Post-9/11 Anthrax, Iran Contra Ties & a Fake Psych Report to Reinforce a Transparent Cover-Up

By Alex Constantine

This afternoon, MSNBC reporter Pete Williams claimed that an (unnamed, so we can't Google them) "panel of behavioral experts and psychiatrists" agree with the FBI contention that Dr. Bruce Ivins was the sole perpetrator of the 2001 anthrax mailings. The "report" is a necessary step in a gimpish cover-up because, as MSNBC reports, "many" of Ivins' co-workers "at the bioweapons lab in Maryland have disputed the FBI's findings." So have any number of editorial skeptics and bloggers. So along comes an "expert panel report" to kend weight to a murder & mayhem accusation devoid of evidentiary substance:

WASHINGTON — Medical records of Dr. Bruce Ivins, blamed by the FBI for the deadly 2001 anthrax mail attacks, "support the Justice Department's determination that he was responsible," a panel of behavioral experts and psychiatrists contended in a newly released report.

"Dr. Ivins was psychologically disposed to undertake the mailings, his behavioral history demonstrated his potential for carrying them out, and he had the motivation and the means," they said in a report made public Wednesday.

Letters containing powdered anthrax were sent to news organizations and two US senators in late 2001, infecting 22 people who received or handled them, five of whom died. Ivins, a civilian researcher at the US Army's Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland, committed suicide in July 2008 as the FBI was preparing to accuse him of preparing and mailing the letters. He was never charged. ...

[Judge Royce Lamberth, a Reagan appointee and presiding judge of the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court from 1995 to 2002, requested the psychiatric report on Bruce Ivins]

Their report was requested in secret by a federal judge, Royce Lamberth of Washington DC, who asked for an examination detailing "the mental health issues of Dr. Bruce Ivins and what lessons can be learned from that analysis that may be useful in preventing future bioterrorism attacks." The findings were filed last fall under seal.

Though many of his co-workers at the bioweapons lab in Maryland have disputed the FBI's findings, the panel found that Ivins "cultivated a persona of benign eccentricity that masked his obsessions and criminal thoughts."

Dr. Gregory Saathoff of the University of Virginia School of Medicine, the panel's chairman, said the medical records "document behavior he claimed he undertook and provide an indication of a strong component of revenge, including graphic plans to engage in violent behavior." ...

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/42235097/ns/us_news-security

Dr. Saathoff is fudging the truth.

A "Lone Assassin?"

The (still unnamed) psychiatric panel claims in its "report"  that Bruce Ivins -- driven by "stress," a bruised ego, and an instance of sexual rejection years before in grad school (?)  - "had the motivation" to mail the spores and incite a national panic. Pete Williams:

" ... [Ivins] acted out of a desire for revenge against his critics, "a desperate need for personal validation," and a hope that the response to the attacks would revive the government's efforts to develop an anthrax vaccine — a program on which he was a key researcher. The scientists and doctors who studied the records emphasized what they said was an obsession Ivins had with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, which began when a member of the sorority turned him down for a date while he was a graduate student. Shortly after the first anthrax letters were mailed, but before they were discovered, he wrote an e-mail to another KKG sister he had known as a student. In the e-mail, he referred to bio-warfare and anxiety. ... "

Evidence of guilt or psycho-babble? The mailings occurred in the wake of Black Tuesday. Anyone who was conscious at the time heard the media drum beats: "Anthrax  on the way. Anthrax  on the way ... " The possibility of an attack, specifically involving anthrax, was discussed on talk shows, in Op-Ed columns, on 60 Minutes. Everywhere. Dr. Ivins worked with bioterror agents. SO OF COURSE, he experienced some anxiety over the possibility of anthrax terror.  Many felt that anxiety. Ivins had the same fear known to hundreds of millions of Americans. Yet in Dr. Saathoff's opinion, based on normal apprehansion fed by 9/11, Ivins was the "lone assassin" ....

MSNBC: "Briefing reporters on their findings, [still unnamed] panel members said they found no reason to question the FBI's findings that Dr. Ivins acted alone in carrying out the anthrax attacks. ... "

The panel's "report" reinforces the cover story. The scapegoat, of course, is conveniently dead.  The actual killers will no doubt get away with it, thanks to the Dr. Saathoff and the FBI.

This is not a capricious conspiracy tale. It is as real as, oh, the Iran Contra scandal -- the first episode in a continuing series of criminal acts that haven''t been tried or televised.  Anthrax attacks among them.

The first anthrax suspect was Staphen Hatfill, and the material evidence against him was comparatively much more compelling than that levied postmortem against Ivins. From my 2008 post on the anthrax mailings:

* Bloodhounds found him of some interest after snuffling letter inside of envelope put there by Hatfill, preserved in a hermetically-sealed bag. The hounds responded to him alone.

* A return address on one of the anthrax-bearing envelopes was Greendale, Rhodesia. Hatfill formerly lived in Greendale.

* The neo-fascist Selous Scouts in Rhodesia spread anthrax. Hatfill was a member of the Scouts at the time of that contagion's spread.

* Hatfill had no fit alibi for the days of the anthrax mailings.

• Hatfill's PhD was forged. He was caught lying on his resumé.

* He failed a CIA lie-detector test regarding his activities in Rhodesia before the anthrax attacks. He failed a lie detector test afterward concerning his involvement in them.

http://aconstantineblacklist.blogspot.com/2008/08/project-anthrax-cover-up.html

Hatfill, after the initial burst of media attention, found a spokeman to handle the mob of reporters barking questions, questions: Pat Clawson. Clawson, as I noted in 2008, was "a radio executive who worked with Iran-contra's Oliver North." ...

... Clawson, reports the Baltimore Sun, was a "former CNN reporter who has known Hatfill socially for six years, said he and Hatfill are part of a group of friends who visited a house in the Virginia mountains near Shenandoah National Park in October for a weekend of skeet-shooting and socializing. The visit, in the middle of that month, came at the peak of anthrax hysteria, Clawson said. He told Hatfill that a few weeks earlier he had opened a vitriolic letter addressed to Oliver North, whose radio program is produced by Clawson's employer, Radio America. White powder had spilled from the envelope, which Clawson discarded" After Stephen J. Hatfill was named as the FBI's leading suspect, the same ultracon media opinion-shapers who had immediately blamed Saddam Hussein now hustled to Hatfill's defense. Rupert Murdoch's Evening Standard opined that his status as "interesting" to federal inevestigators "inspired a mini-industry of speculation that he may somehow be implicated in last fall's deadly anthrax attacks. [But] much of that speculation pretends to be something more: certainty of his guilt, and certainty that in every nook and cranny of his life must be found some blot or scar or mark of the devil that proves his guilt" ...

In my 2008 post, I also explained Hatfill's connections to a CIA agent and Prince Bandar. According to prince-bandar.com “As Ambassador, Prince Bandar worked with CIA Director BILL CASEY to fund covert CIA operations with Saudi petrodollars. He played a key role in the Iran-Contra affair."

Bruce Ivins, if he had any role in the mailings whatsoever, was one of a clutch of perpetrators, and this is conclusion is borne out by the fact that some of the mailing came from locations probably not visited by Dr. Ivins. The sheer quantity of spores involved rules out a single culprit. The lethal dust was found in mail rooms, at a newspaper in Florida near the house that Mohammed Atta had lived in prior to 9/11 ... in a Princeton borough ... in the Senate ... in Dan Rather's CBS office ... in a Kabul factory ... in New York City Hall ... in a diplomatic pouch to the US Consulate General in Yekaterinburg, Russia ... in the Supreme Court's basement mailroom ... in a letter mailed to Kenya ... at the Bureau of Prisons headquarters in Washington ... at the broadcaster's headquarters … 30 Rockefeller Plaza ... on and on. Could Hatfill or Ivins or anyone have done it all without some assistance? Mailing the spores was a full-time job, involving loads of fully-processed, stolen anthrax spores. And Ivins worked under tight security.

Dr. Saathoff's unnamed psychiatric panel is telltale. Could this be yet another Iran contra connection?

Sure is. The panel is called the Critical Incident Analysis Group (CIAG). On the CIAG's advisory board, we find not one, but several Iran contra connections

Iran contra conspirator Lawrence Eagleburger

Laswrence Eagleburger was not only involved in Iran contra, he was among the first ranking federal officials to call for a "war on terror." Anthrax spores were a  provocation that culminated in immense profits for defense and intelligence contractors (thesis sentence). Joihn O. Marsh "investigated" covert Iran contra bank accounts, kept the investigation focused on the civilian supply network, not the Pentagon. Marsh was rewarded for covering up the DoD connections by appointment to Secretary of the Army (1981-1989). Edwin Meese III is well-known, of course. Meese broke Iran contra to the press ... and steered attention away from deeper connections to the executive branch (GHW Bush in particular) and DoD. General Edward L. Rowny is also of interest. Rowny has been an arms control adviser and negotiator to five presidents - Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan and Bush. As Reagan's arms control adviser, he was on intimate terms with the Iran contra clique. Lord Alderdice must be the CIAG advisory panel''s poodle.

These are the grisly eminences lurking behind Dr. Saathoff and his august "panel of experts."

The Iran contra seditionists pulled off the anthrax mailings. Now they have Dr. Saathoff reinforcing the cover story and pointing the finger at a deceased "lone assassin."

Judge Royce Lamberth secretly commissioned the ersatz CIAG report on Bruce Ivins. Judge Lamberth, who has often been accused of a right-wing bias in his decisions - very controversially in his ruling against stem cell research -- was nominated to the federal bench on March 19, 1987 by Ronald Reagan. He was confirmed by the senate on November of that year. He was also the presiding judge of the Constitution-shredding U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA), 1995-2002. Judge Lamberth is in the loop.

The cover-up proves the crime. In the theater of anthrax bioterror, all paths lead to the Iran contra players.