Chapter 6: Advance Knowledge of the Attacks - International Center for 9/11 Justice

This book argues that members of the executive branch of the U.S. government had the anthrax attacks carried out in accordance with a plan. According to this hypothesis the plan was formulated before the events of 9/11. The plan, which undoubtedly had flexibility and a set of options built into it, included the passing of legislation giving the executive increased powers and authorization to invade and occupy, at a minimum, Afghanistan and Iraq. Other associated objectives that can be assumed to have been part of the plan include increasing military spending, both in general and for biological weapons research and development. That this was a goal of the plan is borne out by the fact that the massive expansion of bioweapons R&D continues apace despite the official acknowledgement that the only bio-attack in American history, the anthrax attacks of 2001, came from inside the American program.

The present chapter explores one of the most intriguing sets of evidence in support of this hypothesis: advance knowledge of the anthrax attacks.

The October 18, 2001 issue of The New York Times carried a front page article by R. W. Apple Jr. entitled, “City of Power, City of Fears,” in which the author says “the government has been caught completely by surprise by the anthrax attacks.” This was a peculiar claim to make in The New York Times. Brigitte Nacos, in her book Mass-Mediated Terrorism, relates that her research has revealed a huge wave of advance warnings in the U.S. media, including 76 references in The New York Times to biological or chemical terrorism, 27 of which specifically included anthrax, between September 12 and October 3, 2001.[1] That is to say, there were a plethora of bioweapons warnings in The New York Times before there was supposed to have been any knowledge of an actual anthrax attack.

Of the ten most intriguing warnings in The New York Times in the two weeks before that newspaper reported the first anthrax case (October 5), most of the articles mention anthrax explicitly and many show the involvement of U.S. government leaders in these warnings.[2] Health Secretary Tommy Thompson, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card were among those involved. What is bound to strike an investigator looking back at the anthrax attacks is not that the government was caught off guard but that key government officials seem to have had foreknowledge of the attacks.

Yet there is a strange aura of unconcern in this matter—researchers pause briefly in puzzlement but then move on to other topics. Nacos refers in her book to “the media’s sudden obsession with endlessly reporting and debating the potential for biological, chemical, and nuclear warfare in the wake of 9/11.”[3] She notes that this obsession began before the reporting of the anthrax attacks and she comments:

It was as if anchors and news experts expected the other shoe to drop as they went out of their way to report to the public that the public health system and other agencies were ill prepared to deal with bioterrorism and other mass destruction terrorism.[4]

Yet she delves no further into this odd circumstance and does not stop to examine the details of this “sudden obsession.”

Jeanne Guillemin, in her substantial book on the anthrax attacks, notes:

Anthrax was quickly identified as the most likely ‘second blow’ that al Qaeda would launch against Americans. My phone began ringing with requests from reporters and news stations to outline the basics about the disease. On October 4, when the diagnosis of the first anthrax letter case was announced in Florida, I was in the CBS newsroom, having come to New York, my hometown, to brief reporters.[5]

Guillemin goes on to describe the role of the media in spreading anxiety and panic with its reporting of the danger of an anthrax attack[6] and gives one of the results of this reporting: “A September 23 Newsweek poll indicated that eight out of ten Americans thought that a biological attack was a least ‘somewhat likely.’” [7] But none of this causes Guillemin to pause to investigate this peculiar foreknowledge and its challenge to the FBI’s narrative of the attacks.

The New York Times was not the only newspaper to raise concerns before there was public knowledge of the attacks. On September 15 the Washington Post had an article entitled, “Experts Won’t Rule Out Another Attack Elsewhere in U.S.” Newt Gingrich, former House speaker, warned that the second attack might use more deadly weapons: “the next stage after this will be chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.” Two days later, “senior administration officials took to the airwaves to warn Americans about the possibility of a new attack in the days ahead.”[8] Donald Rumsfeld noted that one should not assume the next attack would resemble the first one: “A terrorist can attack in any time and any place using a variety of different techniques.” A second article in the Post on the same day (September 17) had the title: “Bioterrorism: An Even More Devastating Threat.” Anthrax was one of the dangers mentioned, and care was taken, in that connection, to mention Iraq. Journalist Rick Weiss added:

Biological attacks can be far more difficult to respond to than conventional terrorist attacks. For one thing, they are covert rather than overt; for days, no one would know that one had occurred. That’s a huge problem for a disease like anthrax.

Curiously, at the moment Weiss was pondering this possibility the first anthrax letters were being sent out or were about to be sent out (the first letters went out between September 17 and 18).[9]

Meanwhile, back at The New York Times, an op-ed by Maureen Dowd appeared on September 26 entitled, “From Botox to Botulism.” The article’s theme was that naïve “boomers” were living in the delusion that “they could make life safe.” This generation “that came of age with psychedelic frolicking” was ill prepared, Dowd said, for Muslim martyrs dispersing biological toxins. Upper middle class New York women were carrying Cipro, Dowd claimed, in their “little black Prada techno-nylon bags” due to widespread fears of an anthrax attack.

