fantasy: noun 1. the imagining of improbable or impossible things 2. an idea with no basis in reality 3. a genre of imaginative fiction involving magic and adventure.

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It has been two weeks since the FBI announced the official closing of Amerithrax, its 8+ year investigation into the 2001 Anthrax Atttacks – eighteen months after the “suicide” of their prime suspect.

Time enough to peruse the accompanying report on Dr. Bruce (”Dr. Doom”) Ivins–the allegedly crazed killer with the high US Army security clearences. It is a fascinating piece of business: a serious effort by skilled Government wordsmiths to imagine the mind of a madman, sprinkle in some CSI whiz-bang, and pass it all off as good gum-shooing. No easy task. We have dog-eared our copy and urge citizens to download it for themselves.

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From where we stand, the 92 page “Investigative Summary” is an instant classic–not only for the intensity of its cover our ass narrative, but for its literary bent. Part Don DeLillo, part Dan Brown, this official FBI narrative of the ‘Amerithrax’ affair is screenwriter-ready… You are there as as the G-Men close in on Dr. Ivins in the humid Maryland days and nights of August ‘08 , and you can hear the crazy whispers inside the head of this purported serial killer racked with guilt and fear as he does himself in with handfuls (60!) of Prescription Tylenol #3,–supposedly inducing a two day coma that ended in a final dead silence .

The G-Men scribes use the text of never- before-released Ivins e-mails as the narrative thread in their report, and even uncover a DaVinci code buried in the infamous DEATH TO AMERICA note sent with the deadly powders in the anthrax attacks of 2001. The FBI says that the code– supposedly based on DNA components (“codons”)–in one instance spelled out the name of a women who was presumably one of Ivins’ sexual obsessions . Another ‘message’ revealed his deep seated anger toward New York City.

While it demanded a leap of imagination, there’s no denying that the secret code was kind of cool…

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The FBI's decoding of the text in the 2001 Anthrax letters to NBC's Tom Brokaw. (Courtesy the NY Times)

So lemme get this straight, all those T&As are really amino acid symbols equaling PAT and FNY? Hmmm…

Why the Feds overlooked an interpretation embraced by neo-cons –that the emphasized ATTA’s may have been a final farewell from 9/11 Terrorist Mohammed ATTA—remains a mystery. Talk about not connecting the dots. But that’s just nit-picking, given the larger scandals embedded in this flat-footed effort.

Even the FBI’s head office wasn’t particularly proud of its anthrax detectives. It released the report suddenly with no fanfare, no press opportunities in the deadest of news dead zones–Friday afternoon at 4, the same day as Tiger Wood’s mea culpa. It was no contest. The media spent one breathless day on it and then it was over, we had closure. The biggest FBI investigation in history ended with a whimper and it wasn’t even on the mop-up segments of cable news debating parlors. The only real traction the story got was in the low precincts where Ivins’ off-hour interests in bondage, blind-folded women and sororities titillated.

While mainstream reaction was muted, a hearty band of skeptics came out swinging: They say the case against Dr. Ivins, which never has to be proven in court, screams reasonable doubt. There is no incriminating physical evidence. Ivins had even passed his polygraph. Narrative inconsistencies. Hearsay quotes. Scientific implausibility. Selective prosecution based on circumstantial evidence requiring an X-Files like leap of faith into Mulder and Scully-land.

Paul Kemp, Ivins’ former lawyer, thundered:”There’s absolutely no evidence he did anything…”

Rep. Rush D. Holt, a Democrat from central New Jersey, grumbled: “This has been a closed-minded, closed process from the beginning. Arbitrarily closing the case on a Friday afternoon should not mean the end of this investigation… The evidence the FBI produced would not, I think, stand up in court. But because their prime suspect is dead, and they’re not going to court; they seem satisfied with barely a circumstantial case. The National Academies of Science review of the FBI’s scientific methods in this case won’t be released until summer, but the FBI doesn’t seem to care.”

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D–NY) echoed Holt’s skepticism and called for a probe of the FBI’s casework.

But the cagey Sen. Patrick Leahy, one of the targets of the attacks and a critic of the FBI’s performance, held his fire. The Senator who’s told FBI Director Mueller directly that there was conspiracy and cover-up at the core of the anthrax murders had no comment and refused interviews on the topic. What’s up with that?

The best detailed blog-response came from Dr. Merryl Nass, named in the report as an activist critic who drove Ivins nuts while he was working on a controversial anthrax vaccine for the Army with the private company BioPort.

Forensically, the FBI was taken to task for sidestepping the crucial issue of ‘weaponization” of the attack powder, ignoring Army data and the FBI’s own admission of high levels of the additive silicon—a story we broke on this blog last July.

