Vietnam was a chemical war for oil, permanently contaminating large regions and countries downriver with Agent Orange, and environmentally the most devastating war in world history. But since 1991, the U.S. has staged four nuclear wars using depleted uranium weaponry, which, like Agent Orange, meets the U.S. government definition of Weapons of Mass Destruction. Vast regions in the Middle East and Central Asia have been permanently contaminated with radiation.

And what about our soldiers? Terry Jemison of the Department of Veterans Affairs reported this week to the American Free Press that “Gulf-era veterans” now on medical disability since 1991 number 518,739, with only 7,035 reported wounded in Iraq in that same 14-year period.

This week the American Free Press dropped a “dirty bomb” on the Pentagon by reporting that eight out of 20 men who served in one unit in the 2003 U.S. military offensive in Iraq now have malignancies. That means that 40 percent of the soldiers in that unit have developed malignancies in just 16 months.

Since these soldiers were exposed to vaccines and depleted uranium (DU) only, this is strong evidence for researchers and scientists working on this issue, that DU is the definitive cause of Gulf War Syndrome. Vaccines are not known to cause cancer. One of the first published researchers on Gulf War Syndrome, who also served in 1991 in Iraq, Dr. Andras Korényi-Both, is in agreement with Barbara Goodno from the Department of Defense’s Deployment Health Support Directorate, that in this war soldiers were not exposed to chemicals, pesticides, bioagents or other suspect causes this time to confuse the issue.

This powerful new evidence is blowing holes in the cover-up perpetrated by the Pentagon and three presidential administrations ever since DU was first used in 1991 in the Persian Gulf War. Fourteen years after the introduction of DU on the battlefield in 1991, the long-term effects have revealed that DU is a death sentence and very nasty stuff.

Scientists studying the biological effects of uranium in the 1960s reported that it targets the DNA. Marion Fulk, a nuclear physical chemist retired from the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab and formerly involved with the Manhattan Project, interprets the new and rapid malignancies in soldiers from the 2003 war as “spectacular … and a matter of concern.”

This evidence shows that of the three effects which DU has on biological systems - radiation, chemical and particulate – the particulate effect from nano-size particles is the most dominant one immediately after exposure and targets the Master Code in the DNA. This is bad news, but it explains why DU causes a myriad of diseases which are difficult to define.

In simple words, DU “trashes the body.” When asked if the main purpose for using it was for destroying things and killing people, Fulk was more specific: “I would say that it is the perfect weapon for killing lots of people.”

Soldiers developing malignancies so quickly since 2003 can be expected to develop multiple cancers from independent causes. This phenomenon has been reported by doctors in hospitals treating civilians following NATO bombing with DU in Yugoslavia in 1998-1999 and the U.S. military invasion of Iraq using DU for the first time in 1991. Medical experts report that this phenomenon of multiple malignancies from unrelated causes has been unknown until now and is a new syndrome associated with internal DU exposure.

Just 467 U.S. personnel were wounded in the three-week Persian Gulf War in 1990-1991. Out of 580,400 soldiers who served in Gulf War I, 11,000 are dead, and by 2000 there were 325,000 on permanent medical disability. This astounding number of disabled vets means that a decade later, 56 percent of those soldiers who served now have medical problems.

The number of disabled vets reported up to 2000 has been increasing by 43,000 every year. Brad Flohr of the Department of Veterans Affairs told American Free Press that he believes there are more disabled vets now than even after World War II.

They brought it home

Not only were soldiers exposed to DU on and off the battlefields, but they brought it home. DU in the semen of soldiers internally contaminated their wives, partners and girlfriends. Tragically, some women in their 20s and 30s who were sexual partners of exposed soldiers developed endometriosis and were forced to have hysterectomies because of health problems.

In a group of 251 soldiers from a study group in Mississippi who had all had normal babies before the Gulf War, 67 percent of their post-war babies were born with severe birth defects. They were born with missing legs, arms, organs or eyes or had immune system and blood diseases. In some veterans’ families now, the only normal or healthy members of the family are the children born before the war.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has stated that they do not keep records of birth defects occurring in families of veterans.

How did they hide it?

Before a new weapons system can be used, it must be fully tested. The blueprint for depleted uranium weapons is a 1943 declassified document from the Manhattan Project.

Harvard President and physicist James B. Conant, who developed poison gas in World War I, was brought into the Manhattan Project by the father of presidential candidate John Kerry. Kerry’s father served at a high level in the Manhattan Project and was a CIA agent.

Conant was chair of the S-1 Poison Gas Committee, which recommended developing poison gas weapons from the radioactive trash of the atomic bomb project in World War II. At that time, it was known that radioactive materials dispersed in bombs from the air, from land vehicles or on the battlefield produced very fine radioactive dust which would penetrate all protective clothing, any gas mask or filter or the skin. By contaminating the lungs and blood, it could kill or cause illness very quickly.

They also recommended it as a permanent terrain contaminant, which could be used to destroy populations by contaminating water supplies and agricultural land with the radioactive dust.

The first DU weapons system was developed for the Navy in 1968, and DU weapons were given to and used by Israel in 1973 under U.S. supervision in the Yom Kippur war against the Arabs.

The Phalanx weapons system, using DU, was tested on the USS Bigelow out of Hunters Point Naval Shipyard in 1977, and DU weapons have been sold by the U.S. to 29 countries.

Military research report summaries detail the testing of DU from 1974-1999 at military testing grounds, bombing and gunnery ranges and at civilian labs under contract. Today 42 states are contaminated with DU from manufacture, testing and deployment.

Women living around these facilities have reported increases in endometriosis, birth defects in babies, leukemia in children and cancers and other diseases in adults. Thousands of tons of DU weapons tested for decades by the Navy on four bombing and gunnery ranges around Fallon, Nevada, is no doubt the cause of the fastest growing leukemia cluster in the U.S. over the past decade. The military denies that DU is the cause.

The medical profession has been active in the cover-up - just as they were in hiding the effects from the American public - of low level radiation from atmospheric testing and nuclear power plants. A medical doctor in Northern California reported being trained by the Pentagon with other doctors, months before the 2003 war started, to diagnose and treat soldiers returning from the 2003 war for mental problems only.

Medical professionals in hospitals and facilities treating returning soldiers were threatened with $10,000 fines if they talked about the soldiers or their medical problems. They were also threatened with jail.

Reporters have also been prevented access to more than 14,000 medically evacuated soldiers flown nightly since the 2003 war in C-150s from Germany who are brought to Walter Reed Hospital near Washington, D.C.

Dr. Robert Gould, former president of the Bay Area chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR), has contacted three medical doctors since February 2004, after I had been invited to speak about DU. Dr. Katharine Thomasson, president of the Oregon chapter of the PSR, informed me that Dr. Gould had contacted her and tried to convince her to cancel her invitation for me to speak about DU at Portland State University on April 12. Although I was able to do a presentation, Dr. Thomasson told me I could only talk about DU in Oregon “and nothing overseas … nothing political.”

Dr. Gould also contacted and discouraged Dr. Ross Wilcox in Toronto, Canada, from inviting me to speak to Physicians for Global Survival (PGS), the Canadian equivalent of PSR, several months later. When that didn’t work, he contacted Dr. Allan Connoly, the Canadian national president of PGS, who was able to cancel my invitation and nearly succeeded in preventing Dr. Wilcox, his own member, from showing photos and presenting details on civilians suffering from DU exposure and cancer provided to him by doctors in southern Iraq.

Dr. Janette Sherman, a former and long-standing member of PSR, reported that she finally quit some time after being invited to lunch by a new PSR executive administrator. After the woman had pumped Dr. Sherman for information all through lunch about her position on key issues, the woman informed Dr. Sherman that her last job had been with the CIA.

How was the truth about DU hidden from military personnel serving in successive DU wars? Before his tragic death, Sen. Paul Wellstone informed Joyce Riley, R.N., B.S.N., executive director of the American Gulf War Veterans Association, that 95 percent of Gulf War veterans had been recycled out of the military by 1995. Any of those continuing in military service were isolated from each other, preventing critical information being transferred to new troops. The “next DU war” had already been planned, and those planning it wanted “no skunk at the garden party.”

The US has a dirty (DU) little (CIA) secret

A new book just published at the American Free Press by Michael Collins Piper, “The High Priests of War: The Secret History of How America’s Neo-Conservative Trotskyites Came to Power and Orchestrated the War Against Iraq as the First Step in Their Drive for Global Empire,” details the early plans for a war against the Arab world by Henry Kissinger and the neo-cons in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That just happens to coincide with getting the DU “show on the road” and the oil crisis in the Middle East, which caused concern not only to President Nixon. The British had been plotting and scheming for control of the oil in Iraq for decades since first using poison gas on the Iraqis and Kurds in 1912.

The book details the creation of the neo-cons by their “godfather” and Trotsky lover Irving Kristol, who pushed for a “war against terrorism” long before 9/11 and was lavishly funded for years by the CIA. His son, William Kristol, is one of the most influential men in the United States.

Both are public relations men for the Israeli lobby’s neo-conservative network, with strong ties to Rupert Murdoch. Kissinger also has ties to this network and the Carlyle Group, who, one could say, have facilitated these omnicidal wars beginning from the time former President Bush took office. It would be easy to say that we are recycling World Wars I and II, with the same faces.

When I asked Vietnam Special Ops Green Beret Capt. John McCarthy, who could have devised this omnicidal plan to use DU to destroy the genetic code and genetic future of large populations of Arabs and Moslems in the Middle East and Central Asia - just coincidentally the areas where most of the world’s oil deposits are located - he replied: “It has all the handprints of Henry Kissinger.”

In Zbignew Brzezinski’s book “The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives,” the map of the Eurasian chessboard includes four regions strategic to U.S. foreign policy. The “South” region corresponds precisely to the regions now contaminated permanently with radiation from U.S. bombs, missiles and bullets made with thousands of tons of DU.

A Japanese professor, Dr. K. Yagasaki, has calculated that 800 tons of DU is the atomicity equivalent of 83,000 Nagasaki bombs. The U.S. has used more DU since 1991 than the atomicity equivalent of 400,000 Nagasaki bombs. Four nuclear wars indeed, and 10 times the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere from atmospheric testing!

No wonder our soldiers, their families and the people of the Middle East, Yugoslavia and Central Asia are sick. But as Henry Kissinger said after Vietnam when our soldiers came home ill from Agent Orange, “Military men are just dumb stupid animals to be used for foreign policy.”

Unfortunately, more and more of those soldiers are men and women with brown skin. And unfortunately, the DU radioactive dust will be carried around the world and deposited in our environments just as the “smog of war” from the 1991 Gulf War was found in deposits in South America, the Himalayas and Hawaii.

In June 2003, the World Health Organization announced in a press release that global cancer rates will increase 50 percent by 2020. What else do they know that they aren’t telling us? I know that depleted uranium is a death sentence … for all of us. We will all die in silent ways.

