Glenn Greenwald: The Lawless Surveillance State

Another bulls eye from the indefatigable Glenn Greenwald. I've mercilessly cut out the bulk of his blog entry for space reasons. So all that is left is some notion of his focus and enough for me to emphasize or bring up an issue or three.

For Greenwald's complete blog entry, visit: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html

I've kept his reference to "the strange criminal prosecution of former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, who refused to comply with several government requests to enable warrantless spying, after which he was prosecuted."
Why haven't we heard more about this? Has Democracy Now covered this case? Is anyone in Congress interested in finding out more about what would seem to be the political prosecution of the only CEO apparently who has stood up to Bush-Cheney on warranties spying of all our telephone and internet communications?

I've included the issue of Harry Reid making sure that the telecoms get their amnesty. Greenwald doesn't tackle the question of why Reid is abetting Bush-Cheney on this issue. Like the whole "war on terror" could it be the government's choice of victims?
[As I write, the Senate is "debating" as per Harry Reid's cave-in -- which means that the administration will get the retroactive amnesty it desires.]

Also, Greenwald's last sentence in the selection below caught my eye.
As but the latest example, read Mark Benjamin's superb though now-numbingly-familiar account of how we tortured Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah for 19 months and then just let him go once we realized that -- like so many others we've detained and tortured -- he was guilty of nothing.

What's my quibble? Regular readers will have guessed. If the State is responsible for virtually all the high profile (and a great deal of the low profile) terror actions of the last decade or so such as 9/11, London, Madrid, Jordan Hotel bombing, Oklahoma City bombing, African Embassy bombings, Tel Aviv Disco bombing and on and on, then the detention and torture of its victims like Mohamed Bashmilah was done with the full knowledge that he was guilty only of being chosen as a patsy, one more victim.
Ronald***

Selections from
Glenn Greenwald
December 16, 2007
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html
The Lawless Surveillance State

There are several vital points raised by the new revelations in The New York Times that "the N.S.A.'s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before" and includes both pre-9/11 efforts to tap without warrants into the nation's domestic communications network as well as the collection of vast telephone records of American citizens in the name of the War on Drugs. The Executive Branch and the largest telecommunications companies work in virtually complete secrecy -- with no oversight and no notion of legal limits -- to spy on Americans, on our own soil, at will.
[snip]
That's precisely why our political class is about to bestow amnesty on telecoms which broke multiple laws in how they enabled the government to spy on us, even though what the telecoms did -- on purpose and for years -- is unquestionably illegal. Our political leaders in both parties plainly want this limitless surveillance to continue, and they don't think that telecoms do anything wrong even when they work with the government in spying on Americans in ways that are against the law.

And they're saying that explicitly. The legislation jointly created and about to be enacted by Jay Rockefeller, Dick Cheney, Congressional Republicans and Harry Reid -- with a vital assist from the Jane-Harman-led "Blue Dogs" in the House -- is all designed to conceal and protect this state of affairs and to enable it to grow.

In mid-October, numerous documents were made publicly available in the strange criminal prosecution of former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio, who refused to comply with several government requests to enable warrantless spying, after which he was prosecuted. Those documents detailed the unbelievably extensive and secret cooperation between the federal government and large telecoms in creating domestic spying programs. [snip]...

It's the same process that led our political class to decide astoundingly that it would do nothing upon learning that the President also broke the law for years in how he ordered spying on American citizens. The Washington Post's Congressional reporter Jonathan Weisman recognized on Friday the indispensable role the Senate Majority Leader is playing in all of this:
San Francisco: Why is Harry Reid ignoring the Judiciary Committee's FISA bill and bringing up the SSCI bill? Is telecom amnesty that important to Sen. Reid? If so, why?

Jonathan Weisman: A very good question. Reid has said he will bring up the Intel Committee bill, then allow advocates of the Judiciary Committee bill to bring up theirs as a substitute. That's a big blow, since it will take 60 votes even to consider a vote on the Judiciary version.

Reid says he opposes retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies, but he seems to be stacking the decks for it.
[snip],,,

Ultimately, what is most significant about all of this is how the most consequential steps our government takes -- such as endless expansion of its domestic spying programs with literally no oversight and constraints of law -- occur with virtually no public debate or awareness.

[snip]...

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful -- precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values. As but the latest example, read Mark Benjamin's superb though now-numbingly-familiar account of how we tortured Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah for 19 months and then just let him go once we realized that -- like so many others we've detained and tortured -- he was guilty of nothing.

