Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label terrorism. Show all posts

August 6, 2008

Confirmation of my Cochran blog from yesterday

As I've been pointing out, the hero in this investigation is the advance in genome sequencing technology over the last seven years. The Washington Post reports:

Much of what the FBI seeks to explain involves the scientific trail, which included 19 outside laboratories at a cost of $10 million, that led investigators to Ivins. The Justice Department yesterday continued to discuss whether it can shutter one of the most perplexing investigations in FBI history and unseal the bulky case files in their entirety.

"We crossed a number of scientific barriers in this case," said one senior FBI official who has been ordered not to talk about the case publicly. "We literally were inventing science as we went along."

Law enforcement sources and published scientific papers indicate that the investigation gained traction through technological and scientific advances that dramatically speeded up the process of differentiating the genetic makeup of hundreds of distinct but closely related strains of bacteria.

Coupled with a fresh scientific understanding of the subtle differences between the strains and a new system for analyzing them, the rapid "sequencing" machines made it possible to detect the minuscule differences and link the one used in the attacks to a single laboratory.

At the time of the attacks, the knowledge to accomplish this in less than decades of laborious work did not exist. But the science of reading and analyzing DNA was on the verge of an explosion, one that the anthrax attacks may have helped to speed up.

Bruce Budowle, an FBI scientist at its lab in Quantico, reported to an international conference in September 2003 that a new field of forensic science -- known as microbial forensics -- had evolved as a result of the investigation. The letter attacks, he said, showed the "need to enhance our capabilities for forensic attribution."

The FBI has boasted publicly only in general terms about the scientific accomplishments in the case. Laboratories and researchers involved in the work under FBI contracts signed agreements not to discuss their contributions, but some relevant insights have emerged in scientific papers published over the past six years as work progressed on decoding the genetic composition of Bacillus anthracis, the anthrax bacterium. ...

J. Craig Venter, former head of the Institute for Genomic Research, said such investigation was impossible before the recent advances. "This is just applying that same technology to forensic purposes. It's more the use of it to solve a particular criminal problem rather than [to] make advances in science," he said.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

Anthrax evidence

First take on evidence against Dr. Bruce Ivins, as revealed to victims' families.

CNN reports:

"At the time of the attacks, he was the custodian of a large flask of highly purified anthrax spores that possess certain genetic mutations identical to the anthrax used in the attacks," according to a July 11 affidavit from a U.S. postal inspector. ...

A source familiar with the investigation said Tuesday that in the fall of 2001, Ivins borrowed a machine that can convert wet anthrax -- the kind used at Fort Detrick where Ivins worked -- into dry powder -- the kind used in the anthrax letters.

By the way, the first anthrax attack, as I recall, wasn't technically in the Fall, it was on September 18, 2001, in the very late summer. So, I'd like to hear the exact date.

Washington Post reports on the timeline:

"According to a chart investigators submitted with their October 2007 request for a search warrant, Ivins began working longer hours in mid-August 2001, logging lengthy evening shifts from Sept. 14, 2001, through Sept. 16, 2001, with another spike in late hours in early October 2001.

Ivins explained his longer shifts by telling investigators that he retreated to the lab "to escape" from problems at home, Dellafera said in his affidavit. The document referred to e-mail messages Ivins sent to a friend describing his rising stress loads, depression and feelings of "isolation -- and desolation" in 2000 and through the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The anthrax letters sent to congressional offices and news organizations that fall were postmarked Sept. 18, 2001, and Oct. 9, 2001, investigators said.

The timeline fits pretty well: Ivins' anthrax vaccine project got cancelled before 9/11. Then 9/11 happens showing how vulnerable we are to terrorism. He spends the following weekend, Friday through Sunday in the lab. Then, after work on Monday, Feb. 17, he drives 198 miles to Princeton and back to mail the letter. It gets postmarked on 9/18.