This failure to grapple with the hard science was picked up by Richard Bernstein in the New York Times and International Herald Tribune which followed veteran investigative reporter and author Edward Jay Epstein’s much discussed piece in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks prior to the closing of the case.

Bottom line, the FBI report did nothing to mollify leading mainstream opinion recently outlined by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald:

“The case against Ivins is so riddled with logical and evidentiary holes that it has generated extreme doubts not merely from typical government skeptics but from the most mainstream establishment-revering, and ideologically disparate sources. Just consider some of the outlets and individuals who have stated unequivocally that the FBI’s case against Ivinis is unpersausive and requires a meaningful investigation: The Washington Post Editorial Page; The New York Times Editorial Page; The Wall St. Journal Editorial Page; the science journal Nature; Senators Pat Leahy, Arlen Specter and Charles Grassley; physicist and Congressman Rush Holt, whose New Jersey district was where the anthrax letters were sent; Dr. Alan Pearson, Director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Control Program at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation; and a vast array of scientific and legal experts in the field.”

So as the case comes to an official close, some big plots holes remain in the story. We’re particularly fascinated with the final days of Bruce Ivins . He spent ten of the last 12 days and nights of his life involuntarily committed to a mental health facility in Baltimore on the basis of remarks he made in a group therapy session led by substance abuse “counselor” Jean Duley who later took out a restraining order against him because she feared for her life.

Interestingly, Ms. Duley was embroiled with legal problems of her own at the time involving multiple D.U.I .charges (!). After Ivins’ death she–along with one-time Ivins’ shrink the very mysterious Dr. David Irwin– dropped from sight.

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0801081anthrax1.html

We find these phone calls to be an interesting piece of the puzzle….

Click here to hear the voice of “evil”… Dr. Ivins calling his counselor angry that she has gotten him arrested and involuntarily committed to a psychiatric faciliity on July 11-12 2008, two weeks before he commits suicide. Sound crazed to you?

Duley suddently reemerged on CNN this week too eager to heap further dirt on the corpse of a troubled man who sought her professional advice. (How exactly did these two hook up in the first place?)

http://www.youtube.com/wath?v=Ju3QqJAWm1k

Too busy fingering Ivins circumstantially, the FBI report fails to shed much light on how other US government labs and contractors who may have had access to the same genetic mutant Ames anthrax as Ivins escaped the Amerithrax net. But there are glimspes of this shadowy germ war complex buried within supporting documents.

Can you find a note–apparently by Ivins –tucked deep inside the two-hundred and fifty-four pages of just-released FBI documents -implying that CIA contractor Battelle made weaponized anthrax spore powder from Ames strain anthrax sent by Ivins and then misled the FBI about its role in the affair?

Prizes also to those who discover another diagram sketched by Ivins, that seems to show that the Ames strain of anthrax was sent to other top-secret labs including the U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground in Utah and interestingly Porton Down in the U.K. We are especially intrigued by Ivins’ note’s reference to the low-profile Southern Research Institute, (Hint: Look for SORES–second arrow from top on right) a government-wired lab with a bad safety record for its anthrax research.

Porton Down, of course, is another top-secret germ war facility we examine in our film ANTHRAX WAR (paperback book coming May 1). The former head of microbiology there and fellow anthrax expert Doctor David Kelly met a similar fate to Ivins – a questionable suicide of an army scientist at the center of anthrax research. And like Ivins the questions on the other side of the pond are not going away.

What inquiring minds want to know hereabouts are:

What drugs was the U.S. Army’s Dr Ivins, a top echelon member of our Bio-Defense Command- given during his commitment to a mental health facility in Baltimore for two weeks prior to his suicide? Did they contribute to his death?

We may never know. Amazingly, no autopsy in this high-profile case was performed.

Was Bruce Ivins driven to suicide by his guilt or by dark actors playing games? Can we honestly rule out foul play?

What does the Ivins family say about all this? Was their loved one a homicidal madman or an innocent driven to suicide by the powers of the U.S. government? Or worse?

Stay tuned. This story is fantastic.

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ghost : noun

1 : the seat of life or intelligence : soul <give up the ghost>
2 : a disembodied soul; especially : the soul of a dead person believed to be an inhabitant of the unseen world or to appear to the living in bodily likeness

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56 years ago, on November 28th 1953, Frank Olson, a US Army scientist, fell to his death from a New York City hotel window. Officially classified an accident, this was the first in a series of mysterious deaths of germ war scientists.

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Frank Olson was an anthrax aerosolization specialist who was based at the US Army’s germ war lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland. At the time of his death he was part of Special Operations, a covert division with close links to the CIA which was run by Sidney Gottlieb, the brainchild of notorious clandestine projects like MKULTRA, Project Artichoke and MKNAOMI. Olson was involved in some of the most highly classified work of the Cold War – germ war, mind control and the development of extreme interrogation methods.

