Colin Powell lies about Iraq at the UN
The 2001 anthrax attacks may be an almost-forgotten aspect of post-9/11 history, but like 9/11 they are still relevant today. They helped facilitate the passage of the draconian Patriot Act and set the template for numerous false-flags in the years since. Several of those attacks have directly targeted legislative bodies with physical intimidation. (See Dr. MacQueen's article: War on Terror or War on Democracy? The Physical Intimidation of Legislatures)
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Here's the transcript of the show:
Harrison: Hi everyone. Welcome back to The Truth Perspective. It's April 16th. In the studio today we have Corey Schink,
Corey: Welcome back everyone.
Harrison: Carolyn McCallum.
Carolyn: Hi. How's everyone going?
Harrison: Elan Martin.
Elan: Hello everyone.
Harrison: And Harrison Koehli, myself. Today we are very pleased to have with us a special guest, Graeme MacQueen. Graeme has a PhD in Buddhist studies from Harvard University and he has taught in McMaster University's religious studies department for 30 years. He became founding director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster and helped develop the BA program in peace studies and oversaw the development of peace building projects in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Croatia and Afghanistan. Graeme was a member of the organizing committee of the Toronto Hearings held on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and he is co-editor of the Journals of 9/11 Studies.
Today we're going to be talking about his book that came out in 2014 - The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy. So welcome to the show Graeme.
Graeme: Thank you very much Harrison.
Harrison: So the book, the 2001 Anthrax Deception, is on the anthrax attacks which I'm sure everyone remembers something about. I remember them. I was in Canada at the time, in high school but thinking back on it, before I read your book, I realize I didn't really know much about them. I thought, okay, anthrax, Al-Qaeda, something in there and maybe some crazy US scientist that stole this stuff and that really the extent of what came to mind when I was thinking about the anthrax attacks. But this book came out in 2014 and there have been a few stories in the news in the couple of years since then. So maybe you could start out by telling us what were the anthrax attacks and why are they still relevant today?
Graeme: Sure. Absolutely. I have to say that my impressions weren't all that different from yours up until a few years ago. I remembered rather vaguely that there were these anthrax attacks. They weren't as big a deal up here in Canada as they were in the US and I had some vague idea that this had turned out to be fraudulent and that the source had been found to be in the US {laughs} rather than in the Middle East. And I thought, "You know what? If that's true, that's kind of important."
By this time I had already studied the 9/11 attacks for some years and I had decided that they were indeed fraudulent and I thought let's look at the anthrax attacks seriously and being a retired guy now, when I decide to look into something seriously, I can do it. I can just clear my desk and say "Okay, let's take a few months and do it properly."
I was really surprised; not just surprised that the anthrax attacks were traced to a US source, because after all it was Americans who were being killed by this and it was considered a big terrorist attack, kind of a big deal that it's an American source, but there was another thing that I hadn't known at all, hadn't even heard rumours of and that is that the anthrax attacks were clearly connected to the 9/11 attacks.
Carolyn: When you began, this was simply "9/11 was pretty weird so let's look into this. This sounds really weird" but it wasn't immediately apparently that the two ran in parallel.
Graeme: It wasn't immediately apparent that they were physically, directly connected. I figured if they both happened in the fall of 2001 and the 9/11 attacks were fraudulent, then it sounded as if probably they were going to turn out to be created by the same people but I didn't know that there was actual evidence that they were directly connected. I found out that they were pretty quickly. Like a lot of this stuff, it's not rocket science. If you actually have the time and you take the time to look for evidence, then there it is.
And I found that out pretty quickly and I thought okay. So I gave a few talks on the anthrax attacks. I didn't pretend to be a big expert. I knew who the experts were in that field and I clearly was not one of them and that was okay. But I gave a few talks and people were interested and they encouraged me. David Ray Griffin who's written a whole bunch of books, at least 10 on the 9/11 attacks, encouraged me to write. He said "It's no good just giving a talk. You have to write it up!"
So I wrote it up initially as an article and it became a long article and one of my friends said "This could be a book" and so that's how it works. Then it became a book. It's a fairly short book but it's a book and Clarity Press in Atlanta, Georgia agreed to publish it to their credit really, because anything like this that questions these so-called terrorist attacks pinned on Muslims is immediately taboo and it becomes difficult to talk about and it becomes difficult to publish it; so all credit to Clarity Press.
And I realize I haven't answered your question Harrison, yet. But I just wanted to say a bit about how I got into this.
Harrison: Well no problem. And before you go on, I just wanted to say that, like you said, the book is short. It's about 200 pages but it is just jam-packed full of interesting stuff and I really recommend it. Even though it's not a 9/11 book per se, it's about the anthrax attacks, it is one of the best 9/11 books out there that I've read. So I just want to recommend it to all of our listeners. It's available, it's affordable and it's an easy-breezy read even though it's jam-packed full of stuff.
Graeme: Well thank you very much. After your having said that I will naturally have to ask you to write a little blurb. Clarity Press collects these on the website. One of the neatest is by Peter Dale Scott because I kind of revere him. He's such an innovator in the study of the deep state and deep politics and he said basically what you said, that he sat down and read it and thought it was one of the best 9/11 books he'd ever read and I thought "That's interesting". That's how he's describing it. And of course it's true. In the end I wrote it to a large extent as a doorway into the issue of 9/11, a doorway that most people aren't familiar with.
So having said all that, I can try and answer your question. You said what were the anthrax attacks. Well okay, the 9/11 attacks happened and directly after that somebody - and by directly after that I mean starting about a week after the 9/11 attacks - somebody in the US started sending out letters with spores of anthrax. We use the term anthrax both to refer to the actual bacteria, bacillus anthracis and also to the disease that bacillus introduces into people.
So the dormant form of the bacteria is spores, tiny, tiny little round spores and somebody had spooned some of these spores into envelopes and had written a little letter to accompany the spores and sent them out. Over the next few weeks people in news agencies initially - because they sent them to ABC and NBC and CBS and so on - began getting strange rashes. This was cutaneous anthrax that they were getting and it was initially not diagnosed. Finally a man named Robert Stevens was admitted to a hospital in Florida on October 3, 2001, was diagnosed as having pulmonary anthrax. That means he had actually breathed the spores in and that's by far the deadliest form of the disease you can get, much more deadly than cutaneous.
It was diagnosed on October 3rd. It was announced to the public on October 4th and he died on October 5th, 2001 and that's when the real scare began because it was only after the announcement of Stevens' having contracted the disease and then having died that anybody was supposed to have known that anthrax was in play. The people getting cutaneous anthrax hadn't been diagnosed. So suddenly then the panic about anthrax begins although, as I hope we'll get into later, the panic actually began before that, which is one of the very fishy things about this whole event.
But anyway, people began dying. Robert Stevens was the first and there were altogether five people who died, altogether 22 confirmed cases of anthrax. Some people think that twice that many people got it. People were taking ciprofloxacin, the antibiotic to get rid of it and also just in case they were to breathe it in and there was a big wave of panic and anxiety in parts of the US which was further promoted by the mass media who kept talking about how scared everybody was.
So it was a very big deal from early October to late November. The last death was I believe November 20th. It of course continued after that and had several major effects in the US politically. So it was a big deal. It was right after 9/11 and many people assumed initially that that's what it was, that it was the same people, that 9/11 had been punch number two and this was the second in a one-two punch and they were part of a single operation and this was scary and promoted all kinds of draconian legislation and foreign wars. I'll draw this little overview to an end in a moment, but just to say the FBI was the agency that was authorized to investigate it, just as it was the agency authorized to investigate 9/11.
Everybody initially assumed the two attacks were connected and once it became clear that in fact the anthrax attacks had come from a source inside the US then the FBI of course had to quickly say "Oh no, they weren't connected. First of all we told you they probably were but now we can say they weren't connected". And the reasons for that are obvious because they threatened to bring down the 9/11 myth.
Carolyn: It was interesting to read your analysis of the four possibilities that have been postulated and how they sort of had to cha-cha back and forth between them as more and more facts came out.
Graeme: That's right.
Carolyn: It was very inept but somehow they managed to pull it off anyway.
Graeme: Yeah.
Harrison: I was reading a couple of articles in the past couple of days to prepare for the interview and one of them was about the FBI whistleblower. This was the guy in charge of the investigation and he came out in I think it was April of last year, 2015, pointing out all the problems with the FBI investigation. But one thing that stood out - maybe we can get into it a bit later - was that this was the FBI and they were doing the investigation out of the Washington field office and I just happened to be reading right now, at the same time, Sibel Edmonds' memoir "Classified Woman" and that's where she was working, the Washington field office. So around the same time that the anthrax attacks were happening, she was working there and of course if anyone knows Sibel's story, she uncovered just so much going on in the FBI with espionage and corruption. It's mind-boggling how corrupt that field office was. Of course she only had access to the translator's portion of the field office but the cover up of the things that she was trying to expose about what was going on there went up the entire chain of command all the way up to Mueller at the time, who was head of the FBI.
Graeme: Yes.
Harrison: I just wanted to throw that in there to give some context. But to get back to the story, we had 9/11 of course on 9/11 and then one week later these letters start going out. It's not until October 4 or 5 that anyone actually gets confirmation that there's an anthrax attack going on.
Graeme: Right.
Harrison: So that was October 4th or 5th. Then one more time marker, as reference for some future discussion that we'll get into, on October 26th is when the Patriot Act was brought into effect and approved.