For more, visit:
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/index.html

Aeneas: Suicide Bombings -- A Favorite US Counter-Insurgency Tactic

This is a very important article explaining much of today’s reality. However as indicated by the title, Aeneas doesn’t explore the most critical point of the suicide bombings which is NOT to counter the insurgency, but to create an insurgency and chaos in order to justify an indefinite occupation and the destruction of the country.

Thus it’s no surprise that further down Aeneas gets it wrong when s/he argues

The US and British invasion of Iraq was NOT for the purpose of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Iraqi people, but rather for the purpose of securing Iraq's oil resources for the US and British governments and expanding their control over the greater Middle East.

Yes, we agree that Bush and Cheney did not invade Iraq for the purpose of bringing freedom and democracy to Iraq. They are doing everything to beat back democracy in the U.S. and everywhere else their power reaches. They certainly would not abide democracy in Iraq.

But as we have been arguing, the purpose of the war was not to secure Iraq’s oil resources or to expand their control over the greater Middle East. Up until 1991 the U.S. “controlled” Middle East oil and Middle East politics sufficiently for their purposes. They only started losing control in 1991 when they had to spend billions of dollars a month and then a day in bombing and finally occupying and destroying a country, including destroying its oil potential.

Interestingly, Israeli military analyst Martin van Creveld gives the game away in a just published article on a possible U.S. strike against Iran. M.vCreveld: Iran Helpless in face of possible US missile attack Creveld correctly writes that President Bush is on the same belligerent wavelength as Prime Minister Olmert: “— the same President Bush who four years ago needed no reason at all to take on Iran’s neighbor to the west and demolish it to the point where it may never rise again.”

There we have it: the elusive answer to the question: Why did the U.S. invade Iraq? The U.S. invaded the country in order to destroy it -- to the point where it may never rise again:
a. for Israel’s purposes
b. for the Bush-Cheney neocon purpose of perpetual war.
Ronald
***

Suicide Bombings - A Favourite US Counter-Insurgency Tactic
Aeneas, Signs of the Times

http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m35541&hd=&size=1&l=e

[photo]
The true face of Iraqi suicide bombers. Two SAS agents dressed in full "Arab Garb" driving a car full of explosives were caught carrying out a false flag terror attack in Basra, Iraq September 20th

August 20, 2007

Since 9-11 reports of "suicide bombings" have increased exponentially in the news. We are led to believe by the experts that it is one of the favorite weapons of the insurgency against the occupation forces, since it is a cheap and simple way to create chaos. Hardly a day goes by without at least one bombing in Iraq or Afghanistan being immediately seized upon by the media as the work of Iraqi insurgents.

It is one thing for an insurgency to commit suicide bombings against the occupation forces, it is another thing entirely to use them to target and kill civilians. We have been brainwashed into believing that the insurgents in Iraq are such brutal, uncivilized, fanatical crazy extremists that they will anything to fight 'freedom' - even kill their own people.

This picture presented to us by the US government and mainstream media is so insane that Joe Quinn, in response to the massive 'suicide' bombings in Mosul that killed 350+ people last week, felt confident to say:

"The person who can present a convincing argument (i.e. logical and backed up with reliable data) that explains why any anti-American Arab or Islamic group, "terrorist" or otherwise, would kill hundreds of thousands of Iraqis as a response to the US occupation of Iraq, will receive a prize of 1 million USD."

Looking at this from a historical perspective, precedence for the type of bombings in Iraq that are attributed to the insurgency or "al-Qaeda" is virtually non existent. During world war II, a number of countries were occupied by the Nazis. Countries such as France, Denmark, Norway and many others all had resistance movements who used various tactics to hamper the Nazi take over. Yet, there are no records whatsoever that the resistance fighters resorted to the mass murder of their fellow country men in an effort to evict the Nazis. Sure there was factional infighting, but nothing on the massive scale that we are seeing in Iraq. And of course, how could there be? It defies all logic.

Fast forward to the Vietnam war and here too we find no evidence that the Vietcong waged a campaign to kill their own fellow citizens as part if the fight against American forces.

Of course, there are those who would suggest that Muslims are a different breed, that they, like so many other ungrateful peoples who attempted to throw-off the chains of empire, are little more than uncivilised savages and we cannot therefore hope to understand their mentality or actions. Such an ill-informed attitude however is in no way backed up by any evidence and must therefore be dismissed for the obvious racism that it is.