At the time of death his family had no idea of this secret work and were just told that he had fallen in some sort of accident. But more than a decade later, during that short-lived post-Watergate period in 1975, when the Rockefeller Commission looked into the murky world of the CIA, it was revealed that Frank Olson had been secretly given LSD which had caused him to jump. The story made headlines, his family was invited to the White House where President Ford offered the family a public apology, they later met with the CIA director and were eventually awarded a $750,000 settlement.

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But Olson’s son Eric believed there was more to the story and in 1994 had his father’s body exhumed and examined by the country’s leading forensic pathologist who determined that Olson had suffered a blow to the head before falling from the window. In other words he has been assassinated.

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It’s interesting to note that both Frank Olson and Anthrax Attacks suspect Bruce Ivins both worked at Fort Detrick and were both anthrax specialists. Even though Eric Olson believes the cases are very different, their deaths, half a century apart, are somber bookends to the deadly world of germ war research investigated in Anthrax War.

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In fact we also uncovered a connection between Frank Olson and David Kelly and secret human testing experiments at the British Government’s Porton Down lab. Olson had been a liaison between Proton and Fort Detrick and had witnessed experiments on volunteer servicemen there just months before his death. It is alleged that he was present during an experiment that killed a young serviceman volunteer.

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That death and scores of complaints by fellow human guinea-pigs prompted the launching of the largest-ever police investigation by the Wiltshire Police Department in 1999. Code named “Operation Antler” it looked into scores of deaths during decades of experiments conducted at Porton Down from the late 1930s up to 1989, a time when David Kelly was head of their Microbiology Department.

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An official notice from Porton Down calling for volunteers in experiments to test chemical and biological agents.

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After an exhaustive investigation by a team of twenty detectives that stretched over several years, the police recommended the prosecution of Porton Down scientists and senior MOD officials. But in July 2003, just days before David Kelly was found “dead in the woods” the Crown Prosecution Service quietly announced that they were dropping the case. The British press, who had made headlines of the story when the police first announced their investigation in 1999, ignored this latest twist and another dark chapter in germ war history was lost in the shadows.

Were Frank Olson, Bruce Ivins and David Kelly all scientists who wanted out? Had they reached a point in their work at which they could no longer continue in good conscience?

As Eric Olson so eloquently points out in his interview… it’s sort of like the mob… you can never quit the International Bio-Weapons Mafia.

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The Ghost of Frank Olson from Bob Coen and Eric Nadler’s “Dead Silence – Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail” (2009 Counterpoint Press).

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Pandemic • adjective (of a disease) prevalent over a whole country or large part of the world. • noun an outbreak of such a disease.

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Has Biowar broken out in Europe?

A mystery disease, thought at first to be swine flu, has ravaged Ukraine – infecting some of the 1.4 million in the country hit by a pandemic of respiratory disease in the past month. 189 have died, according to official Ukrainian sources. The body count is much higher on the Internet.

Ukrainian President Victor Yuschenko went on national TV and Radio November 4 to declare that “Infections of viral origin, including the A/H1N1 flu, are rapidly spreading across Ukraine….The emergency is evident in the scale of the epidemic: the speed and the geography of its spreading, rapid progress of the illness and the exceptional number of deaths… People are dying. The epidemic is killing doctors. …This is absolutely unprecedented and inconceivable in the 21st century!”

Schools and universities were closed for three weeks and all mass gatherings, including campaign rallies heading into the January 17 presidential contest have been banned.

In began in mid-October: there was a growing number of cases of what many thought was Swine Flu (A/H1N1) in the western part of the Ukraine. But what doctors saw there was puzzling—The first deaths in Teropyl and Lviv were from an ‘atypical pneumonia’ which featured the passing of much blood .

“The flu doesn’t cause hemorrhagic bloodletting and pneumonia.” one ER doctor told the UK’s The Daily Mail. The exotic and deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses, which have no cure, induce those very hemorrhagic symptoms. Some experts were speculating that the H1N1 swine flu virus had mutated into something similar to the Spanish Flu that killed millions around the world in 1918. But the World Heath Organization has said that it has found no evidence the virus has mutated after examining samples taken from 34 victims.

Combine this with reports (officially unconfirmed) by people in western Ukraine that low flying light airplanes were aerosol spraying something over Ukrainian cities, and a nation-wide panic ensued.

People on the ground whom we’ve contacted say large swaths of the Ukranian populace believe the epidemic is due to germ warfare being conducted against them by the United States. Or Russia… or China, Israel, Iran, the Brits, Blackwater. Who knows? One reliable source told us, “They are definitely panicking and talking about bio war.”