Graeme: Right.
Harrison: So let's get into some of the things that were happening between 9/18 and the time that the anthrax attacks were actually made public because there's a lot that was going on in those weeks. So this is before anyone knows that there's anthrax. Maybe we can start with just what's going on politically. So after 9/11 there are these attacks and then right away Bush makes a call for some legislation - what was it called? - the authorization for the use of military force. And then shortly after that he called for some more anti-terror legislation which became the Patriot Act.
Graeme: Right.
Harrison: So maybe you can just give us some background about what was going on there and who was involved, what happened.
Graeme: Well you've pointed to two very important things that were going on and they are connected and it's important to see that. So as I point out in the book, one of the huge effects of the anthrax attacks was in causing loss of civil rights for Americans. They directly contributed to getting the Patriot Act passed and also the NSA spying. It's important to remember that. However we cannot de-link that from war. So it's all about going to war as well. 9/11, what happens? All these old guys come on the radio and the TV saying "This is an act of war! This is an act of war!" You get Kissinger, you get Krauthammer, you get Kagen, all kinds of neocons saying "America's been attacked with an act of war." Well what's the significance of that? First of all it means we have to respond with war. If it were a crime after all we would need to have a legal process. And legal processes if they're to be any good require gathering of evidence. They require argument. They require a search for the truth. We don't want any of that.These guys are very explicit about "This is not a crime. We don't a criminal process. We want war. We want to devastate the people who did this." They're amazingly outspoken about this.
And so sure enough Bush comes out a couple of days later and says "Yeah, this was an act of war." Now I'm trying to get people to see how important that is because a number of things follow from that. That's a signal first of all that "we're not going to bother gathering evidence and making arguments and trying to take people into courts of law, looking at international law. That's not what war is about. We're going to attack somebody." That's the first signal.
Secondly, to the extent that we use any judicial process in the war on terror, we're going to set up special military tribunals and those tribunals are not going to be established by the legislature, by Congress. They're not going to be established certainly by the judicial branch. They're going to be established by and responsible to the Secretary of Defence. So they'll be under the executive branch. They'll be under the military and they're not going to have the usual guarantees that Americans expect and - what shall we say - democratic countries in general expect. There will be no such protections. People will be at our mercy in these military tribunals.
So here's how it works. First we declare it an act of war. We say we're going to respond with war. We pervert justice and weaken law by setting up these kangaroo courts to snatch people and put them in Guantanamo Bay and so on. And then of course - as you just mentioned - we get this special resolution passed. It was passed very quickly, I think on September 14th, just a few days after 9/11. And Congress very unwisely approves the use of military force which is what Bush wanted. That means he can now claim he's the commander-in-chief which the US Constitution give the President the right to be.
So now he's commander-in-chief, or at least he says he is and he deserves special powers. He can have his military tribunals. He can ignore this and that, typical restriction. When you look at that resolution, authorization of military force, it's very dangerous. First of all Tom Dashiell, the Senate majority leader who is a democrat, was invited to the White House shortly after 9/11. I think it was on September 12, and he said he was told "We really need Congress to give approval" because as you guys know, the US Constitution gives to Congress the right to declare war. It's not the President's right. So if Bush is going to have any fig leaf at all for attacking all these countries, he needs to get Congress onboard.
Well Tom Dashiell and George Bush are very far apart ideologically but Tom Dashiell, Senate majority leader, democrat, has been swindled like everybody else by 9/11. He's convinced it's Al-Qaeda and America's under attack so he agrees. He agrees the resolution is needed and he even volunteers to be the one to put it forth, to propose it, which really guarantees its acceptance because the republicans already have a majority in the House of Representatives. The democrats have a very slim majority, I think by one person, in the senate and could cause trouble. But he's basically saying "We won't cause trouble. I'll be the one to propose it."
So he proposes it, it goes through with I think just one dissenting vote in all of Congress. So what's happening is people are accepting that it's an act of war, they're accepting that we are going to have to go to war in response. Congress is coming onboard. Everything's falling into place. The President now is commander-in-chief, or at least sees himself that way. He demands extraordinary powers. He sets up kangaroo courts. And the ground is now laid for two things: for military invasions of other countries, first Afghanistan then Iraq; no legal process going on, no attempt to try Bin Laden for example, or to present evidence of guilt. No, this is war. And at the same time when you can convince a population that you're at war and that war is needed and that you're not striking the first blow, the blow was struck against you, you're just defending yourself, that's when you can now say "We're going to restrict your rights because we all know that all citizens have to pull together. You don't get to have democratic rights during a war. This is a national emergency. Everybody needs to pull together."
And that's precisely what was said so that's why Ashcroft, the attorney general, immediately after 9/11 begins to say "We're going to be introducing new legislation. This is going to involve certain restrictions on civil rights." And it's all tied to this notion that "We are at war!" And they keep saying that. "We need this because we are at war!" And there are some further dates of interest there, but I'll just stop here for a moment, take a break and ask you if I'm on the right track.
Carolyn: Oh yeah.
Elan: I think so. What strikes me as incredible with 20/20 hindsight is that the anthrax letters sent to five or six at the most, high profile individuals, Tom Dashiell and Patrick Leahy...
Graeme: Yeah.
Elan: ...I think was also head of an important committee of some kind.
Graeme: Yes; The Senate judiciary committee.
Elan: So if you just look at those two events, these letters going to these incredibly politically powerful people who are instrumental in assisting in bringing about the Patriot Act and the new draconian measures, it's the elephant in the room.
Graeme: Yeah, it really is. It really is.
Carolyn: It's painfully obvious. You make a really interesting point about Senator Dashiell too, that he was alive to the implications of such a sweeping piece of reform and you wrote that he'd modified it in his agreement to shepherd this thing through the senate. He wasn't against it. It wasn't like he was standing there going "We can't do this!" He was actually for it, as you said. But he did change the wording to tighten it up to apply only to 9/11.
Graeme: That's right.
Carolyn: Because the problem is - and you write here "The problem he had with the resolution is that it gave Bush the right to determine matters of fact". Like he got to say what the reality was and having set that down, he says "This is the reality, therefore we can take this, that and the other step." And according to your thesis, this made Dashiell a bit of a target even though he was being so cooperative, is that he would even put this small impediment in the way of this march to war and total powers. And it was so tiny. It wasn't like he was trying to scupper the whole thing {laughter} but it was enough to freak everybody out.
Harrison: But that was right after 9/11, right, so on the 12th and then to the 14th they were dealing with this "use of force" legislation so like you said, Dashiell had some problems with the wording and he changed it a bit. The end result was still pretty terrible when you look at it. But this was still about three weeks or so before any letters were sent to Dashiell and Leahy so Graeme maybe you can lead up to that.
Graeme: Yeah, I wanted to talk about those letters to Dashiell and Leahy but first I'm really glad that you brought up the text of this authorization on military force - several of you brought it up - because I was quite struck by it. So the original resolution was written by people in the White House. It wasn't written by Dashiell. It was sent to him and "This is what we want you to introduce". Well he was shocked by it because the first part has to do with 9/11; "We're authorized to use force against those people who did 9/11". But then there's a second part which says "And we're authorized to use force to prevent such attacks in the future."
And of course Dashiell said "By god! You could use that to justify attacking anybody! You could say 'Oh, looks like Iran might do something against us in the future so this thing authorizes us to attack Iran." So he did cut out that last half and changed it so that it focused on 9/11 but unfortunately what he left gave the President the power to determine who carried out the 9/11 attacks! Think about it! If this had been treated as a crime, then there would have to be an investigation. Who carried out these attacks? And it would have to be credible hopefully, for the international community and then that evidence would have to be presented in a court of law and the accused would have hopefully a lawyer that could give a counter-narrative and could cross-examine, all that stuff. But by passing that legislation they just said "No. Bush gets to determine who did 9/11."
Well half the game has been given away immediately and that's what people have to realize, is that within the first few days after 9/11 the ground was set for all these horrific things that came later. So I'm glad that you pointed that out.
Now the other thing about the attacks on the senators is that these were two very powerful and important senators. Dashiell was senate majority leader. He got to shepherd the democratic senators to encourage them on what they should vote on, to establish a timetable to consult. He's supposed to consult with the republicans and with the White House. It's a very powerful role. And Leahy was chair of the senate judiciary committee which had among its tasks to look very carefully at any legislation that was proposed that might affect the rights of American citizens.
So obviously his committee had to look very closely at the Patriot Act that was being proposed and where necessary to slow it down, to revise it, to stop it, all that kind of thing. And I look at Dashiell and Leahy and I kind of go "Well, it looks from our perspective as if they really didn't do very much." They were swindled, like most people, by 9/11 and they were convinced this had to be passed and they were doing their best to get it through. However we have to give credit where credit is due and that is that they did both put up a little fuss from time to time. I think it's the little fuss that they put up which led to them being sent letters with anthrax spores in them and this is quite astonishing.
Ashcroft is nagging and nagging. I went through all the speeches he gave in that time, September and October, and he's just relentless in saying "We have to pass this new legislation restricting peoples' rights. The democrats are obstructing us. It will be on their heads if another attack comes soon." And so of course Dashiell and Leahy are under all kinds of pressure. They're feeling this. And then finally the administration gets involved and Bush encourages this. He says "This should be passed quickly" and Cheney meets with a bunch of republicans and says "How about October 5th? I would like to see this passed by October 5th at the latest." Now remember this is 2001. So this is still really ramming this through very quickly.