Cipro (ciprofloxacin) was the antibiotic recommended at the time against anthrax. It is not surprising that Cipro received a great deal of media attention in October after it was clear that people were contracting anthrax, but it is odd that Cipro received so much attention in the period just prior to the attacks. On September 27, the day after Dowd’s article, The New York Times carried an article with the title, “Anthrax Scare Prompts Run on an Antibiotic.” “‘We can’t keep it in stock,’ says Sebastian Manciameli, ‘a pharmacist at Zitomer Pharmacy on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.’”[10]

It eventually came out that some White House staff had been put on Cipro on September 11, 2001.[11] In 2002, the public interest group Judicial Watch filed a series of lawsuits against U.S. government agencies:

In October, press reports revealed that White House staff had been on a regimen of the powerful antibiotic Cipro since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Judicial Watch wants to know why White House workers, including President Bush, began taking the drug nearly a month before anthrax was detected on Capitol Hill.[12]

The decision to put White House staff, including George Bush and Richard Cheney, on Cipro on September 11 led to embarrassing evasions. Mr. Bush was, it seems, unwilling to tell the public he and others were on Cipro.[13]

The strange and seemingly prescient worries about anthrax were not restricted to The New York Times and the Washington Post. An investigator attempting to get a full picture of foreknowledge would want to pay attention not only to other news media, but also to other kinds of published documents[14] as well as dramatic representations. Among dramatic representations the investigator would have to deal with the planned NBC mini-series, Terror.[15] Work on this series was intense by August of 2001 and filming was supposed to start on September 24. The series was to have had al-Qaeda setting off an explosion in the New York subway. The event would kill 1000 people and would be accompanied by the release of anthrax. There was also a CBS series about the CIA that had been written, apparently, before September 11 and began to be broadcast in late September. One show in the series “involved a planned terrorist attack in the U.S. using anthrax.” The CIA, in this story, discovers that the perpetrator intends to use “a crop duster plane to spray the deadly disease.” The theme of the CBS story is said to have been suggested by a CIA consultant working with CBS.

How are we to explain all the foreknowledge of the attacks?

Presumably investigators who decline to look into this matter have an explanation that satisfies them, but they typically do not go into the issue so we are forced to speculate as to what that explanation might be. Here are four possible explanations together with responses showing their inadequacy.

The present chapter explores one of the most intriguing sets of evidence in support of this hypothesis: advance knowledge of the anthrax attacks.

It was as if anchors and news experts expected the other shoe to drop as they went out of their way to report to the public that the public health system and other agencies were ill prepared to deal with bioterrorism and other mass destruction terrorism.[4] Yet she delves no further into this odd circumstance and does not stop to examine the details of this “sudden obsession.”

Jeanne Guillemin, in her substantial book on the anthrax attacks, notes:

Anthrax was quickly identified as the most likely ‘second blow’ that al Qaeda would launch against Americans. My phone began ringing with requests from reporters and news stations to outline the basics about the disease. On October 4, when the diagnosis of the first anthrax letter case was announced in Florida, I was in the CBS newsroom, having come to New York, my hometown, to brief reporters.[5]

Biological attacks can be far more difficult to respond to than conventional terrorist attacks. For one thing, they are covert rather than overt; for days, no one would know that one had occurred. That’s a huge problem for a disease like anthrax.

Curiously, at the moment Weiss was pondering this possibility the first anthrax letters were being sent out or were about to be sent out (the first letters went out between September 17 and 18).[9]

In October, press reports revealed that White House staff had been on a regimen of the powerful antibiotic Cipro since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Judicial Watch wants to know why White House workers, including President Bush, began taking the drug nearly a month before anthrax was detected on Capitol Hill.[12]

How are we to explain all the foreknowledge of the attacks?

Argument:

The widespread media foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks was reasonable. It was natural to think that the initial attacks of 9/11 would be followed by biological or chemical attacks—the crude WMD of terrorist groups or their state sponsors. Moreover, anthrax, the most convenient of biological agents, was possessed by some potential enemies of the U.S.

Response:

No, this foreknowledge was not reasonable. There was nothing natural or inevitable about following up airplane attacks with anthrax attacks: such a combination of events had never occurred before. Had terrorists wished to strike a second blow to the U.S. after 9/11 there were many ways they could have done it, most of them involving simple technology (guns, planes, homemade explosive devices). The conviction that anthrax attacks were natural or inevitable in the period after 9/11 was a creation of the U.S. intelligence community. To the extent that intelligence reports ascribed anthrax capacities to al-Qaeda and Iraq at this time, they were false. Neither of these parties possessed weaponized anthrax in significant quantities in 2001.

Argument:

There were many fears after 9/11. Biological attacks were merely one fear among many that were circulating. It is just coincidence that this particular fear turned out to be justified. There is no meaningful connection between the fears and the attacks.

Response:

It is true that biological attacks were merely one fear among many, but they received a greatly disproportionate emphasis both in the media and from government spokespeople. And this fear turned out to be uncannily justified.

Recall from Chapters 4 and 5 the numerous warnings of biological attacks, from the FBI and from assorted members of the executive branch, throughout the period when the Patriot Act was being rushed through Congress and on dates that corresponded quite precisely to major events in the passing of the bill. How was it that letters were sent to two senators directly after they resisted intense pressure from the executive? Why did so many people seem to know as soon as they heard that Stevens had anthrax that this was the result of a bioweapons attack?[16]

How do we account for comments by officials and experts that seem prescient not merely in a vague way but in a quite specific way? For example, a Washington Post article by Rolf Myller, dated September 30, began: “As weapons of terror, anthrax spores would be the easiest to handle.”[17] Biological weapons have advantages, we are told in the article, over chemical weapons, and among biological weapons the anthrax bacterium “would be the most likely.” The article concludes by saying that although terrorists working without state support might not achieve mass casualties, there is no reason to believe mass casualties are required for their ends. Alan Zelicoff of Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico is quoted:

The chance of a large [bioweapons] attack that affects tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands is very small. But is that what the terrorist cares about? Inducing enough disease to produce panic or disrupt life is probably enough. I would posit that one or two cases of pulmonary anthrax in downtown Washington or New York would achieve that goal.

As the attacks unfolded the total number of casualties was, indeed, small but the panic and disruption were large. As for the timing, Robert Stevens was coming down with pulmonary anthrax precisely as Zelicoff was speaking. True, Stevens contracted the disease in Florida, but to the best of our knowledge the letters to New York were actually the first to be sent out, and the New York and Washington attacks were, as Zelicoff suggested, highly significant politically.