We are paying special attention to one curious Ukrainian firm MaxWell- Bio Systems, headed by Ken Alibek, formerly Katian Alibekov, the head of the Soviet Union’s clandestine bio war efforts. During the Cold War Alibekov’s team worked outside the box – putting bubonic plague onto missile warheads and genetically-modifying massive industrial-size quantities of anthrax, ebola and smallpox into deadly “designer germs”.

Alibek’s fellows had even cultivated an especially virulent form of the Marburg virus named “Variant U” after a fellow scientist (Ustinov, Nikolai) met a horrific, bloody death after accidentally becoming infected.

Alibek defected to the west in 1992 and after a lengthy debriefing went into business with the US Government—consulting for the CIA, testifying to Congress about Saddam’s Russian germ connections and starting a graduate program for G-men and spooks in the state of this evil art at a Virginia university . He outlined his bio-warrior escapades in his 1999 book Biohazard.

But in 2007, Alibek suddenly re-located to Kiev and established Maxwell Bio-Systems to develop and market “alternative cancer cures”. Many eyebrows were raised.

Suspicions were fueled when it was learned that MaxWell’s President was Peter Leitner, a veteran Washington insider who previously headed a Republican task force on bio defense and was the President of the Higgins Counterterrorism Research Center where he has helped to train law enforcement, first responders, military, FBI, and CIA personnel. He was also a Senior Fellow and Professor with the Center for Advanced Defense Studies responsible for Terrorism, Intelligence, and Cyber War issues.

Heading up PR for the biocorp was Alex Meerovich a veteran operative for the U.S. State Department with postings in Belarus, St. Petersberg, and Prague

Clearly, among the anti-cancer crowd, MaxWell was way spookier than Sloan Kettering. But that didn’t deter George Bush’s Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez from actually jetting into Kiev to cut the ribbon in June 2008 at the grand opening of MaxWell’s huge $90 million state of the art production facility.

US Commerce Secretary Carlos Guitierrez (L) with Ken Alibek (C) at the official opening in June 2008 of MaxWell pharmaceutical plant in Kiev.

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During the making of Anthrax War we interviewed Alibek at MaxWell HQ in Kiev, his bodyguards nearby. He denied biowar games in Ukraine, and insisted it was all about giving something back to the community. He shared with us his fervent wish that that today’s bio-warriors “are not about to destroy all mankind.” Food for thought, indeed.

Presumably still a traitor to the Russian state, why Alibek left the leafy hills of McLean Virginia for Kiev is worth pondering. Many are interested in what he’s up to over there. A Russian in our employ, with intelligence ties, grabbed several snapshots of Ken when we visited Kiev and wanted us to tell him the square footage of Alibek’s new business digs. And to please draw a diagram of the layout. We politely deferred.

And now just two years later comes all this Death in Ukraine. British medical teams are studying the mystery. Was it a test? An accident? A warning? An early salvo of a deadly dance in an undeclared biological arms race which Vladimir Putin omminously warned about last February in his address to the Russian Duma? No matter what, it’s certainly big news. Naturally the mainstream media has missed the story completely or spun it so as not to offend the International Bio-Terror Military Industrial Complex.

Thus, thank goodness for the Interwebs. The blogosphere has a few Bio-war Correspondents who seem to get the Big Picture. Dr. Rebecca Carley goes too far with the One World Government analysis for our tastes but we trust her news instincts. She gets our Prescient Pulitzer Prize for this recent great lede:

“The biggest story on the Planet today is the outbreak of a very serious Advanced Biological War virus in Europe. The second biggest story on the Planet is the suppression of this story for almost two weeks by the corporate owned mainstream news media….

Read all about it… and get the video that outlines the big picture…

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grass roots: pl.n. (used with a sing. or pl. verb)

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They call it “The Little Apple”—Manhattan, Kansas– a prairie town of 58,000 people deep in the ‘fly-over heartland” of America. It is GOP country, home to Kansas State University, a football-crazy campus with a distinguished veterinary and agricultural faculty, and a place where personnel from the nearby U.S. Army’s Ft. Riley come to shop and play. And if the town’s Chamber of Commerce, local and state reps, and the Kansas congressional delegation have their way, the ‘Little Apple” will also be the site of the nation’s new National Biological and Agricultural Facility (NBAF)—the successor to the very controversial NBAF facility in Plum Island, NY—which local residents say is the genesis of dangerous air-borne diseases such as Lyme’s Disease and West Nile Fever—among the factors which makes the place a most dangerous facility for our public health.

