Barbara Honegger

OpEd News

September 26, 2008

The author is a Senior Military Affairs Journalist, and former White House Policy Analyst and Special Assistant to the Assistant to the President in the first Reagan Administration. Ms. Honegger is the author of the 9/11 expose “The Pentagon Attack Papers” http://physics911.net/pdf/honegger.pdf and October Surprise (Tudor, 1989), the first book to reveal the true origins of the Iran side of the Iran/Contra scandal.





By insisting that Bruce Ivins, a biowarfare scientist then with the Army’s Ft. Detrick laboratory, was behind the anthrax attacks, the Bush Administration has officially acknowledged that those attacks were perpetrated by a U.S. Government insider — and not by bin Laden or by Iraq.





Likewise, compelling evidence (1) has demonstrated that the mass murders of 9/11 themselves were perpetrated or enabled by U.S. Government insiders. And while it is well known that President Bush has admitted Iraq was not behind Sept. 11, it is less widely known that bin Laden has never been wanted by the FBI for 9/11 on the agency’s ‘Most Wanted Terrorists’ web page. FBI Director Mueller and his chief investigative spokesman, Rex Tomb, have publicly stated that the reason bin Laden isn’t officially wanted for 9/11 is because there is “no hard evidence” linking him to the Sept. 11 plot. (2)





Because the Administration has thus admitted the anthrax attacks were perpetrated by a U.S. government insider — and Sheila Casey and Barry Kissin have shown in the Sept. 2008 issue of The Rock Creek Free Press that they were a true inside job by the CIA (and DIA) and its contractor Battelle Memorial Institute, not a ‘lone nut’ rogue (3) — if significant evidence links the insider anthrax attacks to 9/11, we can reasonably infer that the same government/military insiders were behind both mass crimes.





So what is the evidence linking anthrax to Sept. 11?





1) Whatever insiders wrote the letters mailed with the anthrax wanted you to believe they were linked to 9/11. As is well known, the date hand written on the anthrax letters is Sept. 11, 2001. Though the official story — that the first letter, to Florida photo journalist Bob Stevens, wasn’t mailed until after 9/11 and so anthrax wasn’t part of the actual 9/11 plot — it’s clear that whoever wrote and dated the letters and added the super-weaponized (3) U.S. military anthrax wanted you to believe there is a direct connection, and that Islamic foreigners were responsible for both.





2) Superweaponizing anthrax was one of Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld’s top priorities. Two days before 9/11, on Sept. 9, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) held a rare press conference in which it revealed that on his first day as Secretary of Defense, Rumsfeld ordered the DIA to take Project Jefferson, a secret and illegal anthrax weaponization program (probably using the Ames strain contained in the anthrax letters) to the next level of lethality and that it had achieved ‘success’ earlier that month in a classified field test. The mainstream press reported this event on Sept. 10, the day before 9/11.

3) Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) preplanned a bio/chem-terrorism exercise likely involving an anthrax scenario for which personnel were in New York City on 9/11, and Giuliani’s just-recent OEM director urged White House staff to go on anti-anthrax Cipro on Sept. 11. Giuliani testified to the 9/11 Commission that his Office of Emergency Management (OEM) had scheduled a bio/chem-terrorism response exercise, called TRIPOD II, to begin the day after 9/11, Sept. 12. But personnel who were to take part in the exercise were already in New York City on Sept. 10th and OEM personnel were cleared out of their WTC7 offices on Sept. 11 and moved to the exercise command center on a New York pier and thus conveniently out of the building when it was brought down by military-grade thermate explosives on 9/11 — controlled demolition charges that required weeks to pre-place, the very weeks the exercise was being planned. New Jersey’s Ft. Monmouth, an Army base just across the water from the Twin Towers, also held a ‘II’ exercise, called TIMELY ALERT II, on 9/11 (4), almost certainly coordinated with Giuliani’s TRIPOD II, further evidence that the latter was also scheduled to begin on Sept. 11.