From the NYT:

Documents Detail Evidence Against Anthrax Scientist
By DAVID STOUT and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — A few days before the anthrax attacks of 2001, the scientist who has emerged as the suspect in the case sent e-mails warning that Osama bin Laden’s “terrorists for sure have anthrax and sarin gas” and have “just decreed death to all Jews and all Americans,” according to documents released by the government on Wednesday.

The documents, released on the orders of federal judge, were made public to bolster the Justice Department’s contention that the scientist, Bruce E. Ivins, was the man behind the lethal mailings that killed five people and made at least 17 others ill while the country was still traumatized by the Sept. 11 attacks.

The segment about the e-mails does not reveal to whom they were sent — the address was redacted before the documents’ release — but it notes that the wording was similar, and in some instances identical, to the language in the anthrax-laced letters. “Death to America” and “Death to Israel” were phrases that appeared both in the doctor’s e-mails and in the letters.

Moreover, the envelopes that held the letters were “federal eagle” envelopes, so-named because of the eagle perched on a bar bearing the initials “USA” in the upper right-hand corner, and bore tiny but tell-tale defects that searchers determined were bought from a post office in Maryland or Virginia, the official documents relate.

And of the 16 government, commercial and university laboratories that had virulent anthrax strains like the one used in the deadly mailings, only one was located in Maryland or Virginia — the Fort Detrick, Md., lab where Dr. Ivins worked before his July 29 suicide, the documents say.

In addition, searches of Dr. Ivins’s home in Frederick, Md., turned up “hundreds” of similar letters that had not yet been sent to media outlets and members of Congress, people who were briefed by the F.B.I. on Wednesday said. Those people said investigators found that Dr. Ivins sometimes kept odd, night-time hours in the lab, and that he would sometimes drive to mailboxes miles out of his way.

“Ivins has been unable to give investigators an adequate explanation for his late night laboratory work hours around the time” of the mailings, the documents say. And around that time, Dr. Ivins was suffering from “incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times,” in the doctor’s own words to a colleague, and feared that he might not be able to control his own behavior, the documents go on.

The material released Wednesday is meant to bolster the F.B.I.’s circumstantial case against Dr. Ivins, who by many accounts had descended into paranoia and despair before he took his own life.

As for motive, the documents suggest that in addition to whatever long-term personal problems he had, Dr. Ivins was distraught because a company had lost its government approval to produce an anthrax vaccine for troops, and he believed the vaccine was essential.

So, mass-murderer or harmless weirdo who was in the wrong place at the wrong time? I lean toward the former, but I'm not sure yet.

My experience, as I've gone through life, is that the fraction of people who, at some point in their lives, aren't quite right in the head is much higher than you might imagine.

I suspect that the terrorist wasn't actually trying to kill people, just to scare the country into taking anthrax vaccines seriously.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 5, 2008

Greg Cochran on anthrax

Greg Cochran says, in defense of the much maligned FBI, that in 2001 the technology didn't really exist to sequence the anthrax found in mailed envelopes in the fall of that year. As you'll recall, the Human Genome Project had spent years sequencing Craig Venter's DNA, not finishing until about then.

By the middle of the decade, however, genome sequencing technology had improved so much that the FBI could hire biotech firms to sequence the evidence, which traced the terrorist anthrax to a particular batch accessible only to about ten people at Ft. Detrick. (That's assuming that the initial inspection of the evidence at Ft. Detrick in 2001 didn't contaminate the sample -- which may or may not be a Big If.)

What we don't know yet is how solid the links are to Ivins as the One of the Ten. He sounds like he was always pretty eccentric, and was fairly crazy at the end. Still, one concern would be: what if the FBI picked out the most eccentric of the ten for surveillance, and that, rather than guilt, drove him around the bend? Anyway, we should know more pretty soon.

It might not be a bad idea to buy out the other nine people at the lab who had access to the terror anthrax and pay them all to take early retirement.