To learn more

Sources used in this story that readers are encouraged to consult:

American Free Press four-part series on DU by Christopher Bollyn.
Part I: "Depleted Uranium: U.S. Commits War Crime Against Iraq, Humanity,"

Part II: "Cancer Epidemic Caused by U.S. WMD: MD Says
Depleted Uranium Definitively

Part III: "DU Syndrome Stricken Vets Denied Care: Pentagon Hides DU Dangers to Deny Medical Care to Vets",

Part IV: "Pentagon Brass Suppresses Truth About Toxic Weapons: Poisonous Uranium Munitions Threaten World",

August 2004 World Affairs Journal. Leuren Moret:
"Depleted Uranium: The Trojan Horse of Nuclear War,"

August 2004 Coastal Post Online. Carol Sterrit: "Marin
Depleted Uranium Resolution Heats Up - GI's Will Come Home To A Slow Death,"

World Depleted Uranium Weapons Conference, Hamburg, Germany, October 16-19, 2004:

International Criminal Tribunal for Afghanistan. Written opinion of Judge Niloufer Baghwat:

"Discounted Casualties: The Human Cost of Nuclear War" by Akira Tashiro, foreword by Leuren Moret,

Leuren Moret is a geoscientist who has worked around the world on radiation issues, educating citizens, the media, members of parliaments and Congress and other officials. She became a whistleblower in 1991 at the Livermore Nuclear Weapons Lab after experiencing major science fraud on the Yucca Mountain Project. An environmental commissioner in the City of Berkeley, she can be reached at leurenmoret@yahoo.com.

As the current international situation shows, terrorism emerges where contradiction aggravate, where there is a change of social relations or a change of regime, where there is political, economic or social instability, where there is moral decadence, where cynicism and nihilism triumph, where vice is legalized and where crime spreads. It is globalization what creates the conditions for the emergence of these extremely dangerous phenomena. It is in this context that the new world geo-strategic map is being designed, that the resources of the planet are being re-distributed, that borders are disappearing, that international law is being torn into pieces, that cultural identities are being erased, that spiritual life becomes impoverished... The analysis of the essence of the globalization process, the military and political doctrines of the United States and other countries, shows that terrorism contributes to a world dominance and the submissiveness of states to a global oligarchy. This means that terrorism is not something independent of world politics but simply an instrument, a means to install a unipolar world with a sole world headquarters, a pretext to erase national borders and to establish the rule of a new world elite. It is precisely this elite that constitutes the key element of world terrorism, its ideologist and its “godfather”. The main target of the world elite is the historical, cultural, traditional and natural reality; the existing system of relations among states; the world national and state order of human civilization and national identity. Today’s international terrorism is a phenomenon that combines the use of terror by state and non-state political structures as a means to attain their political objectives through people’s intimidation, psychological and social destabilization, the elimination of resistance from power organizations and the creation of appropriate conditions for the manipulation of the countries’ policies and the behavior of people. Terrorism is the weapon used in a new type of war. At the same time, international terrorism, in complicity with the media, becomes the manager of global processes. It is precisely the symbiosis between media and terror, which allows modifying international politics and the exiting reality. In this context, if we analyze what happened on September 11, 2001, in the United States, we can arrive at the following conclusions: 1. The organizers of those attacks were the political and business circles interested in destabilizing the world order and who had the means necessary to finance the operation. The political conception of this action matured there where tensions emerged in the administration of financial and other types of resources. We have to look for the reasons of the attacks in the coincidence of interests of the big capital at global and transnational levels, in the circles that were not satisfied with the rhythm of the globalization process or its direction. Unlike traditional wars, whose conception is determined by generals and politicians, the oligarchs and politicians submitted to the former were the ones who did it this time. 2. Only secret services and their current chiefs – or those retired but still having influence inside the state organizations – have the ability to plan, organize and conduct an operation of such magnitude. Generally, secret services create, finance and control extremist organizations. Without the support of secret services, these organizations cannot exist – let alone carry out operations of such magnitude inside countries so well protected. Planning and carrying out an operation on this scale is extremely complex. 3. Osama bin Laden and “Al Qaeda” cannot be the organizers nor the performers of the September 11 attacks. They do not have the necessary organization, resources or leaders. Thus, a team of professionals had to be created and the Arab kamikazes are just extras to mask the operation. The September 11 operation modified the course of events in the world in the direction chosen by transnational mafias and international oligarchs; that is, those who hope to control the planet’s natural resources, the world information network and the financial flows. This operation also favored the US economic and political elite that also seeks world dominance. The use of the term “international terrorism” has the following goals: - Hiding the real objectives of the forces deployed all over the world in the struggle for dominance and control; - Turning the people’s demands to a struggle of undefined goals against an invisible enemy; - Destroying basic international norms and changing concepts such as: aggression, state terror, dictatorship or movement of national liberation; - Depriving peoples of their legitimate right to fight against aggressions and to reject the work of foreign intelligence services; - Establishing the principle of renunciation to national interests, transforming objectives in the military field by giving priority to the war on terror, violating the logic of military alliances to the detriment of a joint defense and to favor the anti-terrorist coalition; - Solving economic problems through a tough military rule using the war on terror as a pretext. In order to fight in an efficient way against international terrorism it is necessary to take the following steps: - To confirm before the UN General Assembly the principles of the UN Charter and international law as principles that all states are obliged to respect; - To create a geo-strategic organization (perhaps inspired in the Cooperation Organization of Shanghai comprised of Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) with a set of values different to that of the Atlantists; to design a strategy of development of states, a system of international security, another financial and economic model (which would mean that the world would again rest on two pillars); - To associate (under the United Nations) the scientific elites in the design and promotion of the philosophical concepts of the Human Being of the 21st Century. - To organize the interaction of all religious denominations in the world, on behalf of the stability of humanity’s development, security and mutual support. General Leonid Ivashov is the vice-president of the Academy on geopolitical affairs. He was the chief of the department for General affairs in the Soviet Union’s ministry of Defense, secretary of the Council of defense ministers of the Community of independant states (CIS), chief of the Military cooperation department at the Russian federation’s Ministry of defense and Joint chief of staff of the Russian armies.

Not only did this show that the fugitive Saudi billionaire did not die in last autumn's south Asian earthquake, as some had suggested, his message also demonstrated that wherever he is, and whatever communications difficulties might exist, he is still taking a keen interest in affairs on planet Earth. So he must be savouring the tsunami of speculation that followed his re-emergence.

Some analysts commented that bin Laden's voice sounded more laboured, wondering whether this indicated a deterioration in his health. There was also a pronounced echo, as if he were speaking in a room, in contrast to previous recordings that seemed to have been made outdoors or in large spaces.

Then there was the content: an eye-catching, though vague, offer of a "truce" in Iraq and Afghanistan, on his terms, and a warning to Americans that al-Qa'ida was still seeking to attack them. For Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA unit dedicated to hunting him down, this was almost a specific threat to make a fresh attack on Washington. Al-Qa'ida failed to hit the Capitol building and destroy the Pentagon in 2001, said Mr Scheuer, pointing out that it had first attempted to destroy New York's World Trade Center in 1993 before returning to finish the job eight years later.

The US swiftly rejected any notion of a truce, with Vice-President Dick Cheney declaring: "I think you have to destroy them. It's the only way to deal with them." This was a mistake, in the view of Loretta Napoleoni, an expert on terror financing who recently published a book on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, leader of al-Qa'ida in Iraq. "I think the US should have called his bluff," she said. "This tape was an attempt by the old leadership of al-Qa'ida to relaunch themselves. There is a power struggle between them and Zarqawi, and the US could have exploited it."

For George Kassimeris, senior research fellow in conflict and terrorism at Wolverhampton University, the response to the message fulfilled bin Laden's aims: "He wanted to show his followers he still calls the shots. What happened? He was front-page news. The US immediately replied to him, and the media around the US began reporting increased security as a result of his threats.

"The fact that he had been silent for a year increased the impact - if he spoke out too often, it would be less dramatic. Bin Laden is no longer in operational control of al-Qa'ida, but he doesn't want to be. He sees himself as a prophet, an ideological focus, not as a strategist or commander."

All the same, capturing or killing bin Laden or his deputy would be a priceless coup for a President who, as the al-Qa'ida leader noted, is losing support because of his entanglement in Iraq. But while the US or its allies have twice claimed to have got close to Zawahiri, there have been no such claims about bin Laden, who has pulled off one of the most remarkable disappearing acts in history.

There has not been a single confirmed sighting of him since the battle of Tora Bora, al-Qa'ida's last stand against the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. If "intelligence sources" are to be believed, he has not even shown up on America's electronic surveillance network. Not a satellite phone call. Not an email. Yet between them, he and Zawahiri have issued at least 28 video and audiotapes from hiding. Both of them were heard from last week.

So where are they? As this month's missile strike shows, the assumption is that they are still in the lawless border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The frontier runs 1,530 miles through some of the most rugged terrain on earth, and is inhabited by fearsome tribesmen who have no love for any outside interference from Kabul or Islamabad, let alone America.

For all the speculation that bin Laden might be sheltering in a Pakistani city, which is where other senior al-Qa'ida figures have been captured, or could have escaped by boat to Yemen or Saudi Arabia, his safety seems best assured by staying in an area where neither American nor Pakistani troops dare venture.

Even if he is finally hunted down, by this stage it would have little strategic impact. Bin Laden has already achieved what he set out to do, by creating al-Qa'ida. As an ideology, it is far more dangerous than a single group of conspirators.

After issuing new threats to attack the US and calls for President George Bush to withdraw American troops from Iraq, Bin Laden then found time to "plug" Mr Blum's book. "If Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, it would be useful for you to read the book Rogue State," he announced in his message relayed to a potential audience of billions via Arab satellite television.

Mr Blum is a long-standing and fierce critic of the White House, laying scorn on Mr Bush and his predecessor, Bill Clinton. His 320-page book tears to pieces US foreign policy and its opening line reads: "Washington's war on terror is as doomed to failure as its war on drugs has been."

Mr Blum has described the attacks on 11 September as "an understandable retaliation against US foreign policy", stopping short of calling that a justification.

Once an employee of the State Department until his career was cut short after he led demonstrations against the Vietnam War, Mr Blum, 72, has been taken aback by his sudden celebrity. News networks in the US are clamouring to interview him. "The Washington Post refuses to publish my letters, but now they are coming to my house," he told reporters.

Talking to a New York radio station, he said most interviewers have pressed him to reject Bin Laden's endorsement but he says he has no qualms about being promoted by the world's most wanted man. Mr Blum said: "I happen to share with Osama bin Laden a certain view of US foreign policy, and this is great if more people read my book."

Lawrence recently analyzed more than 20 complete speeches and interviews of the al Qaida leader for his book. He says the new message is missing several key elements.

"There's nothing in this from the Koran. He's, by his own standards, a faithful Muslim," Lawrence said. "He quotes scripture in defense of his actions. There's no quotation from the Koran in the excerpts we got, no reference to specific events, no reference to past atrocities."