Well guess what? Leahy and Dashiell are the two guys who were responsible for that October 5th deadline being missed. They balk. They put up a fuss and almost immediately after that deadline is missed guess what? Two letters with anthrax spores, very sophisticated, weaponized anthrax spores are sent to precisely those two and only those two senators. It's not rocket science to figure out what's happening here. And this could have killed them of course, so this is direct intimidation of Congress. Of course it helped to get the Patriot Act through Congress.
Carolyn: One of the knock-on effects of that was that effectively from having these letters opened within Congress, I remember you writing that they evacuated the entire building, Congress was dispersed all around the city, they were working in cramped quarters with inadequate equipment, computers, printers, whatever, and I think you described it as a form of strategy of tension.
Graeme: Yeah.
Carolyn: So all of these people were worried. They were all stressed. They can't focus and so it facilitated this bill going through pretty much unscathed.
Graeme: That's right.
Carolyn: Because there simply wasn't the time and wasn't the mental presence, collectively, to really look at it. So it was a very devious manoeuvre.
Graeme: It was devious. And when we see how 9/11 and anthrax were used together, 9/11 shocks everybody. People in Congress are told there's a plane headed for the US capitol. They freak. They scatter from the building. Dashiell says there was no protocol. The capital had never been evacuated like this before. They're running all over the place. They finally drift back timidly in the evening to sing God Bless America on the steps of the capitol. But this is a big intimidation on 9/11.
Then it's followed up. So there's yellow police tape and concrete barriers and everything protecting the capitol after that. It's in a state of constant harassment and fear. They're told not to use their usual licence plates which indicate that they're members of Congress. They shouldn't wear their Congressional pins. They should make sure nobody knows who they are. This is what they're going through. Then the anthrax attacks happen. The whole Hart senate building, as you said, is evacuated and has to be evacuated for several months while it's cleaned up and that's because of the high degree of sophistication of the anthrax that was sent.
Again, they're dispersed all over the place, using other peoples' fax machines and stuff as this Patriot Act is going through. So there's a state of intimidation of Congress that lasts actually over several months and that is happening in this crucial period during the attacks on Afghanistan and the passage of the Patriot Act. It's such a really gross intimidation of the legislative branch.
Elan: Graeme, some years ago I read a statistic where there were a pretty high percentage of people in the US who had tied the attack that the US made in Iraq in I think 2003, with 9/11.
Graeme: Right.
Elan: And reading your book, there were some things that you suggest were responsible for planting the seeds of that connection. Can you speak a little bit about that?
Graeme: Yes. When the anthrax attacks first began nobody knew of course, or nobody supposedly knew, who they were from, who was responsible but it didn't seem like rocket science. Okay, the 9/11 attacks and right after them there's another attack. Clearly terrorists aimed at news agencies and senators; and then of course the text of the letters was open and it was written in this crude, un-idiomatic language with spelling - "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great. You die now." And penicillin is spelt wrong. And at the top of the letter it gives the date as 9-1-1, 9/11.
So in other words here are letters which basically say to people "Hey, we're the ones who did 9/11. We're the same people. We're back for number two and we're Muslims and we want to scare you." In fact one of them says "Are you afraid?" {laughs} In other words that's exactly what terror is. This is pretty gross stuff. And this is what people are getting and they naturally conclude that this is Al-Qaeda, this is Bin Laden's group back for number two. And so a poll taken in early-to-mid October - I don't remember the exact date - revealed not surprisingly, the majority of Americans thought this was Al-Qaeda doing the anthrax attacks.
Now here's where Iraq gets involved. Now we get various experts in the media saying "Well it's true that Al-Qaeda might have a small capacity to make anthrax." They supposedly had set up a little lab in Kandahar or somewhere. "This is pretty sophisticated stuff and we think that you couldn't make this in caves in Afghanistan" or something. "We think a state supplier is giving it to Al-Qaeda." Well gee, who could that be?! And of course immediately they begin saying "It looks like it could be Iraq because we know Iraq had an anthrax program and we suspect they never did get rid of that anthrax. They've still got it and they can use it against us."
This is what I call the double perpetrator hypothesis and it becomes big, starting in the middle of October and you have Senator McCain going on a late night talk show dropping the name of Iraq. "We think maybe this came from Iraq." Then you have newspapers all over the place, the Guardian, here, there everywhere, saying "Experts are speculating that this may have come from Iraq." So the whole "Let's get Iraq" thing starts around the middle of October and it looks like that's where they're going. It looks to me as if that was the original plan; get Al-Qaeda involved first and then say they had a state sponsor which was being claimed all along anyway. The idea of Iraq as a state sponsor from Al-Qaeda by the way, goes back before 9/11. They had planted the seeds for that scenario. "So look! So we'll have to get them both! So we'll attack Afghanistan first and then we'll attack Iraq. It makes perfect sense!"
I think that was the plan and it looked pretty clever. Unfortunately it fell apart pretty quickly and we can talk about that if you like.
Harrison: Yeah, let's get into that because I'm pretty sure that in several newspapers and magazines that were essentially PNAC propaganda rags, a lot of these authors were the first people to make the tie between Iraq and Al-Qaeda and specifically even with the hijackers.
Graeme: Yeah.
Harrison: There was the whole story about Mohammed Atta meeting an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague...
Graeme: Right.
Harrison: ...and so that story was going around for a while. And then the German BILD newspaper reported another story, that they'd interviewed an Israeli intelligence security person who directly witnessed the Iraqi intelligence agent handing over anthrax to Mohammed Atta.
Graeme: {laughing} I'm sorry I'm laughing, but he directly witnessed.
Carolyn: If you're going to lie, you lie big.
Graeme: {more laughter} He witnessed it but he didn't want to do anything about it.
Harrison: So maybe talk a bit about that because that Prague visit was a big part of the tie between Al-Qaeda and Iraq, right? That was the linchpin of the whole story.
Graeme: That's right. Yes. The Prague story was one of those narratives that was clearly meant to do a lot of work. If you have Mohammed Atta - just to remind your listeners - he was supposedly the lead guy among the 19 hijackers and as I recall he was piloting the plane that flew into the north tower. If Mohammed Atta is seen hanging out with an Iraqi political guy or intelligence agent, then that's the connection they want and this means that Al-Qaeda was being sponsored by Iraq. It means that whether it's 9/11 or anything else, obviously Iraq is part of this. And so we start preparing not just for hitting Afghanistan, we start preparing for hitting Iraq. And that story about Atta and the Iraqi grew legs. It became big. It was given astonishing amount of detail. It was confirmed at one point by the folks in Prague and it seemed solid, or at least a naïve reader of the mainstream news would have thought it was solid even though of course as usual, we weren't given any real evidence of it.
It turned out to be complete baloney. There was no such meeting. But this was one of numerous false narratives that were given out during this period. And I must say - this is kind of an aside. I've been studying war for a long time. I've been a peace activist for a long time. I'm not naïve, or at least I thought I wasn't naïve about the mainstream media and the way they report things, but when the people would call them the ministry of propaganda, I used to think that was maybe a little bit shrill, maybe a little bit of an oversimplification. After writing this anthrax book, I'm pretty much prepared to accept that designation-ministry of propaganda - because one paper after another, very widely dispersed, not only the big ones - New York Times, Washington Post - but little newspapers all over the place are reporting all this stuff about 9/11 and anthrax and they're clearly getting these handouts from the government and they're just printing them as news, as fact. It's just a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign.
I'm sorry I didn't know where I was going there, but I wanted to say that.
Harrison: I'll steer you in a direction with that because we had this propaganda barrage about the connections between Al-Qaeda and Iraq, but at the same time in these months, in September and October, like you alluded to earlier, there was talk about anthrax attacks and the danger of bioterrorism. I've got some notes here. On September 22 there were media reports about warnings of the danger of bioterrorism. There were accounts of the possibility that crop-duster planes could be used and retrofitted to disperse biological agents, bio-weapons. And then also there was the Al-Qaeda connection already going on 11 days after 9/11.
Graeme: Right.
Harrison: And then before October 3rd - so we're not sure exactly when - but Cipro sales were already spiking and going up before October 3rd. So this was before anyone knew about the anthrax attacks, people were buying this stuff. Say something about this Cipro stuff because there were people taking it.
Graeme: Yeah.
Harrison: Maybe just comment on that.
Graeme: The general principle is quite interesting. Just ask your listeners to think about this. If somebody's diagnosed with a really scary disease like anthrax - because if you breath this stuff in and develop pulmonary anthrax, chances are somewhere between 75% and 95% that you are going to die. So this is a scary disease. Now when you hear that somebody has got it and that he's sorting wool for a living or anything, there's no reason for this guy to get it, he's a photo shop guy working for a tabloid called the Sun, he's got it and it quickly becomes clear that there's no legitimate reason for him to get it, it looks like a terrorist attack, well my god! You can see why people would start running out and trying to get Cipro which is the antibiotic recommended at the time against anthrax.
So if we were looking at a timeline here we would, as you indicated, expect to see a sudden spike in the sale of Cipro after October 3rd which is when the first anthrax case was identified, alright? But what we actually find is that sales of Cipro went up dramatically before that. Somewhere around the middle of September, a couple of weeks before the first diagnosis, Cipro sales start going up and we're told that there is a panic. We're told there is a run on Cipro, druggists are quoted saying "We can't get enough of the stuff." People are worried. They're worried about an anthrax attack.