The new NBAF facility is a cornerstone of the national “bio-defense” boom launched in the wake of the 2001 anthrax attacks in which the U.S. government has contracted out $60 billion for a host of new Bio-Safety level 3 and BSL 4 laboratories designed to handle the most deadly pathogens known to humankind. Some observers point out that this “defensive” work is in fact spurring a de facto “germ war arms race” internationally, and they warn that we may be on the road to catastrophe as this spending increases with scarce public debate and a failure to meet federal safety guidelines, causing accidents to proliferate at these sites.

Manhattan–KS was among a handful of finalists vying for the commerce and jobs promised by the NBAF facility. And while local citizen groups/counter-cultural journalists in San Antonio, Texas and Butner, North Carolina successfully moved forward campaigns critical of the proposed facility, Manhattan was chosen by the Department of Homeland Security as its ”winner ”, in part, due to what seemed to bea lack of effective local grass-roots opposition.

Yet ,as the project steam-rolled to ‘victory” and the K-U’s NBAF official website exalted its benefits and safety, a handful of dedicated local activists from the “Manhattan Alliance for Peace and Justice” spearheaded by stalwart Christopher Renner, and the yellow- T-shirted clan of “No NBAF”—stood up and delivered.

No NBAF in Kansas started a grass roots opposition to the the development of the massive complex of top-secret bio-labs and asked us to come to Kansas and screen/discuss “Anthrax War” to stir up public conversation on this crucial issue.

So, last month, we showed the film at the public library and at the student union at Kansas University to more than 250 people. The crowd was receptive but in follow-up Q and A’s, folks appeared genuinely depressed about the future of their community vis a vis this issue.

“What can we do? The fix is in”, was the general sentiment.

Eric Nadler, co-director/co-producer of ANTHRAX WAR suggested that there was indeed an organizing strategy that could be put in place.

He urged the crowd to reach out to officials in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Frederick, Maryland who have drafted stringent local laws—national models for communities forced to deal with deadly pathogens– introduced locally by these new federal efforts.

The screenings and discussions may have made a bit of a difference:

Nadler received extensive coverage on “K-MAN’ talk radio in Manhattan environs.. and in the local paper.

Listen to Eric Nadler’s interview with Community Bridge Radio:

MP3 file

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Truth • noun (pl. truths /trooths, troo&ulth;z/) 1 the quality or state of being true. 2 (also the truth) that which is true as opposed to false. 3 a fact or belief that is accepted as true.

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We, as the producers of ANTHRAX WAR, want our film to be seen by as many audiences as possible. That is why we didn’t think twice when the representatives of the Fifth Annual “9/11 Truth Film Festival” in Oakland, California contacted us and asked if we would be interested in screening our film as part of their 9/11 observances this year. This crowd of so-called ‘truthers’ exists on the fringes of polite political discourse in the U.S. and beyond. And we, filmmakers who rely upon mainstream journalism contacts for funding—i.e. the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, PBS in the States, and the ARTE Network in Europe—know that it is possible that we could experience some professional discomfort by being associated with these folks in any way.

Yet we believe that ‘conspiracy theorists’– as the ‘truthers’– have been labeled/libeled—is just an ugly sobriquet tossed at those who dare to question the official narrative promoted by government officials and broadcast by the mainstream media.

As serious investigative journalists who’ve made it a cardinal principal to challenge the ‘official story’ in most of our work, we feel a certain kinship with these “truth” skeptics and thus readily agreed to show our film at their event held at the beautiful Grand Theatre in Oakland, California Sept 9 and 10th, 2009.

We especially loved the fact that actor Ed Asner pitched our film and the fest on the radio and we enjoyed the publicity burst we received as a result on Pacifica Radio flagship KPFA and assorted media.

The impressive crowd of 500 souls who came to the screening was receptive to the arguments of our film, and we sold bunches of DVDs, trading cards and books during that weekend.

We also took the opportunity to film the events of that 9/11 anniversary weekend in the Bay area, and thus were planted the seeds of a new project of ours that examines the ‘Truth Movement’ as a fascinating cultural and political phenomenon. It is something that for now we’re calling “9/11—Where Truthers Dare”…and filming will continue as events heat up in the coming days….

FYI, our association with the fringe does not seem to have hurt our mainstream reputation. After returning from Oakland, we learned that our film has been nominated for the prestigious PRIX EUROPA for outstanding work in Current Affairs documentary.

The winner wil be announced next month…

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Confront • verb 1 meet face to face in hostility or defiance. 2 (of a problem) present itself to. 3 face up to and deal with (a problem). 4 compel to face or consider something.

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It’s interesting that the filmmakers and authors behind Anthrax War/Dead Silence found ourselves on opposite sides of the globe during the week of 9/11 – Eric Nadler on the West coast of the USA showcasing the film at the 9/11 Truth Film Festival and myself Bob Coen in South Africa at the Tri Continental Human Rights Film Festival in Johannesburg, South Africa… During our investigation we came to realize that -9/11, anthrax and the man who came to be called Doctor Death, the Mengele of the South Africa’s racist apartheid regime, are all part of this global shadow world of secrets.