When the Iraqis first fought the British Empire in the 1920's, there was no "suicide bombings" by insurgents against Iraqis. On the contrary and according to good strategy, they united despite minor cultural and religious differences to confront the common British enemy.

Likewise in Afghanistan during the 10 year war with the Soviet union there were no instances of suicide bombings targeting Afghan civilians. Here too, the Afghan tribes united despite previous disagreements against the common aggressor.

Does no one find all of this even mildly odd? After 9-11, suddenly this bizarre phenomenon of an insurgency using suicide bombings against their own people rather than the invaders appears, as if to provide supporting evidence for the reality of the crazed "suicide bombing" hijackers that attacked America - or so the official story goes.

Could the answer be as simple as that what is being touted as suicide bombings are in fact the work of US/British/Israeli counterinsurgency teams? In Iraq, are we in fact dealing with the what are better know as "false flag operations"?

This certainly would explain a lot of the confusion over why Iraqi groups would kill their own people in response to a US invasion of their country. After all, the people who are dying by the hundreds every day in Iraq are the people who support the insurgency, and the US, British and Israeli forces in Iraq are fighting that insurgency, so who benefits from the daily mass murder of the supporters of the insurgency?

Past counterinsurgency tactics involved such things as ethnic cleansing ("draining the dam" as this tactic was known) and/or the destruction of crops like with agent orange in the case of Vietnam. But these methods had little success.

In recent years it seems that devious and deviant minds in the employ of the military industrial complex came up with much more insidious modern tactics.

Roger Trinquier, an immensely influential French counter-insurgency expert, suggested in his book Modern Warfare: A French View of Counterinsurgency (1961) (Available online here) three simple principles of Counter Insurgency:

1. separate the guerrilla from the population that supports him;

2. occupy the zones that the guerrillas previously operated from, making them dangerous for him and turning the people against the guerrilla movement;

3. coordinate actions over a wide area and for a long enough time that the guerrilla is denied access to the population centres that could support him.

Remote controlled bombings masquerading as "suicide bombings" that are carried out by the US, British and Israeli occupation forces fit these principles very neatly. By detonating bombs on a daily basis across Iraq and Afghanistan and via the propaganda organs touting them as being the work of Iraqi/Afghani "suicide bombers" belonging to the insurgency, the occupying military hopes to achieve several goals:

cut off the widespread support base that the insurgency have amongst the Iraqis

create tensions between religious lines, especially by ascribing the faked "suicide attacks" to either Shias or Sunnis.

In other words divide and conquer.

The sheer carnage shown on TV back in the West only supports the idea that the Iraqis/Afghans can't take care of their own country without help from the occupation forces or that they are uncivilised savages. This propaganda reinforces the US government's persistent claim that it would be dangerous to pull US troops out of Iraq and for the American military grunts on the streets of Iraq it helps them to rationalise their continued presence. Either they are trying to show a lesser class of human how to become civilised, or they are doing god's work in wiping them out.

There is ample evidence for the inquiring reader to discover that so-called suicide bombings against civilians are not the product of the insurgency. Some will say that it is the product of "al-Qaeda", which is true if you first clarify that "al-Qaeda" is simply a tool of the very same counterinsurgency, namely CIA/MI6/Mossad. Always ask yourself, "who benefits?", and in this case it is pretty obvious who doesn't benefit.

For years Israel has very effectively used 'suicide' bombings as a tool in the perpetration of its slow genocide of the Palestinian people, with the effect that, today, the world's sympathy lies with the perpetrator (Israel). As a result, all peace initiatives have been stalled and the world has provided tacit if not outright approval of Israel's covert genocidal policies.

The knowledge gained by the Israelis has certainly been passed on to the their counterparts in MI6 and the CIA as this SOTT editorial from September 2005 illustrates:

"Today in Basra, Southern Iraq, two members of the British SAS (Special Ops) were caught, 'in flagrante' as it were, dressed in full "Arab garb", driving a car full of explosives and shooting and killing two official Iraqi policemen.

This fact, finally reported by the mainstream press, goes to the very heart and proves accurate much of what we have been saying on the Signs of the Times page for several years.

The following are facts, indisputable by all but the most self-deluded:

Number 1:

The US and British invasion of Iraq was NOT for the purpose of bringing "freedom and democracy" to the Iraqi people, but rather for the purpose of securing Iraq's oil resources for the US and British governments and expanding their control over the greater Middle East.