In some cases, presentiments and foreknowledge appear to have led to preparations that reduced the number of casualties when the attacks occurred. While casualty reduction is a good thing, this does not make the widespread anticipation of anthrax attacks any less perplexing.

For example, the death of Robert Stevens took place in Florida, where John Ellis Bush, (“Jeb”), the younger brother of George W. Bush, was governor. Florida’s new incident commander, appointed by Jeb Bush with responsibilities for managing events in case of a terrorist attack, met with “the chief of Florida’s Department of Health to confirm contingency plans in the event of a biological attack” one week before Stevens was admitted to the hospital.[18] “Also fortuitously,” reported the Washington Post, “several laboratory chiefs from around the state had recently returned from Atlanta after attending a CDC training course in identifying bioterror agents. When the samples arrived from Bush, they had everything they needed and knew what to do.”[19]

Then there is the case of Richard Cohen, a columnist for the Washington Post. (Cohen’s cheerleading for an attack on Iraq was mentioned in Chapter 5.) Cohen wrote, in an article for Slate magazine in March, 2008: “I had been told soon after Sept. 11 to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax. The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official, and I immediately acted on it. I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.”[20]

When did Cohen receive this extraordinary tip? Maureen Dowd wrote about New York women with Cipro in their Prada bags on September 25 (article published on September 26), an indication that a great many people had heard of Cipro by then. In any case, by September 26 (article published September 27) there was a run on Cipro and druggists could not keep it in stock. So Cohen’s tip must have been received “way before” September 25/26 and “soon after” September 11. Whatever the precise date may have been, it was well before any government official is supposed to have known about the anthrax attacks.[21]

Note also that Cohen did not portray his anthrax information as rumor or the result of panic: it was a “tip” and it came from a high government official. What on earth can this mean? Has the FBI sought more information from Cohen? Has the Bureau asked him who his highly placed benefactor was?

Cohen has told the same story elsewhere, with the added information that when he, in the conviction that he was acting on insider information, went to his doctor to get Cipro, he found that many people had preceded him.[22]

When the FBI was pursuing Steven Hatfill and building a case against him it did not hesitate to cite his use of Cipro prior to the anthrax attacks as evidence of his complicity in the crime.[23] Have Cohen and his source been treated in the same way?

Argument:

Government officials and experts estimated that anthrax attacks were possible or even likely, based on the intelligence they had received from various agencies. They made their best call and began warning of the dangers of such attacks. The intelligence they provided was sound insofar as anthrax attacks actually occurred; it was weak insofar as it misidentified the source of the attacks.

Response:

If error is chosen as an option, it will have to be complete error, not partial error. If a physician gives a prognosis, saying that a man will die in a week from cancer, and the man dies in a week when a building collapses on him, the doctor does not get to claim half-credit. He or she can claim no credit whatsoever. For the same reasons, the intelligence community gets no points for predicting the anthrax attacks since the attacks, when they came, issued from a completely different source, and therefore presumably via different routes, methods and motives, than the intelligence community, obsessed with al-Qaeda and Iraq, had predicted.

The error explanation cannot, in any case, stand up to scrutiny. As in the previous case, the explanation looks sensible only when given in vague terms. The fact is that parties known to have deceived the U.S. population repeatedly and intentionally during the period in question gave out, as “intelligence,” warnings that had no sound empirical foundation and that served the interests of these parties. This becomes apparent as soon as we restore the attacks of the fall of 2001 to their proper context.

The Double Perpetrator hypothesis not only aimed at pointing to a ubiquitous and shadowy enemy (“al-Qaeda”), but also sought to frame Iraq. Iraq was, according to this hypothesis, both supporting al-Qaeda and in possession of weapons of mass destruction. But we know that these two claims about Iraq were part of a program of systematic, intentional deception that stretched over several years.

Here are three well-known sets of evidence that combine to make this clear.

(i) The Center for Public Integrity and the associated Fund for Independence in Journalism carried out a lengthy and detailed study of public statements made by leading members of the Bush administration. The results of the study were released in 2008.[24] The study examined statements made by eight top Bush administration officials: President G. W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, and White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan. The two-year period studied stretched from September 11, 2001 to September 11, 2003. Two topics were the basis of study: (a) “Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destruction” and (b) “Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda.”

The study, which produced a searchable database, discovered that on at least 532 occasions these officials made at least 935 false statements on these two topics.

The database not only counts the false statements but “juxtaposes what President Bush and these seven top officials were saying for public consumption against what was known, or should have been known, on a day-to-day basis.”

The researchers concluded that “the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that effectively galvanized public opinion and, in the process, led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses.”

The incidence of false statements peaked twice, first in August 2002, at the time of “congressional consideration of a war resolution,” and, second, when Colin Powell went to the UN Security Council to make the case for war against Iraq. The day of the second and higher peak is captured in the well known image of Colin Powell holding in the air a vial of simulated anthrax for the UN Security Council to ponder.

These peaks remind us of the storm of warnings about terrorist attacks involving biological or chemical weapons that clustered around the consideration of the Patriot Act by Congress. Apparently there are certain moments that call for an intensification of deception.

In addition to the 935 false statements, “Bush and these seven top officials also made hundreds of other statements in the two years after 9/11 in which they implied that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction or links to Al Qaeda.” In other words, in addition to directly false statements, innuendo and misleading statements were common.