So you really have to sit down and say "what's going on?" Why would people be worried about an anthrax attack when there is no sign of anthrax anywhere around? Nobody's been diagnosed. There's been no communication at this point from any foreign governor or terrorist saying "We're going to hit you with anthrax." Nothing. Silence. And yet there's this apparent foreknowledge. And that's what led me to write a whole chapter of the book on foreknowledge.
For example, George Bush and Dick Cheney were put on Cipro on September 11th and that's one of the things that came out. They didn't want to talk about that very much but that became clear. Now if you try to defend that and say "Yeah, but that's just protocol. There's been a major terrorist event. It might be followed by a biological attack so you put the President and Vice President on Cipro as a precaution." The reason why that doesn't work is because there's a lot of other people who start to get the information that it looks like an anthrax attack is coming and one of the journalists for the Washington Post, Richard Cohen, actually says "Oh, yeah. A high official in the Bush administration gave me a tip, namely that I should start taking Cipro." And this is well before Robert Stevens was diagnosed. Nobody was supposed to know that this was required. So he said "I immediately started taking it and I knew about Cipro when most people hadn't even heard of it."
Think about that! A high official in the administration gave him a tip! So the obvious question is did the FBI really go after Richard Cohen and find out who the heck gave him a tip? I've seen no evidence of it. I don't know who gave him the tip. If we found that out we might be able to break the case easily.
So this is the kind of thing that's going on. All kinds of people are taking it. New York Times reporter says that "women are now carrying Cipro in their fashionable little Prada bags in New York" and this is all before anybody's been diagnosed. So yeah, this is fishy. This is really fishy. When you're ever looking at an alleged terrorist event, one of the first things you do is look for suspicious foreknowledge, that somebody knew it was coming. You've got that in spades in the anthrax attacks.
Elan: I was living in New York at the time and I can testify to this. A friend of the family who was in the medical profession - I don't know if she had a Prada bag or not - but she told me one day "I'm on a prescription of Cipro." So I knew one of these people...
Graeme: Yeah.
Elan: ...who had, to the extent that this psychological warfare was working in the US, who had enough fear to go out and start taking this drug. But you spoke of foreknowledge and in your book Graeme, you mention this special operation that was underway only months before the actual anthrax letters were sent out called the Dark Winter exercises.
Graeme: Yes.
Elan: And the parallels that you draw between these exercises and what has actually occurred are quite interesting. Usually when we hear about exercises and things they happen more or less at the same time as a false flag operation. This happened a few months just prior, but no less interesting it seems.
Graeme: Yes. Dark Winter is a bizarre thing. Obviously governments carry out simulations and games and exercises all the time to ensure they'll be prepared. So when I heard that they had carried out a biological warfare exercise a few months before the anthrax attacks occurred, I thought well, it could be just a genuine thing. But the more I looked at it the more I thought oh come on! A lot of the people who were deeply, deeply implicated as suspects in all these fake terrorist events were actual participants in that exercise. And the exercise was not mainly an anthrax exercise. It was mainly smallpox, but there are all kinds of parallels as you mention.
For example it gradually becomes clear that an organization connected to Osama Bin Laden is responsible. Well, that's interesting, just a few month before Osama Bin Laden is accused of 9/11. And then as the exercise progresses it becomes clear that a state is supplying him with the actual biological material. Gee, who could that be? It turns out it's Iraq. So this whole double perpetrator model was tried out several months before the actual anthrax attacks. And you get all kinds of other things. You get them trying out "Oh it looks like we're going to have to restrict civil liberties." And it looks like, "Oh dear! There's attacks on Muslims in the United States taking place, which of course did take place and so on and so forth.
I believe I drew up something like 10 parallels between the two so that it's very hard to look at Dark Winter as an innocent exercise when you compare the two. And in fact I even briefly raised the question - I later gave a paper on this in an academic conference - I said "This really raises the question of what is the difference between an exercise like Dark Winter and an exercise like the anthrax attacks." We tend to say they're completely different. One is a simulation and one is an attack but you could equally well say that the attacks in the fall were a simulation, a lethal simulation; in other words that you use all the main elements of a simulation including leaks to the press and scary announcements on television and all kinds of lamentation articles and accusing Iraq. You do all the things you would do in a good exercise. The main thing that's different is instead of fake anthrax in letters - because Dark Winter included letters to media as well - now you use real anthrax and now you have some real people really dying.
And that makes it noteworthy because you can have any number of exercise simulations and the public doesn't give a damn but as soon as people are dying, the public wakes up. This is very scary because I see this is one of the patterns we're up against. The FBI and the RCMP, for example, promote all kinds of fraudulent terrorist events. We know this. It's a matter of record. But often they don't have much effect on the public. I think there's a very strong, strong temptation there for crossing that line; it may take a few deaths in the next one because as soon as people die it has a much bigger effect.
Carolyn: It certainly had a very strong priming effect on the media, those that participated. You mentioned that Judith Miller and a few other notorious names actually participated in that exercise.
Graeme: That's right.
Carolyn: It made them very quick to jump on the "real event" and they'd already been primed with what to write , when to write the types of stories to put out. It's like they'd been put through their paces and now "Let's do it for real".
Graeme: Oh absolutely. Judith Miller is a fascinating case. Here she was writing a book about biological warfare with two other people and the book was timed so that it came out right as the anthrax attacks were occurring and of course immediately became a bestseller and blah, blah, blah. In the book there's a lot of blaming of Iraq. There's suspicion cast on Russia. All kinds of people are being set up. So that's Judith Miller. But there she is, as you say, in June 2001 in the Dark Winter exercise, she's there playing a journalist, which of course she is.
Carolyn: This was her audition.
Graeme: Well yes, it's kind of hard not to think it is because then the anthrax attacks start and who gets attacked? Well the first wave of letters is sent out to journalists. And guess who gets a letter? Judith Miller. {laughing}
Elan: Wow!
Graeme: Judith Miller's letter was fake anthrax and there were a few letters with fake substances as well as other letters with real substances but that's part of the pattern too. That was part of the pattern in Dark Winter. That's what you do. You create chaos. You send out letters and some have this kind of powder and some have that and some have the most sophisticated anthrax spores ever seen. If you trace through someone like Miller you go oh my god! And then of course as soon as she gets this letter she writes an article about it and it helps promote her book. It's all tied together.
Harrison: Well it strikes me as pretty absurd, that whole scenario because in September you had real anthrax being sent to certain individuals and then fake anthrax being sent to other individuals. Would a real terrorist do that? If you were sending anthrax and you were targeting someone, if you're sending Judith Miller anthrax, why use fake anthrax?
Graeme: It's a good question. I think it is more typical of a state-sponsored false flag attack, then it would be on Al-Qaeda foot soldiers. The Al-Qaeda foot soldiers probably wouldn't use the fake product. They'd probably just use the real.
Harrison: Well Judith Miller's interesting for other reasons too. She was instrumental in the Plame affair.
Graeme: Yes.
Harrison: She was a girlfriend of Lewis Libby who had also had numerous ties to all these PNAC people. Wayne Madsen wrote a report. I haven't been able to back it up though. He said from his sources in intelligence that Libby was a lawyer for some very high-placed Mossad-linked individuals, which wouldn't surprise me.
Graeme: No. It wouldn't surprise me either.
Harrison: So there's Judith Miller in the middle of all of this. Reading the book, I can't remember if you say this or not, but it just struck me that it was like the letter that got sent to her with the fake anthrax. It was a publicity stunt for her book.
Graeme: Yeah, I think that's part of what it was. She kept writing throughout this whole period of the anthrax attacks, articles about the anthrax. She was a big shot. She was very influential and these would get published in the New York Times. It was quite a while before the New York Times eventually found out that she was writing BS and they cut her loose. But that took a while. Meantime she had been in Iraq basically bossing around US military guys in the field, "Go look there" and "Go look there". It's bizarre and you kind of wonder who is this Judith Miller really? Is she just like a flakey journalist or is she on somebody's payroll here? Has she got authority at some level? You have to ask that question.
Corey: Graeme, you mentioned the absolutely lethality of the anthrax virus and I was wondering, could you talk a little bit about how that serves to undermine their entire argument that it was Iraq and Al-Qaeda teaming up to attack America?
Graeme: Right. So first of all, the people who were pushing the Al-Qaeda theory said there was some evidence that Al-Qaeda had a little lab somewhere, I think in Kandahar, where they could make anthrax. Well okay, the guy running the lab had a BA or something {laughing} and under those circumstances you cannot produce a really highly advanced biological weapon. So that was silly, once it was seen just how sophisticated some of this anthrax was. Now there were two different grades of anthrax used. The first grade during the attacks on the press was not all that sophisticated. It was pretty sophisticated but nothing compared to the second product. The product that was used against the senators was really staggering.
So anyway, you can work with Al-Qaeda for a while but pretty soon you have to say "Oh my god, they couldn't have produced this, especially the stuff sent to the senators." So that's when you go to the state-sponsor. Now notice by the way, that any intelligent person would have said the same about the 9/11 attacks. Do we really think that these guys from caves did this attack? This obviously had to have been supported by a state. But anyway, back to the anthrax attacks. So we're looking at Iraq. Unfortunately some scientists who seem not to have been fully briefed on this fraudulent operation actually got hold of the most advanced anthrax spores and looked at them and they said first of all, this isn't Iraqi. And by the way Brian Ross - I forget what network he worked for. Does anyone remember?
Corey: No.
