Random Hits

Ace links to an interesting rethink of the 2001 anthrax attacks. The FBI has been unable to solve the case, and maybe there's an explanation that brings together key details.

The basic premise is that the anthrax attacks were part and parcel of the al Qaeda attacks on the country in 2001, and that they used weapons grade anthrax obtained from a foreign country, who upon seeing what had been wrought, realized that if the links could be traced all the way back to them, that it would mean their doom. So, that foreign country embarked on a program to destroy their anthrax stocks and all other similar evidence.

The foreign nation involved? Iraq.

I know, that sounds way too convenient and Occam's Razor might have a few questions for this theory. It has all the makings of a conspiracy theory all to its own. Still, there has been quite a bit of evidence over the years that various terrorist attacks against the US have not been as thoroughly investigated as they should have been, including following up on possible foreign assistance - see the 1993 WTC bombing and the OKC bombing.

Case Dismissed

A libel case by Stephen Hatfill against the New York Times was dismissed. Hatfill sued the Times because the Times alleged that he was a person of interest in the still unsolved anthrax attacks of 2001.

The FBI and law enforcement are still no closer to discovering who sent multiple letters and packages that killed and sickened more than a dozen people in October 2001 and required decontamination of multiple sites in Florida, New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

White Powder Found In Sen. Schumer's Office

I am looking out my office window down 3rd Avenue in Manhattan and there are a lot of emergency service vehicles a few blocks south. So, wondering what is going on, I turn to 880 Radio AM (the only AM radio station I can get without much difficulty in my office) and they just reported that a white powder substance was found, presumably by an aide, in Charles Schumer's NY office located a 757 Third Avenue.

On the web, the only place I can find any information(for now at least) is WNBC Newschannel 4's site.

A suspicious powder was found at Sen. Charles Schumer's Midtown Manhattan office Friday, authorities said.

A Joint Terrorism Task Force headed to the scene at 757 Third Ave. after an envelope containing white powder was opened. Schumer's office is on the 17th floor, police said.

There were no reports of injuries, and preliminary tests showed that the substance is not explosive. Anthrax, however, had not been ruled out, police said.

Probably turn out to be nothing, but, so close to midterm elections, who knows.

Out of Bounds

The New York Post's Page Six, which has had its share of controversies in the past (requiring new editors if I recall correctly), certainly stepped in it once again with quite a few bloggers on the Left. This time over the way it covered an incident involving Keith Olbermann.

“MSNBC loudmouth Keith Olbermann flipped out when he opened his home mail yesterday. The acerbic host of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” was terrified when he opened a suspicious-looking letter with a California postmark and a batch of white powder poured out. A note inside warned Olbermann, who’s a frequent critic of President Bush’s policies, that it was payback for some of his on-air shtick. The caustic commentator panicked and frantically called 911 at about 12:30 a.m., sources told The Post’s Philip Messing. An NYPD HazMat unit rushed to Olbermann’s pad on Central Park South, but preliminary tests indicated the substance was harmless soap powder. However, that wasn’t enough to satisfy Olbermann, who insisted on a checkup. He asked to be taken to St. Luke’s Hospital, where doctors looked him over and sent him home. Whether they gave him a lollipop on the way out isn’t known. Olbermann had no comment.”

I'm no fan of Olbermann, but according to the Page Six story, someone sent him a package containing a white powder. That would scare the bejebus out of most anyone, and Keith reacted as most of us would. He also didn't want to take any chances, which is again a normal reaction.

You might recall that in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks, there were a series of unexplained anthrax attacks where members of the media, which happened to include the New York Post (via Ed Morrissey), members of Congress, and several other individuals were infected with anthrax. The perpetrators were never found.

Perhaps you might think that Olbermann overreacted. I don't. I'd want to be absolutely sure that whatever in the package was benign. And then the Post's writeup of the incident does not reflect well on the paper, especially knowing that Post reporters were targeted by the 2001 anthrax attacks. Indeed, it screams for yet another shakeup of the editorial staff for Page Six.

The Post should have used better judgment in publishing the headline on this story. After all, they were among those journalists who were targeted by the original anthrax attacks. Sensationalizing this incident further served no purpose whatsoever.

The part I find completely and utterly distasteful is the fact that someone thinks that sending threatening letters, laced with white powder, is an appropriate action.

