lies on the horizon

Retired Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers has published a memoir. Predictably, Eyes on the Horizon carries an impressive payload of military-industrial propaganda in support of the “War on Terror”. But most interesting is Myers’ chapter recollecting the “defining moment” of September 11, which begins thusly:

My driver, Dan Downey, braked hard at the Pentagon River Entrance, and we jumped from the car. The steps were crowded with men and women fleeing the building, many still coughing from the smoke inside.

From what is this thrilling Doc Savagesque prose meant to distract us?

On September 11, 2001 Air Force General Richard Myers was the Acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and yet his tale of that day begins some time after the Pentagon was officially attacked at 9:38 a.m. What about the 35 minutes after the South Tower was hit, announcing a coordinated operation to the world? What about the 52 minutes after F-15s were finally scrambled from Otis to intercept a hijacked airliner at that moment striking the North Tower?

It seems that–like his friend Donald Rumsfeld–General Myers was otherwise occupied prior to the Pentagon hit, though he has given several different accounts of that time:

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a848myerslies#a848myerslies

“According to his own account, Air Force General Richard Myers, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sees reports of the first WTC crash on television. Myers is acting chairman of the US military during the 9/11 crisis because Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Army General Henry Shelton is flying across the Atlantic for a NATO meeting in Europe. [ABC News, 9/11/2002; American Forces Press Service, 9/8/2006] Myers has a 9 o’clock appointment with Senator Max Cleland (D) in one of the Senate office buildings. He is heading into this meeting and sees a television in Cleland’s outer office showing the burning North Tower, with the commentator suggesting it has been hit by an airplane. [MSNBC, 9/11/2002] Myers later recalls, “They thought it was a small plane or something like that.” [Armed Forces Radio And Television Service, 10/17/2001; American Forces Press Service, 10/23/2001] He says, “And we’re standing around saying, ‘What in the world happened?’ I remember the day being beautiful. I said, ‘How could a pilot be that stupid, to hit a tower? I mean, what’—but then you think, ‘Well, whatever.’” So he goes ahead and walks into the meeting, and is with Cleland at the time the second tower is hit (see (Shortly After 9:03 a.m.) September 11, 2001). [Council on Foreign Relations, 6/29/2006] On several occasions, Cleland will confirm that Myers had this meeting with him. [US Congress, 9/13/2001; CNN, 11/20/2001; Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6/16/2003] But counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke seems to contradict this account. He claims that, when he joins a video teleconference shortly after arriving at the White House, he sees Myers on screen, indicating that Myers is at the Pentagon rather than with Cleland (see (9:10 a.m.) September 11, 2001).”

http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?item=a903myerslearns#a903myerslearns

“According to some reports, acting Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers entered a meeting on Capitol Hill with Senator Max Cleland (D) just minutes before the second plane hit the World Trade Center (see Shortly Before 9:00 a.m. September 11, 2001). There are confused accounts of when Myers learns of this second attack, and what he does in response. Myers later tells NBC News, “[S]omewhere in the middle of that meeting, they came in and said the second tower has been hit… and I think that’s when we figured out something—that America or at least the World Trade Center is under attack.” He adds, “And then I left the office,” and says that NORAD Commander Ralph Eberhart then calls him. [MSNBC, 9/11/2002] In testimony on September 13, 2001, he similarly states, “[A]fter the second tower was hit, I spoke to the commander of NORAD, General Eberhart.” [US Congress, 9/13/2001] In a speech in 2006, Myers says that after the second attack occurs, “The meeting was over very quickly.” [Council on Foreign Relations, 6/29/2006] He tells CNN, “[W]hen the second target was hit, we knew something was up, so we rushed back to the Pentagon.” [CNN, 4/15/2003] Yet in an interview five weeks after 9/11, he claims, “Nobody informed us” when the second tower was hit, “But when we came out [of our meeting], that was obvious.” [Armed Forces Radio And Television Service, 10/17/2001; American Forces Press Service, 10/23/2001] And, according to several accounts, he does not leave Capitol Hill until around the time the Pentagon is hit, which is more than 30 minutes after the second attack happens (see (Shortly After 9:37 a.m.) September 11, 2001). In a speech in 2003, Max Cleland recalls, “Gen. Myers bolted from his seat. We rushed into an adjoining office as we saw on TV the second plane slam into the second tower. Gen. Myers rushed out of my office, headed for the Pentagon. At that moment, the Pentagon was hit.” [Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 6/16/2003] But on a couple of other occasions, Cleland says he is still meeting with Myers in his office at the time the Pentagon is hit. [US Congress, 9/13/2001; CNN, 11/20/2001] Contradicting both Cleland and Myers, counterterrorism “tsar” Richard Clarke later claims that when he joins a video teleconference shortly after the time of the second attack, he can see Myers on screen, meaning Myers is at the Pentagon at that time rather than on Capitol Hill (see (9:10 a.m.) September 11, 2001). [Clarke, 2004, pp. 1-3] “

