* a A couple of people have mentioned Philip Zack as a possible culprit for the 2001 anthrax attacks because he apparently was filmed by security cameras in the labs after he lost his job - however that was in 1992 - so that seems unlikely.
I'm still of the opinion that Hatfill is probably innocent - although I'm not sure that those who had him making all-but-plugged-in mobile anthrax labs are equally benign.
Hatfill's 'friend and spokesman' said:
"If the facts were known, most Americans would be deeply grateful to Dr. Hatfill for his service to our nation... He is a loyal American and patriot who loves his country."'if the facts were known...' - for some reason I'm inclined to believe that he is innocent, and i suspect that he was duped somehow, and for reasons currently unknown.
the real question is why they needed both a perfectly designed mobile weapons lab, and a 'static' lab - first the mobile lab:
One of Hatfill's most intriguing projects at the SAIC was his design of the mock mobile lab, which was assembled for training of the Delta Force, a commando unit of the U.S. Special Forces based at Fort Bragg. The nonfunctional lab was built on an 18-wheel trailer and fitted with a fermenter and other specialized equipment... The trailer, known at the SAIC as the "can," was under construction in late 2001 at a shop in Frederick, where Hatfill once lived in an apartment near Fort Detrick.
Col. Bill Darley, a spokesman for the U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, said that Hatfill also designed a fixed or "static" nonfunctional bioweapons lab for use in training Special Forces in an unspecified location in the western United States.color me unconvinced about the 'static' lab. wtf does that mean? in my book a 'static lab' sounds a whole lot like a mobile lab sans wheels.
Yesterday I posited that Judy's article may have been to pre-empt other articles that were about to break. Reading Judy again, I'm tempted to think this was the case. She doesn't mention the 'static' lab at all - was she trying to spin the 'static' lab away?
Given what we know about Judy's reporting, every time i re-read Judy's article new stuff keeps jumping out at me. I should probably leave the interpretation job to experts like emptywheel - but it's kinda difficult to resist. One problem with trying to interpret this particular piece is that she shares the byline with two other reporters (although it was definitely her terrain) - so it's difficult to know how much to read into it.
If you read her article, you see that the word 'mobile' is in eight of the first nine paragraphs - it's almost as though wheels are more dangerous than anthrax. wtf is that about? and why did hatfill have to design a mobile lab? you've got the world's premiere expert in manufacturing anthrax - why on earth is he trying to put a manufacturing plant on wheels? or even in a confined space? that's not his expertise.
we know that curveball (chalabi, financed by rumsfeld) spouted the mobile labs nonsense - but:
While Curveball is reported to have claimed to be a chemical engineer trained on the use of the trailers the nature of the intelligence he supplied, as reflected in the CIA/DIA white paper on the alleged mobile laboratories, indicates he was a poseur. A chemical engineer would be concerned with the function of components, material flow, energy flow, control of parameters, conditions. Nothing in what is claimed to be intelligence from Curveball appears to be anything other than an external description of trailer components, as would be made by a non-engineer. None of what is purported to be intelligence supplied by Curveball shows any glimmer of engineering awareness.we saw the same thing in later reporting about the labs that they pretended to find in iraq - they looked similar from a distance
it's hard to know whether to laugh or fucking cry. from what i can gather, it looks like chalabi gave a photo of the mobile weather stations to curveball who reported it to the cia/dod who then got their premiere expert to construct an anthrax-producing trailer to fit the descriptionCurveball's detailed descriptions -- which were officially discredited in 2004 -- helped CIA artists create color diagrams of the labs, which Powell later used to argue the case for military intervention in Iraq before the U.N. Security Council.
"We have firsthand descriptions of biological weapons factories on wheels and on rails," Powell said in the Feb. 5, 2003, speech. Thanks to those descriptions, he said, "We know what the fermenters look like. We know what the tanks, pumps, compressors and other parts look like."
The trailers discovered in the Iraqi desert resembled the drawings well enough, at least from a distance.
back to judy - she tells us that hatfill's lab was "never actually "plugged in" to make weapons" - and a few paras later she tells us that "In any case, investigators found no evidence suggesting that the plant ever made anthrax, his friends, government experts and investigators all agree."
i wish emptywheel was tearing the article to pieces with her sharp expertise, so i didnt have to do it with my blunt amateurishness - but why on earth is judy quoting hatfill's friends as to whether or not he was making weapons in his spare time?
more judy:
"The secret trainer is similar to the mobile units..."wtf is a 'trainer' ? (for some resaon she alternates between 'trailer' and trainer' thru the article
more judy :
" (officials) said the unit was set up last fall at Fort Bragg, N.C., to help Delta Force, the Army's elite Special Operations unit, learn what to look for in Iraq and how to react if it found dangerous mobile gear."again with the mobile thing. god help the 75th if they came across an anthrax lab without wheels - they wouldnt recognize it.
more judy:
Several people familiar with the Delta Force trailer, including senior counterterrorism officials, said it was intended solely for training. They emphasized that its components were not connected and that it could not have made lethal germs.these two memes are repeated ad nauseum. a) it wasnt 'connected' - even senior officials tell us that - and b) it was only for 'training' - honest.
