Thoughts
and Comments
by Ed Lake
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, June 16, 2013, thru Saturday, June 22,
2013
June 18, 2013 - This is somewhat
off-topic, but I just noticed an interesting article on the ABC
News web site that says the feds think that a serial bomber who rides to his bomb
sites on a bicycle may be on
the loose in New York City.
The FBI said they believe
the March 6, 2008 blast at the Armed Forces Career Center is likely
linked to two earlier blasts at the consulates of foreign nations in
New York -- the U.K.'s in 2005 and Mexico's in 2007. The bureau also
announced a reward of $65,000 for information on the case, the first
time there has been a reward associated with the case.
There's a YouTube video HERE of the
suspect bicycling to the 2008 bomb scene in New York. He enters
the scene at about the 11 second mark; he (or she) lays down the
bicycle at about the 27 second mark; and he walks to the Armed Forces
Career Center where the bomb was placed, disappearing behind
the structure. At about the 2 minute
10 second mark he emerges again, picks up his bicycle and rides off
away from the camera. About a minute later, at the 3 minute 14
second mark, the
explosion occurs. The Times Square surveillance video ends at
about the 4
minute mark when the first cop car arrives at the bomb scene. The
same YouTube video then shows various
surveillance videos of the same bicyclist before and after the bombing.
The FBI has a web page HERE
that provides some more details, including general information about
where the other bicycling surveillance videos were taken:
The suspect rode a blue
Ross bicycle west on 37th Street, took a right up Sixth Avenue, and
made a left on 47th Street before turning left down Seventh Avenue. The
suspect got off his bike near the recruiting station at West 43rd
Street and Seventh Avenue, placed the explosive device at the
recruiting station, lit a fuse, and fled the scene on the bicycle.
Although the suspect appears to be working alone, he or she may have
had a lookout or surveillance team of as many as five other individuals
in Times Square at the time of the attack. The suspect then rode his or
her bike south on Broadway before turning left on 38th Street. The bike
was later recovered in a dumpster near Madison Avenue and 38th Street.
Evidently, the same person (or persons) then mailed letters
to as many as 10 members of Congress declaring "We did it!"
June 17, 2013 - As anticipated in
yesterday's (A) comment, "The Return of the Convincer" occurred today
on my interactive blog.
He posted 3 messages: The
first was another argument over the definition of the word
"eyewitness." He equated it to "bystander," which doesn't include
a witness who merely testifies to something he saw (or heard, felt,
smelled or tasted) that is relevant to the case. The
second argument was that a hypothetical child using a Scooby Doo
iPhone ap to decode a
critical message is not the same as an FBI agent using a code book and
a
magazine to decode a message. According to "The Convincer,"
The important point: the
PROGRAM ('ap') is doing the decoding, not the child.
But, of course, the
child had to know how to use
the program and that the message could
be decoded by using the program. So, the child USED the
program to decode the message just as FBI agent Darin Steele used the
book Godel, Escher, Bach and
a science magazine to decode the hidden
message
Ivins put in the anthrax letters he sent to the media. The
FBI agent just had to figure things out first.
The
third post by "The Convincer" is an argument over whether the same
rules of evidence apply during a sentencing hearing as during the
actual trial. I assume so, he hopes not. "The Convincer" is
looking for a
way to ignore and dispute any similarity to the Jodi Arias secret coded
message I mentioned in my (A)
comment yesterday.
In an effort to find some common ground, I posted
a message where I attempt to settle on a term that can be used by
both of us to describe a NON-expert who testifies about some
relevant fact in a court case. I think "lay witness" is
good. But,
"The Convincer" may prefer to argue endlessly, rather than to agree on anything.
June 16, 2013 (B) - As soon as I
posted my (A) comment this morning, I had some additional thoughts
about my arguments with "The Convincer." He and I had argued at
length on what the three different kinds of witnesses - (1)
eyewitnesses/lay witnesses, (2) expert witnesses and (3) character
witnesses - could testify about in court. But, it had never
occurred to me to check to make certain that a police officer could
testify as an "eyewitness" or "lay witness" and not as an "expert witness" in court.
So, after posting my (A) comment this morning, I did a Google search
for - police officer lay witness
- and found an article from "The
Police Chief" magazine which said,
During criminal and civil
litigation, police officers on the witness stand are sometimes asked to
offer their opinions. According to two recent state court rulings, some officers who offer opinion
testimony are expert witnesses and should be presented as such.