Myers does include the curious claim that after his arrival in the NMCC, he “went to find Secretary Rumsfeld” as “CNN showed the south tower of the World Trade Center collapsing in an avalanche of smoke and debris”, confirming that after 9:59 a.m. Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld–No. 2 in the military chain-of-command after the President–for some reason was “‘outside’, helping with the wounded” rather than doing his job in the NMCC, which he also had managed to avoid before the Pentagon attack.

————————

“And we’re standing around saying, ‘What in the world happened?’ I remember the day being beautiful. I said, ‘How could a pilot be that stupid, to hit a tower? I mean, what’—but then you think, ‘Well, whatever.’”

Of course, it’s perfectly reasonable that the man who had been Commander of NORAD from 1998 – 2000 stood around thinking “Well, whatever”. Isn’t it?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.htm

In the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.

One of the imagined targets was the World Trade Center.

http://www.kepplerspeakers.com/speakers/speakers.asp?1-3M4TG

The Global War on Terror will last several decades. Al Qaeda and their affiliate organizations that span the globe have a 100-year plan to destroy the worldwide economy and defeat western democracies. As the architect of the global war on terror since its inception and the fifteenth chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, military speaker General Richard Myers sees the war on terror as an even greater threat to America’s security than World War II. In this compelling speech, he describes what’s at stake for America, her allies, and the world, and prepares audiences for the bold challenges that lie ahead. Myers also leaves them inspired in his deeply held conviction that this threat will ultimately be defeated.

http://www.northropgrumman.com/leadership/bios/richard_myers.html

Elected to the Northrop Grumman Board of Directors in 2006.

 

Well, whatever.

culture of deception

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/09/AR2009020903511.html

The U.S. Army’s Frederick-based laboratory for studying some of the world’s deadliest diseases has suspended most research activities as it tries to find errors in an inventory of its biological materials, a spokeswoman for the institute said yesterday.

Col. John P. Skvorak, the head of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, ordered most lab work to stop last Friday, according to an order first obtained and posted on the ScienceInsider blog. He said the order was required to meet the Army and Defense Department’s standards for keeping track of “biological select agents and toxins,” known as BSAT, such as anthrax bacteria and the Ebola virus.

The lab has been under heavy pressure to tighten security since the 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people and sickened 17 others. FBI investigators think the anthrax strain used in the attacks originated at the Army lab, and its prime suspect in the investigation, Bruce E. Ivins, researched anthrax there. Ivins committed suicide last year.

http://www.infowars.com/scientific-impossibility-did-fbi-get-their-man-in-bruce-ivins/

Deborah Rudacille
Examiner Correspondent
November 18, 2008

Bruce Ivins was a cold-blooded murderer, a deranged psycho-killer, who in the fall of 2001, cooked up a virulent batch of powdered anthrax, drove to Princeton, N.J., and mailed letters loaded with the lethal mix to five news organizations and two U.S. senators.

At least, that’s what the FBI says.

The letters infected 22 people, killing five, including two Maryland postal workers.
The sixth victim of the madness was Ivins himself, a 62-year-old biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, who committed suicide rather than face charges.

Case closed? Neatly wrapped up? Not so fast.

Married for 33 years — and a father of two — with a 35-year career as a civilian microbiologist at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Ivins, a devout Catholic, worked as a senior research scientist and an expert in animal models of anthrax. In 2003 he received the Army’s Decoration for Exceptional Civilian Service for work on an anthrax vaccine — an assignment the FBI now says provided a motive for the attacks.

Ivins apparently was obsessed with the investigation. According to the FBI, on Sept. 7, 2007, he sent an e-mail to himself, claiming to have figured out who mailed the anthrax letters. “I should have it TOTALLY nailed down within the month,” he wrote. “I should have been a private eye.”

Ivins, who did not name anyone in the e-mail, died on July 29, 2008, at Frederick Memorial Hospital after overdosing on prescription Tylenol with codeine. The FBI says he killed himself. The presence of the drug was determined from a blood sample. No autopsy was ordered.

Before his death, he was under 24-hour police surveillance, which included interrogations about his research and work habits, searches of his home and office, and intense questioning of family members and co-workers. Friends say that the FBI offered Ivins’ son $2.5 million and a sports car to hand over evidence implicating his father in the attacks.