It isn't. Whoever sent the letter should be prosecuted to the maximum extent of the law. Period.

That said, there is room for criticism of the leftie bloggers who are now indignant over how Olbermann was treated by the Post. Where were these bloggers when Olbermann lashed out at fellow journalist Chris Wallace, calling him a monkey. Don't see them castigating Olbermann over that.

Now, Macranger wonders whether this incident actually happened. That's quite a contention, and he doesn't provide a link. Can or will we get verification that this went down as described in the original Page Six story?

The Moderate Voice has a roundup of the reaction to this story. It's a good read.

Technorati: olbermann, keith olbermann, msnbc.

Valuing Sources

NBC News would like folks to believe that this particular source, Naji Sabri, Iraq’s foreign minister under Saddam, was more reliable than Iraq's other sources. Yet, the body of the article paints a different picture.

But on that very trip, there was also a secret contact made. The contact was brokered by the French intelligence service, sources say. Intelligence sources say that in a New York hotel room, CIA officers met with an intermediary who represented Sabri. All discussions between Sabri and the CIA were conducted through a "cutout," or third party. Through the intermediary, intelligence sources say, the CIA paid Sabri more than $100,000 in what was, essentially, "good-faith money." And for his part, Sabri, again through the intermediary, relayed information about Saddam’s actual capabilities.

The sources spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the case.

The sources say Sabri’s answers were much more accurate than his proclamations to the United Nations, where he demonized the U.S. and defended Saddam. At the same time, they also were closer to reality than the CIA's estimates, as spelled out in its October 2002 intelligence estimate.

For example, consider biological weapons, a key concern before the war. The CIA said Saddam had an "active" program for "R&D, production and weaponization" for biological agents such as anthrax. Intelligence sources say Sabri indicated Saddam had no significant, active biological weapons program. Sabri was right. After the war, it became clear that there was no program.

Another key issue was the nuclear question: How far away was Saddam from having a bomb? The CIA said if Saddam obtained enriched uranium, he could build a nuclear bomb in "several months to a year." Sabri said Saddam desperately wanted a bomb, but would need much more time than that. Sabri was more accurate.

On the issue of chemical weapons, the CIA said Saddam had stockpiled as much as "500 metric tons of chemical warfare agents" and had "renewed" production of deadly agents. Sabri said Iraq had stockpiled weapons and had "poison gas" left over from the first Gulf War. Both Sabri and the agency were wrong.

So, Sabri said that he needed more time to build nuclear weapons. Just how much time was Sabri talking about? One year? Five years? Could the US take the risk of that uncertainty? At what point does the amount of time trigger a response?

These are all questions that have been playing through the blogosphere and the halls of Congress since after 9/11. And no one has come up with any better way of dealing with such threats than to deal with them before they become imminent.

It is still clear from Sabri that Saddam sought WMD, sought to obtain nuclear weapons, and Sabri didn't have the kind of access that the article would like to assert.

So how do we assess Sabri's statements? You have to piece them together with all the other sources that the US had. Did Sabri have access to secret weapons programs? Would he even be privy to such information? What makes Sabri any more trustworthy than anyone else who provided information to the CIA?

And just what could the CIA act upon with this supposed information? And it's not like anyone is talking to NBC News either:

NBC News repeatedly requested comments about this report from Sabri, either in written form, by telephone or in person. NBC News contacted Sabri several times by phone, and hand delivered a letter to a representative of his, explaining in detail the substance of this report, including the details about weapons of mass destruction. Sabri confirmed he received the letter, but repeatedly refused to comment in any way, neither confirming nor denying any of the information in this report.

So did the CIA. The agency also would not comment on Sabri, or answer why it discounted or ignored Sabri's assessment of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program.

Maybe the reason that the CIA discounted or ignored the assessment was that the other information was considered more reliable and trustworthy than Sabri. It's not like there wasn't substantial information over the course of the 1990s that leaned towards a resumption of WMD programs, illicit operations, and Iraq flouting the cease fire rules.

Rethinking the Ports Deal

While the Dubai Ports World has agreed to delay the deal so that lawmakers can take another look at the proposed takeover, we're finally seeing a debate on port security emerging. This is long overdue.