Recent Court Rulings: Some Officer Opinion Testimony Is
Expert Testimony
The intermediate appellate court in Maryland recently found that a
trial court committed reversible error when it admitted, in a
prosecution for distribution of a controlled dangerous substance,
opinion testimony of two police officers as lay opinions. The court ruled that because the
officers' opinion testimony was validated by and based on their
specialized knowledge, skill, training, and experience, it was more
properly characterized as expert opinion testimony.
So, if FBI Special Agent
Darin Steele testified in court about how he decoded the hidden message in the anthrax
letters sent to the media, it seems quite possible that he could have
testified as an "expert witness" on that one subject, since his
expertise as a microbiologist had previously enabled him to notice a
key clue - that some of the highlighted characters in the letter
seemed to represent the
parts of DNA called codons.
That same Google search
also found a pair of interesting articles about Section
701 and Section
702 of the Massachusetts Court's "Guide To Evidence" (which
evidently is nearly the same as the federal rules):
Section 701. Opinion
Testimony by Lay Witnesses
If
the witness is not testifying as an expert, the witness’s testimony in
the form
of opinions or inferences is limited to those opinions or inferences
which are
(a)
rationally based on
the perception of the
witness;
(b)
helpful to a clear
understanding of the
witness’s testimony or the determination of a fact in issue; and
(c) not based on
scientific, technical, or
other specialized knowledge within the scope of Section 702.
Section
702. Testimony by Experts
If
scientific, technical, or other specialized knowledge will assist the
trier of
fact to understand the evidence or to determine a fact in issue, a
witness
qualified as an expert by
knowledge,
skill, experience, training, or
education
may testify thereto in the form of an opinion or otherwise if
(a) the testimony is based upon sufficient
facts or data,
(b) the testimony is the product of
reliable
principles and methods, and
(c) the
witness has applied the principles and
methods reliably to the facts of the case.
So, it can be argued that FBI Agent Steele's testimony about decoding
the hidden message could be either
lay testimony or expert testimony, or maybe some of each.
Interestingly, that same Google search found an article titled "One Witness, Two
Hats, Three Cases," which begins with this:
It is well established that a police
officer may testify as an expert witness in one case and a lay witness
in another. However there has been some debate as to whether an
officer can offer both kinds of testimony in the same trial; in other
words, whether a policeman can wear "two hats" on the witness stand.
However, I would think that Special Agent Steele would have testified
as a lay witness in Dr.
Ivins' trial (if there had been one), since he'd been involved in so
many aspects of the case from the very beginning, and it would have
been fully accepted that his testimony would involve his considerable
expertise in many different areas.
In another
link as a result of that same search I found that a police officer
can give a lay opinion on the type of wounds he saw ("The Convincer"
argued that only
a doctor could give an opinion on medical matters):
It was not error to allow officer to
give lay opinion testimony regarding comparison of murder victim's
injuries to those of her cat, over claim he lacked scientific training
in the area to support admission as expert opinion testimony,
where he did not purport to possess any specialized knowledge or to be
an expert in wound determination; he testified based upon his
first-hand observation of the wounds themselves; his observations did not require
significant expertise to interpret and were not based on scientific
theory; although the jurors could view photos of the wounds,
they were not in a position to observe the cat's body first-hand;
officer had a superior vantage point in viewing those wounds, having
observed the body of the cat, while the jurors could view only
two-dimensional photos; his inferences helped to provide a clearer
understanding of what took place contemporaneously to the offense.
This is probably a good
example of finding devastating points to argue after an argument is
long over
and everyone has gone home. But, if "The Convincer" returns for
another round, I've got a loaded cannon waiting to blast his beliefs to
smithereens.
What this comment is meant to show is even after arguing for nearly 12
years, there are still some very
interesting things to learn. That's why I enjoy debating the case
so much.
June 16, 2013 (A) - In "Comedians in Cars
Getting Coffee," at about the 10 minute mark in the
segment with Brian Regan, Jerry Seinfeld and Regan riff on the idea
of having a supervillain called "The Convincer." The comedy
concept is
that "The Convincer" has the super power to convince people of
anything.
Seinfeld:
It's
a great name for - like- a Spiderman villain. His only power is
... he wins every
argument. No matter how stupid his point of view is, you
eventually go, You know what, I think you convinced me.