The then recent director of Mayor Giuliani’s Office of Emergency Management, Jerome “Jerry” Hauer — a bio-warfare expert and one of the signers of the pre-9/11 Project for a New American Century manifesto calling for “a new Pearl Harbor” (such as 9/11) who had been a central player in scripting the TRIPOD II bio-chem attack scenario exercise — was an expert in the response to building collapses (5) and managing director of Kroll Associates before and on 9/11, the company that managed the WTC7 OEM ‘bunker’ and provided ‘security’ for the World Trade Center, including all three buildings brought down by controlled demolition that morning. He thus oversaw personnel with the complete access needed to pre-place explosive charges. It was Hauer who had advocated, despite the 1993 terrorist attack on WTC1, that Giuliani locate his OEM, from which a response to an expected follow up attack on the WTC would need to be orchestrated, next door in WTC7 (6). The new OEM opened on the 23rd floor of WTC7 in June 1999, where Hauer, its director, had his office. Hauer became a National Security Adviser to the National Institutes of Health on Sept. 10, the very day TRIPOD II personnel arrived in New York City, from which new NIH post he managed the Bush Administration’s ‘response’ to the imminent anthrax attacks, which falsely pointed the finger at Iraq and diverted attention from the true insider anthrax killers. Indeed, it was Hauer who zealously pushed the ‘bin Laden did it and just planes-and-fires brought down the Towers’ official story on CBS News on 9/11 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks before anyone not on the inside could have possibly determined the actual cause of the collapses, taking pains to insist that explosives were not involved, when they were. And according to mainstream press reports and a lawsuit by the conservative government watchdog group Judicial Watch, it was Hauer who personally advised the White House to take anti-anthrax Cipro antibiotics on 9/11 (7). [Other reports state White House personnel were put on Cipro nearly a month before the attacks (8). Did Hauer recommend that White House personnel be put on an anti-anthrax antibiotics on 9/11 because he had reason to believe the 9/11 attacks would also involve anthrax and/or because he had advance knowledge there would be subsequent imminent anthrax attacks?





4) The FBI had been told the 9/11 attacks would involve anthrax. On Sept. 11, Janette MacKinlay lived in a fourth floor apartment overlooking what was soon to become ‘the pit’ of the World Trade Center. Her neighbor and close friend Bruno told her later that day or early the next morning that he had been pulled off the street into a bank lobby next to the WTC towers by an FBI agent on the morning of Sept. 11 to protect them from the dust cloud from the collapsing tower, and was told by the agent that “We were told this was going to happen and that it would involve anthrax.” Another FBI agent told a woman about to enter the NBC Bldg. that she should leave immediately because “there are explosives in the building as well as in the WTC.” Clearly, the FBI had been pre-alerted because their own offices were in the WTC — in WTC7 — which, like WTC1 and WTC2, was pre-wired for a controlled demolition take down that day. MacKinlay had the presence of mind to collect the dust from the cloud that poured into her apartment overlooking the ‘pit’, and it is this dust that physicist Prof. Steven Jones has analyzed and in which he found military-grade thermate as well as other high explosives, proving the presence of pre-placed charges throughout the towers to which ‘Al Qaeda’ could not have had access to set.



Though no anthrax has been reported in the dust — though it may not have yet been tested for — if TRIPOD II were at least in part on an anthrax attack scenario, it wouldn’t have used actual anthrax, but an anthrax simulant — an anthrax-like powder that would disperse through the air in a way similar to the real thing. Experts should be consulted for the chemical composition of anthrax simulants and the dust from the WTC collapses tested for these simulants.





5) In the minds of the insider scriptwriters for the Sept. 2001 New York City TRIPOD II emergency response exercise, an attack on the World Trade Center was already associated with bio/chem terrorism. According to respected New York Times science writer William Broad, the plan for the 1993 attack on WTC1, for which alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheihk Mohammed’s nephew Ramzi Yousef is in prison for life, involved a plot to push cyanide into New York City. This is reported in Germs , Broad’s book co-authored with Judith Miller. Though the latter’s credibility has been compromised, Broad remains a respected journalist.





6) Rudolph Giuliani bought the Florida-building crime scene of the first anthrax attack. Anthrax was found throughout the American Media, Inc. (AMI) building in Boca Raton, Florida where the first anthrax letter victim, Robert Stevens, worked — as confirmed by AMI employees whose desks were near Stevens’ whom I have interviewed. A ‘don’t cross’ line was put around the building by the FBI, which had been “told 9/11 was coming and that it would involve anthrax.” AMI was forced to move to another location and put the building up for sale. According to The New York Times, this first anthrax attack crime scene with evidence still in place was then bought (at an anthrax sale price) by former NYC Mayor Giuliani, overseer of the Sept. 11/12 TRIPOD II bio/chem-terrorism probable-anthrax-scenario exercise, who formed a partnership with a decontamination expert qualified to decontaminate the building. Giuliani thus controlled and oversaw the destruction of evidence at both the New York crime scene of the 9/11 attacks, the WTC, ordering the steel containing traces of controlled demolition explosives to be removed, and the crime scene of the first anthrax attack, America Media, Inc, in Florida.



