From: slaac@yahoo.com (Rev. Lemuel Atom)
Newsgroups: alt.slack
Date: Tue, Feb 19, 2002
From http://www.nj.com/mercer/times/index.ssf?/mercer/times/02-19-IZAR1IUB.html
Expert: Anthrax suspect ID'd
02/19/02
By JOSEPH DEE
Staff Writer
PRINCETON BOROUGH -- An advocate for the control of biological weapons
who has been gathering information about last autumn's anthrax attacks
said yesterday the Federal Bureau of Investigation has a strong hunch
about who mailed the deadly letters.
But the FBI might be "dragging its feet" in pressing charges because
the suspect is a former government scientist familiar with "secret
activities that the government would not like to see disclosed," said
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, director of the Federation of American
Scientists' Chemical and Biological Weapons Program.
Rosenberg, who spoke to about 65 students, faculty members and others
at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at
Princeton University, said the FBI has known of the suspect since
October and, according to her "government insider" sources, has
interrogated him more than once.
The investigation into five anthrax-laced letters and several other
hoax letters -- all mailed last fall, including several processed by
Trenton Main Post Office in Hamilton -- was the focus of Rosenberg's
talk. She also gave her thoughts about what the government should do
to control biological weapons.
"There are a number of insiders -- government insiders -- who know
people in the anthrax field who have a common suspect," Rosenberg
said. "The FBI has questioned that person more than once, . . . so it
looks as though the FBI is taking that person very seriously."
She said it is quite possible the suspect is a scientist who formerly
worked at the U.S. government's military laboratory at Fort Detrick,
Md.
Rosenberg said she has been gathering information from press reports,
congressional hearings, Bush administration news conferences and
government insiders she would not name.
During a brief question-and-answer session after her talk, one man
wondered whether biological agents truly pose significant dangers to
the public, given the limited number of deaths and illnesses caused by
five anthrax-laced letters.
Without mentioning other biological agents that are far more deadly
and contagious than anthrax, Rosenberg said the potential for a
biological attack is "catastrophic."
Another man wondered if the FBI and other investigators might be
focusing too narrowly on one scientist, saying, "New Jersey is the
epicenter of the international pharmaceutical industry," and many
people in those labs presumably have the skills to handle and refine
anthrax.
"I think your argument would have been a good one earlier on, but I
think that the results of the analyses (of the letters and the anthrax
in them) show that access to classified information was essential,"
Rosenberg said. "And that rules out most of the people in the
pharmaceutical industry. . . . It's possible, but they would have had
to have access to the information," Rosenberg said.
Picking up the conversational thread, another man said, "People know a
lot, and it's a question of what they choose to focus their knowledge
on. Things are invented in parallel," he said.
-- -- --
She said the evidence points to a person who has experience handling
anthrax; who has been vaccinated and has received annual booster
shots; and who had access to classified government information about
how to chemically treat the bacterial spores to keep them from
clumping together, which allows them to remain airborne.
"We can draw a likely portrait of the perpetrator as a former Fort
Detrick scientist who is now working for a contractor in the
Washington, D.C., area," Rosenberg said. "He had reason for travel to
Florida, New Jersey and the United Kingdom. . . . There is also the
likelihood the perpetrator made the anthrax himself. He grew it,
probably on a solid medium and weaponized it at a private location
where he had accumulated the equipment and the material.
"We know that the FBI is looking at this person, and it's likely that
he participated in the past in secret activities that the government
would not like to see disclosed," Rosenberg said. "And this raises the
question of whether the FBI may be dragging its feet somewhat and may
not be so anxious to bring to public light the person who did this.
"I know that there are insiders, working for the government, who know
this person and who are worried that it could happen that some kind of
quiet deal is made that he just disappears from view," Rosenberg said.
"This, I think, would be a really serious outcome that would send a
message to other potential terrorists, that (they) would think they
could get away with it.
"So I hope that doesn't happen, and that is my motivation to continue
to follow this and to try to encourage press coverage and pressure on
the FBI to follow up and publicly prosecute the perpetrator."
-- -- --
She expressed disappointment that the U.S. government last July
decided against signing an international biological weapons treaty
that would ban nations from developing such weapons.
"It became clear from congressional testimony that the reason for this
rejection was the need to protect our secret projects," Rosenberg
said.
During the question-and-answer period, one woman said, "I'm not sure
that I understood you completely, but it seems to me that the United
States government has a double-standard," of wanting other nations to
comply with a weapons ban but wanting freedom to pursue its own
program.
"I'm totally shocked by this information," she said, sending a wave of
laughter through the lecture hall.
"They make no bones about it," Rosenberg replied. "On many occasions
they've argued that rules should be for the bad guys, not the good
guys."
Rosenberg said she worries about an "enormous increase" in money in
the Bush budget for research into bioterrorism agents. "There is
already a rush for this funding," she said.
The number of researchers and labs ought to be tightly controlled, she
said. Under the current budget proposal, however, she says the
government will be spreading money around to "a lot more people and a
lot more laboratories around the country from which bioterrorists can
emerge, as one just did.
"By spreading around this access and this knowledge, we're asking for
trouble.'
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: "Rev. Ivan Stang"
In article <49b3655d.0202191409.59385ea4@posting.google.com>, Rev.
Lemuel Atom
> From
> http://www.nj.com/mercer/times/index.ssf?/mercer/times/02-19-IZAR1IUB.html
>
> Expert: Anthrax suspect ID'd
>
Yeah, this is what got me thinking THE STAND and THE TWELVE MONKEYS and
so on.
I should stop reading the news so that when the Doomsday Sniffles kill
me, I won't be so PARANOID about it.
--
4th Stangian Orthodox MegaFisTemple Lodge of the Wrath of Dobbs Yeti,
Resurrected
P.O. Box 181417, Cleveland, OH 44118 (fax 216-320-9528)
A subsidiary of:
The SubGenius Foundation, Inc. / P.O. Box 140306, Dallas, TX 75214
SubSITE: http://www.subgenius.com
PRABOB
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From: alecto
"Rev. Lemuel Atom" wrote:
> During a brief question-and-answer session after her talk, one man
> wondered whether biological agents truly pose significant dangers to
> the public, given the limited number of deaths and illnesses caused by
> five anthrax-laced letters.
I read an interesting old pamphlet recently telling the true tale of a railroad
construction project in Africa early in the 20th century which was brought to
a
halt by two lions. The company hired one man with a gun to protect a couple
of
thousand mostly Indian laborers, yet the lions got away with one of them almost
every night, pushing through twenty-foot thick walls of brambles and dragging
the
hapless lackeys screaming from their tents to crunch them up in plain sight
of
everyone but the guy with the gun. The remarkable thing to me was that
this went
on for so long, because the workers felt that, since there were so many of them
their chances as individuals of being the one who got dragged off and devoured
every night were really quite slim. So they just stayed there working
all day and
listening to agonized screams at night. The lions killed and ate almost
150
before they were shot.
Sure your chances are good unless you're the one the lion wants. Then
your
chances are very poor indeed. Like playing the lottery only backwards.