By a decade. Or more. Ad Ed notes:

In the end, the increased scrutiny of the deal may be the biggest boon of the debate; we're finally talking about port and border security, and Congress and the Administration is finally listening. I think Krauthammer has it correct that the deal will likely go through; however, we may wind up with better focus and security at our commercial ports as a result of the controversy.

This would be a good thing - improved security at the ports is a paramount concern, but let's hope the focus is expanded to border control in general, which both sides of the aisle are loath to address.

New Jersey is also looking to sue to block the deal. That's on the heels of the PANY/NJ lawsuit to intervene.

UPDATE:
This story about Vado Diomande and how he contracted inhalation anthrax from cattle skins he brought into the US from the Ivory Coast to make drums shows how much of our border control and baggage/cargo checks rely on the honor system to safeguard against threats.

Officials suspect that the skins he bought during his two-week trip to Africa ultimately made him sick with inhalation anthrax — an extremely rare affliction, and a development that for New Yorkers amounted to a jarring flashback to the scares of October 2001.

Interviews and records show that the authorities had at least two chances to prevent the spread of the disease and that both, in the end, depended on Mr. Diomande's telling them the details about what he was bringing back from Africa. As of yesterday, it appeared he had not, officials said.

The first time that Mr. Diomande, who lives in Greenwich Village, was obligated to inform authorities about his purchases was when he packed the shipments of goatskins to send them out of Ivory Coast as cargo. A law enforcement official said that Mr. Diomande shipped the skins in a plane's cargo hold, not as part of his carry-on bags or checked personal luggage. It is unclear on what date he did this.

But United States Customs and Border Protection officials in New York and Washington say that if Mr. Diomande had followed regulations precisely, an entry form filed with a Customs broker would have spelled out what was being imported.

The second opportunity for Mr. Diomande to reveal his cargo was when he flew to Kennedy International Airport on Dec. 20, on an American Airlines flight. He was subjected to standard questioning, but officials say it appears he did not tell anyone of his shipment. Had he said anything at any point, a long list of standard procedures would have kicked in. Customs agents say they would have debriefed him more thoroughly, and federal agriculture officials very likely would have become involved.

"Absolutely, there are questions on the Customs declarations asking if the person is importing any type of animals, plants or meats, or whether they have been on a farm," said Lucille Cirillo, a supervisory Customs and Border Protection officer in the New York field office. "All the indications that I have gotten are that Mr. Diomande did not declare anything on his Customs declaration on the 20th of December."

She added that in "everything I looked at from his travel, there is nothing to indicate he had skins. If he had them, he should have declared them."

Experts in the field say that Mr. Diomande's case makes clear a fundamental reality: it is all but impossible to systematically stop the entrance of all potentially lethal germs, whether anthrax or other organisms, in plants, insects or animals. The ports are porous, and systems are not in place to inspect everything, law enforcement officials said. So, little winds up being thoroughly reviewed, in part to keep the travel and commerce of the world moving. And, despite the presence of security agents, a great deal hinges on the honor system.

So, for all the talk about Dubai Ports World and the potential security threats that deal may pose, there are other more serious security loopholes that need to be addressed as well.

Technorati: port security, port authority, dubai, national security, foreign investment.

Duelfler: Saddam Cultivated Ambiguity on WMD

He told the council that there were intelligence failures on both sides. The United States couldn't discern Saddam's true motives, while he miscalculated just how much U.S. attitudes had changed in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

"There really was this element of mutual misunderstanding," Duelfer said.

Saddam likely feared renewed conflict with Iran in the years after a brutal 1980-88 war between the two neighbors in which 1 million people died, Duelfer said. In the 1990s, intelligence reports from elsewhere had also begun to raise questions about whether Iran was developing weapons of its own.

"Saddam was certainly aware of the WMD assessments of Iran and he created a certain ambiguity about what his capabilities were," Duelfer said.

U.S. officials may have also underestimated how much it offended Saddam to have weapons inspectors "poking around their most secure areas."

Duelfer's comments were reminiscent of those made by former U.N. chief weapons inspector Hans Blix, who said in 2003 he believed Iraq had destroyed most of its weapons of mass destruction years before, but kept up the appearance that it had them to deter a military attack.