9/11 and anthrax will always be inexecrably linked – “the one, two punch against our Republic” as Francis Boyle, Professor of International Law put it… even though the anthrax attacks appear to be all but forgotten, not only now eight years after the event, but beginning just months after the anthrax letter attacks spread fear and panic across the USA and beyond when the story faded from the headlines.

While the attacks on the Twin Towers are remembered and ritualized it’s almost as if we just don’t want to know about germ warfare… it’s too scary… too dark. And you know what – it is… and more.

To begin with the very basis of germ weapons research undermines the moral foundations our so called “civilized” societies are built upon – a subversion of the life-sciences into the death-sciences. Instead of finding cures for germs, actually turning them into more efficient and deadly killers.

And it doesn’t get much darker than Doctor Death…

Following leads on the anthrax trail took us across four continents – filming outside the high security perimeter fences of some of the world’s most secret germ war labs (and inside a couple), tracking down and talking to experts and scientists some of whom were members of the so called “International Bio-Weapons Mafia”. None was more chilling than the face to face we got with Doctor Death – Wouter Basson, the army scientist who headed apartheid South Africa’s secret germ war program – Project Coast.

Shrouded in mystery and hidden behind front companies that used worldwide intelligence connections, the shocking activities of the program only emerged after the fall of apartheid – revealing a shockingly sophisticated operation that had 200 scientists developing germ war agents to be used against the country’s black population.

This was one of the very few interviews Doctor Death has given and for the first time he talks candidly about the help the received from the West, his relationship with David Kelly and the creation of “the Black Bomb” an agent that could sterilize blacks without their knowledge.

Larry... Mad as hatter...

And then there’s his strange relationship with Larry Ford, the Mormon gynecologist to Hollywood stars who was also moonlighting for the South Africans and had CIA connections. Some experts we spoke to wonder whether Doctor Death’s program provided a convenient off-shore operation for Western germ ware experimentation.

So it’s especially fitting that the South African premiere of Anthrax War was held in Soweto – the township where the final struggle against apartheid was born and where so much blood was spilled in the fight for freedom. In attendance were some of the “Rainbow Nation” generation, students like Phunulani Khanyile and Mbuso Mkhize who are eager to about the sins of the past of their young democracy and the threat that germ weapons pose to the future of our planet today.

Soweto Anthrax Posse

It’s a reminder of how we are all connected… and it’s time for people everywhere to confront the demons of germ war.

Fall Guy

• noun informal a scapegoat.

One year ago this week, the FBI announced that after an intense seven-year manhunt—reportedly the biggest in Bureau history—it had identified the perpetrator of the infamous 2001 U.S. anthrax attacks. The feds said that Bruce E. Ivins—an Army scientist who worked on anthrax vaccines at Fort Detrick, Maryland—was the lone individual responsible for putting deadly anthrax into the U.S. mail system. Five people died and 22 were injured as a result.

The FBI also announced that unfortunately Ivins had just committed suicide (an overdose of prescription Tylenol), and thus the murder charges against him would not have to be proven in a court of law. It then promptly announced that it was soon to officially close the case. The stunning developments generated several days of huge headlines—and then, like the anthrax attacks themselves, soon became the discourse primarily of internet chat rooms—many of the conspiratorial bent.

Still, legitimate questions about the affair were raised in more conventional quarters. Ivins’ family didn’t believe the official line, charging through their attorney that the FBI hounded an innocent man– with substance abuse and mental health problems—to his grave. And Ivins’ co-workers and some scientific experts claimed Ivins lacked the equipment and the skill set necssary to develop the sophisticated powders sent to the Washington offices of Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

At a hearing in the Senate in September 2008, Leahy who had stayed relatively mum about the attacks for years, thundered to FBI Director Robert Mueller that he believed “there are others who can be charged with murder”. And New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt, who represents the district in Princeton from where the anthrax letters were mailed, has introduced a bill in Congress for an independent probe of the matter.

The key evidence in the case boils down to the murder weapon—the anthrax aerosol, which Army scientists said was the most sophisticated anthrax powder ever seen. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP) says the powder contained an additive –silica—which makes the anthrax a more effective killer. This, say many, is evidence of a sophisticated, perhaps state-sponsored program, and that the anthrax was ‘weaponized”.

The FBI and the experts it hired claim the powder had no additives; that the silica in the spores was “naturally occurring” and could have been made by Ivins after hours with rudimentary equipment. Most tellingly, the FBI has refused to release the AFIP report to date, and has never officially closed the case. Many observers say the data contained therein could destroy the FBI’s case that Ivins acted alone.