Graeme: Okay, Brian Ross was a pretty major journalist who broke a number of these fraudulent stories during the anthrax attacks and one of them was where he came out and said "Oh, this substance called bentonite has been found in the anthrax mixed in with the spores". What did they describe it as? The "potent substance!" Actually bentonite is just clay and it's used in kitty litter, alright? {laughter} But "the potent substance" was found. And since bentonite was used in the Iraqi product, it's an Iraqi signature. This is like Saddam Hussein signing this stuff. "Oh my god!"
So several articles got published and Brian Ross said he had something like four independent high level sources.
Carolyn: Yeah. He was on ABC news and he started out with three but then he had four by the end of October.
Graeme: That's right.
Carolyn: And it got tied to the Prague story, so it's like a double whammy.
Graeme: That's right. It was given at the same time. So we've got Atta meeting Iraqi agent. We've got Saddam's signature in the anthrax. They were trying really hard here. They were pretty desperate to push their double perpetrator story. But there was dissent within the ranks clearly, because it became clear from scientists who looked at this stuff, including the armed forces institute of pathology - who obviously weren't brought into this plot - they looked at it and they said "There's no bentonite here!" So that story just crumbled. That was really the last serious attempt. This was the end of October, early November. This was the last serious attempt I think.
Well no, there was one more later, but it was one of the last to really try and frame Iraq for this. That project was not working very well. In fact the scientists who'd looked at this said first of all this is the Ames strain of anthrax. Anthrax has different strains or sub-varieties and the anthrax strain was first isolated in the early '80s in the United States and it was very virulent and was used widely in labs in the United States but highly secure labs and it had been given to a few allies but there was not a shred of evidence that Iraq or Al-Qaeda had ever got hold of the Ames strain.
So that was the first giveaway. And the second was the way these spores were weaponized. And by the way, the FBI will contest what I'm saying here. They claim that they weren't weaponized. I think that is such a childish comment that doesn't even bear refuting. To weaponize something means to make it into a weapon and in a case of anthrax it means you're preparing it in a way that makes it more effective and deadly against people. That's really all it means. And it's clear this was done. The spores were very small and uniform and all kinds of refuse had been removed, so we have a very clean product. The spores are just the right size to be breathed in by a human being to get past the nose hairs and so on, and once lodged in the lungs, they were large enough to not be breathed out again. So they're the optimal size as a weapon, but not only that, they are coated in a way that will aerosolize them, because anthrax when it's wild, tends to clump and there's an electrostatic charge and the spores stick together so it doesn't readily form an aerosol.
But this stuff had gotten a coating on the spores which allowed it to float - it became more floaty if you like - to the extent that when the young woman who opened Dashiell's mail for him - and of course these are the people who were at more risk than the senators themselves - when she opened that letter, this white stuff floated out of the envelope and she started to scream and it contaminated, partly through just floating and partly because of getting on peoples' clothing and shoes, the whole building quite rapidly and it even showed the capacity to re-aerosolize, that is when it settled on furniture or whatever, if you bumped that furniture it would take to the air again.
Well wild anthrax doesn't do this. This was stuff that had been treated. Okay, treated by whom? Well a few people were willing to say it even though initially they wouldn't give their names. Experts would say "This looks like our own program. This is what we've been working on for years. We use silica to coat the stuff and we have labs that are experts in aerosolization." So already in October, the US is being mentioned by some of these sources as a possible source of this. And as the year draws to a close by December 2001 it is acknowledged even by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, that gee whiz, it looks like there's a "domestic source" of this anthrax.
I think it's a very interesting term "a domestic source". It's not too scary. You can imagine someone going down to their drugstore. "Excuse me, can I have a little bit of this aerosolized anthrax. {laughter} So what does a domestic source really mean? It means a highly secure laboratory, one of just a few, very small number, tied to US military and intelligence and there are really only three major suspects among US labs; Fort Detrick, Battelle Memorial Institute and Dugway Proving Ground, all of which are connected to the military and intelligence communities. So that's what we're talking about when we say "domestic source".
Harrison: Well Graham, I think that Charles Krauthammer blew everyone out of the water by knowing exactly what was going on because on October 4th before Robert Stevens died, in an article he called this weaponized anthrax, before anyone even knew that it was a terrorist attack, he knew that it was a terrorist attack.
Graeme: Yeah.
Harrison: And in that same article he pretty much gave the game away for the purpose of what this attack was for. I'll quote a sentence from it. This was his goal basically: "Harbour terrorists and your regime dies." So that's what was being set up. And right from the first day, the day before anyone even knew this was anthrax, Krauthammer was saying it was weaponized anthrax and like you said, the plan was to tie this to Iraq, going along with the whole Patriot Act and the Authorization of Force, this was a means to give the US the ability to go and kill people, take over governments, regime change. That was one of the big things about this. It was just this mass campaign.
Graeme: Absolutely. Krauthammer and, as you say, calls it weaponized anthrax and he mentions Iraq specifically. What's that about? There's no evidence Iraq did anything. As you say, there's no evidence even that this is terrorism. And there he is. "You can't make this stuff in caves in Afghanistan. This must come from Iraq." So I think you're right. I think they got some kind of a briefing, these guys. Maybe they weren't able to control him because he shouldn't have come out with that, that early.
Carolyn: No, it's like "Look what I know! I'm really on the inside." But the thing is too, by the end of October they were really faced with a media issue. I think it was by the end of that same October the doubts were coming up, where it was from, etc., so they had to start separating the two issues as fast as they could. So that led to a whole other media blitz.
Graeme: Absolutely, absolutely. It's important that people understand that. We haven't talked very much up to this point about the connections between the anthrax attacks and 9/11. We should do that, but given that quite a bit of effort had been spent connecting those attacks in the first few months, when the anthrax official narrative began to fall apart and this is coming from the US intelligence lab, there was a panic I'm sure. They thought "we have to disconnect these two attacks from now on in everybody's mind." And in a way the FBI's job from that day to the present day has been first of all to get people to forget about the anthrax attacks and to the extent that they think about them to say "Oh no, that's solved. That was a lone nut in the system and it has nothing to do with 9/11."
So my book is really trying to go against the FBI, to say they were connected. They were connected and you have to see that. And that's why even if you're not interested in the anthrax attacks, hopefully you're interested in the granddaddy of all terrorist attacks, 9/11, which is the gift that keeps on giving and it keeps being used. It's a justification of all these outrageous acts. And if you're interested in 9/11 you have to study the anthrax attacks.
Harrison: Graeme, let's get into some of those connections. You've got a whole chapter on them and it's dispersed throughout the book; specifically connections with the hijackers. We can bring back our favourite character - well not so favourite character, Mohammed Atta {laughter} because it's really an absurd story. It's funny but disturbing at the same time because of the significance of it and what it meant, but tell us a bit about the Mohammed Atta story and him trying to get a loan a year or so before 9/11.
Graeme: Right. Well this story again is reported by ABC news, Brian Ross again, deeply implicated. He says that "We've discovered that an employee of the US Department of Agriculture, a woman by the name of Janelle Bryant, was approached by Mohammed Atta and he wanted a loan. There was some kind of a program to help farmers who needed loans so he thought he fit in that category. He had recently come to the US and he explained to Ms. Bryant in her office that he had this dream, which was to fly crop duster planes {laughter} over American fields and he would really like a loan. I think he wanted $650,000. And she was very polite, according to this story, and said "Well I'll see what I can do to help you. What exactly do you want the money for?" "Well, I want to take an ordinary plane, not a crop duster plane, a bigger plane, and modify it so that it can be a crop duster plane, but a crop duster plane with bigger capacity, so that all the spraying that you need to do can be done in one go. You don't have to keep landing and picking up more substance. You can just spray the heck out of whatever you're spraying." And she says "Well that's kind of weird because actually I know a few things about crop duster planes and it's usually essential that they be small and nimble and this doesn't sound like a very nimble plane." And he just brushes it off. He says "Oh I'm an engineer. My name is Mohammed Atta, A-T-T-A" {laughter}.
Carolyn: Get the spelling right.
Graeme: That's right. He doesn't try to hide his identity. He says "I've come from Egypt via" - what does he say? I think it's "Egypt via Afghanistan and I'm an engineer so I can handle this. I can handle the technical problems."
So they continue to talk. She has to give him a little bit of bad news at one point. She says "Well you know you're not an American citizen so you're not really eligible for this." And so he gets upset. He gets irate. He says "What would stop me from going around behind the desk and cutting your throat and then just taking the money from the safe?" I kind of think that would be the moment where she might pick up the phone and ask for security, you know. But instead, no, the ever-calm Ms. Bryant said "Well first of all we don't keep large amounts of cash in the safe and secondly I know karate." {gales of laughter} I'm sorry; I just find this whole story so absurd. "I know karate."
Well for all I know she could have eaten him up. He wasn't a very big guy. But anyway all kinds of other bizarre things happen in that interview. He sees a picture on her wall of Washington, DC with the various monuments including the Pentagon and he says "Oh, I've never seen such a good view from the air of Washington with all these monuments. I want to buy it." And he starts throwing cash down on her desk. And of course you and I are thinking the whole time this is the Al-Qaeda crew who ran a plane into the Pentagon, right? They would want such a photograph. He keeps throwing cash down and she says "No. I won't sell it. It was a gift from a friend."