(ii) The original “Downing Street Memo” consists of minutes of a meeting held on July 23, 2002 at which U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair met with senior ministers involved in establishing that country’s Iraq policy.[25]

The document is indicative, quite precisely, of a conspiracy. The document reveals multiple persons meeting to consider and develop a plan to facilitate the commission of an illegal action by devising its propaganda legitimization—the casus belli for the illegal invasion of Iraq. The illegality of the action that the plan intends to support is acknowledged more than once in the minutes and the Foreign Secretary is delegated the job of working up a plan to allow the invasion to go ahead with a show of legality. Secrecy is also key to the meeting and the plan, as indicated by the word “SECRET” on the document as well as the words: “This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made.”

The document also makes reference to the earlier and larger conspiracy, namely the conspiracy of the Bush administration to proceed to a war against Iraq. It is clearlysaid in the Downing Street Memo that the Bush administration had already decided (by July 23, 2002) to go to war against Iraq and that it had also decided to do so through deception. “Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route…” These two claims by the head of MI6, the U.K. foreign intelligence service, mean (a) that the same two claims central to the Double Perpetrator scheme familiar from the anthrax attacks would soon be central to the invasion of Iraq, namely support for terrorism and possession of WMD, and (b) that the claims were not justified by evidence and were being used as a pretext for war.

Later in the same document the legal case for war is said to be “thin.” The Attorney General makes it clear that there is, in fact, no justification in international law for an invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless, one conclusion of the meeting is: “We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action.” The anticipated legal problem was to be addressed by working up an ultimatum (on the otherwise largely irrelevant inspections issue) to Saddam Hussein: if he rejected it—the hoped-for outcome—there might be a basis for a legal justification of the invasion.

Law was viewed as something to circumvent in order to avoid negative consequences.

(iii) In April of 2009 a redacted version of a 2008 report by the Senate Armed Services Committee was made public. One of the revelations was that an objective of the torture carried out on detainees in the Global War on Terror was to obtain testimony that would support the administration’s claimed link between al-Qaeda and Iraq. U.S. Army psychiatrist Major Paul Burney said, “a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq and were not being successful in establishing a link between Al Qaeda and Iraq…there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.”[26]

A number of senior officials in the Bush administration were implicated. Jonathan Landay of McClatchy Newspapers reported that “Cheney’s and Rumsfeld’s people were told repeatedly, by CIA…and by others, that there wasn’t any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam, and that no such ties were likely because the two were fundamentally enemies, not allies.”[27]

As with the military tribunals, a set of questions can be asked: why use techniques (torture in this case) that are known to be unreliable in discovering truth?[28] Why risk losing the battle for “hearts and minds” by confirming the worst views of the behavior of the United States? Why risk losing the support of key allies by violating international law and common standards of decency? Why had Cheney and Rumsfeld been willing to push so hard to establish this link? As with the military tribunals, the answer emerges when one understands the fraudulent nature of the two sets of attacks that took place in the fall of 2001. Although the McClatchy article suggests that abusive tactics were used to “seek” an “Iraq-al Qaida link,”[29] the administration was not concerned to “seek” a link. It was trying to obtain statements, by force, that would “prove” false claims. The resort to torture did not seek truth any more than the military tribunals sought truth.

In short, the contention that al-Qaeda and Iraq were linked as terrorist-to-sponsor—the Double Perpetrator hypothesis— was false, was known to be false, and flowed from repeated acts of deception by the U.S. government during this period, rather than from error.

Argument:

Suppose state officials, not wanting to cause panic in citizens, initially concealed part of what they knew. Suppose, for example, the FBI actually discovered that there was a case of cutaneous anthrax in mid-September? Or perhaps the Bureau even discovered a letter at this time with anthrax spores? In either case, perhaps a decision was made to conceal these facts in order to break the news more gently to the public via indirect and circuitous warnings? In this case, even if the officials’ actions were ill-advised there is no question of the officials themselves being involved in the attacks.

Response:

It is not surprising that the U.S. administration did not take this escape route. Legal action in 2002 by Judicial Watch had already raised the issue of the White House receiving Cipro on September 11 while leaving other citizens to fend for themselves. How could the administration avoid the charge that it was responsible for five deaths and many injuries from anthrax by having chosen to keep the population uninformed?

But there is a more convincing reason to reject this explanation. At best this explanation could deal with foreknowledge over a period of perhaps two weeks prior to the news of Stevens’ disease. It certainly cannot deal with foreknowledge that precedes September 11, 2001.

In the following two chapters several cases suggestive of such foreknowledge will be discussed. The present chapter will close with one such case.

During June 22-23, 2001, less than three months before the initiation of the anthrax attacks, several institutions joined to sponsor a biological warfare simulation at Andrews Air Force Base. The exercise, called Dark Winter, involved a scenario where terrorists release smallpox virus, via aerosol spray, in three American cities, beginning in early December, 2002. By the time of the Christmas holidays of 2002, 16,000 smallpox cases are reported in 25 states. The disease has by this time also spread to 10 other countries.[30]

Biological weapons attacks are frequently simulated as part of preparedness training, so there is nothing inherently suspect about such an exercise. Moreover, such simulations can be expected to share certain common elements. But the cumulative parallels between this particular simulation and the actual anthrax attacks are worthy of note. Consider the following ten elements common to both Dark Winter and the anthrax attacks:[31]

(i) Dark Winter: Anonymous letters are sent to the mainstream media. The letters contain threats, including threats of follow-up attacks with anthrax. In addition, the strain of smallpox in the epidemic is identifiable since “each letter also contained a genetic fingerprint of the smallpox strain matching the fingerprint of the strain causing the current epidemic.”

Anthrax Attacks: Anonymous letters are sent to the mainstream media. Some contain threats and harmless powder while others contain threats and anthrax spores. From the spores it is possible to determine the genetic strain of the anthrax.

(ii) Dark Winter: Among the casualties is a high state official. The U.S. President gives the following announcement: “Good morning. I am sorry to announce that the Secretary of State is ill. He has been hospitalized at Bethesda Naval Hospital. I know all of our prayers are with him.”