Our investigation turned up two interesting pieces of forensic data:

1.We interviewed Dr. Jeff Mohr of the U.S. military’s Dugway Proving Grounds, who examined the powder at the behest of the FBI. He told us on-camera that the anthrax spores were milled down to a size of “ one micron” per spore—which is phenomenally small and evidence of a specialized technical activity beyond Ivins’ capability and the equipment available to him at Ft. Detrick.

2. Working with the office of U.S. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, we got the FBI to admit that the percentage weight of the silica in the anthrax powder sent to Senator Leahy was 1.45%. Several experts told us that no “naturally occurring” silicon content over 1% had ever been discovered. This percentage, they say, is convincing evidence the anthrax was “weaponized”, and required more skills and equipment that Bruce Ivins had available to him.

Download FBI responses to Congressional questions

Even the FBI admits that the case against Ivins is largely circumstantial. The great strides in microbiological forensics it has enlisted –including ground-breaking DNA analysis used in the latter years of the investigation –don’t prove Ivins’ guilt.

This week, the first meeting of a National Academy of Sciences panel asked by the FBI to examine the forensics of their case, took place. All eyes in the community of those who continue to focus their attention on the unsolved mysteries of the anthrax attacks were on Washington. And the first public session was disappointing, with an FBI spokesman deflecting detailed questions , saying they were beyond his personal expertise, and promising answers via written supplmentary evidence. We shall see….

Cover-up

• noun 1 a device or stratagem for masking or concealing. 2 a usually concerted effort to keep an illegal or unethical act or situation from being made public.

The mysterious “suicide” of Doctor David Kelly is the story that refuses to go away… it’s also one of the five strange deaths of germ war scientists we investigate in our film Anthrax War and accompanying book Dead Silence – Fear and Terror on the Anthrax Trail.

As we prepare to hold the film’s UK premiere at the Frontline Club in London, on the sixth anniversary of his death, we find that David Kelly is back in the headlines – the Mail on Sunday reports that a group of leading doctors has just announced that they are mounting a legal challenge to overturn the British government’s official ruling of suicide.

We never believed it from the get go…

Kelly had crossed our radar early in our investigation into the 2001 U.S. Anthrax Attacks – he was perhaps the world’s foremost expert of biological weapons and as such was on our short-list to be interviewed. So when he turned up “dead in the woods” shortly after the invasion of Iraq in a scandal about leaks to the press about the “sexed up” intelligence claims, we thought it important to take a closer look.

In 2004, a few months after his death we traveled to Oxfordshire to examine the evidence for ourselves … While the media circus surrounding Kelly’s death and the subsequent Hutton enquiry was focusing on the details about who said what to whom at the BBC and the Prime Minister’s office, no-one was examining the forensics of Kelly’s demise… and they simply did not make sense.

We tracked down the searcher who discovered Kelly’s body, interviewed the UK’s leading vascular surgeon, John Scurr who clearly explained the unlikelihood of committing suicide by severing the ulnar artery and spoke to the editor of One World Publishers who confirmed that Kelly was seriously contemplating writing a book. It was clear there was much more to this case… especially relating to Kelly’s work for the Department of Defence as a microbiologist specializing in germ warfare and his tenure as head of microbiologist at Porton Down, the UK’s top-secret lab.

Over the course of several years further digging our film and book reveal many new details of Kelly’s key role in the shadowy world of international germ warfare, including:

* His direct dealings, and the UK government’s relationship with apartheid South Africa’s notorious Project Coast program which worked on developing an “ethnic” germ weapon that could target the country’s black population.

* His possible links to illegal human experiments on British servicemen at Porton Down that were the focus of the largest ever police investigation by the the Wisltshire Police which recommended that charges be brought against Porton Down scientists. Unnoticed in the media storm surrounding the Kelly case at the time, the Crown Prosecution Service quietly decided not to pursue with the cases just days before Kelly was found dead on Harrowdown Hill.

* Further evidence that he was planning to write a book that could violate the Official Secrets Act.

Was David Kelly the proverbial “man who know too much”? And what secrets did he take to his grave?

Anthrax War will have its UK premiere at the Frontline Club, London on Friday July 17th at 7:00 PM.

Secret

• adjective 1 not known or seen or not meant to be known or seen by others. 2 fond of having or keeping secrets; secretive.

• noun 1 something secret. 2 a method of achieving something that is not commonly known or recognized: the secret of a happy marriage is compromise. 3 something not properly understood; a mystery: the secrets of the universe.