Regan:
You wore me down.
Seinfeld:
And I see your point.
I thought it was
particularly
amusing,
because I sometimes feel that I'm in a battle with "The Convincer," a
man who doesn't use facts, so he cannot logically win an argument, but he will
not give up
no
matter what
anyone says, and he just continues to try to convince people
he's
right. "The Convincer" tries to wear down his victims.
In discussions on my
interactive blog, "The Convincer" has been trying to convince me
that
witnesses in court who are NOT "expert witnesses" can only testify about things for which
they ARE "expert witnesses." That's about as absurd an argument
I've heard since a True Believer argued that it was the FBI's job to prove themselves wrong about the
anthrax case.
I, in turn, of course, tried to convince "The Convincer" that
eyewitnesses are not
the same as expert witnesses and do not have to have the
expertise of "expert witnesses."
At times, it was a very
interesting argument, because I would look
for different ways to try to get "The Convincer" to understand that
what
he's arguing
makes no sense whatsoever. It appears that I've (at least
temporarily) managed to get him to stick to just one argument, instead
of constantly changing the subject and going off in fifteen different
directions at once. That might be considered to be progress.
"The Convincer's" current argument is that FBI Agent Darin Steele would
not be
allowed to testify in court that he decoded the
hidden message in the anthrax letters sent to Tom Brokaw and the
New York Post, because Agent Steele was not a cryptographer. "The
Convincer" believes that
only a certified "expert" in cryptography can testify in court about
decoding a
message.
My counter argument was:
An eyewitness testifies in
court
about what they saw or heard or smelled or felt [or tasted]. The only
rules are they must tell the truth, it must be something they
personally did (no hearsay), and they can only respond to questions
that are asked by members of the court (they can't make speeches).
If an eyewitness decoded a message, they can testify that they decoded
a message, even if they are not an accredited cryptographer.
I even pointed out that, if a child used a Scooby-Doo decoder ap on his
iPhone to decode a message, and if that information was relevant to a
court
case, the child could testify to decoding the message.
I also did a Google search for "coded message" and "testimony,"
to see what I could find.
I found an
article which says that Jesus once sent a coded message to John the
Baptist. But, there didn't seem to be any court case involved,
and "The Convincer" would likely argue that the laws are different in
other countries. Besides, since Jesus was the Son of God, he can
probably be considered to be a "certified expert" on almost everything.
Then I found articles
about a coded message in a court case where an actress sued for
"wrongful termination" after being fired from the TV show "Desperate
Housewives." It seems a coded message "Steven drinks OJ" was sent
indicating that the actress's days on the show "were numbered."
But, I could see a hundred ways that "The Convincer" could argue that
the case was in no way similar to the case against Bruce Ivins.
Then I found an ABC
News article that says the prosecutor
in the Jodi Arias trial
told the jury about decoding a message that Arias allegedly may have
used to tamper with a
witness. Not only didn't the prosecution need to have
a cryptographer do the actual decoding and testimony, the prosecutor
didn't even need a witness of any
kind to describe the code and how it was decoded.
Prosecutor Juan Martinez described the decoding process himself. I
advised "The Convincer" of this.
The secret code Jodi Arias allegedly used involved writing brief
meaningless comments on the margins of various pages of a copy of Digital Photo Pro magazine.
Then, in a copy of Star Magazine,
she wrote a series of numbers. The prosecutor (or one of
his staff) determined that the numbers in Star Magazine related to page
numbers in Digital Photo Pro
magazine where the pieces of the coded message could be found, and the
order in which they were to be read: 43 40 56 20 37 54
Evidently, Arias gave or was going to give the two magazines to the
witness and
tell the witness how to decode the hidden message. That is witness
tampering. The decoded
message (with page numbers) was:
43 = You f***ed up what you told my
attorney the next day
40 = directly
contradicts what I've been saying for over a year
56 = get down
here
ASAP and see me before you talk to them again and before
20 = you testify
so
37 = we can fix
this
54 = interview
was
excellent! Must talk ASAP!
For awhile, it appeared that this example of a NON-expert telling a
jury about the decoding of a secret message just bounced harmlessly off
"The Convincer" as if it was meaningless, since he just continued to
argue his beliefs
as if the Arias incident and the child with the decoder ap had not been
mentioned. But, then on Friday, after I wrote a
long message describing all the things that eyewitnesses can testify
about even though they aren't "certified expert witnesses" on the
subjects, "The Convincer" went quiet. He didn't respond. He
disappeared.