Number 2:

Both the Bush and Blair governments deliberately fabricated evidence (lied) about the threat the Saddam posed to the west and his links to the mythical 'al-Qaeda' in order to justify their invasion.

Number 3:

Dressed as Arabs, British (and CIA and Israeli) 'special forces' have been carrying out fake "insurgent" attacks, including 'car suicide bombings' against Iraqi policemen and Iraqi civilians (both Sunni and Shia) for the past two years. Evidence would suggest that these tactics are designed to provide continued justification for a US and British military presence in Iraq and to ultimately embroil the country in a civil war that will lead to the breakup of Iraq into more manageable statelets, much to the joy of the Israeli right and their long-held desire for the establishment of biblical 'greater Israel'

Coming not long after the botched London bombings carried out by British MI5 where an eyewitness reported that the floor of one of the trains had been blown inwards (how can a bomb in a backpack or on a "suicide bomber" INSIDE the train ever produce such an effect), more than anything else today's event in Basra highlights the desperation that is driving the policy-makers in the British government.

British intelligence would do well to think twice about carrying out any more 'false flag' operations until they can achieve the 'professionalism' of the Israeli Mossad - they always make it look convincing and rarely suffer the ignominy of being caught in the act and having the faces of their erstwhile "terrorists" plastered across the pages of the mainstream media. "

As in Israel, 'suicide' bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan often occur at a time that most benefits the occupiers. A recent 'suicide' bombing in Afghanistan illustrates this aspect well:

Seventeen civilians, a dozen of them schoolboys, were killed and 30 others wounded when a suicide bomber blew himself up near a NATO convoy in southern Afghanistan, officials said Tuesday.

The timing just couldn't have been better. NATO had been under a lot of international pressure due to their random use of Aerial bombings with very large numbers of civilian casualties. This incident (as in most cases) harmed no troops, most victims were children. The desired effect of the bombing was described in the article:

The UN representative in Afghanistan, Tom Koenigs, was shocked.
"I am especially concerned by the reports I am seeing of a large number of children being among the dead from todays bomb," he said in a statement." Such utter disregard for innocent lives is staggering and those behind this must be held responsible."

You see? The enemy is uncivilised, crazy, half human in contrast to the civilised benevolent white crusaders who sacrifice so much in the fight against evil. The article concludes:

"There have been more than 70 suicide attacks in Afghanistan this year, as compared with about 140 in all of 2006. Most are aimed at the security forces but civilians are usually the primary victims."

It should be pointed out that these so-called suicide bombings seem to be a speciality of Western intelligence agencies and their client regimes. In recent months we have also heard a lot about suspicious suicide bombings targeting civilians in Pakistan, whose intelligence agency, ISI, has close ties to the CIA.

In Chechnya there have been 28 acts of suicide bombings from June 2000 until 2006. The difference is that these attacks were against Russian civilians and not their own people. Perhaps the defining point is that Western (US/British/Israeli) counterinsurgency teams are not involved in these attacks because they do not wish to hand the Russians a victory. Certainly suicide bombings would demonise the Chechnyan rebels and provide propaganda value to the Russians. This is not to say that Russia does not engage in its own counter-insurgency, it is just that faked suicide bombings do not appear to form a core part of their strategy.

As mentioned before, during the 10 years of Russian occupation of Afghanistan, no suicide attacks were carried out by the insurgency against the Afghan population. Why? It certainly didn't benefit the Americans to kill Afghans who were engaged in killing Russians, the key enemy of the Americans at the time. The Americans were heavily involved in recruiting and supplying the insurgency with all kinds of military hardware. Now however, the situation is different. In Afghanistan it serves the American agenda to murder as many Afghani civilians as possible under the cloak of Taliban "suicide bombings" because it provides the justification for the troops to stay there to fight this manufactured "evil". In Iraq, the goal is the same, with the added element of the Neocons' desire to destroy the real Iraqi resistance by dividing and alienating them from the ordinary people that support their fight against a brutal occupier. It seems that the American, Israel and British tactic in Iraq is that if the ordinary Iraqi people will not be intimidated into accepting occupation and rejecting the real insurgency, then they will be murdered. Plain and simple.

Despite Joe Quinn's offer of 1 million dollars then, he can rest assured that it is unlikely that he will have to go and talk to the bank anytime soon.