While the CIA confirms the voice on the tape is bin Laden's, Lawrence questions when it was recorded. He says the timing of its release could be to divert attention from last week's US air strike in Pakistan. The strike targeted bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, and [reportedly] killed four leading al Qaeda figures along with civilians.

Lawrence believes faulty Pakistani intelligence led to the strike and the civilian deaths, and the tape was leaked by Pakistani authorities to divert attention from their mistake.

"It led to a failed military operation where America got blamed, but they people who are really to blame are the ones who provided the intelligence," Lawrence said. "I think this is an effort to say were not going look at this terrible incident that happened."

Another element that Lawrence takes issue with in bin Laden's latest message is it's length -- only 10 minutes. Previously, the shortest was 18 minutes.

There are good and bad Americans, just like there are good and bad Muslims. By drawing a difference between the "American people" and its leaders, Osama bin Laden has ultimately resorted to using the Western rhetoric for his own purposes. People might have believed they were listening to George Bush highlighting the chasm between the Iraqi people and the Saddam Hussein regime.

But making a distinction between the Western street and its leaders isn't part of al-Qaeda's sinister tradition. On 9/11, by targeting the New York towers as well as the Pentagon, jihadists weren't making that distinction. These are the facts. Their words do not at all differentiate [between civilians and the leadership]. Bin Laden's February 1998 founding fatwa declaring a "jihad against all Jews and Crusaders" is clear: "The commandment of killing Americans and their allies - civilian or military - is a personal duty for all Muslims in a position to do so."

Once more, the icon of evil shows his capacity to understand his opponent's logic and to turn it against him. But it also demonstrates his capacity to master the media agenda. The broadcasting of this new tape WindowsVideo comes at a time when Bush is facing difficulties in Iraq, when the retreat of his Italian allies is about to take place, and just after al-Qaeda's chief ideologue and number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, was declared dead a little too soon by the Pentagon.

Of course, in Washington, bin Laden's proposition of a "truce" is interpreted as a confession of weakness. It is a proof that at the end of the shotgun there will be victory. Maybe.

For others, bin Laden's simple capacity to broadcast this tape is his victory. And Washington's refusal of a "truce" could be the trigger for new attacks. In April 2004, the al-Qaeda leader offered Europeans an end to terrorist attacks against countries that would oppose the war in Iraq. Fifteen months later, London was bathed in blood by a few kamikazes.

REFOCUS OF JIHAD

So what is Osama bin Laden trying to do in sending this kind of signal? He certainly doesn't believe he can worsen the split between the Executive power [Bush] and the American people. But by not addressing George Bush directly, bin Laden is in reality putting himself on the same level. The leader of the Ummah, that fantasy Muslim community, is talking to the flock of the leader of the Western world.

"His message is more a sign of strength than it is a sign of weakness, Alain Chouet, former DGSE executive (Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure, French equivalent of the CIA or Homeland Security), explains, it shows that he can do what he wants, when he wants and against who he wants. He chooses his targets."

Bin Laden's message, taken up and commented with joy on all Islamist sites, also has an internal purpose. Jihadists haven't always been unanimous on what strategy to adopt against the United States. In the middle of the 1990's, debates have even been violent on the opportunity to refocus Jihad against "distant enemies" (the United-States and the Western world in general) rather than against "close enemies" (apostate Arabic regimes).

"By offering a truce, he is rejecting the idea that the conflict is the responsibility of Western citizens," Dominique Thomas, a specialist of Islamist movements, says. He reasserts the condition of Muslims as victims whose lands are occupied in Iraq and Afghanistan." Al-Qaeda claims to be a vanguard, but that's no reason to isolate itself from the Muslim "masses."

However, the tape is an obvious fake being used by the Bush administration to scare Americans into believing "Al Qaeda" is making plans for another attack and an attempt to link Bin Laden to Democrats.

The reason the tape is as phony as Niger yellowcake documents and Saddam's weapons of mass destruction is as plain as day. "Bin Laden" allegedly quotes from the introduction of a book written by long-time Washington, DC progressive author and journalist and a friend of mine, Bill Blum. Bill was once an editor and contributor to Covert Action Quarterly, a magazine devoted to exposing CIA operations like the arming, funding, and training of Bin Laden and his mujaheddin guerrillas during the Afghan-Soviet war.

The Bush perception managers are either incredibly stupid or are trying to ensnare liberal journalists as aiders and abettors of Al Qaeda, something that is certainly within their scope. Bin Laden allegedly quotes the following passage from Blum's book, Rogue State: "If you (Americans) are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you. And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book Rogue State, which states in its introduction: 'If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all.'" However, this quote is not from Rogue State, again, pointing to a very bad forgery of the Bin Laden audiotape. No sooner had the alleged Bin Laden tape been released, neo-con activist Cliff Kincaid was already spinning nonsense about Blum and his publisher, Common Courage Press of Monroe, Maine, being part of some sort of pro-Bin Laden progressive and liberal "Fifth Columnist" grouping in the United States.

Bin Laden might not be so eager to quote Blum if he was aware of his other work, Killing Hope, an expose of the CIA's covert wars. In it, Blum defends to Soviet occupation of Afghanistan as self-defense against the CIA-backed Islamist guerrillas, including Bin Laden's forces, that were backed by the CIA. Now, why would Bin Laden plug an author like Blum who backed Bin Laden's hated enemies, the Soviet Communists and their Afghan allies? Because the Bin Laden tape and his purported oratory are frauds. In Killing Hope, this is what Blum wrote about Bin Laden and his CIA masters' war in Afghanistan:

"The new government under President Taraki declared a commitment to Islam within a secular state, and to non-alignment in foreign affairs. It said the coup was not foreign inspired and that they were not Communists but rather nationalists and revolutionaries. They pushed radical reforms, they talked about class struggle, they used anti-imperialist rhetoric, they supported Cuba, they signed a friendship treaty and other cooperative agreements with the Soviets and they increased the number of Soviet civilian and military advisers in Afghanistan.... In May 1979, British political scientist Fred Halliday said 'probably more has changed in the countryside over the last year than in the two centuries since the state was established.'

In March 1979, Afghan President Taraki visited Moscow to request Soviet help to fight the mujahideen. The Soviets did promise some military aid, but they would not commit ground troops. As Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin told Taraki: 'The entry of our troops into Afghanistan would outrage the international community, triggering a string of extremely negative consequences. Our common enemies are just waiting for the moment when Soviet troops appear in Afghanistan. This will give them the excuse they need to send armed bands into the country.'

. . . prior to the Soviet invasion, the CIA had been beaming radio propaganda into Afghanistan and cultivating alliances with exiled Afghan guerrilla leaders by donating medicine and communications equipment. U.S. foreign service officers had been meeting with Mujahideen leaders to determine their needs at least as early as April 1979. And, in July, President Carter had signed a 'finding' to aid the rebels covertly, which led to the U.S. providing them with cash, weapons, equipment and supplies, and engaging in propaganda and other psychological operations in Afghanistan on their behalf."

So, we're now supposed to believe that Bin Laden has come around to plug the book written by an author who demonstrated that the Soviet cause in Afghanistan was for self-defense and in furtherance of the well-being of the Afghan people and that Bin Laden's and his mujaheddin compatriots' cause was anti-progressive and destabilizing to the central Asian region? This would be laughable if it were not for the fact that the neo-cons are once again using the Big Lie to further their ambitions of global domination and worldwide fascism. The 911 attacks are beginning to look more and more like the Reichstag Fire, both engineered to bring about fascist control.

I also know someone on the NSC and they told me this morning that they really wished the CIA would be a little more accomplished in their fakes.

His reasoning?

It has been known, officially, that bin Laden died of kidney failure in a Pakistani hospital in August of 2002 and obviously isn’t making any tapes now. A live bin Laden, however, is a good boogyman with which to terrify the American public into slavishly believing our government is trying to protect them. Secondly, there is no reference to the Koran in the message, something always found in original, period, bin Laden announcements. Thirdly, the fake bin Laden does not make any references, as original messages have, to past Western atrocities against Muslims and, finally, the tape is far too short.

What is this source’s reasoning? That the CIA’s blunder in killing 17-25 perfectly innocent Pakistani civilians in a badly botched rocket attack against a bin Laden supporter has caused an uproar in Pakistan, (and elsewhere) an ally, albeit a very dicey one. First, the CIA “revealed,” through paid Pakistani stooges, that “many top terrorists” were killed in the attack <>although the sole victims were women and children and two sets of grandparents<>. Their logic is that while the intended target was “mysteriously absent” at the time of the attack, the slaughter of the innocents was justified because “many top terrorists” were eradicated.

Typical high-level bald-faced lies.

This latest taped fake is designed both to give Bush increased stature to a disbelieving American public and to justify any future actions against more generally completely innocent civilians.

The Bush Administration is drawing an enormous bill that is going to have to be paid by the American people, hopefully for the criminals, long after they are out of office and living in tax-payer supported safe (and non-extraditable) retirement in the south of France or Tahiti.

Something needs to be done about all of this murderous corruption.

When Patrick Henry, addressing the Virginia House of Burgesses, made a negative reference to their King George, some stooge shouted “Treason!” at him.

His reply, and one we all ought to contemplate?

“If this be treason, Sir, why make the most of it!”
www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a2085.htm

According to ABC's 20/20, when police stopped the cheering Israelis, one of them told the officers: "We are Israelis. We are not your problem. Your problems are our problems. The Palestinians are your problem”.

One of the five Israelis had a German passport in addition to his Israeli passport. Another had an international flight booked to Thailand on September 13, two days after the attacks. The FBI also found out that one of them was a former paratrooper, assigned to an elite Israeli defense forces unit.

Two more Israelis were caught in a truck on Interstate 80 in Pennsylvania, near the site of the crash of American Airlines flight 93. Police became very suspicious when they found maps of the city with certain locations highlighted, box cutters (like the ones used by the hijackers), along with other incriminating evidence. Police also said that bomb sniffing dogs reacted as if they smelled explosives when they were brought to the Israelis’ truck.

The FBI believes that most of the arrested Israelis belong to an Israeli intelligence unit operating outside New Jersey, near where the Anthrax letters were mailed. They all worked for a U.S.-based company known as Urban Moving Systems.

An editorial on whatreallyhappened.com states that an FBI SWAT team raided the New Jersey warehouse of the Urban Moving Systems and confiscated a number of computer hard drives and files. It further adds that the Israeli owner of the company, Dominick Suter, closed his business days after the Sept. attacks and returned to Israel. He was in such a hurry that some of Urban Moving System's customers were left with their furniture stranded in storage facilities.

Behind closed doors, Israeli authorities were doing all what they can to get the men released and the FBI probe closed. Israeli lawmakers contacted their “friends” in the U.S. Congress, and the Mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Ohmert personally called the New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and asked him to intervene.

An article on Power of Prophecy reported that a war brewed inside the FBI between the agents conducting the probe and their superiors, who warned that involving the Israelis in the attacks could be an "explosive political volcano." But the lower-level agents didn’t buy it. They believed that the arrested Israeli Jews might just hold the key to the whole 9/11 debacle. "These Israeli guys knew what was coming down," one FBI veteran was quoted as saying. "We would be fools if we let them just fade away into the sunset and pretend they weren't involved."