But, he's probably just off somewhere plotting tactics for a different
argument. So, I suspect it won't be long before we'll all be
witnessing
"The Return of The Convincer."
|
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, June 9, 2013, thru Saturday, June 15,
2013
June 12, 2013 - This is totally off
topic, but this morning while looking for something else, I stumbled
across an ad for Season 2 of "Comedians in Cars
Getting Coffee," which features Jerry Seinfeld chatting with
various comedians while having coffee. Season 2?
I'd never heard of it before! Life is getting too complicated if
Jerry Seinfeld can be in Season 2
of a show that I never heard of!
Investigating further, I found that Season 1 consists of 10
episodes ranging in length from about 8 to about 17 minutes in
length, totally free, and
usually absolutely hilarious.
Click on the link and check it out.
June 11, 2013 - Each morning for the
past decade, I've been doing a Google news search for the words
"anthrax" and "2001" to see if there is anything new being written
about the anthrax attacks. This morning, a post by one of The Three
Professors (the others are James Tracy and Lance DeHaven Smith), showed
up on the World
Socialist Web Site. Professor
Francis Boyle wrote this comment in response to an article about
the "Obama Administration collecting phone records of tens of millions
of Americans":
And be sure to add to your
list of FBI cover-ups since 9/11/2001 the FBI covering up the DOD/CIA origins
of the anthrax attacks in October 2001. See my book Biowarfare
and Terrorism (2005). The retiring FBI Director Mueller was also
the architect of the cover-up of the Lockerbie bombing, blaming Libya
instead of whoever the real culprits were. See my book Destroying
Libya and World Order (2013), I would recommend your readers have
a look at Swearingen, FBI Secrets (Southend Press). There the
author, a retired and decorated FBI agent, repeatedly calls the FBI “an
American Gestapo.” The FBI/CIA also
put me on all the US government’s terrorist watch lists when I refused
to become an informant for them on my Arab and Muslim clients.
Q.E.D.
Francis Boyle
8 June 2013
The
comment mentions a name I never heard before: FBI Agent (from 1951 to
1977) M. Wesley Swearingen, whose book "FBI
Secrets" was published 6 years before the anthrax attacks. It
appears to be a rant against FBI activities during the height of the
Cold War. So, Anthrax Truthers like Boyle, who think the U.S.
Government was behind the anthrax attacks of 2001, can use it as
evidence in support of their current beliefs. After all, if J.
Edgar Hoover was a cross-dresser, then it's only logical that all FBI
directors after Hoover must do
the same
thing.
June 10, 2013 -
DXer (from
Lew Weinstein's blog) just emailed me a complaint:
you
mischaracter what is on its face as a tweet as an email
Please correct your mistakes and take
greater care in getting basic facts right.
The only relevant use of
the word "email" in Sunday's (B) post was in what I wrote about Yazid
Sufaat's daughter. Sure enough, looking at the
post in question, it says:
His daughter today writes:
Soraya Yazid @sorayaanur4h
Tomorrow. 9am. Court of Appeal. #FreeYazidSufaat
I'm not a tweeter
(the appeal of "tweeting" totally eludes me), so I didn't immediately
recognize the tell-tale "hashtag."
I stand corrected, and I fixed Sunday's post.
June 9, 2013 (B) - Consider this: Yazid Sufaat is a
known al Qaeda terrorist.
A Google search indicates he's currently
under arrest in Malaysia. Yazid
Sufaat is also the subject of a
lot of posts on Lew Weinstein's web site about the anthrax attacks
of 2001. And, it appears that DXer, who posts endlessly to
Weinstein's site, is reading
tweets from Yazid Sufaat's daughter.
Moreover, in a
post from two days ago,
DXer
appears to ask Yazid Sufaat a question:
Yazid, if you have the
chance,
can you also describe your relationship with Adnan?
One article on Weinstein's site is titled "Before
his recent arrest, Yazid Sufaat declined to tell DXer the strain of
'anthrax spore concentrate' harvested July 4, 2001."
That title appears to come from when DXer
posted this:
I
asked Yazid Sufaat, prior to his
recent arrest, to identify the strain in the bottle labeled “anthrax
spore concentrate” that was harvested July 4, 2001.
