anthrax

The recent suicide of the government scientist who is suspected of being behind the 2001 anthrax terrorism brings up the question of what FBI investigators, who were about to close in on him, have been doing all this time. It turns out that they worked for almost seven years in secret.

Most people did not know that the work in Ray Goehner’s materials characterization department at Sandia National Laboratories was contributing important information to the FBI?s investigation of letters containing bacillus anthracis, the spores that cause the disease anthrax. The spores were mailed in the fall of 2001 to several news media offices and to two U.S. senators. Five people were killed.
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Here at Unknowncountry, we have always suspected that a single US government scientist was behind the 2001 anthrax attacks. Now, facing arrest and a possible death penalty, a microbiologist who helped the FBI INVESTIGATE the anthrax deaths has killed himself with an overdose of painkillers.

According to BBC News, the anthrax tainted mail was sent to legislators in Washington and media offices in New York and Florida. Those killed were two postal workers in Washington, a New York hospital worker, a Florida photo editor and an elderly woman in Connecticut. The incidents took place shortly after the 911 attacks.

Art credit: freeimages.co.uk
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Could the anthrax attacks of five years ago happen here again? Bioterrorism expert Ken Alibek says yes, and he ought to know, since he used to develop biological weapons for the ex-Soviet Union. When someone sent anthrax through the mail to a group of reporters and politicians, five people died. The last anthrax attack consisted of a few envelopes sent out by an anonymous attacker, and we were helpless to fight it. The Center for Biosecurity at the University of Pittsburgh says that despite spending over 40 million researching bioterrorism and training specialists to fight it, in Project BioShield, we wouldn’t do any better today.
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The CIA is beginning to assert that the 2001 anthrax attacks were a terrorist plot. This goes against the FBI’s accusation that they were a demonstration of our vulnerability to a bioweapons attack that was perpetrated by a U.S. government scientist. The problem is, the anthrax used in the attacks was the Ames strain, which so far has only been found in the U.S. Traces of anthrax were recovered from a bomb in Iraq, but they weren’t from the Ames strain.

Bill Gertz and Rowan Scarborough write in The Washington Times that the CIA points to the fact that the anthrax was sent to two U.S. senators and several media organizations in envelopes containing letters that ended with: “death to America, death to Israel, Allah is great.”
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