If the anthrax mailer's goal was to get America to pay more attention to and spend more money on defenses against bio-terrorism, he certainly succeeded: we've spent something like $50 billion since then.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

August 3, 2008

Anthrax and Craig Venter

David Willman of the LA Times continues to scoop everybody on the unfolding anthrax story. Now, he reveals that the FBI turned to a firm associated with Craig Venter for analysis of the mailed spores:

As the investigation ground on, authorities enlisted colleagues of J. Craig Venter, founder of a Rockville, Md., institute that had helped map the human genome. Based on analyses performed at the Institute for Genomic Research, Venter said the culprit "almost had to be a government scientist." The institute's analysis was completed under contract to the FBI and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Venter said federal investigators within the last two years retrieved the anthrax evidence from the institute.

"FBI came in and took freezers and all the samples," he said in an interview Sunday.

Anthrax

A reader writes about Bruce Ivins, developer of an anthrax vaccine, who recently committed suicide as the government prepared to charge him in the 2001 anthrax terror attacks:

"Sorta like the fireman who is also an arsonist?"

Yes, that might turn out to be a useful analogy.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 31, 2008

Suicide in 2001 anthrax case

David Willman of the LA Times breaks a big story on the post-9/11 terrorism wave that is one reason why we're in Iraq:

A top government scientist who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an apparent suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the Los Angeles Times has learned.

Bruce E. Ivins, 62, who for the last 18 years worked at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Md., had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death and the FBI investigation.

Ivins, whose name had not been disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulations used in experiments on animals.

Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins also helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S. senator's office in Washington.

Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague, who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI. ...

The anthrax mailings killed five people, crippled national mail service, shut down a Senate office building and spread fear of further terrorism after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The extraordinary turn of events followed the government's payment in June of a settlement valued at $5.82 million to a former government scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, who was long targeted as the FBI's chief suspect despite a lack of any evidence that he had ever possessed anthrax.

Early in the year, I took a look at a third Ft. Detrick scientist (since moved on to other jobs) -- i.e., neither Ivins nor Hatfill -- whose name has been fairly widely tossed around as the possible anthrax assassin. The more I Googled, the more the pieces seemed to fit together. I was about ready to post my conspiracy theory when I took one more look at it and -- poof -- I realized that I didn't have any real evidence at all. So, thankfully, I didn't post his name, and instead wrote:
"I'm not going to mention his name, but if you know who I'm talking about and think he did it, try to force yourself into a gestalt where you assume he didn't do it and see if you can think of less sinister explanations for the facts known about him."

As far as I can recall, Ivins's name, in contrast, didn't come up much in the conspiracy theorizing. Here's a Google search that shows relatively little in the way of theorizing about his involvement -- even though his name was published in USA Today in 2004 in regard to some dodgy doings at Detrick.

His name was featured suspiciously in the book Vaccine A by investigative journalist Gary Matsumoto about the anthrax vaccine that Ivins helped develop. But I don't see anything on Google suggesting Matsumoto linked Ivins to involvement with the 2001 terror attacks.

In general, it appears that almost nobody -- whether government investigators, professional journalists, or lone obsessives in their bathrobes -- suspected Ivins, at least not enough to leave much of a trace on Google. (Indeed, most of the Google searches on "Ivins anthrax" turn up references to the late pundit Molly Ivins.)

For example, here's the part of Ed Lake's website where he collects all the published facts on the anthrax attacks where he speculates on traits of the supplier and who the mailer might be. He doesn't sound too far off, but neither set of traits seems to fit Ivins terribly well. Lake's profile is in bold:

1. The supplier probably took the Ames anthrax from a government facility.

Yes.

2. The supplier was probably fired from that facility.

Not when Lake wrote this a few years ago.

3. The supplier is probably considered an unstable personality, perhaps even a "drunk".

Sounds more like delusions of grandeur, according to Ivins's brother.

4. The supplier is almost certainly unmarried.

No, Ivins was married.