It was later confirmed that the five detained Israelis were in fact Mossad agents. However, FBI and Justice Department superiors succeeded in pushing aside the local FBI agents and the Israelis were released after spending just 71 days in U.S. custody. "Evidence linking these Israelis to 9/11 is classified. I cannot tell you about evidence that has been gathered. It's classified information,” a U.S. official told Fox News at the time.

The compliant mainstream media completely ignored the Israeli connection. Rather it immediately blamed OSAMA BIN LADEN even though he had no record of doing anything on this scale. On the day of the attacks, CIA Director George Tenet said "You know, this has bin Laden's fingerprints all over it."

But a number of intelligence officials have raised questions about BIN LADEN's capabilities. "This guy sits in a cave in Afghanistan and he's running this operation?" one CIA official said at the time. "It's so huge. He couldn't have done it alone."

BIN LADEN himself denied any involvement in the attacks. The BBC published his denial in which he clearly stated: "I was not involved in the September 11 attacks in the United States nor did I have knowledge of the attacks. There exists a government within a government within the United States. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself…” (Most of us never heard that quote on our nightly newscast).

To date, the only shred of "evidence" against bin Laden is a barely audible fuzzy amateur video that the Pentagon just happened to find "lying around" in Afghanistan.

U.S. intelligence analysts believe that Israel benefited most from the September 11 attacks. Israel has been widely criticized by the West for its aggression against the Palestinians. Israeli occupation soldiers were, and still are, shown on international TV news in heated exchanges with Palestinian youths armed with nothing more than stones. Israeli tanks bulldoze Palestinian farms and homes, and human rights groups complain that Palestinian detainees are tortured and abused in Israeli jails.

But after 9/11, things changed dramatically. Sympathy for the Palestinians vanished. The Arabs were universally portrayed as the "bad guys." Israeli Prime Minister ARIEL SHARON reportedly said: "Now we and the Americans are in the same fight."

An article by political analyst Richard Becker published on Jan. 9, 2003 on the Workers World newspaper states that “SHARON and other Israeli leaders aspire to fulfill what the goals of the political ZIONIST movement have been since its origin a century ago: to turn all of historic Palestine into an exclusively Jewish state. A central tenet of the ZIONIST ideology is expressed in the racist slogan, 'A land without people for a people without a land.'"

The implication of the Arabs in the 9/11 attacks provided the Israelis with a golden opportunity to achieve the above-stated goals because the world would view the Palestinians as terrorists.

Blaming the horrible attacks on the Arabs was the best thing that has even happened to Israel. Now Washington, once again, solidly stands in the pro-Israeli camp, and "Palestinians be damned!"

ON OCTOBER 4, 2001, reporters in Florida announced the first case in 25 years of a person contracting the deadly bacterium anthrax. The following day, Robert Stevens, the photo editor of the Florida-based tabloid Sun, died. His death was the beginning of the Anthrax Mystery, America’s worst—and most baffling—case of bio-terrorism. Days later, four other persons in the New York City and Washington, DC areas would die from anthrax spores that leaked from tainted letters sent through the mail. Seventeen others would become infected, and hundreds of millions of dollars would be spent on cleaning up contaminated office buildings and postal facilities. All of these events came just a few days after the tragedy of September 11. It appeared the terrorists had struck again, but this time the attack was biological.

Investigators believe seven letters containing anthrax spores were mailed. Four of the seven are thought to have been mailed on the same day and addressed to major media outlets in New York City: ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and the New York Post. Of these, only the NBC and New York Post letters were recovered. Letters believed to be addressed to ABC News and CBS News offices caused two persons to develop anthrax infections. One was a seven-month-old boy brought in by his mother, a producer at ABC News; the other was an assistant to Dan Rather at CBS. These letters were never found and were likely discarded.

The two recovered letters did not have a return address but were postmarked September 18, 2001 in Trenton, New Jersey. These letters contained identical messages tending to indicate that the perpetrators were Islamic terrorists. The notes read, “09-11-01, THIS IS NEXT, TAKE PENACILIN [sic] NOW, DEATH TO AMERICA, DEATH TO ISRAEL, ALLAH IS GREAT.”

It is also believed an anthrax-laced letter was mailed to the National Enquirer’s old mailing address and forwarded to their new offices at American Media Inc. in Boca Raton, Florida. Anthrax spores were found at the postal facility that held the National Enquirer’s old P.O. Box address. American Media also publishes the tabloid Sun where Mr. Stevens worked. Investigators have never been able to located the anthrax letter addressed to the National Enquirer.

Interestingly, hoax letters claiming to contain anthrax were mailed days later from St. Petersburg, Florida. However, instead of anthrax spores, these letters contained a harmless substance described by some as looking like talcum powder. One of these hoax letters was again addressed to NBC News in New York City. In addition, Judith Miller, the author of a book on bio-terrorism and a reporter on the Middle East for the New York Times, received an anthrax hoax letter at her office. The St. Petersburg Times and Fox News also received similar hoax letters.

The mailing of hoax letters cannot be considered the work of a copycat. For example, the NBC News hoax letter was mailed on September 20. This would have been two days after the NBC News letter containing anthrax was mailed from Trenton, New Jersey. The remaining hoax letters were mailed between October 5 and 9. News reports naming media outlets that received the original anthrax letters were on October 12 and 13. A copycat mailer could have acted only after October 12, when the public first became aware of the media anthrax letters. The person who sent the hoax letters was aware of the mailings of the original anthrax letters. The apparent purpose of mailing the hoax letters was to foster the anthrax scare and create a media frenzy.

The mailings of anthrax-laced letters from New Jersey and the Florida hoax letters that followed were probably coordinated. It is likely that least two individuals were involved in the mailings. Experts who have seen the block lettering on the envelopes of the hoax letters and anthrax letters have concluded two different persons were responsible.

The mailing sites of Trenton, New Jersey and St. Petersburg, Florida were chosen, perhaps, to emphasize an Arab or Islamic connection in the minds of Americans. Trenton is the home of a large Arab-American community. Also, several of the September 11 hijackers had lived in both areas. The mailers of the anthrax and hoax letters wanted the public to think that remnants of al-Qaeda were still around and active.

However, the mailing of the anthrax letters shows a degree of media savvy that would be unusual for foreign Islamic terrorists. The persons who sent the letters knew which media outlets would have the greatest influence on the public. Even today, with the advent of cable and satellite television, the three major television broadcast networks remain as the primary source of news for most Americans. The New York Post and the National Enquirer are tabloid papers and were likely chosen for their sensational headlines. Of all the papers in New York City, the New York Post would have screamed the loudest concerning the threat from Islamic terrorists. For Americans who don’t follow the news, the National Enquirer, with its presence at every checkout stand in America, would convey the message. The desired effect in choosing these media outlets was to alarm the public and to remind them these terrorists wanted to destroy both America and Israel.

But only five of the seven anthrax letters were sent to media outlets. The remaining two were addressed to members of the United States Senate. These letters were posted on Tuesday, October 9, exactly three weeks from the first anthrax mailings, and four weeks from September 11. The letters were addressed to two of America’s most liberal Democrat Senators: Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Patrick Leahy of Vermont.

An aide opened the Daschle letter on October 15. A puff of powder quickly flew out of the letter. Capitol police were called and a Hazmat team sealed off the Senator’s office. This letter had a different note that read, “09-11-01, YOU CAN NOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW. ARE YOU AFRAID? DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT.”

Once tests confirmed the Daschle letter actually contained anthrax, all Capitol mail was stopped and impounded for further investigation. The Leahy letter would be found on November 16 in the impounded mail. It also contained anthrax spores and an identical note. It is believed the Leahy letter was delayed and misdirected due to an initial misreading of the letter’s zip code.

The Senate letters had a fictitious return address indicating they came from school children. The return address read, “4th Grade, Greendale School, Franklin Park NJ 08852.” Apparently, it was thought a letter coming from school children would have a better chance of reaching the intended targets without raising suspicions.

The envelopes and notes have yielded few clues leading to the true identities of the persons who were responsible for the anthrax attacks. Obviously, the senders tried to mask who they were and to hide their true motives. Investigators turned to analyzing the anthrax material itself.

Anthrax is a spore-forming germ, Bacillus anthracis, and can be found in livestock such as sheep or cattle. Analysis of the spores from the letters reveled them all to be of the same strain. This particular strain, known as the Ames strain, was first researched at the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), Fort Detrick, Maryland. This strain of anthrax bacteria originally came from a single cow that had died in Texas in 1981. Ames has the reputation of being deadlier than other anthrax strains. Some have called Ames the “gold standard” of anthrax.

From Fort Detrick, the Ames strain was sent to researchers in at least fifteen laboratories within the United States and six laboratories abroad. It is not known how many other universities and labs may have had access to the strain, but according to one law-enforcement official “more labs than you think” could have obtained the Ames strain.

In the past, microbiologists attending conferences on infectious diseases would take vials of various strains and simply swap them with each other to aid in their research. Martin Hugh-Jones, a scientist at Louisiana State University, stated that during this period deadly pathogens were traded “like playing cards.” In the real pre-9-11 scenario, any microbiologist in the world might have obtained the Ames strain.

Investigators examining the anthrax spores within the letters found them to be of different grades, with the best among them considered by some to be “weapons grade” material. A modern spray drying technique was used in preparing these spores, instead of the older method of milling. Also, radiocarbon dating found the spores to be releatively newly-created—not more than two years old.

Of the two anthrax letters that were recovered in New York City, the New York Post letter was found unopened and still contained the anthrax material. The NBC News anthrax letter tested positive for anthrax, but only a trace amount remained after it was opened. Major General John Parker, with the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command, said one of his scientists described the New York Post sample as, “looking like Purina Dog Chow.” It had coarse brown granules but was densely packed with anthrax spores and highly concentrated.

In contrast, the anthrax in the Daschle letter was like a fine white powder; General Parker compared it to talcum powder. Under the microscope the Daschle sample was ten times denser in anthrax spores when compared to the New York Post sample. The New York Times described the anthrax from the Daschle letter as consisting of nearly pure spores, with a concentration of a trillion spores per gram. However, the spores tended to cluster together, creating particles of variable size. Some of these particles would have been too large to penetrate human lungs.

A team of scientists at USAMRIID opened the Leahy letter on December 5. This letter also contained a very fine powder which was easily made airborne. The Leahy letter had particles that were smaller and more uniform in size compared to the Daschle letter. This made the anthrax spores in the Leahy letter even deadlier: Smaller spores of a uniform size have a better chance of entering the respiratory system and causing death.