The month before Ivins’ death, the federal government agreed to pay $5.8 million to another former Fort Detrick researcher, Steven Hatfill, for “improperly identifying him as a suspect in the case.”
When he learned the FBI was going to charge him with the crime after clearing Hatfill, Ivins swallowed a bottle of Tylenol.

Rush to judgment

In exclusive interviews with The Examiner, two former directors of the bacteriology division at Fort Detrick challenged the science underlying the case against Ivins. They argue it would have been impossible for Ivins to have produced the powdered anthrax in the contaminated letters in the time frame proposed by the FBI — the two weeks following the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

The BSL-3 (biosafety level 3) suite where Ivins worked at the Institute was composed of a series of laboratories and an office where access was restricted to trained personnel who were required to log in and out.

“Knowing the layout of the BSL-3 suite, the implication that Bruce could have whipped out [anthrax mixture] in a couple of weeks without detection is ridiculous,” says Gerald P. Andrews, director of the bacteriology division and Ivins’ supervisor from 2000 to 2003.

The first anthrax letters were mailed to the New York offices of ABC, NBC and CBS, the New York Post and the National Inquirer in Boca Raton, Fla., on Sept. 18, 2001. The second letters were mailed to Sens. Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) on Oct. 9.

Infectious disease specialist W. Russell Byrne, who preceded Andrews as the division’s director, said he “never believed Ivins’ could have produced the preparations used in the anthrax letters working in the bacteriology division area of Building 1425.”

Departmental policy prohibits Institute employees from speaking with the media. But one researcher, speaking anonymously, told The Examiner: “It would have been impossible for Ivins to have grown, purified and loaded the amount of material in the letters in just six days. It simply could not be done.”

http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2002/01/26/assaad/index.html

“Assaad believes there is a possible link between the person who sent the unsigned letter to the FBI and the terrorist who sent anthrax to Democratic politicians and prominent members of the media. Whoever it was seemed to display eerie foreknowledge of the biological attacks, since the letter was sent to the FBI well before any anthrax terror attacks were known to the public.”

“Before the investigation ended, both Zack and Rippy were reprimanded. Then Zack left USAMRIID in December 1991, first heading to the Army’s Walter Reed Institute, then going to the private pharmaceutical company Eli Lilly, and then to a company in Colorado acquired by St. Louis’ Nexstar Financial Management. Several calls by Salon to his last known phone number and address in Boulder, Colo., went unreturned, and Nexstar says it no longer has any record of Zack. Rippy, who left USAMRIID shortly after Zack, in February 1992, worked for a while at Eli Lilly, but could not be located by Salon.”

“Assaad is puzzled that after clearing him of the accusation that he could be a bioterrorist, the FBI showed no interest in talking with him about his days at Fort Detrick. “The whole world wants to talk to me, except the FBI,” he said, as his lawyer’s phones rang nonstop this week, with media organizations seeking interviews with him. “Something’s wrong here.”

For some reason, Rozen declines to name “a company in Colorado” where Zack was employed. And of course Nexstar “no longer has any record of Zack”.

But perhaps this obscure scientific paper can provide a clue.

http://cat.inist.fr/?aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=937680

“Auteur(s) / Author(s)
DROLET Daniel W. (1) ; NELSON Joyce (2) ; TUCKER Christopher E. (1) ; ZACK Philip M. (1) ; NIXON Kerry (2) ; BOLIN Richard (1) ; JUDKINS Mark B. (2) ; FARMER James A. (2) ; WOLF Julie L. (1) ; GILL Stanley C. (1) ; BENDELE Raymond A. (1) ;

Affiliation(s) du ou des auteurs / Author(s) Affiliation(s)
(1) Gilead Sciences Inc., 2860 Wilderness Place, Boulder, CO 80301, ETATS-UNIS
(2) Sierra Biomedical, 587 Dunn Circle, Sparks, NV 89431, ETATS-UNIS”

So “a company in Colorado” is Gilead Sciences. And what is interesting about Gilead Sciences? In 2000, when this paper was published, Gilead was under the Chairmanship of one Donald Rumsfeld. Yes, the same PNAC signatory who later regaled us with tales of Saddam’s WMD.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/10/31/news/newsmakers/fortune_rumsfeld

The prospect of a bird flu outbreak may be panicking people around the globe, but it’s proving to be very good news for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other politically connected investors in Gilead Sciences, the California biotech company that owns the rights to Tamiflu, the influenza remedy that’s now the most-sought after drug in the world.