5. The supplier is a loner with few friends - if any.
6. The supplier is disgruntled and uncomfortable working with others.
7. The supplier probably uses phrases like "I keep telling them, but they don't listen."
8. The supplier doesn't care much about "rules".
9. The supplier believes that a free exchange of information is key to advancements in science.
10. The supplier may have had knowledge needed by the refiner/mailer.

I don't know about 5-10.

11. The supplier is probably in his late 40s or early 50s.

A little older.

12. The supplier probably lost his security clearance as a result of his actions.

No, Ivins got off scot-free despite admitting to breaking rules regarding handling of anthrax.

It's striking that here's one of the big historical mysteries of recent years, and yet nobody, official or unofficial, seemed to have had a clue for at least five years. I thought the Internet was supposed to make this kind of thing untenable.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

July 5, 2008

One percent of foreign jihadis with U.S. criminal records

More than six and a half years after 9/11, the U.S. bureaucracy is starting to get basic tasks done.

Fingerprints from one out of a hundred detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the Horn of Africa are matching those in U.S. local police files:

From the Washington Post:

As they analyzed the results, they were surprised to learn that one out of every 100 detainees was already in the FBI's database for arrests. Many arrests were for drunken driving, passing bad checks and traffic violations, FBI officials said.

"Frankly I was surprised that we were getting those kind of hits at all," recalled Townsend, who left government in January. They identified "a potential vulnerability" to national security the government had not fully appreciated, she said.

The people being fingerprinted had come from the Middle East, North Africa and Pakistan. They were mostly in their 20s, Shannon recalled. "One of the things we learned is we were dealing with relatively young guys who were very committed and what they would openly tell you is that when they got out they were going back to jihad," he said. "They'd already made this commitment."

One of the first men fingerprinted by the FBI team was a fighter who claimed he was in Afghanistan to learn the ancient art of falconry. But a fingerprint check showed that in August 2001 he had been turned away from Orlando International Airport by an immigration official who thought he might overstay his visa. Mohamed al Kahtani would later be named by the Sept. 11 Commission as someone who allegedly had sought to participate in hijackings. He currently is in custody at Guantanamo Bay.

Similarly, in 2004, an FBI team choppered to a remote desert camp on the Iraq-Iran border, home to the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), whose aim is to overthrow the Iranian government. The MEK lead an austere lifestyle in which men are segregated from women and material goods are renounced. The U.S. State Department considers the organization to be a terrorist group.

The FBI team fingerprinted 3,800 fighters. More than 40, Shannon said, had previous criminal records in the agency's database.

While the FBI was busy collecting fingerprints, the military was setting up its own biometrics database, adding in iris and facial data as well. By October, the two organizations agreed to collaborate, running queries through both systems. The very first match was on the man who claimed to be a poor dirt farmer. Among his many charges were misdemeanors for theft and public drunkenness in Chicago and Utah, a criminal record that ran from 1993 to 2001, said Herb Richardson, who serves as operations manager for the military's Automated Biometric Identification System under a contract with Ideal Innovations of Arlington.

Many of those with U.S. arrest records had come to the United States to study ...

So, one percent is just the fraction of jihadis who got fingerprinted in America when they got caught by the police screwing up. What fraction managed to not get caught when they were in America? Of course, we don't seem to collect fingerprints on foreigners in the U.S., so nobody knows.

Not every young foreign man who attends college in America develops a lifelong love of America. John Updike's 1978 novel "The Coup" explains the psychological mechanics of this in a character very similar to Barack Obama Sr.

So, why did our President go out of his way to start up a new program with the King of Saudi Arabia to bring thousands of Saudi college students to America?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

September 12, 2007

"A Mighty Heart"

Here's my review for The American Conservative of the Angelina Jolie flick that got the critics all excited but died at the box office.