He
complimented the question but
graciously declined to tell me.
In another message, DXer
posted this:
Yazid’s wife Chomel should
have
their daughter Soraya delete those tweets that might be misunderstood
such as “Full of hatred” and “The war is far from over” out of contest.
If Soraya is going to engage in PR, then it is important that it
continue to be calculated to be in Yazid’s interest. And she has been
doing a great job in emphasizing what a great dad he is. Anyone who has
had contact with him can see how gracious and witty he can be.
That’s a
rare quality under such trying circumstances. That’s the PR Yazid needs
right now from her.
And
in another thread, DXer
posted this:
Communicating with me by Facebook
and chat, Yazid Sufaat tells me he can work magic.
And the above post seems to be related to this
comment by DXer:
Al Qaeda anthrax lab tech Yazid affably brags to me that
he could do “magic” — but I didn’t think the journalist’s description
fit. We have had one or two others say that Yazid had poor lab
technique.
In another message, DXer
posted this:
In connection with Yazid
Sufaat’s
work with anthrax — he is due in court, I believe, on May 6 on another
charge — the key factual question in regard to analysis in the Fall
2001 anthrax mailings is: what strain was he working with? Yazid wouldn’t tell me.
In another message, DXer
posted this:
Yazid, in my experience, has not
engaged in false denials. He simply respectfully declines to
answer.
I could probably go on and on and on. But, my point is that DXer appears to be blatantly and
unabashedly communicating with a
known al Qaeda terrorist. It's been going on for a long
time, and I
hadn't thought much about it before, since DXer is a lawyer and should
know more about the law than I do. I also assumed that the FBI
and CIA
keep track of discussions between American citizens and known
al Qaeda terrorists. But, when it was in the news the other day
that Verizon
was turning over to the National Security Agency (NSA) information
about local calls, I recalled that my web site logs show that all
of DXer's visits to my web site come from a verizon.net account.
That made me wonder what kind of phone calls DXer has been
making. If he talks on the phone (or exchanges text messages)
with
a known al Qaeda terrorist, does he realize that he may be
communicating
with
an FBI or CIA agent pretending to be Yazid Sufaat? And, does
Yazid Sufaat assume that DXer is a CIA agent?
The apparent reason DXer is talking with known terrorists is because he
believes
Amerithrax represents the
greatest counterintelligence failure in the
history of the United States because the threat is still ongoing — and
the FBI closed the Amerithrax investigation.
DXer clearly feels that he
can
do a much better job than the FBI of figuring out who actually sent the
anthrax letters of 2001. He doesn't seem to accept any of the evidence against Bruce
Ivins found by the FBI and used by the Department of Justice. So,
he's doing his own
investigation by
schmoozing with at least one known al Qaeda terrorist.
I guess my point in all this is: When you read that the NSA is tracking
telephone
calls between Americans and known terrorists, you shouldn't assume that
no American you know would be communicating with known
terrorists. If you know someone who doesn't trust the government,
that person could be out
there doing his own investigation to prove the government is wrong
about something.
Hopefully, there aren't many such people.
And, I'm going to continue to have my all my debates and discussions
with DXer (a.k.a. "Anonymous")
in public.
I'm going to continue to ignore (but archive) his
emails or put
them on my blog for discussion there. I don't have any
serious problem arguing
with someone who talks with known al Qaeda terrorists, but I certainly
don't
want to talk with such people in private.
I want everything out in the open for all the world to see.
By the way, my web site log files show that, on Monday, the CIA was
prowling around my web site. They started on my main page at 2:31
p.m., after doing a Google search for "Amerithrax." And they
finished at 3:04 p.m. on part 3 of my Update History for 2011.
Here's the Site summary report as of Tuesday morning:
| Top
30 of 1714 Total Sites |
| # |
Hits |
Files |
KBytes |
Visits |
Hostname |
| 1 |
314 |
3.94% |
115 |
1.80% |
13759 |
2.64% |
42 |
2.78% |
crawl-66-249-75-135.googlebot.com |
| 2 |
298 |
3.74% |
298 |
4.66% |
2143 |
0.41% |
1 |
0.07% |
ch05.slc.monitorengine.com |
| 3 |
234 |
2.93% |
66 |
1.03% |
5031 |
0.97% |
3 |
0.20% |
110.85.114.123
[China]
|
| 4 |
129 |
1.62% |
128 |
2.00% |
9280 |
1.78% |
1 |
0.07% |
relay202.net.cia.gov |
I
hope they found what they were looking for.