The FBI had already joined the conspiracy to obstruct its own investigation of the anthrax attacks by “agreeing to the request” of Iowa State University College of Veterinary Medicine in Ames, Iowa to destroy its ‘library’ of over 100 vials of the Ames strain gathered since 1928 necessary for a definitive match against the anthrax in the mailed letters, which library was destroyed on Oct. 12, 2001, one week after Bob Stevens became the first victim. (9)



This Florida anthrax is critical because, according to press reports on Ivins’ alleged involvement, the anthrax in the mailed letters — but not the ‘first’ anthrax sent to Stevens (the FBI claims no letter was found in connection with the anthrax recovered from Stevens’ computer keyboard but assumes a ‘missing’ letter) was traced back to a flask in Ivins’ laboratory. The Stevens anthrax is thus key to proving that Ivins, if he was involved at all, did not act alone, as it does not trace back to his flask, and because it’s the closest in time to 9/11 and so most likely to be directly linked to Sept. 11.







Based on the above, a reasonable case can be made that Giuliani’s Sept. 11/12 TRIPOD II bio/chem. terrorism response exercise was at least in part on an anthrax scenario, using an anthrax simulant; that the letters mailed slightly later with real anthrax may have been written or the text drafted for that exercise; and that Giuliani’s former Office of Emergency Management director and close friend Jerome Hauer advised White House staff to take anti-anthrax Cipro on 9/11 because he was afraid the anthrax attack exercise scenario might be about to ‘go live’ just as both the NORAD hijacked-plane ‘exercise’ and the NRO plane-crashing-into-tower ‘exercise’ had already just ‘gone live’ earlier the morning of Sept. 11 as parts of their ‘game’ scenarios suddenly turned horribly real.







If the Florida anthrax doesn’t link back to Ivins’ Ft. Detrick flask and Ivins, who worked on vaccines (bio-defense) and not its weaponization (bio-offense) wasn’t behind the attacks — and neither, the government now claims, was Steven Hatfill whom the Bush Administration just agreed to pay millions of dollars to settle his case — then who was? As detailed in the September issue by Casey and Kissin, the key suspects are CIA/DIA contractor Battelle Memorial Institute (BMI); and, individually, William Patrick and Ken Alibek.







Battelle, a bio-defense contractor located in West Jefferson, Ohio, has exclusive control of the Ames strain contained in the mailed anthrax letters (10) and, in partnership with the CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency, ran Project Jefferson, the government’s covert bio-weapons program whose goal was to develop hyper-weaponized anthrax like that contained in the mailed letters (11) and which Rumsfeld ordered developed to the next level of lethality on his first day as Secretary of Defense.







William Patrick, a former top bio-scientist at Ft. Detrick and close colleague of former Giuliani OEM Director Jerry Hauer, was the mentor of initial FBI ‘person of interest’ in the anthrax attacks Steven Hatfill. Patrick holds five classified patents and trade secrets, including on how to hyper-weaponize anthrax to the 1 trillion spores per gram contained in the letters mailed to Democratic Congressional leaders Senators Daschle and Leahy (12). After leaving Ft. Detrick, he was contracted by Battelle to research and write a report on howmailed letterscould be used as the vector for dispersing weaponized anthrax. (13) On Sept. 9, two days before 9/11, Battelle contractor DIA announced the ‘success’ of Project Jefferson’s anthrax hyper-weaponization program. Following the Sept./Oct. 2001 letter mailings, some of which were reported to contain anthrax at 1 trillion spores per gram, a footnote in Patrick’s report stating that “We have now arrived at the point where we can purify [anthrax] to the extent of 1 trillion spores in a gram” was removed from publicly available copies. (13)







William Patrick worked with his close colleague and friend, former Soviet bio-weapons expert Ken Alibek, at Battelle, which also ran Project Clear Vision, a secret CIA program to reverse engineer dry-powder anthrax bombs produced by the former Soviet Union. Patrick and Alibek were the FBI’s first suspects in the anthrax attacks, but the initial FBI investigative team was taken off that focus and replaced by a new team that diverted attention to Hatfill. Director Mueller himself assured a Senator that the FBI “was not investigating, nor intending to investigate, anyone with, or formerly with, BMI [Battelle]." (14) Battelle is also a contractual partner with BioPort and Scientific Applications International Corporation (SAIC), and directs the anthrax production and experimentation program at the Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, the second ‘home’ in addition to Ft. Detrick of the Ames strain contained in the letters. Hauer and Hatfill worked together at SAIC. (15)





The inside job anthrax attacks were then used as a pretext for the illegal secret domestic wiretap program and assault on the Constitution.





