Anthrax and Bin Laden and the price of treason

Clintons Cat

One thing i find intresting is that when Al Queeda was the prime suspect for the Anthrax posting. The state department and Rubens in particular were emphasising how such technology required state backing for Procurement and Refining the biological strain.Fingers were pointed at Iraq.
Now the FBI has released a psycological profile of the suspect to be more likely a lone domestic terrorist in the vain of mc viegh or the Uni Bomber using a home science kit what happened to all sophisticated technology we were being "sold ?" how come it is no longer necessary for large numbers of people to be involved in the procurement/refining and distribution process.
It kind of reminds me of a bad joke "Q how many arabs does it take to address an envelope?
A Twenty and Iraq to procure the stamps
Now that the facts are inconvienient to the policy being persued they are quietly being dropped.Whoever is responsible will hopefully be caught as quickly as possible and an inquiry held into how he got the substance in the first place.
The terrifying fact is security round bio technologies research institutes is disproportionately lax.In the !970s the FBI arrested a man driving around with two vials of Bubonic Plague in his glovecompartment.The only felony he could be charged with is faking the Research licence number he used to be sent them from a reseach institute.



The truth is somewhere in between.


Cite> the FBI and state department daily press briefings

Baz_

I'm not really sure what you are driving at here, or what you are asking, but I get the impression that you are asking about whether or not the FBI are consistent with their information or not.

If thats what your point is then let me tell you that they are not consistent, thats how government agencies work, one week they have one suspect the next week it changes.

But again I'm not sure about what you are asking to I won't post anymore just incase I am at the wrong end of a very big stick.

Clintons Cat

What i am saying is that when the hawks believed they had a reasonable case to implicate Al Quidia, Barry Rubens and the other Hawks In the State Department were very vocal about the massive financial investment needed to refine Anthrax to Weapons Grade.The public was spun the Story That a rogue state was behind the attacks,that state was by implication Iraq. the lead was head hi jacker mohammed attar had supposedly met iraqi diplomats in prage.
Despite this monumental coup for the security services had such a meeting occured and been monitored,mohamed attar(*spelling?) managed to plot and train for the attack,assemble the hi jackers and enter america without raising any alarms,not bad for a man who had been trailed from hamburg to prage.
Since the story was spun the FBI in the course of its investigation has managed to find a number of clues that lead to disprove that theory or rather make it more likely that it is the work of a lone American Male working to his own agenda.Sudenly the Bio Tech Requirement has shrunk from needing State facillities and funding to the requirement of needing a home science kit and a lock up.
Quite a disparity in scale considering that the crisis was considered justifiable grounds for a re engagement of large scale hostilities against a nation state.
Until the person or persons are caught there is no way of telling which of the two theories is correct.But hopefully Bio Tech will face a lot tighter regulation and security in the future.

Baz_

well in fairness the American government has never been good at releasing the full details of anything at first, and have always proved quite good at misinformation, thats just the way it is, it shouldn't be, but if you want that to change, stop voting for people like bush becaus bush==conservative==stausquo.

Lemming

have you considered the possibility that they're keeping quiet because they HAVE found something??? What's the sense in letting someone know that you're coming to arrest them??

Just a thought

And in any case .. to get Anthrax spores to weapons grade costs money. Note the lack of the words "create anthrax". Everything you need is all there in the wording.

bonkey

Originally posted by Lemming
And in any case .. to get Anthrax spores to weapons grade costs money. Note the lack of the words "create anthrax". Everything you need is all there in the wording.

More correctly :

to get large quantities of Anthrax spores to weapons-grade (i.e. will cause inhalation anthrax successfully, as opposed to skin-anthrax) costs large amounts of money. This would be for the "crop duster" approach.

To get small quantities of Anthrax spores to the same grade is a lot more cost effective and while still expensive is not undoable. This would be for the "letter bomb" approach we have seen.

My read on it was that initially, the FBI played up the "state backing" argument on the assumption that there was a large quantity of Anthrax on the way. As the number of letters and outbreaks ultimately proved to be relatively small, they refined down the required cost to match the known incidents and came to a different conclusion.

The rest, is of course, keeping the media happy, and spin.

So - this change of tune isnt actually that incredible.

What is more incredible is the amount of crap which we saw *before* the Anthrax outbreaks talking about how cheap and easy it was to make buck-loads of Anthrax and how effective a bioweapon it was. The only people debunking that information were branded as "fringe" scientists, IIRC. Suddenly, after the outbreaks, the mainstream all took the same side as the "fringe" guys and remembered that Anthrax and "weapons grade Anthrax" are two completely different things.

Heh - scare us until it actually happens, then try and reassure us. What will they do for news next?

jc