a strong case that people have very little conscious control over most of their moment-to-moment psychological lives. Specifically, they argue “that most of a person’s everyday life is determined not by their conscious intentions and deliberate choices but by mental processes that are put into motion by features of the environment and that operate outside of conscious awareness and guidance”

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I am posting most of the preface to "Faulty Towers of Belief, Part II", in which Manwell points to the very conspicuous lack of curiosity about 9/11 on the part of those who should be MOST curious - namely, her colleagues in the academic community. I highly recommend that everyone, academics and non-academics alike, read these few paragraphs. Robyn
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August 2007
Laurie Manwell

...However, of the many nonreceptive answers I have received from professors regarding [9/11], that have ranged from unawareness to dismissal, the ones that concern me the most are those that are just plain indifferent. Being told that, although they believe that there is merit in such work, they are ‘too busy career-building’ or ‘cannot see how it directly affects them,’ is deeply troubling. In the aftermath of 9/11, it is strangely ironic that many academics still choose to remain within the proverbial ‘ivory towers’ of intellect, while the rest of the human population fights for truth from deep within the trenches. How can scholars, especially those who study the plight of people affected by deception, aggression, terror, and war, dispossess themselves of the responsibility to stop it, whilst accepting the publics’ money to further their own careers? Have we academics lost sight of the needs of our fellow man, to whom we endeavor to teach our insights? How long can we safely continue to believe that these towers too will not fail, as most of us believed on 9/11?

Thus, to those who would question the breadth and depth of Part II, which is absolutely more political than Part I, I respectfully ask you to consider the reasons why I endeavor to cross the boundaries of science and the humanities...

August 5, 2008
George Washington

Bestselling Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ron Suskind has revealed that the White House ordered the CIA to forge and backdate a document falsely linking Iraq with Muslim terrorists and 9/11 . . . and that the CIA complied with those instructions and in fact created the forgery, which was then used to justify war against Iraq.

Suskind also revealed that "Bush administration had information from a top Iraqi intelligence official 'that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq – intelligence they received in plenty of time to stop an invasion.' ”

This is a stunning revelation in its own right. But what does it say about the government's claims that 9/11 was an attack by Muslim extremists which the U.S. government could not have anticipated?

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Anthrax mystery: the FBI/media narrative is laughable – and sinister

by Justin Raimondo
August 6, 2008

It sounds like a very bad made-for-television movie: a mad scientist – a violent sociopath, a "nerd with a dark side," who had already tried to kill several people, is obsessed with pornography, and is fixated on a particular college sorority – unleashes a strain of deadly anthrax through the U.S. mail, killing five, infecting 17 others, and terrorizing the country. His motive, aside from sheer antisocial vindictiveness: he holds the patent for an anthrax vaccine, and he also wants to direct the nation's attention to the supposedly overlooked and underfunded problem of bio-terrorism. That'll teach 'em!

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This is our first glimpse of an overview of the evidence. The claim that he had "hundreds" of letters similar to the anthrax letters may be something, but we will need to see those letters. The other evidence is circumstantial and could well fit other people; obviously, the FBI thought so too or they would not have pursued Hatfill so relentlessly. We will know more in a few days as more people look over the files. ABN
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By DAVID STOUT and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: August 6, 2008

WASHINGTON — A few days before the anthrax attacks of 2001, the scientist who has emerged as the suspect in the case sent e-mails with wording that was sometimes identical to the language used in deadly anthrax-laced letters that autumn, according to documents released by the government on Wednesday.

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David Edwards and Muriel Kane
Published: Wednesday August 6, 2008

Author Ron Suskind says his sources are under "enormous pressure" to change their stories after revealing to him that the Bush administration had ordered the CIA to forge a letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence connecting Iraq to the 9/11 hijackers.

On Tuesday, former CIA official Robert Richer, who is one of Suskind's sources, sent a statement to news outlets in which he wrote, "I never received direction from George Tenet or anyone else in my chain of command to fabricate a document from Habbush as outlined in Mr. Suskind's book."

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Judge unseals hundreds of pages of documents in FBI's investigation of anthrax mailings

LARA JAKES JORDAN and MATT APUZZO
AP News
Aug 06, 2008 08:36 EST

The chief judge of Washington's federal courthouse on Wednesday unsealed hundreds of pages of documents in the FBI's nearly 7-year investigation of anthrax mailings that killed five people.

The move by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth came after consultation with Amy Jeffress, a national security prosecutor at Justice, and as FBI Director Robert Mueller prepared to brief the families of anthrax victims on details of the case.

The documents that Lamberth authorized to be released include more than a dozen search warrants aimed at Army microbiologist Bruce Ivins, whom federal investigators were closing in on as he committed suicide last week. Among other things, the papers are expected to reveal how the FBI narrowed the scope of its investigation to the Fort Detrick, Md., scientist.

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Reuters
Wednesday, August 6, 2008; 10:32 AM

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba - A jury of U.S. military officers convicted Osama bin Laden's driver on charges of providing material support for terrorism Wednesday but acquitted him on charges of providing material support for al Qaeda in the first U.S. war crimes trial since World War Two.

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MILITARY: HAMDAN IS AN ENEMY COMBATANT AND WILL BE DETAINED IF ACQUITTED BY JURY

George Washington
August 5, 2008

Colonel Arthur Anderson is the chief of human use and ethics at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the bioweapons facility where Dr. Ivins worked and where the anthrax strains were apparently obtained by the anthrax killer.

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By PETE YOST, Associated Press Writer 1 hour, 24 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Before killing himself last week, Army scientist Bruce Ivins told friends that government agents had stalked him and his family for months, offered his son $2.5 million to rat him out and tried to turn his hospitalized daughter against him with photographs of dead anthrax victims.

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Chambers Expresses Surprise At Christians' Violent Reaction To Lawsuit

OMAHA, Neb. -- A Nebraska senator who filed a lawsuit against God appeared in court Tuesday and demanded the defendant to "cease certain harmful activities and the making of terroristic threats."

Despite Sen. Ernie Chambers' lack of success in petitioning the defendant, he hopes the lawsuit brings to light his stance that no lawsuit is frivolous until the court decides.

Chambers said state senators periodically have offered bills prohibiting the filing of certain types of suits. He said his main objective is that the constitution requires that the doors to the courthouse be open to all.

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Anyone see a pattern in this? ABN
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Dr. At Center Of August Searches Lost Job, Has Not Been Charged

TOMS RIVER, N.J., Oct. 5, 2004

(CBS/AP) Federal investigators are destroying the life of a New York doctor by wrongly linking him to fatal 2001 anthrax mailings, his lawyer said Monday.

Agents descended on the Wellsville, N.Y., home of Dr. Kenneth Berry on Aug. 5, as well as his parents' New Jersey shore summer home, for searches described by an FBI spokesman as part of the anthrax investigation. Berry has not been charged.

That same day, the doctor, who founded an organization in 1997 that trains medical professionals to respond to chemical and biological attacks, was arrested after a domestic dispute at a Point Pleasant Beach, N.J., motel.

"I believe the family cracked under the pressure," Berry's lawyer, Clifford Lazzaro, said outside court after a hearing was postponed in that case.

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By RICHARD SPERTZEL
August 5, 2008

Over the past week the media was gripped by the news that the FBI was about to charge Bruce Ivins, a leading anthrax expert, as the man responsible for the anthrax letter attacks in September/October 2001.

But despite the seemingly powerful narrative that Ivins committed suicide because investigators were closing in, this is still far from a shut case. The FBI needs to explain why it zeroed in on Ivins, how he could have made the anthrax mailed to lawmakers and the media, and how he (or anyone else) could have pulled off the attacks, acting alone.

I believe this is another mistake in the investigation.

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THE ANTHRAX ATTACKS AND THE ASSAULT ON CIVIL LIBERTIES

FLASHBACK: LAWYER: ANTHRAX PROBE MD REELING

Good essay, good work, smart man. But Glenn, what about the FLOOD of leaks in the government's 9/11 case? Remember, the same FBI controlled that "investigation." I love seeing real journalists go for the truth in this Ivins case but cannot figure out what is stopping them when it comes to 9/11. Glenn, be honest with yourself--have you ever seen a photograph of Flight #93, the one that allegedly crashed into a hole in the ground in Pennsylvania? You figured out that there was no real sorority near the mailbox in Princeton for the Ivins case. So what about the wreckage of Flight #93? Where is it and why have photos never been released? Isn't that a very important question? Does the fact that there is no photo and almost no debris at the "crash" scene not indicate that the plane was possibly shot down, as other lines of evidence also indicate? And if it was shot down, what happens to the rest of the official 9/11 story? Too weird? I know, but look at this anthrax case. It's pretty weird, too, which is my point. ABN
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Glenn Greenwald
Tuesday Aug. 5, 2008

It's certainly possible that once the FBI closes its investigation and then formally unveils its evidence -- which apparently will happen tomorrow -- a very convincing case will be made that Bruce Ivins perpetrated the anthrax attacks and did so alone. But what has been revealed thus far -- through the standard ritual of selected Government leaks which the establishment media, which some exceptions, just mindlessly re-prints no matter how frivolous -- is creating the opposite impression. The FBI's coordinated leaking is making their claim to have solved the anthrax case appear quite dubious, in some instances laughably so.

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