June 9, 2013 (A)
- Someone just sent me an email asking whether the
guy who went on a rampage in Santa Monica, CA, Friday was a
"terrorist." (The emailer still doesn't accept the dictionary's
definition that a "terrorist" is someone who has a motive of changing government policy through
acts of terror.) I think the emailer may also have noticed that
the last name of the killer was Zawahri. That
certainly seems like a
Muslim name. When Muslims go on a shooting rampage, can it be
anything but terrorism?
However, when I did some research, I found a couple interesting
comments following an article about the shooter HERE.
The first comment says:
He was a terrorist...We
have Imams calling for Jihad in the USA, and Muslims of American
training for Jihad in camps in 35 areas of the US, with arsenals of
weapons on American soil..What do you expect? Our government does
nothing to protect us from incidents like this. The Imam in Virginia
calling for Muslims in America to commit Jihad has not been arrested or
deported..
And one of the responses to the above comment reads as follows:
He is Lebanese.
Roughly 40% of Lebanon's population is Christian. His parents named him
John and named his brother Christopher. Killing your family
doesn't really fit the Muslim extremist profile. Usually they just go
kill non-believers without the killing their family part. I don't see
what logic would lead any educated person to assume this man was
Muslim. This story is yet another warning that America's mental health
system needs a complete overhaul.
Would a Muslim name his children after Christian saints? I think
not. John Zawahri was just another nut case with too easy access to
powerful weapons. But, if anyone really wants to consider Zawahri
a "terrorist," then
he has to be a Christian
terrorist.
|
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, June 2, 2013, thru Saturday, June 8,
2013
June 8, 2013 - This morning,
someone
sent me an email with a link to an article on TheSmokingGun.com titled "Ricin
Mailer Was Tracked Via Mail Scanners." They also provide
images of the
complaint filed against alleged ricin mailer Shannon Rogers Guess
Richardson. The
complaint lists a lot of evidence found in the
case. On page 4 there is some interesting information about
how the feds tracked down Richardson by using photographs of every
piece of mail going through the mail processing system at the
Shreveport Processing and Distribution Center on May 20, 2013.
This appears to be an update of the system that was used in the
anthrax letters case to locate cross-contaminated letters that went
through the mail
system in at the Trenton mail facility around the same time as the
anthrax letters. That
system identified a letter that went to someone on Ottilie Lundgren's
mail route which cross-contaminated Lundgren's mail. The
feds also tracked down a lot of other letters that may have been
cross-contaminated. That system used the data collected when the
scanner code is applied to the bottom of each processed
letter. That code is still printed on the bottom of
envelopes. It can be seen in the photo below, which was taken after delivery, not by the
Shreveport system:
So, even though the ricin letters themselves (like the one above to
Mayor Bloomberg) didn't have any return
addresses, the photos taken of each piece of mail indicated in what town they were probably mailed
by associating the ricin letters with other letters processed at the
same time. The probable mailing locations, New Boston, Maud and
Texarkana, Texas, are all within
about 20 miles of each other. And Shannon Richardson lived in New
Boston. Item #37 of the
complaint says that Shannon Richardson confessed to
the crime when confronted with all the evidence against her.
June 7, 2013 - Ah! Surprise
surprise! They evidently caught the person who allegedly sent the
ricin-laced letters to President Obama and NYC Mayor Bloomberg ... and it's a woman. I
haven't been keeping statistics, but I think this may be the first time
a woman has been nabbed in a ricin attack. And, she's a TV actress!
And that's not the end of it. She allegedly tried to frame her husband for the
crime. Here's what NBC
News says:
Shannon Rogers Guess
Richardson of New Boston, Texas, originally called the Federal Bureau
of Investigation claiming that her husband had sent the letters,
officials said. The investigators found that she had sent the letters
herself, they said.
Richardson is an actress with
minor roles on television shows like The Walking Dead and the Vampire
Diaries, and was arrested in Arkansas on charges that will be filed
Friday afternoon, the authorities said. She has five sons, according to
the New York Times.
In a
statement to E! News, Shannon Rogers Guess Richardson said:
Guess said: "I really can't
say much at all but the accusation couldn't be further from the truth.