:: Article nr. 35541 sent on 21-aug-2007 19:38 ECT

www.uruknet.info?p=35541

Link: www.signs-of-the-times.org/articles/show/138504-Suicide+Bombings+-+A+Favourite+U
S+Counter-Insurgency+Tactic

:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Uruknet .

Kurt Nimmo: KSM Deconstructed

In previous blogs Kurt Nimmo has provided links indicating that Osama bin Laden has been dead for years; that al-Zarqawi was dead long before he was "killed" by coalition forces, and that KSM has also been dead for awhile.

So how could he confess to all these crimes? asked one wag.

I confess that it had to be pointed out to me that the annoucement of KSM's confession came at the height of the uproar over the Justice Dept firings.

See below for a link to a pertinent TIME Magazine story. --R

***

Kurt Nimmo wrote:

KSM Deconstructed

Friday March 16th 2007, 8:43 am
Raw Story journalist Larisa Alexandrovna has noted a rather glaring problem with the KSM “confession”: he claims to have targeted the Plaza Bank in Washington state—however the bank was not founded until well after KSM was supposedly captured and interned at Camp Gitmo. “I think we can say for quite certain that whomever is being held as KSM was either caught recently or that his entire confession is a fraud,” concludes Alexandrovna.

Or, more likely, there is no KSM—certainly not as presented—as there is no longer an Osama or al-Zarqawi, and more likely the story of superman-like terror activity on KSM’s part is in fact contrived nonsense, engineered strictly for public consumption. KSM is a Muslim Freddy Krueger, the bastard son of Pentagon intelligence, the Office for Special Propaganda and Machiavellian Nightmares.

KSM is simply too much of a good thing for the Muslim-hating neocons, and that’s why he embodies cartoonish villain qualities, thus revealing the essential simplicity of the Straussian neocon philosophy with its Manichean perspective of good versus evil, light versus dark, and its exploitation of stark moral dualism. As the Straussians believe they are, like Plato, guiding the polis, who are childlike, it is probably natural the requisite myths spun, in the form of “noble lies,” are basically puerile and thus easily deconstructed. Moreover, as “philosopher kings,” the neocons firmly believe the American public, the benighted masses, really do not require more sophistication.

For those unwilling to so easily believe, although captivated by the larger Brothers Grimm story of Osama and his preternatural beings, the corporate media gives us Rosie O’Donnell. “On Thursday’s installment [of the View], O’Donnell actually said that the only reason al Qaeda terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to any of his actions is because he was being held by the CIA at Guantanamo and tortured where it is allowed,” writes Jim Brogan for the Post Chronicle.

In other words, for Rosie and the entertainment establishment, a fluffy counterpart to the corporate department of manufactured news, the existence of KSM and his fantastic deeds are not in doubt, and the issue here, for soft and squishy “liberals,” is rather the immorality of torture. Naturally, this takes away and is a diversion from the core issue: the very posture of KSM is hallucinatory and thus irrational, ascribing to one man a preternatural set of abilities and accomplishments.

But then, of course, most of us, conditioned by television and Hollywood, have bought into the cardinal rule of the entertainment realm: all who enter here must suspend credulity.

***

Even Time Magazine sniffs some of the odor:

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1599861,00.html


Thursday, Mar. 15, 2007
Why KSM's Confession Rings False
By Robert Baer
It's hard to tell what the Pentagon's objective really is in releasing the transcript of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession. It certainly suggests the Administration is trying to blame KSM for al-Qaeda terrorism, leading us to believe we've caught the master terrorist and that al-Qaeda, and especially the ever-elusive bin Laden, is no longer a threat to the U.S.

But there is a major flaw in that marketing strategy. On the face of it, KSM, as he is known inside the government, comes across as boasting, at times mentally unstable. It's also clear he is making things up. I'm told by people involved in the investigation that KSM was present during Wall Street Journal correspondent Danny Pearl's execution but was in fact not the person who killed him. There exists videotape footage of the execution that minimizes KSM's role. And if KSM did indeed exaggerate his role in the Pearl murder, it raises the question of just what else he has exaggerated, or outright fabricated.



Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1599861,00.html

Sherwood Ross: Prof Boyle accuses US of 2001 anthrax attacks

13 December 2006
Anthrax attack on US Congress made by scientists and covered up by FBI, expert says
Sherwood Ross
Middle East Times
December 11, 2006
http://www.aldeilis.net/english/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1976&Itemid=141

WASHINGTON -- The terrorists who perpetrated the 2001 anthrax attack on Congress likely were US government scientists at the army's Ft. Detrick, MD., bioterrorism lab having access to "moonsuits" that enabled them to safely process and manufacture super-weapons-grade anthrax, an eminent authority on the subject says.