It was reported the quality of the anthrax spores found in the Leahy letter surpassed previously known state-sponsored bio-weapons programs. According to Newsweek, “The Leahy anthrax…was coated with a chemical compound unknown to experts who have worked in the field for years; the coating matches no known anthrax samples ever recovered from biological-weapons producers anywhere in the world, including Iraq and the former Soviet Union.” The anthrax in the Leahy letter has proven to be a superior product. Bio-defense experts assisting the FBI have so far been unable to duplicate the anthrax material through any reverse engineering processes. Investigators are left with the uncertain choice of deciding if this was the work of a lone brilliant scientist—or a state-sponsored bio-weapons program.

So who sent the anthrax? Some, like Barbara Hatch Rosenberg with the leftist Federation of America Scientists (FAS), have a suspect. In her report, “Analysis of the Anthrax At tacks,” Rosenberg presents her profile of the anthrax attacker, accompanied by her own political biases. Rosenberg believes the attacker has connections with the U.S. government. She believes he is being protected by the FBI and has information on secret programs the government does not wish to be disclosed.

In her profile, Rosenberg identified the attacker as a bio-defense insider with a doctoral degree. He is a middle-aged American who is skilled in working with dangerous pathogens. She boldly claims he is also a CIA contractor based in the Washington, DC area. There is no mystery as to the identity of Rosenberg’s suspect. Her suspect is the person around whom she has built her profile: Dr. Steven J. Hatfill.

Barbara Rosenberg began her mission to ‘bring Dr. Hatfill to justice’ by giving a series of lectures and media interviews accusing the FBI of stalling the investigation. Eventually, she was able to arrange a meeting with Senate staffers and FBI agents in attendance. Several of the staffers worked for Senators Daschle and Leahy, the recipients of the anthrax letters. Without revealing his name, Barbara Rosenberg indicated to everyone there that her suspect, Dr. Hatfill, was responsible for the anthrax attacks.

A week later—apparently as a result of Senate pressure—the FBI brought Dr. Hatfill into public view. In an investigation that had previously been out of the spotlight, the media was now alerted to the FBI’s scrutiny of Rosenberg’s suspect. When the FBI searched Dr. Hatfill’s apartment, the media, with helicopters overhead, covered it live on national television. The whole world was now aware of the public pursuit (and some would later say the public persecution) of Dr. Hatfill.

When questioned by reporters concerning the attention Dr. Hatfill was getting, Attorney General John Ashcroft declared Hatfill to be not a suspect but a “person of interest.” A few commentators who follow legal issues have noted this “person of interest” expression is not referenced in any law books and, until recently, has not been a term used in investigations. Jonathan Shapiro, an attorney for Dr. Hatfill, referred to the term and said, “It’s a way for the Justice Department to tiptoe around the fact they’re crushing someone, ruining their lives, and not get sued by it. [sic]”

In response to this attention, Dr. Hatfill was forced to hold two press conferences and declare his innocence. On Aug. 11, 2002, Dr. Hatfill said, “After eight months of one of the most intensive public and private investigations in American history, no one—no one—has come up with a shred of evidence that I had anything to do with the anthrax letters.”

Whatever their motives, the FBI was certainly having problems connecting Dr. Hatfill to the crimes: They could not place Hatfill in Trenton, New Jersey at the time of the mailings, and no residue of anthrax material could be found anywhere he had lived or visited. There was no physical evidence whatsoever connecting Dr. Hatfill with the anthrax mailings.

Hatfill is said to be one of perhaps 30 scientists who could have carried out this attack. His background as a former researcher at USAMRIID Fort Detrick, Maryland placed him on the list. However, Dr. Hatfill claims to be an expert on viruses such as Ebola and Marburg, and not on anthrax bacteria. Dr. Hatfill has publicly stated that he has never worked with anthrax.

The FBI initially interviewed Dr. Hatfill in January 2002, apparently as part of the investigation’s broader look at scientists with a connection to the bio-defense community. At that time, Dr. Hatfill took a lie-detector test in an effort to clear his name. The agent who gave him the test reportedly said, “I’m satisfied. I believe you had nothing to do with the anthrax.”

Steven Hatfill was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in Mattoon, Illinois. In the early 1970s he studied biology at Southwestern College in Winfield, Kansas. During this period, he left his studies and traveled to Kapanga, Zaire, where he worked with Dr. Glenn Eschtruth as a medical missionary. After graduating from Southwestern in 1975, Hatfill enlisted in the United States Army. In October 1976 he married Caroline Eschtruth, the daughter of his mentor.

It would be only a few months after their marriage when Cuban-led mercenaries based in Angola attacked Dr. Eschtruth’s mission. The mercenaries captured Dr. Eschtruth and later executed him, a tragedy which left a strong impression on Hatfill. He and his wife Caroline were divorced in May 1978. Shortly thereafter, Hatfill returned to Africa and continued his medical education.

Hatfill attended the Godfrey Huggins Medical School in White-ruled Rhodesia, graduating in 1984. While in Rhodesia, Hatfill claims to have served with the Selous Scouts. The Selous Scouts were Rhodesia’s crack counterinsurgency troops used against the terrorists who wanted to overthrow the White government. In 1980, as a result of international pressure, Rhodesia was turned over to the Black Mugabe government, which still rules there today. The country would later have its name changed to Zimbabwe. In 1984, Hatfill moved to the Republic of South Africa to further his medical studies and research.

While in South Africa, Hatfill was in contact with Aquila, the paramilitary wing of the Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) or Afrikaner Resistance Movement. The AWB was the largest White resistance group active in preventing the Black takeover of South Africa. Some have labeled the AWB a neo-Nazi organization. One has only to look at their political banner to come to this conclusion: It is very similar to National Socialist Germany’s swastika flag but, instead of a swastika, uses a triskelion—an ancient symbol which resembles three “sevens” arranged in a spinning design.

A colleague of Hatfill’s at Stellenbosch University’s radiobiology laboratory saw a newspaper photo of AWB leader Eugene Terre’Blanche surrounded by Dr. Hatfill and members of the Aquila Brigade. This colleague—in an apparent effort to expose Hatfill—placed the photo on the lab’s notice board. When confronted, Hatfill made no secret of his AWB ties. The colleague claimed, “This photo was put up on the lab notice board—and led to Hatfill boasting that he was the weapons trainer of the Western Cape Branch of Aquila.” Since that time, the photo has not been seen by the public.

Several amazing coincidences have contributed to the intense interest in Hatfill shown by investigators. They also help to explain why some, like Barbara Rosenberg, are so convinced Dr. Hatfill was responsible for the anthrax attacks.

One coincidence concerning Dr. Hatfill and his times in Africa is the “Greendale School” reference that appeared as the return address on the anthrax letters sent to Senators Daschle and Leahy. There was an upscale suburb of Salisbury, Rhodesia, known as Greendale; the neighborhood school was informally known as Greendale School. The school was actually named after White Rhodesian patriot Courtney Selous, after whom the Selous Scouts were named. A mentioned previously, Hatfill claims to have served with this group.

Another coincidence involves Dr. Hatfill’s commissioning William Patrick, an expert on weaponized anthrax, to write a report on the proper procedures to be used if an anthrax letter arrived in the mail. Hatfill’s employer at the time, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), saw a need for emergency responders to know exactly what to do if this were ever to occur.

In the SAIC report, written two years before the anthrax mailings, Patrick describes how a few grams of anthrax spores could be sent in envelopes and details the proper emergency procedures that should be followed if this were to take place. The report was provided to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. They, at the time, were working on a similar report and provided the information they assembled to police and fire departments via the Internet. Dr. Hatfill’s attorney Victor Glasberg denies the Patrick report was any type of “blueprint” for an anthrax mailing. Glasberg said, “There is zero data in the report. It shows you what you do after it happens.”

Perhaps the most suspicious coincidence was the mysterious anthrax hoax letter mailed from London, England, in November 2001, and addressed to Senator Tom Daschle. Within the envelope were a powdery substance and a threatening note. At the time of the mailing, Hatfill was in England training to be a United Nations bio-weapons inspector for a future mission in Iraq. As previously mentioned, several anthrax hoax letters were mailed to media organizations. This hoax letter was the first and only one sent to a Senator. Some within the FBI wonder if the London letter may have been an attempt to frame Dr. Hatfill.

One outfit that has spent a great deal of time and energy in blaming Dr. Hatfill for the anthrax attacks is the Jewish Defense Organization (JDO). This group has labeled Hatfill a “Nazi” because of his ties to the Afrikaner Resistance Movement. In The Weekly Standard article, “The Hunting of Steven J. Hatfill,” David Tell claims the JDO is responsible for spreading many of the damning accusations that now surround Dr. Hatfill. The JDO is an offshoot of the terrorist Jewish Defense League, founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Today, the JDO spends most of its time feeding reporters and commentators hateful and misleading information concerning Dr. Hatfill. Tell describes the JDO as the “central clearinghouse of Hatfill demonology.” He claims mainstream reporters will use the JDO material on Hatfill but will never acknowledge their source. It is interesting that a small extremist group like the Jewish Defense Organization appears to have been the first to “document” the background and personal history of Dr. Steven Hatfill.

Since the anthrax attacks, Dr. Hatfill’s life has been radically changed. The Justice Department had him fired from a $150,000 a year teaching job at Louisiana State University, and, to date, he has not found other employment. Though a spokesman Hatfill said, “My life has been completely and utterly destroyed by John Ashcroft and the FBI. I don’t have a job and 20 years of training has gone down the drain… My professional reputation is in tatters. All I have left is my savings and that will be exhausted soon because of legal bills.” The evidence is mounting that Dr. Hatfill is an innocent man and had nothing to do with the anthrax attacks. Reporters and investigators will realize this when those responsible for the anthrax mailings are identified.

There are two other bio-defense scientists who have received some attention in the anthrax investigation. But, unlike Hatfill, these scientists have rarely been mentioned in the press. Some believe one of these scientists may be responsible for the anthrax attacks.

On October 3, 2001, Dr. Ayaad Assaad, an Arab-American scientist and a former researcher at USAMRIID Fort Detrick, Maryland, was called into the Washington, DC offices of the FBI and was confronted with an anonymous letter that accused him of being “a potential biological terrorist.” The author of the letter claimed to be a former colleague of Dr. Assaad, and accused him of having a vendetta against the government. The meeting between Assaad and the FBI took place two days before it was known that Robert Stevens, the first victim of the anthrax attacks, had died. The letter was postmarked September 21 and was addressed to “Town of Quantico Police” in Virginia. Quantico is 25 miles south of Washington, DC and is home to both Marine Corps and FBI facilities.

A number of questions have arisen surrounding this letter. The timing of the letter is suspicious, given that it was written before there was public knowledge concerning the anthrax attacks. Dr. Assaad believes the letter was devised to implicate him in the coming attacks and to set him up as the ‘fall guy.’ He believes the person who sent the letter may also be responsible for the anthrax attacks. The FBI determined Dr. Assaad was not involved with terrorism and that the accusatory letter must have been a hoax.

But Dr. Assaad had reason to be concerned. A decade earlier, he, along with two other Arab-American scientists, all of whom were working at USAMRIID, were targeted and harassed by another group of scientists working there. The group that was harassing the Arab-Americans called themselves the “Camel Club.” One of the “Camel Club” members was Dr. Philip M. Zack, Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army. The apparent objective of the “Camel Club” was to drive the Arab-American scientists out of the bio-defense facility.