I would not put my unborn child or other children in danger just to
'frame' someone. He simply needed someone to blame for what he has done
and I was the obvious person for him to blame. Most of what is being
reported in this case is absolutely inaccurate. That's all I can say.
Thank you for asking for my side of this instead of running with the
inaccuracies many others are publishing."
And according to The
New York Post:
The flame-haired,
thrice-married mom of five is the one who called police to the couple’s
New Boston, Texas, home after she found “Tupperware with what looked
like ricin in the refrigerator,” a source said.
“He says they are going
through a divorce and that she was away for a few days,” said one
law-enforcement source. “He says it was when she got back that she
found the [purported] ricin.”
The beans were bought with a
credit card, according to a source.
USA
Today says,
Richardson, according to a
federal criminal complaint, is charged
with mailing a threatening communication to the the president.
An arrest affidavit says Richardson mailed the letters on May 20. She
made an initial court appearance in Texas Friday afternoon. If
convicted, she faces up to 10 years in prison.
So, they're evidently not
going to charge her with "terrorism." And, we've got a "Did he
frame her or did she frame him?" situation.
That seems like it could be a very interesting plot for a TV
movie.
June 6, 2013 - I've been spending
most of my on-line time arguing with Anthrax Truthers on my interactive blog.
I think some progress is being made. There's no possibility of
agreement, of course, but I've been able to show one of the Truthers
that his arguments are wrong. He sees patterns in things that
really are not
patterns. He sees a "pattern" in the fact that all hoax letters
are "deceptions" and the anthrax letters were also a "deception" in
that they were supposed to look like they came from al Qaeda when they
really didn't. So, he argues that the deceptions are "evidence"
that all the letters came from the same person (except where proved
otherwise).
I explained to him that the fact that the letters are from different locations, use different writing styles, use different threats, and are different in many other ways says
that there is NO
pattern indicating they all came from the same person. He then
changed the subject, so I don't know if that argument made any
impression.
My response to another of his arguments, however, may have made an
impression. I illustrated his argument with this cartoon at the
top of the
thread where we are arguing:
It appears he not only totally disbelieves all the evidence which shows
that Bruce Ivins was the anthrax mailer, he also never paid any attention to that evidence.
At one point, he
argued that Bruce Ivins would know how to spell "penicillin."
He posted:
Mister Lake wants to have it both
ways: dispute me at every turn, even when his disputations cut against
the GOVERNMENT'S case against Ivins!
Okay, have it your
way: "penacilin" was a legit misspelling. Which indicates that the
author was NOT Bruce Ivins!
Whereupon I pointed out
to him that the deliberate
misspelling of "PENACILIN" was a key
point in the government's case against Ivins. It was a key
element in the "hidden message"
encoded within the media letters. The Truther's response was, of
course, to change the subject.
Interestingly, I also told him that misspelling Israel as "Isreal" is
common. (It was misspelled that way in the Ayaad Assaad letter.)
The
Truther responded:
I don't think that that's true. The commonest mistakes are: true
mistakes (misremembered
spellings that the
writer doesn't catch as looking odd); typos (when a typewriter or other
keyboard is used); phonologically-based mistakes.
I neglected to mention
that a typewriter or keyboard WAS used to write the
Ayaad Assaad letter. Instead, I chose to do a Google search
for the word "Isreal." Google informed me that it appeared to be
71,800,000 uses of the word "Isreal" on the Net. Looking at some
of them, it turns out most appear to be a failure to add a space
between "is" and "real." Isreal also appears to be a last name
for a lot of people (or it could be a misspelling of their last name).
But, what surprised me most was that I found a web page which does
nothing but tell people how to avoid misspelling Israel as
"Isreal." Click HERE.
And, I found a
Newsday article with this headline:
Syria vs. Isreal, HUD legislation,
Internet tax collection: Top stories for May 6, 2013
And I found an article
from the Mat-su Valley Frontiersman
with this headline:
Isreal
Attacks Syria
And what appears to be an
Afghan newspaper "Khaama
Press" has this headline:
Iran hangs two men over
espionage charges to Isreal
and US
And, another Mid-East news
site, Albawaba
News, has this headline:
Isreal detains Jerusalem's top
Muslim cleric after scuffles at al-Aqsa mosque
I rest my case.