Although only a "handful" of scientists had the ability to perpetrate the crime, the culprit among them may never be identified as the FBI ordered the destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames, IA., from which the Ft. Detrick lab got its pathogens, the authority said.

This action makes it impossible "to pin-point precisely where, when, and from whom these bio-agents had originated," said Dr. Francis A. Boyle of the University of Illinois at Champaign.

Boyle, who drafted the US Biological Weapons Convention of 1989 enacted by Congress, said destruction of the Ames anthrax "appears to be a cover-up orchestrated by the FBI."

If impartial scientists could have performed genetic reconstruction of the anthrax found in letters mailed to Senators Daschle (D-S.D.) and Patrick Leahy, (D -Vt.), "the trail of genetic evidence would have led directly back to a secret but officially-sponsored US government biowarfare program that was illegal and criminal" in violation of biological weapons conventions and US laws, Boyle said.

"I believe the FBI knows exactly who was behind these terrorist anthrax attacks upon the United States Congress in the Fall of 2001, and that the culprits were US government-related scientists involved in a criminal US government biowarfare program," Boyle said.

The anthrax attacks killed five people, including two postal workers, injured 17 others, and shut down the operations of the US Congress.

Boyle, a leading American authority on international law, said after the attacks he contacted senior FBI official Marion "Spike" Bowman, who handles counter-terrorism issues, and provided him with the names of the scientists working with anthrax. Boyle told Bowman the Ft. Detrick scientists were not to be trusted.

In addition to then destroying the anthrax, the FBI "retained every independent life-scientist it could locate as part of its fictitious investigation, and then swore them all to secrecy so that they cannot publicly comment on the investigation or give their expert opinion," Boyle said.

Boyle pointed out that Bowman is the same FBI agent "who played a pivotal role in suppressing evidence which in turn prevented the issuance of a search warrant for the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged 20th Al Qaeda hijacker on 11 September 2001, which might otherwise have led to foreknowledge and therefore prevention of those terrorist attacks in the first place."

A self-confessed Al Qaeda operative, Moussaoui was detained on immigration three weeks before 9/11 when a Minnesota flight school reported he was acting suspiciously.

Boyle asked if Bowman received an FBI award in December 2002, for "exceptional performance" because of his capacity "to forestall investigations, because of where they may lead?" He went on to inquire, "Could the real culprits behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, and the immediately following terrorist anthrax attacks upon Congress ultimately prove to be the same people?"

Because of its "bogus investigation," Boyle said, "the greatest political crime in the history of the United States of America since its founding on 4 July, 1776 - the anthrax attacks on Congress, which served not only to deliver a terrorist threat on its members, but actually to close it down for a period - may remain officially unresolved forever."

"Could it truly be coincidental," he continued, "that two of the primary intended victims of the terrorist anthrax attacks - Senators Daschle and Leahy - were holding up the speedy passage of the pre-planned USA Patriot Act ... an act which provided the federal government with unprecedented powers in relation to US citizens and institutions?"

Leahy is incoming Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may have a personal interest in holding hearings to learn who tried to kill him. He recently said President George W. Bush should be "terrified" that he will be the new Chair.

Boyle's views are contained in his book Biowarfare and Terrorism, published by Clarity Press, Inc., of Atlanta, GA. His previously published titles include, Foundations of World Order, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Destroying World Order. Dr. Boyle holds a Doctor of Law Magna Cum Laude and a Ph.D. in political science, both from Harvard.

In a forward to the book, Dr. Jonathan King, Professor of Molecular Biology at M.I.T. and a founder of the Council for Responsible Genetics, said the government's "growing bioterror programs [described by Professor Boyle] represent a significant emerging danger to our own population."

A harsh critic of Pentagon biowarfare activities, Boyle pointed out in inflation-adjusted dollars the US spends more on them today than it did on the Manhattan Project to develop the atomic bomb in World War II. He has accused the Bush administration of diverting the bio-tech industry "towards biowarfare purposes" and of making corrupting payoffs to Academia to turn university scientists to the pursuit of biowarfare work.

Sherwood Ross is an American journalist who writes on military and political topics. Reach him at sherwoodr1@yahoo.com