Duelfer speculated that under the U.N. oil-for-food program, which began in 1996 and ended in 2003, Saddam came to believe that he could divide the U.N. Security Council and possibly bring an end to sanctions imposed after his 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

Note that Blix states that he believed Iraq had destroyed most of its WMD years before. Problem is that Iraq was not allowed to be in possession of any WMD. That means a single vial of anthrax or a canister of mustard gas was illegal. And there have been sporadic finds of such items since the US invaded Iraq.

There also continues to be speculation that Iraq managed to transfer technologies or even weapons to the Syrians, hiding the weapons and technologies in the Bek'aa Valley, which doubles as a terrorists haven.

Also, it is interesting that Duelfer suggests that it was a fear of renewed conflict with Iran that fed his desire to keep up appearances. Currently, Iran is speeding along towards developing a nuclear weapon of its own, having obtained the technology and means to produce highly enriched uranium. The appearance of Iraqi WMD would be a cost effective means to balance power with Iran, though it would mean running afoul of the inspection regime. The Iraqi fostered-notion that it was in possession of WMD meant that the US and the rest of the world believed Iraq was in possession, setting off a chain of events.

Toxic Indifference to North Korea

Since 2002, defectors among the flood of refugees from North Korea have detailed firsthand accounts of systematic starvation, torture and murder. Enemies of the state are used in experiments to develop new generations of chemical and biological weapons that threaten the world. A microcosm of these horrors is Camp 22, one of 12 concentration camps housing an estimated 200,000 political prisoners facing torture or execution for such "crimes" as being a Christian or a relative of someone suspected of deviation from "official ideology of the state." Another eyewitness, Kwon Hyuk, formerly chief manager at Camp 22, repeated to me what he asserted to the BBC: "I witnessed a whole family being tested on suffocating gas and dying in the gas chamber. . . . The parents were vomiting and dying, but until the very last moment they tried to save kids by doing mouth-to-mouth breathing."

So why no worldwide outrage?

For now it appears that realpolitik trumps distant horrors. Despite heroic efforts by Christian activists on both sides of the Pacific to sound the alarm, the South Korean government views these accusations as unwelcome complications to its problematic and complex relations with the North. Indeed, a foreign ministry official whom I met did not deny that North Korea gassed political prisoners to further its program to develop weapons of mass destruction. He politely stated that Seoul was focusing exclusively on the threat from Pyongyang's nuclear program in the context of the six-nation peace talks. Meanwhile, most South Korean nongovernmental organizations are so committed to the idyllic vision of a reunified Korean Peninsula that they have turned a deaf ear to the horrors inflicted on their own people north of the 38th parallel.

The Western media haven't exactly ignored this story. Instead, they have generally treated it in an offhand manner chillingly reminiscent of how the Holocaust was reported during World War II. For example, the Pentagon just recently sought emergency authority to resume administering the anthrax vaccine to U.S. troops stationed on the Korean Peninsula as well as in the Persian Gulf because of "a significant potential for a military emergency involving a heightened risk to United States military forces of attack." The limited coverage of the story focused not on the threat posed by North Korean chemical and biological weaponry but on the controversy over the safety of inoculating the troops.

North Korea's Mengele-style experimentation with killer agents such as anthrax has not escalated into a mass-murder campaign against the regime's own population, the Allied troops stationed in the Korean DMV or North Korea's neighbors -- not yet. But beyond the nuclear threat, the world has reason to be deeply concerned over how much of this deadly know-how has been transferred to terrorist states or entities.

It isn't necessary to insist on "regime change" as a precondition of dialogue. But the world community -- with the United States, Japan, China and Russia in the lead -- must insist on behavioral change, ameliorating the North's human rights pathologies, before making diplomatic concessions. We should start by identifying -- by name -- those involved in crimes against humanity against their own people, and warning these criminals that eventually they will be held accountable before the bar of justice.

The problem with the strategy prescribed by the author is that China and Russia are badly in need of regime change themselves; they're simply the lesser of the competing evils at this particular moment. Both were involved in mass murder and the utilization of gulags and concentration camps by both countries is well documents (though understudied by those who think that socialism and communism is humane and a model for all countries to follow).

For starters, there should be no concessions whatsoever. North Korea will implode from within unless the US and others keep the inevitable from happening. North Korea cannot feed itself, nor can it do much of anything other than hold the world hostage to its claims of possessing nuclear weapons (and the attendant selling of said weapons on the black or open market). Further isolating the country may actually hasten the demise of the old regime and bring about greater change than engagement.