Shortly after the Persian Gulf War in 1991, Dr. Assaad found an eight-page poem in his mailbox authored by the “club.” The poem contained lewd and obscene remarks and was written in an attempt to harass and mock the Egyptian-born scientist. The authors of the poem referred to a rubber camel supposedly outfitted with various sexual appendages. A portion of the poem read: “In [Assaad’s] honor we created this beast; it represents life lower than yeast.” The letter states that each week the camel will be given “to who did the least.” Dr. Assaad reported these incidents to Fort Detrick’s commander, who at the time did little or nothing to stop the harassment. Dr. Assaad later sued the Army, claiming “discrimination.” Was this a case of “racism”—or of something going on at the lab which the harassers might not want an Arab scientist to see?

The Hartford Courant has been the only paper to have covered this story in detail. They reported that “Zack left Fort Detrick in December 1991, after a controversy over allegations of unprofessional behavior….” The paper later reported Dr. Zack was observed entering the lab after hours on January 23, 1992. A surveillance camera recorded Dr. Marian Rippy, one of the “Camel Club” members, letting Dr. Zack inside the building.

Lab technicians noticed a late-night intruder was tampering with their equipment. A 1992 inquiry found someone was conducting unauthorized research involving anthrax during the evening hours. An audit of the lab showed 27 sets of specimens—including anthrax spores—were unaccounted for or missing. One former commander at the facility said he did not believe any of the missing specimens were ever found.

Dr. Zack is said to be Jewish, and for some this makes him the leading anthrax suspect, particularly among those in Internet discussion groups. They see the harassment of Dr. Assaad, the late night research on anthrax, and the accusatory letter all pointing in Dr. Zack’s direction.

Ed Lake, the leading amateur investigator of the anthrax attacks, has done some important research concerning the letter sent to the authorities naming Dr. Assaad as a potential terrorist. Lake found that, after September 11, a great deal of speculation ensued concerning the possibility of another terrorist attack. The consensus was that the next attack would likely be biological in nature, and anthrax could be the weapon of choice. Lake did an analysis of how many times the word “anthrax” appeared in Internet discussion groups from September 8, 2001 to October 7, 2001. Not surprisingly, discussions concerning anthrax and a possible biological attack increased dramatically after September 11. Lake concluded, given the circumstances, it would not be unusual for someone to warn authorities concerning potential terrorist activity.

This is the most likely explanation for the anonymous letter. A former colleague of Dr. Assaad sent the letter out of genuine concern in preventing a biological attack. This person may or may not have been a participant in the “Camel Club” shenanigans but could have been influenced by them. It is unlikely Dr. Zack sent the accusatory letter, since it would have brought immediate attention upon himself and his suspicious activities a decade earlier. Also, it is equally difficult to believe Dr. Zack was responsible for the anthrax mailings.

So what other suspects remain? Our best-known suspect or “person of interest” is Dr. Steven J. Hatfill. But after an extensive investigation by the FBI, no physical evidence connects Hatfill with the mailings. Other possible suspects can be dismissed as easily as they are mentioned. Iraq and al-Qaeda are not responsible, even though some within the Bush administration and the news media would like to blame them. There have been suggestions the CIA could have sent the anthrax letters, if a hidden bio-weapons program existed within the agency. But what purpose would such an attack serve? It is hard to imagine a motive for the CIA to commit such an act. Were neo-Nazis, anti-abortionists, or right-wing militias the culprits? There are plenty of off-the-wall theories about possible suspects—even one involving a pagan cult in the Midwest—but nothing has panned out. There is, however, another possibility that needs to be considered.

“Who had the means, the motive, and the opportunity to have brought about these attacks?” is a basic question that needs to be asked. An extensive and well-developed biological warfare program exists within Israel today. A motive for the anthrax attacks would be to blame Arab terrorists or a ‘rogue nation’ for this atrocity and to help launch the United States into war against Israel’s enemies. Lastly, Israel had prior knowledge of the planned attacks on September 11.

Israel’s bio-weapons programs dates back to the earliest formation of the Zionist state. Dr. Avner Cohen documents Israel’s program in his paper, “Israel and Chemical/Biological Weapons: History, Deterrence, and Arms Control.” Cohen begins by describing how Zionists during the 1948 war poisoned the wells and water supplies of Arab villagers. According to Israeli military historian Dr. Uri Milstein, the typhoid epidemic that spread throughout the costal town of Acre in May 1948 was the result of Zionist Jews contaminating the Arabs’ water supply. In Gaza the Jews failed in a similar attempt. The Egyptian Army found four Jews disguised as Arabs near the water wells. The four terrorists were caught with a canteen filled with dysentery and typhoid bacteria. All four were tried, convicted, and hanged within a three-month period. Dr. Cohen questions if the two incidents were isolated or part of a larger program of bio-warfare during the 1948 war.

Israel’s bio-weapons facilities are located at the Israel Institute of Biological Research (IIBR) in Ness Ziona (also Nes Ziona, Nes Tona) a few miles southeast of Tel Aviv. In 1952 the IIBR consisted of a single building hidden in an orange grove. Today, the IIBR has grown into a massive 14-acre compound with several hundred employees surrounded by high walls and electronic sensors. What goes on behind those high walls is something Israel would prefer to be kept secret.

Dutch journalist Karel Knip has researched the IIBR and came up with some interesting findings. Knip began by going through medical literature he found on the Internet. Specifically, he focused on the papers of 140 scientists affiliated with IIBR over the last five decades. With the help of experts on chemical and biological weapons, Knip developed an overview of the various programs that exist at IIBR. Knip found IIBR research began in the 1950s involving plague, typhus, and rabies. Dr. Avner Cohen discusses Knip’s findings in his paper and states, “… a significant number of studies at IIBR focused on anti-livestock agents, following the path of other national BW [bio-weapons] programs at the time.” ‘Anti-livestock agents’ is Cohen’s cryptic reference to Israel’s anthrax programs.

A motive for Israel in launching the anthrax attacks would be to bring America into war against Iraq and to remove that country as a potential threat to the Jewish state. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the United States Senate was thrown into a heated debate as to whether or not this country should go to war. Senator Tom Daschle took the lead in being against American involvement. In order for Israel to achieve her war objective, this time Senator Daschle would have to be removed—or turned toward Israel’s position. Either way, Israel would win.

Likewise, Senator Patrick Leahy ran afoul of the Israelis when he introduced his Leahy Amendment to the Foreign Operations Appropriations Act. The Leahy Amendment, also called the Leahy Law, prohibits American arms sales to foreign security or military units that systematically violate human rights. The Israeli military routinely tortures Palestinian prisoners, assassinates Arab political figures, and fires American-made rockets and missiles into civilian crowds and apartment buildings. If an American administration ever decided to enforce the Leahy Law, Israel would find herself under an arms embargo. Eliminating or ‘turning’ her Senatorial adversaries—a gamble she couldn’t lose— would be powerful motives for Israel to target Senators Daschle and Leahy for political assassination by anthrax.

For Israel to have initiated the anthrax attacks, prior knowledge of the al-Qaeda plot was essential. The Mossad, Israel’s external intelligence service, has made it their mission to track Arab terrorists around the world. Indirect evidence of Mossad’s surveillance of the al-Qaeda hijackers prior to September 11 can be found in the Drug Enforcement Agency report, “Suspicious Activities Involving Israeli Art Students at DEA Facilities,” and in an investigative report from Fox News.

In March 2001, an alert was issued by the National Counterintelligence Executive, a branch of the CIA, warning federal employees to be aware of “suspicious visitors to federal facilities.” There had been reports of Middle Eastern persons showing up at government buildings—many of them DEA offices—claiming to be Israeli art students. At first it was thought the Israeli art students might be Arab terrorists planning an attack. However, it later turned out the art students were indeed Israelis.

The Israelis would appear unannounced at various government offices or at the homes of federal officials. They would falsely identify themselves as art students from the University of Jerusalem or Bazala Academy in Israel and attempt to sell their artwork on canvas. Astute government employees soon discovered the Israelis were more interested in obtaining information than in selling artwork. The students, in the course of their conversations, would ask for business cards and inquire about the officials’ work activities and those of their associates. At times, the Israelis were found breaching government entrances through back doors and parking garages. Others appeared at government offices that were hidden or undisclosed to the local community. Some were found with diagrams of government buildings showing entrances and offices of various employees—indicating prior surveillance. Others were found with photographs of government agents. One Israeli had a computer printout with the heading “DEA groups.”

The DEA, with the help of the FBI, began to compile a report on the Israeli art students. The report, prepared in June 2001, listed over one hundred Israelis by name along with their personal identifying information. After the Israelis were arrested, the government, for sensitive political reasons, was reluctant to prosecute any of them for espionage, so they let them go.

One DEA agent, in an apparent attempt to prevent a government cover-up, had the report posted on the Internet in March 2002. The report provides information obtained from the Israelis during their interrogations. In a general assessment of the Israelis, the report states, “Most admit to having served in the Israeli Military. This is not surprising given the mandatory military service require [sic] in Israel, however, a majority of those questioned has [sic] stated they served in military intelligence, electronic signal intercept, or explosive ordnance units.”

Within the various agencies of the U.S. government, there was a debate regarding the entire Israeli art student phenomenon. Most were convinced this was an intelligence operation, but at the time its purpose was unclear. The best clue in understanding the mystery was their main target: the Drug Enforcement Agency. Although the Israelis penetrated other federal facilities, such as military bases, the spies seemed focused on the DEA.

During this period, the DEA was investigating the activities of Israeli organized crime. Israeli mobsters, along with the Russian Mafia, control the distribution of the drug Ecstasy in America. It should be noted there is no real difference between these two criminal organizations. It has been known for a long time that the Russian Mafia is made up of Russian Jews from the former Soviet Union. Questions still remain: Why were Israeli spies posing as art students interested in the activities of the DEA? What connection does the Mossad have with the Russian Mafia? The conclusion that best fits the known facts is that Israeli intelligence launched an operation against the DEA to protect their new intelligence asset, the Russian Mafia, from prosecution.

After September 11, the activities of Israeli art students were seen in a new light. The FBI began to investigate the trail left by the Arab hijackers and found many of them had residences in Florida. Interestingly, one third of the art student spies were also based in Florida. It was discovered that some of the Israeli art students had addresses in the same locations as the hijackers. One commentator said that, at times, they were just yards apart.

Carl Cameron with Fox News was the first major reporter to break this story, in a four-part series that aired in December 2001. In the series, Cameron gives several examples of Israeli espionage activities in America. In his first report, Cameron focuses on the Israeli surveillance of the Arab hijackers. Cameron reported, “There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance, and not shared it.”

Cameron based his reporting on information he obtained from investigators in the FBI, DEA, and the INS. In his report, one investigator acknowledged there were “tie-ins” between the Israelis and the Arab hijackers. However, it appears Carl Cameron was unable to present on Fox News all that he learned concerning these “tie-ins.”