Judy also tries to give us a history lesson for some reason - 'About 50 years ago...' and 'Over the decades, other countries, including Iraq, have also sought such mobile gear.' - again - it's almost as though the invention of the wheel is as technically signifcant as weaponized anthrax
more of the same:
"Iraqi officials told United Nations inspectors that Baghdad had once considered making mobile germ plants. A United Nations official said that inspectors "kept that in the back of their minds" while looking for evidence of mobile germ plants. "i just did a quick count - the word 'mobile' appears 24 times in the article
i can't work out what is going on - but i'm beginning to understand emptywheel's
(oh - one final point - can i again register my disgust with wapo's headline writers for their recent effort on the debunking of the A1 'mobile labs' story which they curiously titled "Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War". stephen colbert could have spent his entire 20 mins at the whca on this one headline.)
(update - and another post here - with timeline)
3 comments:
Here's a question lukery.
Is oligomania more or less dysfunctional than monomania?
Because I'm probably equally obsessed about Judy, phony Iraqi intel, the CIA leak case, the makeup of the permagov, Sibel's story, and the truth behind 9/11.
Oh, and then there's the Holy Grail of all of this: the Grand Unification Theory of the Republican/PermaGov Scandal. That is, I want to know What's Really Going On (tm).
My wife tells me that's sort of a dysfunctional monomania, as there's nothing I really can do about it.
What do you think?
Have to agree that SOMEONE really was taken with the idea that bioweapons labs could be made to move around, and that someone may not have been Saddam. Folowing up on the comments for the last post, it was pointed out that there was a window of opportunity early in the occupation when no one was actively looking for WMD when it might have been possible to sneak something (oh, say, a mobile bioweapons lab) into Iraq to be conveniently found later. This was after the time that the Iraqi trailers had been found to be not bioweapons labs, a fact reported by Judy (during that window of opportunity) and about a month later by the Observer. The soruce for the Observer article was David Kelly, and as emptywheel pointed out, he could have been Judy's source as well.
What if the major barrier to completing a plant-the-trailer scheme was Kelly? What if he'd been shown the lab and immediately knew it to be a plant? And conveyed his doubts about all the labs found to date to his journalist friends? Are there any other stories from this time period debunking the mobile labs that appear to have come from another source?
Second, Kelly's supervisors first found out about his debunking of Iraqi WMD stories from his role in the Observer story, and followed it back to his role in the BBC sexed-up dossier story. The BBC story got all the attention, but it's possible, if there really was a scheme to plant a mobile lab, that his knowledge combined with his willingness to talk to reporters may have made that the most dangerous thing about him. This assumes of course that the "dark actors" may have had something to do with his demise.
There another aspect to the Kelly story I've long puzzled about. According to his Wikipedia entry as well as other posted accounts, when he went to Iraq in early June 2003, he was delayed in Kuwait for several days due to glitches in getting a visa. This seems implausible to me. Who exactly was issuing visas to enter Iraq at the time? The occupation forces that were barely in charge on the ground? And why would there be any question of letting Kelly in if he's on an official mission for the U.S.'s major coalition partner? Were they having trouble getting the mobile lab in place in time?
Just some tin foil ruminations from another obsessed reader. Thanks for keeping the focus on all this.
thnx mamyaga - great comments - and some good questions too. i dont know the answer to most of em, yet...
nice catch on the kuwait visa story - it does sound odd. the wiki piece isnt particularly clear - but it appears that he was delayed for 'a few days - which was actually half of his trip - which was "5 June–11 June" - i'm not sure if he actually was in iraq for that period, or if that was the length of his trip (some in kuwait). Judy was stepping down from her claims on June 7 - perhaps before Kelly saw the trailers.
From the (june15) Observer article: "Instead, a British scientist and biological weapons expert, who has examined the trailers in Iraq, told The Observer last week: 'They are not mobile germ warfare laboratories. You could not use them for making biological weapons. They do not even look like them."
is that an odd thing to say? are there generic mobile weapons labs that he could know what they look like? or is he referring to some specific trailers?
re your suggestion that maybe they were going to airlift a MWL after they realized that the iraqi trailers werent MWL's - I suspect that they weren't really expecting to find any real MWL's - in which case they should have pre-planted them.
more later
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