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| A Speculation About Atta's Trip to Maine and About the Anthrax Attacks |
| 2004-12-14 |
| From Scientia Press, an article by Kenneth J. Dillon, president of Spectrum Bioscience, Inc., a medical research company, and the head of the nonprofit Center for Appropriate Technology, which works on nonproliferation and appropriate technology projects in Russia. .... According to an August 27, 2004 article in Canada's National Post, Mohammed Mansour Jabarah, a 22-year old Canadian, told interrogators that he had heard from Abu Abdelrahman, who worked for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, that the November 12, 2001 crash of American Airlines Flight #587 in New York was the result of an al Qaeda shoe bomb. The bomber was "Farouk the Tunisian". Newspaper photographs showed him to be Abderraouf Jdey, a 36-year old Montreal-based Canadian of Tunisian origin. Jdey is one of the seven al Qaeda terrorists listed in the FBI's plea for information from the public in May, 2004. He had emigrated to Canada in 1991, gained citizenship in 1995, and then travelled to Afghanistan where he trained as one of the ten substitutes for the 9/11 attackers. According to KSM, Jdey was slated for pilot training and was to be in the second wave of attacks. Jdey recorded a martyrdom statement in a video later found by American forces in Afghanistan. He returned to Montreal in summer 2001. Al Qaeda had a history of interest in biological weapons. There is evidence that the 9/11 attackers had anthrax in their possession during the months preceding September 11, 2001. They were evidently seeking a way to use a cropduster to spread anthrax over an American city. A medical doctor who treated a future hijacker for a skin lesion has stated that the lesion he treated was consistent with one caused by anthrax. A pharmacist reported to FBI that Mohamed Atta, leader of the 9/11 attacks, had sought a remedy for skin irritation on his hands, which were red from the wrists down. An accompanying fellow terrorist sought a remedy for a cough. If the 9/11 attackers possessed anthrax, they would have had to hand it off to another al Qaeda operative before September 11. Otherwise the precious vials of anthrax, the first and only weapon of mass destruction that al Qaeda had ever possessed, would have been wasted. But they wouldn't necessarily trust just any al Qaeda operative to safeguard and perform with the anthrax, and perhaps they knew very few of al Qaeda's sleepers in North America anyway. They would want to give the anthrax to an operative they knew and trusted, one who would use it to the best effect. Abderraouf Jdey appears to have been exactly such a person. He stands out from the nine other 9/11 substitutes. He was older, from a different country of origin, with Canadian citizenship, with semi-sleeper status, and with a clear designation as part of the second wave. He had trained in Afghanistan simultaneously with Mohamed Atta. He was also well enough educated to have been slated for pilot training. So Jdey was the logical person for Atta to hand off the anthrax to. We can also identify the logical time and place for such a transfer to have occurred. One of the unexplained anomalies in the hijackers' story has been why Atta and a fellow hijacker travelled from Boston to Portland, Maine on September 10. Taking a feeder flight from Portland to Boston on the morning of September 11 caused Atta nearly to miss his connection, and he and his companion had to pass through security questioning twice rather than once--at a significant added risk of detection. So Atta must have had some reason to go to Portland that outweighed such risks. The most obvious explanation would be that he had an important meeting on a subject that required face-to-face contact, not just a veiled telephone conversation. A transaction with someone coming from the North, arranged for outside of Boston to lessen the risk of surveillance. Clearly, Jdey would be a very likely "someone", and handing over the vials of anthrax would furnish a compelling reason for their otherwise risky meeting. If we assume that Jdey indeed was the recipient of vials of anthrax, in Portland or by some other means, then subsequent events could have followed this course: While the 9/11 hijackers had sought access to a cropduster to spread the anthrax over an American city, Jdey presumably saw that receiving training at an American flight school was not in the cards after 9/11. So he had to resort to another method of distributing the anthrax. He decided to mail it. The first mailings took place in September immediately after the initial U.S. Air Force's first bombings in Afghanistan, presumably as a response to them. The second mailings, to Senators Daschle and Leahy, occurred in October and included ultrahigh-quality anthrax. Driving (or taking a train) hundreds of miles from Montreal to Trenton to mail the letters made sense because it perfectly disguised Jdey's Canadian base. The anthrax letters do not show any obvious Gallicisms that would betray that they were from a fluent French-speaker, which Jdey presumably was. But they are consistent with a person who has acquired English as a second language, and there is nothing in them that is inconsistent with Jdey as author. In fact, Jdey is a very plausible author of the anthrax letters. One of the main characteristics or anomalies of the Anthrax Mailer case has been how remarkably elusive the Mailer was both during his period of activity in autumn, 2001 and thereafter. Despite a massive FBI investigation backed by hundreds of thousands of tips from the American public, the