Thirty seconds into Angelina Jolie's explanatory voice-over that opens "A Mighty Heart," the critically-acclaimed film about the pregnant wife of the Wall Street Journal reporter who was kidnapped and beheaded by Muslim terrorists in Pakistan, the dozen corn-rowed young men sitting near me got up, put on their gang-colors jackets, and filed out of the theatre to go find something more entertaining to watch.

Who was right about "A Mighty Heart" -- the Critics or the Crips?

After Angelina Jolie first surfaced playing a lesbian junkie supermodel who dies of AIDS in 1998's "Gia," she stood out from Hollywood's fungible ranks of blonde and bland starlets by being dark and demented. After lurid years of soul-kissing her brother and wearing around her neck a vial of then-husband Billy Bob Thornton's blood, however, Jolie has been trying to recast herself as a globe-trotting humanitarian, a sexy Albert Schweitzer. Not surprisingly, she has brought the same demonic energy she once devoted to playing with knives to adopting orphaned children from different countries, resembling an obsessive Pokemon player who's gotta catch 'em all.

Jolie's first attempt to embody her newfound ideals in a film, her 2003 tribute to international relief workers, the romantic drama "Beyond Borders," was a respectful snore. Now, she's trying again in a much-acclaimed performance as the saintly Mariane Pearl, a French radio journalist whose bestselling memoir recounted her four heartbreaking weeks in 2002 trying to piece together clues to her husband's disappearance, until a video emerged of her husband's head being hacked off.

Ever since, her former father-in-law, UCLA professor Judea Pearl, has tirelessly promoted his son as the Anne Frank of the 21st Century, recruiting Bill Clinton for the Honorary Board of his Daniel Pearl Foundation that promotes "cross-cultural understanding." A competing film project based on the insufferable French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy's book Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, with Josh Lucas as the martyred reporter, has been announced, but Jolie's movie won the race to the screen.

Giving "A Mighty Heart" a bad review seems churlish, since the film is so factual that any harping might appear to reflect upon the poor widow. Nonetheless, the critics were wrong and the gangbangers right: this police procedural is one of the more futile films in memory.

Mrs. Pearl says, "To me, it's a story about Danny being held by extremely intolerant people. And yet we, in that house in Pakistan—Christian, Hindu, Jew, Buddhist, Muslim—came together to find him."

But failed, badly. While we can admire the film's refusal to pretend that the Pakistani and American investigators ever came close to rescuing Daniel Pearl, its lack of suspense makes for a pointless 100 minutes.

And then there are the colorless characters. I still have no idea who the "Mighty Heart" of the film's title is supposed to be. Pearl appears to have been a nice guy and a dedicated professional who died bravely, but he never claimed to be an oversized personality. Newspapermen were once, according to "His Girl Friday," sozzled misanthropes too crude to remove their hats while pounding out copy on their Underwoods, but modern reporters, like Mr. and Mrs. Pearl, tend to be sober and self-effacing. Indeed, this murder mystery isn't much interested in the victim, as illustrated by the casting of the obscure Dan Futterman opposite Jolie.

The film's focus on Mariane Pearl might suggest she's the mighty heart. Yet, the emotionally restrained Mrs. Pearl, who meditates in front of her personal Buddhist shrine to maintain her inner harmony during her ordeal, doesn't make much of an impression either. She's too culturally sensitive to vent her wrath against the men who slaughtered her husband.

Although widely praised for not chewing the scenery, Jolie, who studied Method acting and won her Oscar for playing a sociopath mental patient in "Girl, Interrupted," lacks the theatrical training that Helen Mirren used to subtly delineate an undemonstrative character in "The Queen." So, we're left with plenty of time to admire the elegant curve of Jolie's profile from her eyebrows down to the tip of her nose.

Nor does the movie teach you much. Pakistan is an astonishingly complex and potentially crucial country, but the filmmakers are so loathe to stereotype that all we learn about the place is that it's really crowded.

Ultimately, the tedium of "A Mighty Heart" is due to the devotion of all involved to the modern religion of non-judgmentalism.

Rated R solely for language. The beheading is not portrayed on film.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer