Anthrax Lies and Press/Government Complicity

The FBI's lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks -- Bruce E. Ivins -- died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the attacks. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where he was one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID).The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential

For full article and commentary, please go to this URL: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/index.html My own comments on the article: Very intriguing article. There was a report on television's CNN that the government was postulating that Ivins may have released anthrax in order to test his own vaccine development against anthrax. The whole story is so bizarre that it takes on a kind of "conspiracy theory" mythic "smell." It is certainly time for public disclosure of ALL FACTS related to this story by all parties involved - including McCain! If I were part of the Democratic campaign, I'd start digging for the dirt now and spill everything found to be factual. Is Ivins another possible scapegoat as was said of Lee Harvey Oswald after the Kennedy assassination? Was he a lose canon? Was he merely a guy doing what he was told to do by his supervisors? We do know that many media outlets have (and still do) accepted government press releases as fact without doing any investigative journalism during the last eight years. We know there are members of the Bush "team" even now accused of lying to Congress and the press. We have ample reason to be suspicious. If Americans are ever going to regain faith in their government, the truth must come out ASAP. What can you do? Write to every newspaper you normally read, write to your senators and repesentatives, let others know about this article. Use the power of the Internet to get the word out that America must be protected from its own government excesses!

ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN

"F.B.I. Gained Unauthorized Access to E-Mail

WASHINGTON — A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.
F.B.I. officials blamed an “apparent miscommunication” with the unnamed Internet provider, which mistakenly turned over all the e-mail from a small e-mail domain for which it served as host. The records were ultimately destroyed, officials said.

Bureau officials noticed a “surge” in the e-mail activity they were monitoring and realized that the provider had mistakenly set its filtering equipment to trap far more data than a judge had actually authorized.

The episode is an unusual example of what has become a regular if little-noticed occurrence, as American officials have expanded their technological tools: government officials, or the private companies they rely on for surveillance operations, sometimes foul up their instructions about what they can and cannot collect.

The problem has received no discussion as part of the fierce debate in Congress about whether to expand the government’s wiretapping authorities and give legal immunity to private telecommunications companies that have helped in those operations.

But an intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because surveillance operations are classified, said: “It’s inevitable that these things will happen. It’s not weekly, but it’s common.”

A report in 2006 by the Justice Department inspector general found more than 100 violations of federal wiretap law in the two prior years by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, many of them considered technical and inadvertent.

Bureau officials said they did not have updated public figures but were preparing them as part of a wider-ranging review by the inspector general into misuses of the bureau’s authority to use so-called national security letters in gathering phone records and financial documents in intelligence investigations.

In the warrantless wiretapping program approved by President Bush after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, technical errors led officials at the National Security Agency on some occasions to monitor communications entirely within the United States — in apparent violation of the program’s protocols — because communications problems made it difficult to tell initially whether the targets were in the country or not.

Past violations by the government have also included continuing a wiretap for days or weeks beyond what was authorized by a court, or seeking records beyond what were authorized. The 2006 case appears to be a particularly egregious example of what intelligence officials refer to as “overproduction” — in which a telecommunications provider gives the government more data than it was ordered to provide.

The problem of overproduction is particularly common, F.B.I. officials said. In testimony before Congress in March 2007 regarding abuses of national security letters, Valerie E. Caproni, the bureau’s general counsel, said that in one small sample, 10 out of 20 violations were a result of “third-party error,” in which a private company “provided the F.B.I. information we did not seek.”

The 2006 episode was disclosed as part of a new batch of internal documents that the F.B.I. turned over to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit group in San Francisco that advocates for greater digital privacy protections, as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit the group has brought. The group provided the documents on the 2006 episode to The New York Times."

LIVING IS RISKY. IF YOU WANT ABSOLUTE SECURITY, YOU HAVE TO BE DEAD.

Conspiracy Theory or Connecting the Dots?

Check out this link! It does seem that the Bush family is involved in the 9/11 attack up to their wallets. So why Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia? Read the link and then start adding two and two.