Mailer has succeeded in hiding his tracks. Being based in Canada, contrary to every expectation, would nicely explain his elusiveness during his period of activity. The recently leaked Canadian intelligence report from 2002 provides a plausible explanation for the lack of information about Jdey's whereabouts since then (as well as for the cessation of the anthrax mailings): Jdey committed suicide on Flight #587 on November 12, 2001. ..... If he was indeed the Anthrax Mailer, he was a hard-headed man of action. Instead of dreaming about impractical schemes of sowing the anthrax in the skies above a city, he realized that he had to use it before being captured. So he mailed it. Thus, too, in early November, 2001, he recognized that--as the Anthrax Mailer--he was likely to be arrested at any moment, so he would do well to act on his pledge of martyrdom by turning himself into a shoebomber. The first success of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, backed by the U.S. Air Force, could have triggered his decision to leave Canada in early November (the Canadian intelligence report has him leaving Canada in November, though the date is not provided). On November 12 he showed up at Kennedy International Airport and boarded Flight #587. No Canadian passport holders are listed on the final passenger list of Flight #587. Possessor of many aliases, Jdey presumably had several other passports. A number of the passengers were plausibly francophones; perhaps one of them was Jdey. Jdey would presumably have handed whatever remained of the vials of anthrax to a fellow operative in Canada or the northeastern United States. The cessation of the mailings after October, 2001 after their initial success is a third anomaly neatly explained by this account. A fourth anomaly, of course, is that Flight #587 disintegrated and crashed. The scenario sketched out above has the virtue of conforming to the evidence available in a logical manner. Three main perceptions support it: 1) it would powerfully explain Atta's mysterious Portland trip; 2) it would show why the Mailer has proven so elusive and why the mailings ceased; and 3) it fits very well the characteristics that caused Jdey to stand out among the substitute hijackers, and indeed that differentiated him from the actual hijackers as well. Of course, there are major gaps in the evidence. The putative Portland meeting may never have occurred. The cause of the crash of Flight #587 remains controversial. According to the official inquiry, there was no evidence of an explosion on board. Accounts of eyewitnesses from the ground, however, are highly consistent with a shoe bomb explosion. The explosion could have been small enough to be masked by wake turbulence from the preceding JAL aircraft. The co-pilot's frantic manipulation of the rudder would thus have been a hopeless attempt to rescue a doomed aircraft. We don't know when Jdey crossed the border. We have no proof that he ever was in Trenton. It is conceivable that he used messengers to meet with Atta and mail the letters. In short, we don't know a lot that we need to know. .... http://www.scientiapress.com/findings/anthrax.htm ..... First, that the handwriting, linguistic, and putative psychological evidence in the anthrax letters shows them to be a fake seems quite a stretch. No observer has found a single piece of evidence that conclusively demonstrates that the anthrax letters are not what they seem to be. If they are a fake, they are a rather good one, done by someone who had carefully studied the subject and worked hard to develop a mastery of it. Such mastery is unlikely to have been the product of a few days of work between the September 11 terrorist attacks and the September 18 first anthrax letter mailings. This is not inconceivable, but it also isn't easy to believe. If, however, the letters were written by an al Qaeda operative, the opening sentence (without a period)--"This is next"--is a marvelously suggestive and menacing one, the clear suggestion being that al Qaeda has an entire series of dirty weapons at its disposal. Putting this menace in the first sentence is very good literary style, which can make up for the supposedly significant deviation from starting with the traditional invocation of Allah. ..... While the first mailings on September 18 seem to have contained the ordinary Ames strain of anthrax of Fort Detrick, Maryland (U.S. Government) provenance, the second mailings on October 9--to Senators Daschle and Leahy--contained anthrax at a much higher level, reaching the stupendous level of one trillion spores per gram. .... the anthrax in the letters to the senators was clearly the product of an exceptional technical process, with each infinitesmal spore wrapped in its own coating of a special, undisclosed chemical and all of the spores exquisitely stacked. Evidently, in any case, the Mailer had access to more than one batch of anthrax. Several aspects of all this deserve explanation. Why two leading Democratic senators, of all potential U.S. Government targets? A frequent explanation holds that this is a tipoff that the Mailer was a domestic terrorist with a rightwing agenda. Of course, it is hardly likely that the anthrax would have ever reached the senators themselves ..... Senator Leahy was of special interest to al Qaeda as the head of the appropriations panel in charge of aid to Egypt and Israel. In 1998 this panel formulated the "Leahy Law", which permitted the U.S. Government to continue appropriations to military and security units that conduct torture if there are "extraordinary circumstances". Under the Leahy Law, the U.S. has "rendered" Egyptian Islamic Jihad members to the Government of Egypt, a practice that drew the fierce condemnation of Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, leader of the EIJ and second only to Bin Laden in al Qaeda. So targeting Leahy with an anthrax letter must be considered highly characteristic of al Qaeda. ..... If the Mailer has such high-grade anthrax, why didn't he use it in the first mailings? A plausible explanation would be that he doesn't have much of it, that it is precious, in very short supply, that it would not be easy or cheap to come up with more of it. In turn, that suggests that the Mailer acquired this high-quality anthrax from someone else and does not have the capacity to produce it himself. ...... It has Team Effort written all over it. And not just any team. To reach the very demanding specifications of a perfected, ready-to-go high-technology product that these one trillion spores per gram represented required a "national program" with a team of at least a half-dozen highly skilled scientists and engineers working with advanced equipment and many millions of dollars over years of effort in an iterative fashion, with multiple frustrations and setbacks along the road. The scientific, engineering, and project management skills of such a team must have been at an exceptionally high level--suggesting that only a few advanced countries could have accomplished this feat. .... So, which country's government was the perpetrator of this crime against humanity? For that is exactly what one trillion spores per gram of a deadly biowarfare agent are. Developed, of course, in the name of self-defense against a potential aggressor. And how did this superbly refined anthrax come into the hands of the Anthrax Mailer? ..... That leaves two prime suspects: Russia and the UK. The Russians may have obtained the Ames strain via espionage, then worked on it to bring it up to one trillion spores per gram. .... And the UK? In a clearcut violation of the Convention, which states explicitly that no country is to provide biowarfare agents or knowhow to any other country "whatsoever", the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland gave its British counterpart, the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down, the Ames strain in the late 1980s. The reason offered was to permit the British to develop their own defensive measures against the anthrax. The British certainly have the scientific expertise to achieve such an engineering feat. Porton Down is not too far from Oxford University, a leading center of physical chemistry. The justification of developing ultrahigh-quality anthrax in order to test defensive measures could always be applied. A spirit of rivalry with the Americans may have been involved: "We can do better than the Yanks did." And there may have been the motive of seeking a surprise weapon that would strengthen the UK's military posture. How might the various versions of this British anthrax find their way to al Qaeda? Two routes suggest themselves: First, .... If a British scientist in Russian pay had provided small amounts of the original American and successively higher grades of British anthrax to his Russian liaison in the period following the collapse of the Soviet Union, moreover, the chances of diversion would have been very good. ..... A plausible scenario: at a price of perhaps $10 million, a network like that of Victor Bout, ex-Russian officer who became an arms salesman to UN-embargoed countries, would have sold to al Qaeda several vials containing a few grams each of the American strain and the ultrahigh-quality strain of British anthrax. The pattern of small amounts of several grades of anthrax in the letters is very consistent with a situation in which a scientist would have surreptitiously sequestered a few grams each of various batches of anthrax as it was being iteratively upgraded. It is also suggestive of a constraint that would have led the ultimate attacker to decide to disperse the anthrax via mail rather than into the air above a city: that the perpetrator only had a few grams of each type at his disposal. Second, the 1993 partial privatization of the civilian Centre for Applied Microbiology and Research (CAMR) associated with the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down included the transfer of all British Government anthrax vaccine to Porton Products Ltd. Through a series of holding companies, Porton Products is owned in part by the Lebanese-origin Fuad El-Hibri, who had worked for Citibank in Saudi Arabia arranging investments for rich Saudis. El-Hibri subsequently acquired the Michigan Biological Products Institute, thereby forming BioPort, Inc., the sole supplier of anthrax vaccine in the U.S. and UK (see the commentary "FBI Overlooks Foreign Sources of Anthrax" by Edward Jay Epstein in the Wall Street Journal, December 24, 2001). With part of El-Hibri's rationale apparently being to protect Saudi Arabia against Iraqi anthrax, the company managed to acquire at least one virulent Ames strain for testing on animals. What else transpired in the obscure relationships between and among the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment, the civilian CAMR, and Porton Products Ltd is not clear; but surely the opportunities for surreptitious appropriation of a few grams of various grades of anthrax were considerable. The Saudi connection alone makes this route of transmission of the anthrax to al Qaeda very plausible. ..... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #1 Aris (if you happen to see this) this same author has an interesting theory about the Trojans and Etruscans. |
| Posted by: Mike Sylwester 2004-12-14 11:49:19 PM |