Rumsfeld served as Gilead (Research)’s chairman from 1997 until he joined the Bush administration in 2001, and he still holds a Gilead stake valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to federal financial disclosures filed by Rumsfeld.

 

The forms don’t reveal the exact number of shares Rumsfeld owns, but in the past six months fears of a pandemic and the ensuing scramble for Tamiflu have sent Gilead’s stock from $35 to $47. That’s made the Pentagon chief, already one of the wealthiest members of the Bush cabinet, at least $1 million richer.

So how does a “terrorist” top getting away with a WMD attack on the US Senate and media that kills five innocents, expedites the passage of fascistic legislation (USA PATRIOT Act) and helps sell a resource war of aggression in Iraq that has claimed over a million lives?

Don’t wait for Charlie Gibson to tell you about this little “accident”:

http://www.torontosun.com/news/canada/2009/02/27/8560781.html

The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses.

And an official of the World Health Organization’s European operation said the body is closely monitoring the investigation into the events that took place at Baxter International’s research facility in Orth-Donau, Austria.

“At this juncture we are confident in saying that public health and occupational risk is minimal at present,” medical officer Roberta Andraghetti said from Copenhagen, Denmark.

“But what remains unanswered are the circumstances surrounding the incident in the Baxter facility in Orth-Donau.”

The contaminated product, a mix of H3N2 seasonal flu viruses and unlabelled H5N1 viruses, was supplied to an Austrian research company. The Austrian firm, Avir Green Hills Biotechnology, then sent portions of it to sub-contractors in the Czech Republic, Slovenia and Germany.

The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died. Ferrets shouldn’t die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses.

Public health authorities concerned about what has been described as a “serious error” on Baxter’s part have assumed the death of the ferrets meant the H5N1 virus in the product was live. But the company, Baxter International Inc., has been parsimonious about the amount of information it has released about the event.

On Friday, the company’s director of global bioscience communications confirmed what scientists have suspected.

“It was live,” Christopher Bona said in an email.

The contaminated product, which Baxter calls “experimental virus material,” was made at the Orth-Donau research facility. Baxter makes its flu vaccine — including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly — at a facility in the Czech Republic.

People familiar with biosecurity rules are dismayed by evidence that human H3N2 and avian H5N1 viruses somehow co-mingled in the Orth-Donau facility. That is a dangerous practice that should not be allowed to happen, a number of experts insisted.

Accidental release of a mixture of live H5N1 and H3N2 viruses could have resulted in dire consequences.

While H5N1 doesn’t easily infect people, H3N2 viruses do. If someone exposed to a mixture of the two had been simultaneously infected with both strains, he or she could have served as an incubator for a hybrid virus able to transmit easily to and among people.

That mixing process, called reassortment, is one of two ways pandemic viruses are created.

There is no suggestion that happened because of this accident, however.

“We have no evidence of any reassortment, that any reassortment may have occurred,” said Andraghetti.

“And we have no evidence of any increased transmissibility of the viruses that were involved in the experiment with the ferrets in the Czech Republic.”

Baxter hasn’t shed much light — at least not publicly — on how the accident happened. Earlier this week Bona called the mistake the result of a combination of “just the process itself, (and) technical and human error in this procedure.”

He said he couldn’t reveal more information because it would give away proprietary information about Baxter’s production process.

Andraghetti said Friday the four investigating governments are co-operating closely with the WHO and the European Centre for Disease Control in Stockholm, Sweden.

“We are in very close contact with Austrian authorities to understand what the circumstances of the incident in their laboratory were,” she said.

“And the reason for us wishing to know what has happened is to prevent similar events in the future and to share lessons that can be learned from this event with others to prevent similar events. … This is very important.”

They have ears, but they hear not

http://www.911podcasts.com/files/documents/Rodriguez.pdf

Rodriguez said on September 11, 2001 he reported late to work which was unusual for him. He said he was in the B1 sublevel ABM office speaking to Anthony Saltamachia when the plane struck the North Tower (WTC 1). He immediately thought the explosion was caused by a generator. Shortly after the first explosion a second explosion rocked the building and caused the office’s false ceiling to collapse. Following these explosions Felipe David, who was severely burned, ran into the office. Rodriguez said there was a third explosion and he believed then the explosions were caused by an earthquake.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/5321648.stm

then there was an explosion, followed by a loud crack and a sound like an avalanche. That was the tower coming down. He was gone.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/13/buffalo-plane-crash-september-11-widow

The couple talked about their life together before the call ended with the sounds of a loud explosion.