Alan Simpson, in a short piece that he wrote for his own online publication, Spies Magazine, picked up the story where Fox News left off. In an article entitled, “Art, Espionage and Cover Ups,” Simpson appears to have obtained the unaired portions of Carl Cameron’s report concerning the Israelis’ monitoring of the hijackers. Simpson cites the following as coming from “the original investigative report [Carl Cameron’s] breaking the story.” The following are direct quotes from Alan Simpson’s article.

“According to the FBI list, the Arab terrorist and suspect cells lived in the same neighborhoods as the Israeli cells in Irving, Texas and Hollywood and Miami, Florida from Dec. 2000 to April 2001. In the case of Irving, the Israeli cell used a rental mailbox in a shopping center just one block away from an Arab suspect’s apartment. In Hollywood, the terrorists, including lead hijacker Mohammad Atta, the Egyptian who piloted American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, used a rental mailbox drop two blocks from an apartment rented by an Israeli ‘art student’ team leader.”

“It is not the only case where the Israelis were found to be in the same location as the Saudi cells. According to the DEA Report, another Israeli team operating out of Hollywood, Florida, led by team leader Hanan Serfaty lived at 4220 Sheridan St., #303, Hollywood, Florida 33021 (Emerald Greens Apartments) while the Saudi hijackers Khalid Al Midhar, Abdulaziz al Omari, Walid Al Shehri, and UAE national Marwan al Shehri, operated from a mail drop at Mailbox Rentals, 3389 Sheridan St. #256, Hollywood, Florida 33021-3608. Another Serfaty residence at 701 S. 21st Ave., Hollywood was located near the homes of Atta and Al Shehri, including a residence on Jackson Street, just a few blocks away, and the Bimini Motel Apartments, Apartment 8, at 1600 North Ocean Drive. On September 7, just days before their terrorist attack, Atta and Al Shehri spent several hours at Shuckums Oyster Bar and Grill at 1814 Harrison St., just blocks away form Serfaty’s 21st Ave. residence. A Miami-based Israeli unit, led by Legum Yochai, operated from 13753 SW 90th Ave., Miami while hijacker Al Shehri lived nearby at Horizons Apartments, 8025 SW 107th Ave.”

Cameron’s reporting appears in part to be based upon a secret FBI document that shows the “tie-ins” between the Israeli spies and the Arab hijackers. The fact that a secret FBI document exists is also evident in the Die Zeit article, “Next Door to Mohammed Atta.” Die Zeit, a German paper, based their article on information obtained from the French intelligence agency. The FBI apparently shared their report on Mossad activity with the French. The following portions of the article “Next Door to Mohammed Atta,’ closely parallels Carl Cameron’s unaired report.

“Not until after the attacks of September 11 did the consequences of the spy ring become clear. Apparently the agents were not interested in military or industrial facilities [sic], but were shadowing a number of suspects, who were later involved in the terrorist attacks against the U.S. According to a report of the French intelligence agency that Die Zeit examined, ‘according to the FBI, Arab terrorists and suspected terror cells lived in Phoenix, Arizona, as well as in Miami and Hollywood, Florida from December 2000 to April 2001 in direct proximity to the Israeli spy cells.’

“According to the report, the Mossad agents were interested in the leader of the terrorists, Mohammed Atta, and his key accomplice, Marwan al-Shehi. Both lived in Hamburg before they settled in Hollywood, Florida in order to plan the attacks. A Mossad team was also operating in the same town. The leader, Hanan Serfati, had rented several dwellings. ‘One of Serfati’s apartments was located on the corner of 701st St. and 21st Ave. [sic] in Hollywood, right near the apartment of Atta and al-Shehi,’ French intelligence reported later. Everything indicates that the terrorists were constantly observed by the Israelis. The chief Israeli agent was staying right near the post office where the terrorists had a mailbox.”

Le Monde, the French paper of record, in the article, “An Enigma: Vast Israeli Spy Network Dismantled in the U.S.,” also appears to have had access to the secret FBI document or at least the French intelligence agency’s version of it. The French paper provided a new detail and reported that six of the Israeli spies had cellular telephones bought by an Israeli ex-vice-consul. Another source reported some of the phones had a special walkie-talkie feature which made them difficult to intercept. This would indicate the spying was not some rogue operation—but was instead directed by Israel.

The evidence is overwhelming that Israel, in the first half of 2001, launched an extensive intelligence-gathering operation within the United States. One part of their assignment was to learn as much as possible concerning the DEA investigations of the Russian Mafia and Israeli organized crime. Their other task was to monitor the al-Qaeda terrorists.

Through electronic surveillance of the hijackers, the Israelis would have been able to learn the time and place for the September 11 attack. If the spies were monitoring the hijackers’ Internet activities, they would have known the date of the flights and airlines involved since the hijacker’s tickets were bought online.

A newspaper article that appeared in Haaretz, an Israeli paper, further indicates prior knowledge of the coming attack. Haaretz reported two Israeli employees of Odigo—an instant messaging company with offices near the World Trade Center and also in Israel—received a warning two hours before the attack. This, roughly, would have been when the hijackers were seen boarding their planes. The Mossad, in order to minimize Jewish losses around the World Trade Center area, could have easily issued the warning via the instant message service. The Washington Post reported, “The Odigo service includes a feature called People Finder that allows users to seek out and contact others based on certain interests or demographics.” Those whose interests relate to Israel or Jewish topics could have received the message—even if the persons were unknown to the sender. On that day, the Odigo warning may have saved many Jewish lives.

Another mystery surrounding September 11 concerns insider trading of “put” options days before the attacks. Put options, a variation on short selling of a stock, are investments that constitute a bet that a stock will decline in the near future. A few Israelis would have been in a position to make a great deal of money before the al-Qaeda attacks. An unknown number of insider traders made millions of dollars by buying puts during the three business days prior to the World Trade Center attack. United and American airline stocks had highly significant numbers of put options placed upon them, while other airline stocks were not affected in a major way. Only United and American planes were hijacked. A number of insurance and investment companies also had unusual put options placed on their shares. The names of the investors who profited from the tragedy of September 11 have never been released.

Obviously Israel’s overarching objective in the anthrax mailings was to terrorize America. Once the people realized they were again under attack, panic and shock spread throughout the land. But Israel had a special reason for this type of bio-terrorism. For Israel the anthrax attacks had an important strategic purpose, namely shifting the new war away from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and toward Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

Shortly thereafter, the cry went out concerning Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction and her supposed ties to terrorists. With the help of Israel’s neo -con servative allies within the Office of the Vice President, the Pentagon, think tanks (such as the American Enterprise Institute), and some media outlets (like the Wall Street Journal), the campaign for invading Iraq was launched. The campaign, for the most part, was based upon lies. Some of these lies came directly from Israel.

Within the office of Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, a unit was established to prepare “intelligence” reports in English for a new group within the Pentagon known as the Office of Special Plans (OSP). In addition to the Israeli input, some of the OSP’s questionable intelligence came from Iraqi exiles. The Office of Special Plans bypassed the CIA and took the cooked intelligence directly to the Oval Office. The CIA, for the most part, tried to be professional in their analysis, but in the end the neocons and the Israelis got their war against Iraq.

There was no massive intelligence failure that led America to go to war in Iraq. Instead, it was a massive intelligence fraud. Some suspect the forged Niger documents, concerning the allegation that Iraq tried to obtain “yellow cake” uranium oxide from that African country, may have originated with the Israelis. Also, the unconfirmed report on the alleged meeting of Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi agent in Prague was most likely disinformation on the part of Israel. In one bizarre aspect of the story, the London Times reported the Iraqi agent was seen giving Atta a vile of anthrax. The Times reported this as if it actually occurred—and said Israeli security sources observed the transfer.

Israel’s objective was to bring America into a new war against Iraq. When the al-Qaeda plot was discovered, Israel let the terrorists proceed, thereby insuring America would go to war. The anthrax attack that followed was the bio-terror event needed to focus America’s attention upon Iraq and its alleged weapons of mass destruction. However, Israel had planed the anthrax attacks upon America years before the discovery of the al-Qaeda plot. The anthrax hoaxes that preceded the anthrax attacks were an integral part of the conspiracy.

The planning for the anthrax attacks of 2001 goes back to at least 1997. In April of that year, the national headquarters of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith in Washington, DC received a package that contained a petri dish labeled Anthracis Yersinia, implying the dish contained bacteria that could cause anthrax infections or plague. The dish had been broken and was leaking a red fluid. Tests later determined the petri dish to be relatively harmless, and it did not contain the bacteria Anthracis or Yersinia. However, it did contain Bacillus cereus, which is less dangerous and is sometimes used as an anthrax simulant.

A two-page typed letter accompanied the petri dish. The letter was largely incoherent and contained comments on Jews, Nazis, and the ‘Holocaust.’ The letter was signed, “The Counter Holocaust Lobbyists of Hillel.” Months prior to the B’nai B’rith hoax, a movement was forming on college campuses calling for a debate to question some assertions concerning the ‘Holocaust.’ Those responsible for the mailing chose to blame historical revisionists or so-called “Holocaust deniers.”

The B’nai B’rith hoax received a great deal of media attention. Television outlets like CNN and other networks broadcast the incident live to a national audience. The nearby area was evacuated, and for a period of time office personnel were quarantined. The case has never been solved, and the cost to the government was two million dollars.

Israel’s Mossad most likely was responsible for the mailing. The hoax benefited Israel and the Jews in several ways. First, national publicity was generated in this first major anthrax scare. Second, sympathy was elicited for the Jewish organization that was attacked. Third, the persons supposedly responsible—namely, those who have questions concerning the ‘Holocaust’—were demonized. However, on another level, something more important was achieved: This would be the first anthrax hoax used to implicate Dr. Steven Hatfill.

Dr. Hatfill was attending a terrorism seminar in Washington, DC the day the B’nai B’rith incident occurred. At the time, Hatfill was employed as a researcher at the National Institutes of Health where he likely had access to petri dishes containing bacteria. This, in all probability, was the reason a petri dish from a bioresearch lab was used this time, instead of a suspicious powder. This anthrax hoax, along with others that followed, would help to make a circumstantial case against Dr. Hatfill if a real anthrax attack ever occurred.

Dr. Hatfill likely came to the attention of the Mossad when he first appeared in a photo with Afrikaner Resistance Movement leader Eugene Terre’Blanche and members of the paramilitary unit Aquila. The Mossad’s front organization, the South African Board of Jewish Deputies, would have taken notice of the newspaper photo. As an organization, they keep track of individuals and groups they consider hostile to Jews and their interests. The Afrikaner Resistance Movement would be the type of organization they would want to monitor. The information they obtained on Dr. Hatfill could very well have been passed onto the Mossad. In America, the sister organization to the South African Board of Jewish Deputies is the Anti-Defamation League (ADL).