So this is not enough of a giveaway. He then says to her "You know, how would you feel if people attacked monuments and buildings in your country as they have attacked things in our countries, like Afghanistan where I have just come from?" So he's starting to get irate and he begins praising Osama Bin Laden. {laughter} "This is a very praiseworthy man whom the whole world will eventually know about", right? And then he asks her about security in Washington and security at the World Trade Center. He says he would like to check out these buildings.
It's a totally bizarre interview. He gives away every conceivable thing.
Harrison: And he adds "And I'm a card-carrying member of the group called Al-Qaeda."
Graeme: Right, right. "I'm affiliated with these people." And she sits there supposedly, very blandly, nodding politely. So here's a guy who's supposed to be the head of the most secret and deadly group ever to hit the United States from outside and he gives away the whole game in this interview and he would have brought himself to the attention of security and police and everything else. I mean this is a Department of Agriculture employee whose throat he's threatening to cut!
So anyway, it's pretty clear that this whole thing is a setup and it's a setup in one of two ways and I don't know which way. First of all, this interaction may never have happened. This could be a story that Janelle Bryant and Brian Ross have somehow been induced to tell as pure propaganda. It's possible. I don't have any independent corroboration. The other possibility is that they did actually carry out this dramatic scenario, this play if you like, this enactment. But in that case it's obvious that this so-called Mohammed Atta who may or not be the original actual Mohammed Atta who lived and studied Islam in Egypt, it may not be him at all. But this so-called Mohammed Atta is obviously laying down a trail we're all supposed to follow. This is the kind of thing they did. They did the same thing with the whole crop duster scenario; one story after another of suspect-looking Arabic guys going up to crop duster planes in airports and taking videos of them and asking question, very intrusive.
You have to understand that all this talk about planes with substances and "Gee, could we buy a crop duster plane?" isn't about 9/11. This is all about the anthrax attacks. This is one of the ways you would carry out a devastating biological attack on the United States, by getting a plane that can disperse large quantities of biological weapons from the air and you would do it in a populated area. And that's what these guys are doing, going around in the months before 9/11, running around checking out crop duster planes. And it's one of several scenarios that ties these hijackers - because these are some of the same guys who would later be called the 9/11 hijackers - are out there looking for ways to disperse a biological weapon.
There's one other thing you have to know and that is that US intelligence had been busy promoting the notion that the crop duster plane was considered by Saddam Hussein to be his doomsday weapon and that this is the kind of vehicle he had chosen with which to disperse his biological weapons. So all of the pieces are being put in place here for a 9/11 attack, followed by an anthrax attack by similar people affiliated with the same group and that's what we were supposed to believe.
Harrison: And Judith Miller was one of those journalists who was tying Iraq to the crop dusters.
Graeme: She was.
Harrison: So this whole narrative was being set up. It's remarkable, astounding really, everything that was going on and how this whole narrative was created and then it just kind of fell apart. I guess we'll never know exactly why that happened.
Graeme: Well there were all kinds of references to these deadly, scary crop duster planes until the anthrax attacks - well of course as they eventually happened they were much more low tech - but also as the story fell apart we never heard about crop dusters again. But George Bush did order all crop duster planes in the US grounded after 9/11 on more than one occasion. So there was a very high level pretense that "We're taking this threat very seriously."
Harrison: Graeme, there are two other interesting connections and there was Robert Stevens himself, the first man who died as a result of these attacks, was in Florida. Can you tell us a bit about the hijacker connection to him?
Graeme: Yes. There are quite a few different connections between these so-called 19 hijackers who did 9/11 and the anthrax attacks. So crop duster planes are one but there are others. Now in this case, Robert Stevens, the first person who died from contracting anthrax, was a photo editor for a tabloid in Florida called The Sun. It's connected to the National Enquirer. They were both owned by the same organization, American Media, Inc.
So who was the chief editor of The Sun? A man by the name of Mike Irish and his wife Gloria Irish was a real estate agent. So we have a connection between Gloria Irish and anthrax, not only in the sense that this employee of The Sun had died of it, but also the whole building that AMI was located in was found to be contaminated with anthrax.
So who is Gloria Irish? Well it turns out in her capacity as real estate agent she had found apartments for two of the 19 hijackers. And in fact these apartments in Florida ended up being lived in by four of the hijackers and being indirectly connected to at least six, some say nine, of the 19 hijackers. So here's the connection. Imagine a little police board. You've got Gloria Irish in the middle. She's connected to anthrax and she's connected to 19 hijackers and the connection is pretty direct. When you think about the odds of that being coincidence, it's just tiny, tiny odds. So there's a connection and there are multiple connections in fact between the 19 hijackers and the Florida anthrax stuff, same airports being used.
And here's where we get into the Israeli connection as well. We have a whole bunch of hijackers living in Florida and we have all kinds of Israeli agents living very close to them, in some cases just feet from them. All this is just before the attacks of the fall. It's a real nest of connections.
Harrison: Yeah, Mike Irish knew Robert Stevens for 25 years and Mike himself who was Gloria's husband and the editor-in-chief of The Sun, was a member of the same flight school at which Mohammed Atta was flying out of.
Graeme: Exactly. And some of the hijackers supposedly went to the same gym as the employees of The Sun and several of the hijackers had supposedly taken out subscriptions to The Sun and Gloria Irish by the way, was the real estate agent for the first anthrax victim, Robert Stevens, as well as several of the hijackers. That's a pretty direct connection. And she knew these hijackers. It wasn't like she couldn't remember them. She would say "Oh yeah! Marwan Al-Shehhi. Marwan was very nice. He would always phone me when they were going to miss an appointment and I drove them around town for a long time. I had never met a Muslim before. It was quite interesting for me. Personally, I'm Jewish. I had never met a Muslim." So here's Marwan Al-Shehhi and of course Marwan Al-Shehhi is the guy who's a close friend of Mohammed Atta and if I'm not mistaken is the guy supposedly piloted the plane into the south tower. So there is a nest of connections between the anthrax attacks and the 9/11 attacks.
Carolyn: You could make the case for her being a Zionist?
Graeme: Yes, yes. There's a very good chance, in other words, that she's working for Israel, probably didn't know the whole context, good chance she didn't know what she was doing but was probably instructed to do the following things; "It would be very helpful for us if you did". And of course when she's confronted with all this she says "No, no, no, no, there was no connection. It's all coincidence."
Carolyn: And the FBI's helping her out with that too.
Graeme: The FBI's helping her out, yeah.
Elan: There's another piece about Robert Stevens and I'm not quite sure what to do with it or how to think about it, Graeme.
Graeme: Yeah.
Elan: It seems that up until that time, this photo editor of The Sun had been part of the group that was publishing images and stories about Bush daughters behaving drunkenly and just being stupid that might have threatened to put George Bush in a bad light.
Graeme: Yeah.
Elan: But then there's this other story. We had an investigator here in the US by the name of Sherman Skolnick who was pretty good in his time. He would investigate judicial corruption and he had all of these series concerning how the US was in fact an empire and went into all sorts of various details about the Kennedy assassination, the business doings of Hillary Clinton, etc., etc.
Anyway, one of his assertions was that American media, and particularly Robert Stevens, had access to pictures of George Bush with his alleged male lover...
Harrison: Jeff Gannon?
Elan: No.
Harrison: A different one? {laughter}
Elan: A different one who apparently the secret service knew about.
Graeme: Okay.
Elan: I don't know if you'd ever heard that before, whether or not it's valid, or if it's just coincidence that it was Robert Stevens who was the one who opened up the envelope, even though it was addressed specifically to the photo editor. But it seems that he would have been in a position to greatly further undermine Bush, possibly.
Graeme: These are interesting. I certainly had heard of the one about him portraying Bush's daughters in a bad light. I hadn't heard about the male lover story. I don't know anything about it. We would need to see if there's any corroboration. When I wrote the book I thought about mentioning the first of the two because it was very widely discussed on the internet because let's face it, Stevens worked for "a tabloid". He was a photo editor. You know what that means. You find the worst photographs you could possibly find of someone and then you distort them to make them look even worse, right? I always feel so sorry for movie actors when I see what they do. "Look how she's looking now!!" {laughter} Oh my god!
I don't romanticize Stevens. That's the kind of thing he did. So I'm sure he did quite a job on the Bush daughters. However I didn't put it in my book because I just didn't think it was strong enough. I didn't have enough corroboration. I didn't want to speculate so I left it out, but it's certainly possible that he got in the bad books because otherwise it's not clear why he would be targeted. In fact The Sun really doesn't qualify. It's not up there with the other agencies that were targeted, ABC, NBC, CBS. We can understand them being targeted with anthrax letters, but The Sun?!?
Elan: Exactly.
Graeme: It does seem weird and therefore it's perfectly legitimate to research these questions. Was it Stevens in particular? Was it AMI and what did they have? So if they had compromising photos of George W., then sure that could explain it. I hadn't heard that. I just want to say my book is a first draft of the inquiry. I want people to continue the work so that's all good stuff that people need to look into.
Harrison: There was one other interesting thing in that chapter with the hijackers that you mentioned Graeme and this goes back to the Israeli connection. You mentioned the number of spies that were going around. For any of our listeners who don't know, there were over 100, maybe 200 - I don't even know the number - of alleged art students tramping around the United States.
Carolyn: Not even that. In Canada too.
Harrison: In Canada too.
Carolyn: There was a tiny story about them hitting a few buildings in Calgary.