— DERIVATIVES secrecy noun secretly adverb…

In the weeks following the 2001 Anthrax Attacks an important clue was overlooked. On December 12th 2001, the Baltimore Sun reported that scientists at Dugway, another U.S. Army facility, had made weapons-grade anthrax virtually identical to the spores mailed to U.S. Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy.

The U.S. Army’s Dugway Proving Ground is a vast top-secret testing range that is larger than the state of Rhode Island, hidden in one of the most remote parts of the country – the Great Salt Desert of Utah. It lies in the Great Basin, a unique geographic region surrounded by mountain ranges where all rivers flow towards the center – nothing leaks out. The air space surrounding Dugway is controlled by the military and F-16s regularly screech across the high desert skies. For more than six decades this is where the military has been testing and developing its most deadly weapons.

The base has a toxic legacy that stretches back decades – from the “anthrax plots” still contaminated by deadly spores released in testing exercises to the extermination of thousands of sheep by VX in the neighboring Skull Valley in 1968.

Dugway has a long history of working with anthrax and officially is the only lab in the US capable of “weaponizing” anthrax – the process in which anthrax spores are milled and refined into microscopic single spores which are tiny enough to be breathed into the lungs, making it a deadly killer.

The anthrax powder used in the 2001 Anthrax Attacks is considered by many experts to be the most sophisticated and refined ever seen. Yet the FBI has pinned the blame on U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins who was working at the U.S Army’s Fort Detrick lab in Maryland. Detrick does not have the equipment to weaponize such refined anthrax, nor did Ivins have the skill set to produce this kind of sophisticated powder.

The full scope of activities at Dugway are shrouded in secrecy. Citizen watchdogs at the Citizen Education Project and the Sunshine Project have been keeping an eye on the goings on at Dugway for more than two decades. They have monitored a dramatic expansion of facilities since the anthrax attacks and are concerned about what secrets are hidden in the desert.

What is going on in the labs?

Postscript 6/19/09

Well, here’s a clue from today’s Washington Post…

Inventory Uncovers 9,200 More Pathogens

Laboratory Says Security Is Tighter, but Earlier Count Missed Dangerous Vials

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 18, 2009

An inventory of potentially deadly pathogens at Fort Detrick’s infectious disease laboratory found more than 9,000 vials that had not been accounted for, Army officials said yesterday, raising concerns that officials wouldn’t know whether dangerous toxins were missing…

The vials contained some dangerous pathogens, among them the Ebola virus, anthrax bacteria and botulinum toxin, and less lethal agents such as Venezuelan equine encephalitis virus and the bacterium that causes tularemia…

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Conspiracy • noun (pl. conspiracies) 1 a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful. 2 the action of conspiring.

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On Wednesday June 3, 2009, Anthrax was back on Capitol Hill. We organized a special Congressional screening of “Anthrax War” for
Members of Congress and staff, policy-makers and interested members of the public. The event was well attended. Included in the audience were Congressmen Rush Holt (D-NJ) and Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), co-sponsors of the “Anthrax Attacks Investigation Act of 2009″ which calls for the establishment of a 9-11 style commission to look into the matter. It is quite clear this is the only way that the public will ever get to the bottom of the many troubling questions surrounding the FBI’s handling of its investigation into the anthrax attacks.

Anthrax back on the hill

We urged the hill to consider the following:

On August 1st 2008 the FBI announced that it had found the culprit – U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins, who had worked at the very heart of the U.S. military ‘bio-defense’ forces… but authorities announced that he had just killed himeslf with an overdose of prescription Tylenol before criminal charges could be brought against him. Richard Spertzel, the former Deputy Commander of Fort Detrick – the germ war lab where Ivins worked, summed it up pretty nicely in our film. “Nice and convenient isn’t it” he tolds us, because with Ivins dead the FBI’s case would never have to be proven in a court of law.

In fact, Spertzel and many other experts we spoke with said that it was impossible for Ivins to have manufactured the very sophisticated
“weaponized” anthrax used in the attacks. To “weaponize” anthrax the spores have to be milled and refined into microscopic single spores which are tiny enough to be breathed into the lungs, making it a deadly killer. The anthrax powder used in the 2001 Anthrax Attacks is considered by many experts to be the most sophisticated and refined ever seen. Detrick does not have the equipment to weaponize anthrax, nor did Ivins have the skill set to produce this kind of sophisticated powder.

So is there an anthrax conspiracy? It would seem that high ranking members of government believe there is.

At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in September 2008 Senator Patrick Leahy, one of the targets of the anthrax laced letters sent to Congress, blasted FBI Director Robert Mueller saying he believed there were others, besides Ivins, who could be charged with MURDER!

We are confident that in our reporting we have found a smoking gun – a dagger to the heart of the FBI’s case.

Here is a clue:

Stay tuned for more…