Don Foster, an English professor at Vassar and at times a forensic linguistic analyst for the FBI, reviewed several of the anthrax hoaxes in an article he wrote for Vanity Fair. Foster believes Hatfill is a good candidate for the anthrax perpetrator, and is impressed by the apparent relationship between Hatfill and the anthrax hoaxes. Foster said, “When I line up Hatfill’s known movements with the postmark locations of reported biothreats, those hoax anthrax attacks appeared to trail him like a vapor cloud.” In his article, Foster implies Hatfill was responsible for the B’nai B’rith hoax and suggests he may have been responsible for others that followed.

Another hoax, that Foster thinks “trails” Hatfill, occurred in August 1998. In this incident, a white powder was dispersed throughout several floors of the Finney State Office Building in Wichita, Kansas. Foster suggests this was a re-enactment of a bio-terror scenario that Hatfill developed as a part of his responsibilities while employed at USAMRIID. Foster also implies Hatfill and his new mentor, anthrax expert William Patrick, were in the area of Wichita the day of the incident and later arrived together in San Diego to attend an anti-terrorism conference.

An anti-government Christian Identity group claimed responsibility for the office building incident in a rambling 11-page letter. Christian Identity is an unusual religious sect that looks upon Jews in less than flattering terms. A basic tenet of Christian Identity is the claim that the “chosen people” of the Old Testament are the peoples of Europe and their descendants, with the Jews of today considered to be the offspring of Satan.

The Wichita incident is similar to the B’nai B’rith anthrax hoax. Both were designed to implicate Dr. Hatfill solely by his presence in the areas where they took place. In both cases the Mossad wanted the public to know that groups thought to be hostile to Jewish interests had claimed responsibility for the terrorist acts. Also, the same type of rambling disjointed letters accompanied the attacks, probably written in an effort to mislead the FBI and other investigators.

Several other anthrax hoaxes were designed to implicate Dr. Hatfill. The most important one was the anthrax hoax letter mailed from London and addressed to Senator Tom Daschle. Hatfill at this time was in England training with the United Nations weapons inspectors. The Mossad used the anthrax hoaxes to misdirect the authorities. By following these false leads the FBI and other law enforcement agencies wasted valuable time and resources investigating and shadowing Dr. Hatfill.

Israel is perhaps the only country in the world that could have succeeded in the anthrax attack upon America. With the help of Jewish scientists from the former Soviet Union, Israel’s bio-weapons research has probably surpassed that of all other nations. The Soviet Union’s bio-weapons program had 32,000 scientists and staff working in 40 different research and production facilities. Two thousand of these scientists worked exclusively on the Soviet anthrax program. A significant number of these scientists may have immigrated to Israel and become employed in her bio-weapons programs.

Anthony Cordesman with the Center for Strategic and International Studies wrote a report, “National Developments of Biological Weapons in the Middle East: An Analytic Overview,” assessing Israel’s bio-weapons programs. Cordesman reports Israel has stockpiled anthrax at her bio-warfare center, and at times provides Israeli intelligence with deadly pathogens to be used for assassinations. Anthony Cordesman unknowingly has given us the “smoking gun” pointing to Israel’s responsibility in the anthrax attacks.

On the day of September 11, 2001 the Mossad was waiting for al-Qaeda to strike. Soon the greatest bio-terror event in history would follow. Different grades of anthrax were prepared at Israel’s bio-warfare center at Ness Ziona. Coarse brown granules that would cause only skin infections were prepared for the New York media letters. The deadlier “weapons grade” anthrax was reserved for Senators Daschle and Leahy.

The envelopes were pre-addressed and waiting for the letters and the anthrax material to be placed in them. The letters were written with only the date at the top to be added later. In his analysis, Ed Lake has suggested the “09-11-01” top portion of the letter seems to have been printed at a different time and perhaps by a different hand. This would be a necessary precaution if the terror flights were changed or delayed by a few days.

On the day of September 11, or perhaps shortly thereafter, copies of the original letter were made at a publicly accessible copier in New Jersey. Through analysis of scratches on the glass, the FBI is certain they have found the copier used to produce the letters. The original letter used to make the copies may have been destroyed. The Mossad officer could have taken the copies to Israel the next day. The anthrax letters were likely prepared, taped, and brought back to America days later via Israeli diplomatic pouch into New York City or Washington, DC. This speculative scenario could have all occurred within the week that followed September 11. The first batch of anthrax letters was mailed in Trenton, New Jersey, exactly one week after the devastating airplane attacks.

Israel took a huge gamble when she attacked America, but this was not the first time. In June 1967, at the height of the Six Day Arab-Israeli War, Israel deliberately attacked an American intelligence ship, the USS Liberty, in an attempt to destroy the vessel and to lay blame on the Arabs. They failed to sink the ship, but 34 navy crewmen were killed and 171 were wounded. A cover-up was ordered at the highest levels by the U.S. government.

Israel must not be allowed to continue in her attacks upon America or in her misdirection of our foreign policy. Israel must be disarmed of all weapons of mass destruction. If not stopped, she may strike again, perhaps this time by exploding a radioactive “dirty bomb” in a major American city. Fake signal intelligence could be generated by Israel to indicate that a country such as Iran was responsible. Jewish neo-conservatives in America could then argue that since we were attacked by Iran with a radioactive weapon, our response against Iran should also be nuclear. If President Bush acceded to this advice, Israel would have destroyed yet another Middle Eastern country and brought us another step closer to global war. Israel is an enemy, not a friend. America and her political leadership must finally realize this important fact.

Robert Pate is a researcher for National Vanguard.

Here is an extensive list of sources used in the production of this article. This article was completed in January 2004 and was first published in the March-April 2004 issue of National Vanguard magazine.

"Among the many assassinations that Israel has carried out in a systemic and organized manner, the most dangerous one was the assassination of Arafat," Assad said, addressing a conference of Arab lawyers.

Assad, speaking in Damascus, added that "this was done secretly, under the watching eyes of the world. But no country responded - as if nothing had happened at all."

The president, facing pressure from the United states and Europe, said that he fully supported the formation of an international investigation charged with examining the circumstances surrounding Arafat's death, similar to the committee currently charged with investigating Hariri's assassination.

Diplomatic officials in Jerusalem characterized Assad's comments as "ridiculous," and said that -more than anything else - they showed the level of his distress.

In addition, the officials said that Israel has on a number of occasions called on the Palestinians to make public the Arafat medical file.

Assad also referred to the Hariri investigation more directly, implying that he would not accept the UN's request to interview him about his or his senior officials' alleged involvement in the massive bombing that killed the Lebanese politician.

"The issue of national sovereignty is more important than security council decisions," he said.

"It was an unprecedented year ... the IFJ has counted 89 who were killed in the line of duty, singled out for their professional work. In 2005 the trend toward targeted assassination of editorial staff has intensified."

The largest number of deliberate killings, 38, was recorded in the Middle East, all but three of them in Iraq, making the region "by far the world's most deadly beat for reporters in the field," the report said.

"Most of those who died were local, many of them working for international media outlets in Iraq where the streets are too dangerous for foreigners to tread."

On top of the 35 targeted killings in Iraq, the report noted that another five journalists were killed there by U.S. troops, including Reuters soundman Waleed Khaled, shot in the face and chest by U.S. military forces on August 28.

This brought to 18 the number of reporters and media staff killed "at the hands of occupation forces since 2003 and reinforcing calls led by the IFJ for independent investigations into these deaths to eliminate suspicions of targeting," the report said.

AMBIGUOUS RELATIONSHIP

White blamed governments, not only authoritarian regimes interested in silencing journalists, but also in democratic countries where politicians had what he called an ambiguous relationship with the press, for failing to take the problem seriously.

"There is still absolute inertia ... more than 90 percent of every killing that we record will not be properly investigated," he told a news conference after the report's publication.

"If we were nurses, if we were nuns, if we were ... doctors working out in the field there would be immediate political concern. But because we are journalists and because our role is ambiguous as far as politicians are concerned, there is a tendency to ignore or downplay the crisis."

In the Asia-Pacific region, the Philippines was the most dangerous country for journalists, with 10 killed, almost all deliberately. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 12 were killed in Colombia, Haiti, Mexico and Brazil.

At least 61 deaths of media workers in 2005 resulted from accidents, the report said, of which by far the worst was the December 6 crash of a military aircraft in Tehran in which 48 journalists and media staff died.

A panel of six Army officers also convicted Chief Warrant Officer Lewis Welshofer Jr., 43, of negligent dereliction of duty. He was acquitted of assault after six hours of deliberations.

Welshofer was accused of putting a sleeping bag over the head of Iraqi Maj. Gen. Abed Hamed Mowhoush, sitting on his chest and using his hand to cover the general's mouth while asking him questions in 2003.

Welshofer, who stood silently and showed no reaction when the verdict was announced, faces a dishonorable discharge and up to three years in prison for negligent homicide and three months for negligent dereliction of duty. Sentencing was scheduled for Monday.

If convicted of the original murder charge, he could have been sentenced to life in prison.

The defense had argued a heart condition caused Mowhoush's death, and that Welshofer's commanders had approved the interrogation technique.

"What he was doing he was doing in the open, and he was doing it because he believed the information in fact would save lives," attorney Frank Spinner said.

Spinner said he was disappointed with the verdict and would decide after sentencing whether to appeal.

"The verdict recognizes the context in which these events took place," he said. "It was a very difficult time in Iraq. There was confusion, and they were not getting clear guidance from headquarters."

Welshofer and prosecutors left without commenting.

During the trial, prosecutor Maj. Tiernan Dolan described a rogue interrogator who became frustrated with Mowhoush's refusal to answer questions and escalated his techniques from simple interviews to beatings to simulating drowning, and finally, to death.

"He treated that general worse than you would treat a dog and he did so knowing he was required to treat the general humanely," Dolan said.

Welshofer used his sleeping bag technique in the presence of lower ranking soldiers, but never in the presence of officers with the authority to stop him, Dolan said.

The treatment of the Iraqi general "could fairly be described as torture," Dolan said.

In an e-mail to a commander, Dolan said, Welshofer wrote that restrictions on interrogation techniques were impeding the Army's ability to gather intelligence. Welshofer wrote that authorized techniques came from Cold War-era doctrine that did not apply in Iraq, Dolan said.

"Our enemy understands force, not psychological mind games," Dolan quoted from Welshofer's message. Dolan said an officer responded by telling Welshofer to "take a deep breath and remember who we are."

The defense urged jurors to consider conditions in Iraq at the time of the interrogation: Soldiers were being killed in an increasingly lethal and increasingly bold insurgency. Welshofer had to make some decisions on his own because guidance was lacking and other techniques weren't working, Spinner said.

Officials believed Mowhoush had information that would "break the back of the whole insurgency," said defense attorney Capt. Ryan Rosauer. They also thought Mowhoush helping to bring foreign fighters into Iraq from across the Syrian border, he said.

Several prosecution witnesses, including one whose identity is classified and who testified in a closed session, had been granted immunity in exchange for their cooperation, Spinner noted. Two soldiers who were initially charged with murder in the case also were given immunity.

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press.