Anthrax Attacks: Letters with anthrax spores are sent to two prominent U.S. senators.

(iii) Dark Winter: Osama Bin Laden is on the list of suspects. Reference is made to the possibility of “autonomous groups—specifically Bin Laden.” (An October 23 Washington Post article, describing the Dark Winter terrorist teams, says: “spookily prescient, they are identified as being from al Qaeda.”[32])

Anthrax Attacks: Bin Laden’s group is an immediate and leading suspect and remains so for some time.

(iv) Dark Winter: As the attacks proceed, the nature of the perpetrators starts to emerge: “There is a very high probability this attack was conducted by either a state or a state-sponsored international terrorist organization.”

Anthrax Attacks: The Double Perpetrator scenario is gradually unveiled.

(v) Dark Winter: In a memo to the Director of Central Intelligence and the Director of the FBI, the list of key suspect states is said to be short: there are five suspects, and Iraq is one.

Anthrax Attacks: As the anthrax spores are studied a state supplier is said to be indicated, and the list of possible suppliers is said to be very short. Iraq is on the list.

(vi) Dark Winter: A “prominent Iraqi defector is claiming that Iraq arranged the bioweapons attacks on the US through intermediaries.”

Anthrax Attacks: Many WMD claims are made by Iraqi defectors. On October 11, as the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks are being sought, the Washington Post carries an article on one such defector, remarking: “[Khidhir] Hamza knows too well that if the terrorist network that hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon has access to nuclear and biological weapons, it is probably through Iraq, through the weapons program that he headed until his escape in 1994.”[33]

(vii) Dark Winter: Preparations are made for drastic restrictions of civil liberties in the U.S., possibly to include Martial Rule, which may be imposed if “a crisis threatens to undermine the stability of the U.S. Government.” “Options for martial rule include, but are not limited to, prohibition of free assembly, national travel ban, quarantine of certain areas, suspension of the writ of habeas corpus [i.e., arrest without due process], and/or military trials in the event that the court system becomes dysfunctional.” (Material in square brackets is in the original.)

Anthrax Attacks: The Patriot Act is rushed through Congress with the help of the attacks and related threats, while the NSA begins mass domestic spying. Military tribunals are then established for trying suspects.

(viii) Dark Winter: Citizens panic and begin imploring the state for a medical solution: “Mothers Plead for Vaccine as Supply Dwindles.”

Anthrax Attacks: On the day after the first anthrax death, a Washington Post article claims that the desire for antibiotics is so strong that, “[p]eople are on their hands and knees begging for drugs.”[34] The article’s author, Rick Weiss, wrote as early as September 28, before the news of the anthrax attacks broke, about the need for a publicly available anthrax vaccine.[35]

(ix) Dark Winter: Assaults and harassment are directed by parts of the population against citizens of presumed Arab ethnicity. “Reports of beatings and harassment of persons of dark skin and of Arab Americans are increasing in numbers and violence.”

Anthrax Attacks: In the fall of 2001, there is a wave of aggressive acts in the United States, ranging from name-calling to murder, directed against residents of suspected Arab ethnicity.[36] The wave of violence is, apparently, connected mainly to the 9/11 attacks, but prejudices are reinforced when the anthrax attacks are blamed on al-Qaeda and Iraq.

(x) Dark Winter: Near the end of the simulation there is confirmation that the United States has been attacked by a particular double perpetrator. The news anchor for (fictional) TV corporation NCN announces: “Still no group claims responsibility for unleashing the deadly smallpox virus, but NCN has learned that Iraq may have provided the technology behind the attack to terrorist groups based in Afghanistan.”[37]

Anthrax Attacks: As explained in Chapter 5, this conclusion is the one that a powerful party within the U.S. pushes for, especially in the second half of October, 2001.

In addition to the above parallels between the Dark Winter simulation and the anthrax attacks that soon followed, there was a strange intersection of roles. Consider Judith Miller, James Woolsey and Jerome Hauer. In Dark Winter, Miller played a reporter for The New York Times, Woolsey played the director of the CIA, and Hauer played director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Judith Miller would have found it easy to play a reporter for The New York Times since that was her real-life role as well. Mention was made in Chapter 5 of an article in The New York Times on October 26 that she co-wrote with William Broad that touched on the bentonite claims ABC was more flagrantly publicizing at the same time, used in both cases to implicate Iraq. But this was a minor part of her participation in the framing of Iraq. Her bioweapons book, Germs (co-authored with William Broad and Stephen Engelberg),[38] which sounded warnings about Iraq’s alleged ongoing bioweapons program, was published just as the anthrax attacks were about to enter public consciousness (probably on October 2, the day the first inhalation anthrax victim entered the hospital).[39] By the end of October the book was a New York Times best seller, an effective and timely piece of propaganda against Iraq.[40] On October 12—the same day anthrax was reported at NBC—Miller was the recipient of a bioweapon-threat letter at her office at The New York Times. The powder she received was harmless but she was able to write with flair about the incident.[41] No doubt the scare promoted sales of her book.

Miller was an important player in the promotion of war with Iraq. Her use of false information about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction was extremely useful to the Bush administration in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion. Journalist Alex Pareene has put the matter bluntly:

She was hyping bullshit stories about Iraq’s WMD capabilities as far back as 1998, and in the run-up to the war, her front-page scoops were cited by the Bush administration as evidence that Saddam needed to be taken out, right away…[42]

The New York Times, embarrassed when her fraudulent stories were discredited, finally cut her loose in 2005.

James Woolsey would also have found it easy to play his role in Dark Winter. He had been the actual director of the CIA under the Clinton administration. The Institute for Policy Studies noted:

Woolsey was an outspoken proponent of invading Iraq even before 9/11. As a supporter of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), the influential letterhead group founded by William Kristol and Robert Kagan to champion a ‘Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity,’ Woolsey signed several PNAC open letters to government figures encouraging an aggressive military agenda. One such letter was PNAC’s 1998 missive to Clinton, which served as the opening salvo in neoconservative efforts to support a U.S. invasion of Iraq.[43]

Woolsey began trying to implicate Iraq in the 9/11 attacks on the day itself and continued doing so thereafter.[44] When the anthrax attacks unfolded, he added them to the list of Iraq’s likely crimes, telling the American Jewish Congress on October 22, 2001 that a war against Iraq should be waged quickly and “ruthlessly.”[45]

But Woolsey was not content to frame Iraq. He also played an important role in the wave of Islamophobia that hit the United States after the fall attacks. He gave his support to such scurrilous productions as the volume Shariah: The Threat to America[46]and the DVD “The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America.”[47]

Woolsey’s work in the post-9/11 period also led to public accusations that he had profited financially from the boom in military spending.[48]

Jerome Hauer, who played FEMA director in Dark Winter, was, in real life, an important figure in the linking of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax attacks. Hauer is a member of The Committee on the Present Danger, described by the Institute for Policy Studies as “a neoconservative pressure group.”[49] A committee of this same name played an important anti-Soviet role during the Cold War, while the present incarnation of the committee was launched in 2004 to promote the Global War on Terror.

Hauer has a Master’s degree in emergency medical services from Johns Hopkins and maintains a deep interest in bioterrorism. On 9/11 he “was a national security advisor with the Department of Health and Human Services, a managing director with Kroll Associates, and a guest on national television, because of his background in counter-terror and his specialized knowledge of biological warfare.”[50]

Hauer participated in the U.S. administration’s efforts, on September 30 and October 1, 2001, to sound warning bells about biological weapons attacks as part of the effort to intimidate Congress into the passing of the Patriot Act by October 5.[51]

But Hauer was more than an expert in bioterrorism. He had been the director of the Office of Emergency Management (OEM) of New York City from 1996 until early in 2000.[52] The OEM had been located in a “bunker” on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center 7. It was while he was working at this job that many New Yorkers first learned of him.

An article in The New York Times on July 27, 1999 explained that when he was 15, Hauer’s mother, a hospital vice president, “helped him get a job in the hospital’s morgue,” where he was responsible for “cutting open the gut and cleaning it and pinning it and making it ready for the pathologist to review.”[53] Making the most of the metaphor, the Times author said that Hauer, “likes guts…viscera, innards, the stuff things are made of.” By 1999, the article continued, Hauer had graduated from actual human guts to the innards of structures. His obsession had become building collapse. Hauer, said the article, collected samples from every building collapse he could find in New York.

Presumably Hauer was in his element when, two years later, he got a chance to become intimately familiar with what were arguably the most politically important building collapses in modern history. Not only did the Twin Towers undergo a surprising annihilation, but Hauer’s old bailiwick, World Trade Center 7, although not hit by a plane, disappeared that day as well. The OEM bunker was supposed to be the command center for response to terrorism, but on 9/11 it was abandoned early in the morning. Then the entire 47-story building underwent a sudden collapse–allegedly from fire, although no steel-framed skyscraper had ever come down in such a fashion before except from controlled demolition—at near free-fall acceleration at 5:21 p.m.[54]

Interviewed by Dan Rather on television on September 11, 2001, Hauer’s anticipation of what the official causes would be for the destruction of the twin towers—weakening of the structures through plane impact and burning jet fuel—has surprised many.[55] He likewise reported on television on the same day (ABC News, in an interview with Peter Jennings), well before World Trade 7’s collapse, that he had heard concerns about the “structural stability of the building.” This is merely one instance among many of suspect foreknowledge of this historically unprecedented collapse.[56]

A key designer of Dark Winter was Tara O’Toole, who was later chosen by the Obama administration as undersecretary of science and technology for the Department of Homeland Security. O’Toole has been severely criticized for her bioterrorism exercises. One scientist (chemist George Smith) has referred to her as “the top academic/salesperson for the coming of apocalyptic bioterrorism which has never quite arrived. [She’s] most prominent for always lobbying for more money for biodefense, conducting tabletop exercises on bioterrorism for easily overawed public officials, exercises tweaked to be horrifying.”[57] Another scientist, Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright, has commented that “O’Toole supported every flawed decision and counterproductive policy on biodefense, biosafety, and biosecurity during the Bush administration.”[58]

Attempts to solve a crime depend on pattern recognition. Patterns do not always indicate causal connections and there is no way to be certain Dark Winter and the anthrax attacks were connected in a substantial way—that they were, for example, both part of a general plan created by one group or linked groups. Still, given the failure of official investigating agencies in the U.S. to carry out their investigations fully and responsibly, civil society researchers have no choice but to attempt the job. The parallels between Dark Winter and the anthrax attacks are sufficiently suspect to warrant further investigation.

It is difficult, in fact, when reviewing Dark Winter and its participants, to avoid a feeling of vertigo. Perhaps the contrast between simulation and reality is misleading? Perhaps the anthrax attacks were the second phase of a simulation—a phase in which lethality would give the simulation and its purposes the attention the designers craved?

In any case, foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks, widely accepted in the fall of 2001 as deriving from a valid process of intelligence gathering, is today a highly visible sign of fraud. The foreknowledge did not derive from valid intelligence gathering, and because we now know this, we are justified in assuming it derived from the perpetrators of the attacks. An intelligence agency with integrity would be able to follow the leads, even today, quickly to their sources.

Notes to Chapter 6

Brigitte Nacos, Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007), 65.
The following are the ten most important articles.
i. “Nation’s Civil Defense Could Prove to Be Inadequate Against a Germ or Toxic Attack.” Sept. 23, 2001.
ii. “Crop-Dusters Are Grounded on Fears of Toxic Attacks.” Sept. 25, 2001.
iii. “The Specter of Biological Terror.” Sept. 26, 2001.
iv. “From Botox to Botulism.” Sept. 26, 2001.
v. “Anthrax Scare Prompts Run on an Antibiotic.” Sept. 27, 2001.
vi. “Big Push to Accelerate Vaccine Effort.” Sept. 28, 2001.
vii. “Some Experts Say U.S. Is Vulnerable To A Germ Attack.” Sept. 30, 2001.
viii. “Defense Secretary Warns Of Unconventional Attacks”. Oct. 1, 2001, B5.
ix. “Health Secretary Testifies About Germ Warfare Defenses.” Oct. 4, 2001.
x. “E.P.A. Years Behind Timetable On Guarding Water From Attack.” Oct. 4, 2001.
Nacos, Mass-Mediated Terrorism: The Central Role of the Media in Terrorism and Counterterrorism, 65.
Ibid.
Guillemin, American Anthrax: Fear, Crime, and the Investigation of the Nation’s Deadliest Bioterror Attack, xx–xxi.
Ibid., 50.
Ibid.
John F. Harris, “Bush Gets More International Support For U.S. ‘Crusade’ Against Terrorism; Officials Warn New Attacks Are Possible,” The Washington Post, September 17, 2001.
“History Commons: 2001 Anthrax Attacks,” September 17-18, 2001: First Wave of Anthrax Attacks Targets ABC, NBC, CBS, New York Post, and National Enquirer.
Lewin, “Anthrax Scare Prompts Run on an Antibiotic.”
Sandra Sobierai, “White House Mail Machine Has Anthrax,” Washington Post, October 23, 2001.
“Feds Sued Over Anthrax Documents: Legal Group Wonders Why White House Took Cipro before Attacks,” WorldNetDaily, June 7, 2002. http:// www.wnd.com/2002/06/14170/.
Mike Allen, “Bush Balks at Antrax-Test Question; But President States 3 Times That He Does Not Have the Disease,” The Washington Post, October 24, 2001; “The Anthrax Crisis,” The Washington Post, October 26, 2001.
See, for example, Philipp Sarasin, Anthrax: Bioterror as Fact and Fantasy (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Univ. Press, 2006), p. 118.
For the discussion of these two mini-series I am indebted to the blogger who goes under the name of “Shoestring.” See “The CBS Drama Series That–With CIA Help–Predicted 9/11 and the Anthrax Attacks,” Shoestring 9/11: Investigating 9/11 and Other Acts of the Secret State, June 19, 2013, http://www.shoestring911.blogspot.ca/.
Krauthammer, “A War on Many Fronts”; Jo Becker and Rick Weiss, “Problems in Bioterror Response; First Cases Show Need to Inform Public and Guard Against Panic,” The Washington Post, October 14, 2001.
Myller, “Biological, Chemical Threat Is Termed Tricky, Complex; Smallpox Virus Is Most Feared in Array of Deadly Weapons.”
Becker and Weiss, “Problems in Bioterror Response; First Cases Show Need to Inform Public and Guard Against Panic.”
Ibid.
Richard Cohen, “How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?” Slate, March 18, 2008.
Robert Stevens’ pulmonary anthrax was diagnosed on October 3. This was the first time actual anthrax (either the substance or the disease) could have been made known either to the FBI or to anyone else in authority. The first letters with anthrax were postmarked on September 18 but no one except the perpetrators is supposed to have known about the anthrax in these letters for some time. NBC personnel have claimed that, after two suspect letters were received (a September 18 Trenton, New Jersey letter and a September 20 St. Petersburg, Florida threat letter), they alerted the FBI on September 25. The Bureau supposedly picked up the St. Petersburg letter on September 26 but did not test the enclosed powder–which contained no anthrax–until some days later. The Bureau has said it did not receive the Trenton letter, containing actual anthrax, until October 12, which is also the day an announcement was made that NBC employee Erin O’Connor had tested positive for cutaneous anthrax after handling the two letters. Eric Lipton and Jim Rutenberg, “Wider Anthrax Reports, but No Link Is Found,” The New York Times, October 14, 2001.
Richard Cohen, “Our Forgotten Panic,” The Washington Post, July 22, 2004. For crucial timeline information the History Commons chronology of events is extremely helpful. For example, Cohen is dealt with at:http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?anthraxattacks_ other=anthraxattacks_cipro___bayer&timeline=anthraxattacks
“Amerithrax Investigative Summary (Released Pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act),” p. 20.
Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, “False Pretenses: Following 9/11, President Bush and Seven Top Officials of His Administration Waged a Carefully Orchestrated Campaign of Misinformation about Saddam Hussein’s Iraq,” January 23, 2008, http://www.publicintegrity. org/2008/01/23/5641/false-pretenses.
“The Downing Street Memo(s),” accessed May 14, 2014, http://downingstreetmemo.com/.
Inquiry Into The Treatment Of Detainees In U.S. Custody: Report Of The Committee On Armed Services, United States Senate, November 20, 2008, 41, http://media.mcclatchydc.com/smedia/2009/04/21/20/ Detainees-main1.source.prod_affiliate.91.pdf.
Jonathan Landay, “Report: Abusive Tactics Used to Seek Iraq-Al Qaeda Link,” McClatchy Newspapers, April 21, 2009.
Inquiry Into The Treatment Of Detainees In U.S. Custody: Report Of The Committee On Armed Services, United States Senate, 6.
Landay, “Report: Abusive Tactics Used to Seek Iraq-Al Qaeda Link.”
“DARK WINTER: Bioterrorism Exercise, Andrews Air Force Base, June 22-23, 2001 (Final Script–Dark Winter Exercise)” (Johns Hopkins Center for Civilian Biodefense, Center for Strategic and International Studies, ANSER, Memorial Institute for the Prevention of Terrorism, 2001), http://www.upmchealthsecurity.org/our-work/events/2001_dark-winter/Dark%20Winter%20Script.pdf; Steve Fainaru and Joby Warrick, “Bioterrorism Preparations Lacking at Lowest Levels; Despite Warnings and Funds, Local Defenses Come Up Short,” The Washington Post, October 22, 2001.
“DARK WINTER: Bioterrorism Exercise, Andrews Air Force Base, June 22-23, 2001 (Final Script–Dark Winter Exercise).”
Roxanne Roberts, “A War Game to Send Chills Down the Spine,” The Washington Post, October 23, 2001.
Marc Fisher, “To Stop Terror Defang Saddam, Defector Says,” The Washington Post, October 11, 2001.
Weiss, “Source of Florida Anthrax Case Is Sought; Victim Dies as 50 Investigators Search.”
Weiss, “Demand Growing for Anthrax Vaccine: Fear of Bioterrorism Attack Spurs Requests for Controversial Shot.”
Department of Justice Oversight: Preserving Our Freedoms While Defending Against Terrorism, 402 ff.; Sheehi, Islamophobia: The Ideological Case Against Muslims.
Dark Winter Simulated Newscasts, n.d., http://www.upmchealthsecurity.org/our-work/events/2001_dark-winter/dark_winter_slideshow. html.
Miller, Engelberg, and Broad, Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War.
Support can be found for several differing dates of publication of this book, but the confusion is not important for my purposes since I am not claiming the book’s publication was timed to fit the attacks to the day, simply that its appearance near the beginning of the anthrax attacks is suspicious. In any case, the October 2 publication date seems the most common, as noted here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germs:_Biological_Weapons_and_America%27s_Secret_War. The October 2 date seems also implied in the following review: Simon Wessely, “Weapons of Mass Hysteria,” The Guardian, October 20, 2001. http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2001/oct/20/highereducation.news1/print. The Guardian’s reviewer notes that, “With faultless timing, it was published just four days before news of the Florida anthrax cases broke.” I am assuming Wessely is taking Oct. 6, the day Stevens’ death from anthrax was reported in the media, as the day the news of the Florida cases broke.
Alexander Cockburn, “Judy Miller’s War,” CounterPunch, August 16, 2003.
Miller’s participation in Dark Winter is noted in the Dark Winter “Exercise Summary.” As of May 28, 2013 this was available here: http://www. upmchealthsecurity.org/website/events/2001_darkwinter/summary. html. Miller received the anthrax threat letter from St. Petersburg on October 12, 2001, and this was reported in The New York Times on Oct. 13. She wrote about it the next day: Judith Miller, “Fear Hits Newsroom in a Cloud of Powder,” The New York Times, October 14, 2001.
Alex Pareene, “Judith Miller: From the Times to the Nuts”,” Salon, December 30, 2010.
“Right Web: Tracking Militarists’ Efforts to Influence U.S. Foreign Policy: James Woolsey (last Updated Nov. 12, 2013),” Institute for Policy Studies, n.d., http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/woolsey_james.
Ibid. Woolsey named Iraq as a suspect on CNN in the evening of 9/11.
O’Neill, “Ex-CIA Boss Call for War on Iraq: ‘Absolute Destruction’ of Saddam Hussein Is next Step in War on Terrorism: Top Adviser.”
Sharia: The Threat to America (An Exercise in Competitive Analysis-Report of Team B II) (Washington, D.C.: The Center for Security Policy, 2010).
Wayne Kopping, The Third Jihad: Radical Islam’s Vision for America, DVD (Clarion Fund, 2008).
“Right Web: Tracking Militarists’ Efforts to Influence U.S. Foreign Policy: James Woolsey (last Updated Nov. 12, 2013)”; Steve Clemons, “Woolsey Watch: Woolsey Needs to Make a Choice Between Being a War Profiteer or War Pundit,” Washington Note, n.d., http://washingtonnote. com/woolsey_watch_w_1/; Bruce Bigelow, “Enlisting Locals: Small Defense Firms such as ISL Thrive with Military Contracts,” San Diego Union-Tribune, July 8, 2005.
“Right Web: Tracking Militarists’ Efforts to Influence U.S. Foreign Policy: Committee on the Present Danger,” Institute for Policy Studies, n.d., http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/committee_on_the_present_danger.
“Jerome Hauer,” Wikipedia, accessed May 26, 2014, https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Hauer.
Much To Be Done to Protect US From Bio-Terror Attack (New York-WABC, October 1, 2001).
“Jerome Hauer,” Wikipedia.
Randy Kennedy, “What Could Go Wrong? It’s His Job to Know,” The New York Times, July 27, 1999.
David Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2010).
Kevin Ryan, “Demolition Access To The WTC Towers: Part Two-Security,” 911 Truth.org, August 13, 2009, http://www.911truth.org/demolition-access-to-the-wtc-towers-part-two-security/.
“9/11/01: OEM Director Jerome Hauer Explains Abandoning WTC 7…” (ABC News), accessed May 26, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=MKFPaqq7cA4; Griffin, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False.
Noah Shachtman, “DHS’ New Chief Geek Is a Bioterror ‘Disaster,’ Critics Charge,” WIRED, May 6, 2009, http://www.wired.com/2009/05/dhs-new-geek-in-chief-is-a-biodefense-disaster-critics-say/.
Ibid.

Evidence and Reasonableness

Coincidence

Error

Information Control

Dark Winter

Dark Winter Players

The Dark Winter Designer

Foreknowledge Summary

Notes to Chapter 6

Stay Informed