Given the timing, it is now almost certain that the U.S. government insider anthrax attacks were used as the pretext for President Bush’s illegal warrantless domestic wiretap program for which he signed the first ‘authorization’ on Oct. 23, 2001 – right in the middle of the anthrax terror (16). Senator John McCain had just gone on ABC TV, on Oct. 18, to push the disinformation that a nonexistent bentonite additive, purportedly marking the anthrax as coming from Iraq, meant that Saddam Hussein was behind the attacks. To this day, the White House still refuses to provide Congress with this Oct. 23, 2001 presidential authorization for its warrantless inside-the-U.S. surveillance program, and for obvious reason. This is the alleged authorization that we now know, from a footnote referring to it in another now-released document, contains Bush’s shocking claim that the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures do not apply to U.S. military operations conducted inside the United States.







The fact that the Administration continued its secret and illegal domestic spying program long after its was publicly known that the anthrax attacks were the work of one of its own inside military facilities is strong evidence the perpetrators were the same high level officials who used the attacks to justify their illegal surveillance program – the White House itself. Exposing the inside job anthrax mailings as the false pretext for the illegal warrantless domestic wiretap program is thus critical to bringing President Bush and his administration to account for its Reichtag Fire-like attack on Congressional Democratic leaders Daschle and Leahy then pushing for an investigation of the 9/11 attacks and resisting the president’s railroading of the Patriot Act — the analog to Hitler’s Enabling Act passed in the wake of the Reichtag Fire — through Congress, as well as for the mass murders of Sept. 11.





We have seen the Terrorists, and They are U.S. It’s time for under oath pre-impeachment hearings — and pre-court martial hearings — to interrogate these suspects, and all others who worked with them, to expose who wears The Scarlet A.





—————–

Notes

1 The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Expose , by David Ray Griffin, Interlink Books, Sept. 2008.

2 http://www.twf.org/News/Y2006/0608-BinLaden.html

3 “FBI Sweeps Anthrax Under the Rug,” Rock Creek Free Press, Sept. 2008 issue, pp. 1 and 2.

4 http://www.amc.army.mil/amc/pa/oct01.html

5 New York Times, July 27, 1999

6 http://truthmovecom.blogspot.com/2008/07/jerome-hauer-911-suspect-await

ing.html

7 http://www.judicialwatch.org/1967.shtml

8 Crossing the Rubicon , by Michael Ruppert, pp. 505-506.

9 http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/Bioter/theamesstrain.html

10 http://alexconstantine.blogspot.com/2008/08/project-anthrax-cover-up-p

art-five.html

11 The FBI recently held a ‘science’ briefing for reporters on the Ivins evidence in which it made a 180-degree reversal from the results of lab analyses of the anthrax reported by Ft. Detrick and other scientists and officials in the first year following the attacks. Those early analyses showed the spores in the letters to Senators Leahy and Daschle to be super-weaponized: they were found to be highly uniform, extremely small in size, extremely concentrated at 1 trillion per gram, electrically charged, and with a silica coating. At its ‘science’ briefing, the FBI absurdly claimed that mail processing machines caused the additional powderizing and electrical charge found in the samples — both coincidentally common results of weaponization.

12 http://www.strike-the-root.com/columns/rarey/rarey3.html; “Terror Anthrax Linked to Type Made by U.S.,” by William Broad, New York Times, Dec. 3, 2001.

13 Ibid. (Broad, New York Times, Dec. 3, 2001).

14 http://www.worldnewsstand.net/news/anthrax.htm

15 www.tetrahedron.org/articles/anthrax/open_letter_mueller.html;



www.tetrahedron.org/articles/anthrax/anthrax_espionage.html 16 Further confirmation that the insider anthrax attacks were used by the Bush Administration to justify creating the secret illegal warrantless domestic wiretap program is in “Conflict Over Spying Led White House to Brink,” Washington Post, Sept. 14, 2008, by Barton Gellman. Note [6] at the end of this article reveals that the very first memorandum giving the purported legal rationale for the wireless domestic taps, by John Yoo, was dated Oct. 4, 2001 – just after published reports of the first anthrax victim, Bob Stevens, and only one day before his death on Oct. 5. This is contained in Shannen Coffin’s letter to Senator Leahy of Aug. 20, 2007 on the subject of this and other of Yoo’s ‘Top Secret-Codeword’ documents, still not released to Congress.

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