Harrison: Yes. And it turns out a lot of these were actually doing work for Israeli intelligence and scoping out sensitive locations and people including shadowing DEA officers in their investigations of people involved in drug smuggling. So it looks like a lot of these guys were shadowing these terrorists, these hijackers allegedly. They were living across the street, living next door. They were located next to them in locations in Florida, New Jersey, a couple of other cities that I can't remember right now.
But there's one other guy that wasn't implicated in this scandal. It has to do with Hani Hanjour, the guy that allegedly piloted the flight 77 into the Pentagon.
Graeme: Yes, that's correct.
Harrison: From all the testimony of numerous people who knew him and were involved with his flight training, they all said he was a terrible pilot except the 9/11 Commission got testimony from a guy who said - correct me if I'm wrong - he said that he was a good pilot, right? {laughter}
Graeme: Yes. There's just one guy in the midst of people saying this guy couldn't fly to save his life, we get one guy who says "Oh, he's really quite remarkably good!" {laughter}
Carolyn: And that would be the one the Commission talked to.
Graeme: Yeah, you can tell us more about him. Go ahead.
Harrison: And this guy's name was Eddy Shalev, an ex-IDF officer, so Israeli Defense Forces.
Graeme: Who flew in from Israel.
Harrison: In April 2001, so five months before 9/11 he gets to the states. He's working at this flight training school with the hijackers and he's the one guy that the Commission goes to that says that Hani Hanjour was a great pilot; and then he disappears a couple of years later and no one can find him.
Graeme: That's correct. You've got it. No, there are numerous Israeli ties to this, and just so that your listeners know, this talk about all the Israeli agents in the US, most of them posing as art students, although some of them in New York were under the cover of Urban Moving Systems, this is not controversial. This is not gossip. A DEA US government document was leaked. I don't know who leaked it. I've got a copy of it. You can probably still get it online. It talks very frankly about these art students and the fact that they clearly weren't art students and they were clearly Israeli agents and it gives names and it gives affiliations. What did they do? Well this guy did that.
Of course since military service is compulsory in Israel it's not surprising that they all had a military background but it is interesting when you look in detail at who they were. A surprising number of them were explosive experts. I would have thought having a bunch of foreign agents who are explosive experts, walking around the US just before 9/11, just before the obvious explosive destruction of the World Trade Center, would be a little bit worrisome. But it's not worrisome at all to the FBI. They don't care.
Elan: Maybe now would be a good time Graeme if we went a little bit into how the FBI and the government, having been forced to shift its attention from outside sources of the anthrax to this domestic threat - I forget how you termed it - and how they turned to Steven Hatfill and considered him this person of interest and John Ashcroft's continued projecting some suspicion on this poor fellow.
Graeme: Right. There were several people that the FBI investigated but the two most prominent ones were Steven Hatfill and Bruce Ivins. Before we get into the stories of these particular guys, we should pay attention to what is often overlooked here, and that is that we've had this serious, serious crime, multiple homicide anthrax attacks which show all sorts of evidence about having been planned and coordinated and using very sophisticated stuff from government labs and all this. So what does the FBI decide to look for? A lone wolf! This is a major thing we need to pay attention to. All the signs point to a group not a lone wolf. Nonetheless the FBI of course, if they want to cover up the true criminals are going to say "No, no. Lone wolf" and preferably "lone nut". Lone nut is even better than lone wolf because if you can find somebody who's psychologically imbalanced, it's just an anomaly. It tells you nothing about flawed structures, corrupt institutions, nothing. You're always going to have the occasional mentally unbalanced person means nothing. So that's the direction they go.
So first they go after Steven Hatfill who was a guy working in the US as an expert in biological weapons among other things, connected with a number of agencies. The guy has a pretty shady past in some ways. I don't think it's a guy I would particularly want to go and have a beer with. Not only did he inflate his resume, he seems to have been involved in some not-very-nice stuff in the wars in southern Africa. But there was never any evidence that he had actually been the anthrax perpetrator and yet as you say, they had picked him, they chose him at some point as their person of interest and they hounded him mercilessly, in his own house and dredging little ponds near his house and making all sorts of claims. For some reason Hatfill decided to fight back and I'm not sure whether he knew stuff about the real attacks which gave him a little leverage or whether he's just a guy who had had enough. His career was finished. He was drinking too much. He was confined to his house basically. He was depressed.
In any case he fought back and it did go to court and this is one of those few cases in the last couple of decades where the court seems to do something reasonable in this area and the judge said "Well there's no evidence." He threw it out and Hatfill was able to sue - I don't remember who it is, whether you sue the department of justice or what agency - but successfully got I think it was $2.5 million.
Carolyn: Actually $5.82. He cleaned up.
Graeme: Oh, sorry. Alright. Well you see that's what happens when you wrote the book two years ago. {laughter}
Carolyn: No, he made out. He really did well.
Graeme: He made out like a bandit.
Carolyn: Well apparently he was a bandit.
Graeme: I asked a guy who knows a lot about the anthrax attacks "How do you think Hatfill managed to win that and get the five million or whatever?" and he said "Well, I think Hatfill knew stuff and I think he basically said to them "You pay me or I'm going to come forward." Now do I know that's true? No I don't. I like to think of people as innocent until proven guilty so my official position on Hatfill is I might not like the guy for his political leanings, but as far as I can tell he had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks.
So he got off and he got some money and hopefully was able to establish some kind of life after that - although it's hard to imagine anyone hiring him after that - and then the FBI went on to their next big find which was Bruce Ivins who turned out to be the perfect guy. He had a PhD. He was an anthrax researcher. He worked in Fort Detrick at the US Army Military Institute of Infectious Diseases and he was an anthrax expert. He had been trying for years to develop an anthrax vaccine and he was a catholic and played the organ for the local church and was well respected in his community and had a good sense of humour and had tried to help the FBI in the early stages of the investigation into the anthrax attack.
But at some point they turned on him and I think they turned on him as the perfect victim when they found out that he had mental health issues and had been on medication and had confessed to some employee friends of his that he had been feeling really down and anxious and all this kind of stuff. When the FBI claimed that the anthrax in the letters derived from a flask under Ivins' care, he seems to have accepted that as true and to have gone into even more anxiety saying: "How could I have been so careless as to let a killer take anthrax from this flask under my care?"
So he became a mass of nerves and not a guy who was in a very good position to defend himself and fight back and the FBI came to his place of work, they showed up there. They said things to his family. According to his lawyer they offered money to, I think, one of his sons to squeal on his father. They did the nastiest things you could do; grabbing his garbage and surveilling his house in the middle of the night and they made him very nervous indeed. They also said that they were going to seek the death penalty once they had formally indicted him. And this is the lead up to the sudden and mysterious death of Bruce Ivins before he could be indicted by a grand jury. Many people I've talked to said the grand jury would never have indicted him because there was no evidence.
But in any case, that was the process that was coming. Ivins had a lawyer. He was worried about being executed for this and suddenly he shows up dead and we're told that he had killed himself by taking an overdose of Tylenol, I think Tylenol 2 with codeine. His wife had found him comatose. He'd been taken to the hospital and lived maybe a couple of days and that was it.
Well there are so many things you could say about this I don't know where to start. First of all, if he did take his life - which is certainly possible, the man seems to have been mentally tortured and in terrible shape - if he took his life then the FBI drove him to it since they had no good evidence. In fact the whistleblower who you mentioned earlier, who came out last year on this issue, said that the FBI is still sitting on evidence which is exculpatory evidence, in other words it shows that Ivins couldn't have done this. So they knew Ivins didn't do it and yet they went after a mentally ill person and quite possibly drove him to kill himself.
The other possibility of course, which can't be ruled out, is that they just had him killed. To me that would not be unusual. It was clear they didn't want to go to trial. They had a very weak case. Ivins had a good lawyer. Even if it's true that the anthrax came from a flask under his protection, it turns out there were at least 100 people who had access to that flask. So it by no means points to Ivins. They were never able to find a spore anywhere on him. They were never able to demonstrate that he knew how to make that sophisticated product. He didn't even work with dry anthrax. He worked with wet anthrax. He said "I could no more have made that than fly to the moon".
So I think they didn't want it to come to trial and they were happy one way or another that this man died and they wasted no time after he died in saying "Well you know that shows he killed himself out of a sense of guilt so he's the culprit." And I thought, boy talk about shameless! Talk about shameless! You cause the death of somebody, either directly or indirectly, and then you say that death is proof of his guilt and he will go down in history as the anthrax killer even though the evidence is pathetic, because I've read the whole FBI document. It's pathetic. It's ludicrous. So that's the official story. If people listening want to know the FBI's official story, what caused them to finally close the case, well their official anthrax killer is poor old Dr. Bruce Ivins and that's how they closed the case even though the case is pathetically weak.
Corey: Well you even talked in your book about how the FBI was pursuing investigations against Ivins in a criminal situation but then in the civil hearing, since Roberts Stevens' family was suing them, they were actually disproving their own case at the same time.
Graeme: Right.
Corey: Could you talk a little bit about that and how ludicrous that is?
Graeme: That's right. That's correct. A major conflict apparently arose within the Department of Justice, as you say one group, the criminal group was trying desperately to name Ivins the criminal but because the family of the first anthrax victim, Robert Stevens, had launched a criminal suit, you had civil lawyers making the opposite argument and pointing out in all kinds of ways how USAMRID, that particular lab, and Bruce Ivins, couldn't have made this highly weaponized product. Apparently this conflict erupted into shouting in the halls and eventually the ones who wanted to frame Bruce Ivins won out and the other people were scolded and told to quickly settle and to be quiet.
So this has got fraud all over it and I want people to read the book because I want them to see how rotten this is. And once you see how rotten it is, you will be led inevitably into the rottenness of the 9/11 event as well.
Harrison: Graeme, I think we've pretty much covered the anthrax today.
Graeme: Okay!
Harrison: But I wanted to discuss one more thing because you've kind of hinted at this a couple of times throughout the show. The first aspect is the physical intimidation of legislatures. You gave a talk and it was later turned into an article about this very phenomenon, using 9/11 and the anthrax attacks, as well as two incidents that occurred in Canada. The other aspect of this that you've mentioned ties into Ivins as well and the FBI; this use of the technique by the FBI and the RCMP of not only entrapment but essentially creating terrorism and putting people in horrible situation that ruin their lives, sometimes take their lives.
Graeme: Yes.
Harrison: I'm thinking of the story in BC. Can you just give a little background on your article and then maybe we can discuss this case in BC a bit.
Graeme: Are you able to give a link on your site to that article?
Harrison: Yup. I can do that right now. I'll put it on the chat.
Graeme: That's on "Truth and Shadows" website. I don't know at what point it was. I was thinking about a talk I was going to give last November and I realized that there's a theme that nobody seems to be talking about and that is the intimidation of legislatures by the executive branch. This is clearly what's happening in the United States, but it's also it seemed to me, happening in my country, in Canada and I thought why not give a talk where you mention four cases, two American and two Canadian, where this appears to be happening. I suspect it's happening in many other places in the world too, but let's just take these four.
So that's what that talk is about. For the US cases I give the two I've already mentioned today, so I don't have to go through those again. 9/11 itself was a thorough intimidation of the legislature, that is Congress, and the anthrax attacks directly following, continued that intimidation, both in terms of war and in terms of passing repressive legislation at home.
So now I looked to two Canadian cases which are more recent. One is in 2013 and one is in 2014 and I daresay most American listeners don't know anything about them. Before I say a word about them - I'll try and keep this brief - I'll just mention this technique that you mentioned. The FBI and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that works closely with the FBI, have a technique where they find essentially losers, people who are on the borders of society. And of course they love it if they're Muslim in some sense or other. They look very hard to find such people. And then they get some people to dress up as Muslims and to say "Hello brother. I'm from Saudi Arabia (or whatever) and I think we should do jihad together and I've got some money and I've got some weapons. Why don't we blow up the Brooklyn Bridge?" or whatever it is.
And the poor dupe - sometimes they're mentally ill, sometimes they're impoverished, sometimes they're guys who were in jail for various things - the dupe comes into it and of course at the crucial moment the FBI or the RCMP swoop down and arrests them and puts them in jail for the rest of their life or virtually. They get very long sentences. So if anybody wants to know about this, they can read about it in a book by Trevor Aaronson. I think it's called "The Terror Factory". He went through all the files in the US, everybody who's been tried for terrorism since 9/11 so it's a good piece of research.
Anyway, this is what our own Canadian police did in 2013. They found these two pathetic individuals who had apparently self-converted to some form of Islam. They weren't members of a local Islamic community. They were drug addicts. They were extremely poor. They didn't know where their next meal was coming from. So then the RCMP employs over 200 agents, some of whom pretend to be Muslims and come in "Hello brother. Let's create jihad. Let's do this. Let's do that", trying to get these guys to do something. And finally on Canada Day, which is July 1st, it's the equivalent of July 4th in the US, on Canada Day, at the actual provincial legislature in British Columbia, that's the equivalent of a state legislature in the US, suddenly three pressure cooker bombs are found right next to the legislature.
So this is the intimidation of legislatures. Well how did they get there? The RCMP agents pretending to be Muslims, suggested these guys build pressure cooker bombs. They then helped them build the pressure cooker bombs. They then put them in a car and drove them around and said "Oh here is a nice place to put the pressure cooker bombs behind the bushes, next to the legislature." They then swept down of course and arrested them and it became a big court case.
They didn't let the bombs go off. That's one thing they didn't do, but this is the standard pattern that the FBI and the RCMP use. They create terrorist from pathetic individuals and give them the ideas and the means to carry out their act. And this keeps the global war on terror going. This scares the population and it scares legislators.
Now the other activity, which I'll very briefly deal with, happened a year later, 2014 in Canada when a guy is somehow let loose with an actual weapon, a rifle. He shoots to death a man in the Canadian military who's guarding the war memorial in Ottawa and then he drives across the street and then runs into the parliament. You've got to picture this. The Canadian parliament is where our federal legislature meets. He's running down the hall of honour and the Prime Minister and his party are just off the hall on one side and the other major party at the time, the NDP, is in a caucus room just off the other side. It's very easy to get into these rooms and here's a man with a loaded rifle who's just killed somebody, running down the hall.
Well! Shots ring out. Talk about intimidating the legislators! Members of parliament who are behind those doors are terrified. They hear a total of 59 shots in rapid succession and figure they're all going to be murdered. I'm trying to end this off, but I'm trying to give you the gist. It turns out that of those 59 shots, 56 were fired by the security and the police with 9 mm handguns. They shot the perpetrator 31 times. He had a hunting rifle designed in the late 1800s. He was in no position to carry out a major attack. And it turned out that this was the perfect incident which then allowed a bill called C51 in Canada to be passed, which is similar to guess what; the Patriot Act and which takes away crucial rights of the Canadian people and empowers our intelligence agencies and our federal police to do intrusive activities against us.
So I think it's extremely suspicious and I wrote a report on it and you'll find the link to that report if you look at that article I do on "Truth and Shadows". So any Canadian especially, who's interest in this will get a chance to read my document which is called The October 22, 2014 Ottawa Shootings - Why Canadians Need a Public Inquiry.
Harrison: Great. Thank you so much.
Graeme: Yes. So the theme there in both countries is legislators are being intimidated.
Harrison: Before we end the show I just want to read something from that article. This was from I believe a recording - correctly me if I'm wrong - between one of the RCMP moles and one of the so-called attackers in BC.
Graeme: Right.
Harrison: Nuttall. So this is the quote from the guy himself. He says,
Until a couple of days ago I didn't clue in that people were going to die. I've never killed anybody. I'm not a murderer.
Graeme: Exactly.
Harrison: And then you write "At another point Nuttall says clearly that he needs spiritual counselling. 'I want to know in my heart that I did the right thing. I need some spiritual guidance.'" Then you write "The RCMP mole, anxious to discourage these signs of an awakening of conscience replies 'What's the spiritual guidance going to give you?' Nuttall says 'This is about my soul we're talking about, my wife's soul.' The mole says 'All of us, we have our own destiny. Allah chooses it for us. We don't choose it for ourselves.'"
You finish this off by writing "Here is the essence of entrapment. A citizen shows clear signs of being ready to back away from a not yet committed crime, but police, instead of encouraging this tendency, work to beguile, seduce and entrap the citizen into the commission of this crime." I think that just sums it all up right there, just how atrocious this behaviour is on behalf of the RCMP and the FBI, that they would take an individual like this, who was showing signs of not wanting to commit a crime, having second thoughts about it, not wanting to do it, and they egg him on to do it!
Graeme: Absolutely.
Harrison: They incite him to do it! It's criminal!
Graeme: Absolutely! It is criminal. I think every one of those 200 RCMP officers should be on trial for doing that.
Harrison: We've almost gone a full two hours. I think we're all talked out. {laughter}
Carolyn: It's been marvelous.
Harrison: Yes, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show Graeme. We had a great time. We really appreciate everything you do. The book that you wrote - 2001 Anthrax Deception - highly recommended. You've got a couple of websites that you're involved with.
Graeme: Yeah.
Harrison: Can you tell us the URLs for those?
Graeme: No the URLs but you can find them if you Google them. Very quickly, one is the Journal of 9/11 Studies. Just Google that and you'll find it. And the other is called Consensus 9/11, the 9/11 best evidence panel. I'm involved in both of those.
Harrison: Great! Well thanks Graeme. It's been a blast.
Graeme: Thank you. It has been a blast. I had a good time. The two hours went quickly and I have to say you guys make a very good team.
Harrison: Thank you. Thank you so much.
Carolyn: We appreciate that.
Graeme: Okay. Thanks a lot.
Harrison: We'll keep in touch. Thanks Graeme.
Corey: Thank you for your work.
Graeme: Okay, thank you. Bye-bye.
Harrison: So everyone, tune in next week. We hope you liked the show and we hope you buy the book and read it. I'll recommend it again. It's really good!
Corey: Definitely get the book. It's a must read.
Harrison: So everyone take care and tune in to Behind the Headlines tomorrow and we'll be back next week. The Health and Wellness Show is on Fridays. Bye-bye.
Reader Comments
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One Man Asks Why Was Tritium Found At 9/11 Ground Zero
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show featuring such a well spoken and researched guest in Graeme MacQueen – excellent questions that you all asked, which indeed as Graeme said, you make a “good team”.
The Canadian aspects Graeme cites at the end were also spot on, with many more not mentioned. In the latter case, if he had of said that the PM at the time, Harper, was learned to have than ran away from his colleagues in the parliamentary chambers, while locking himself within a broom-closet, now that would have been a good extra in that pathetic case of entrapment.
a wonderful interview. Really useful and explanatory. Very interesting.
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The Boston Bombing Anniversary: Thirteen Unanswered Questions
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