June 5, 2013 - Someone just sent me an
interesting article which says NYC personnel did not follow
established protocols when handling the ricin letter sent to Mayor
Bloomberg:
City agencies, led by the
NYPD, ignored their own bioterrorism protocols while investigating a
threatening letter sent to Mayor Michael Bloomberg and didn't realize
it was laced with potentially deadly Ricin for days, DNAinfo New York
has learned.
I never heard of "DNAinfo"
before, and I don't see any additional reports from any recognized
media source, so I suppose this has to be taken with a grain of salt.
The article says that instead of taking the suspicious letter to the
NYC Department of Health as protocols required, the letter was instead
taken to the NYPD forensic crime lab. The NYPD forensic lab had
it for four days before
something they saw on the news alerted them to what might be in the
letter they were handling:
“[The
city] did not know they had a dangerous substance on their hands,” a
law enforcement source said.
It was not
until four days later — after a similar letter was received at
Bloomberg’s Washington-based anti-gun lobbying group and was tested at
an appropriate local lab — that authorities in New York fully realized
the danger.
“It was
only then that authorities said we better take a better look at the
letter in New York,” the source said.
As I recall, the anthrax
letter sent to Tom Brokaw was also handled as if there was no
serious danger. It was apparently carried to a lab by a cop who
was
contaminated by the powder in the letter, and then two lab technicians
were also contaminated. It's unclear which lab was involved in
that instance, but the lessons certainly weren't fully learned.
On the other hand, the DNAinfo article also says this about the ricin
letter:
NYPD’s Emergency Service
Unit cops suited up in their safety gear and handled the letter, police
said. Even so, three officers became contaminated and later developed
symptoms, primarily diarrhea, related to Ricin exposure.
There aren't any
details, so we don't know exactly what went wrong. But, it
certainly seems like the NYPD
should have left the handling of the letter to the NYC DOH.
June 4, 2013 - The puzzle over why
so many people think the 911 dispatcher cursed at Amanda Berry is still
nagging at me. One
news outlet says:
Cleveland station WOIO
reports that the call taker is a male and a police forensic audio team examined
the call but cannot be sure what is said. “They do say the first
words begins with an ‘F’ and the second word begins with ‘B’,” the
station reports.
Meanwhile 19 Action News
hired their own
independent audio forensic experts.
“One expert says the second word is
b****,” according to the station.
And the second expert believes both
curse words are used.
It’s a shocking and cruel
twist in a story that has captured national headlines. The
investigation is ongoing.
When I
listen to it, there is no cursing
and no mystery. As I
stated in my comment on May 20, the controversial part is a third person saying very clearly,
"What was that?"
It's like we're all watching President Obama on TV as he says, "Good
evening my fellow Americans," and there's an immediate uproar from
everyone else as they say, "Did you hear that?! The President
just said 'We're going to war with Syria!'"
Huh?
The only thing I can figure out is that I'm listening to the Amanda
Berry 911 call on a pair of good
quality stereo speakers attached to my computer, and everyone
else (including the "audio forensic experts") are probably listening to
the call on their iPhone or iPad
or some similar device. Those things apparently have speakers
about the size of a pea and no capability of turning the volume up to
any significant degree.
If I tried to convince any of the "audio forensic experts" of this, I
wonder if they'd argue, "No one uses computers anymore. Computers
are old, iPhones and iPads
are new. New is always better. Everyone knows
that."
Sometimes it seems that the world is going to Hell at 90 miles an hour,
and I'm being left far behind. And no one understands why it
doesn't bother me.
June 2, 2013 - In a heated exchange of posts on my
interactive blog on Friday and Saturday, I think I may finally have gotten to the
heart of
one particular Anthrax Truther's argument. The problem is
correctly interpreting the information I've found. The most
obvious interpretation may not be the correct interpretation.
The
Anthrax Truther's
CLAIMS begin with his belief that the anthrax writer is:
someone who knows enough of
the
Hebrew alphabet to incorporate elements of same into his printing of
Amerithrax, enough of Cyrillic to incorporate elements of that into the
St Pete hoax letters.
He believes the anthrax letters, , the
Assaad letter, the
hoax letters mailed from St. Petersburg, the
B'nai B'rith package, and several other hoaxes were all perpetrated by the same person
or group. In a posting HERE
he CLAIMS:
1)the multiple Hebrew
elements
all but preclude someone who ISN'T thoroughly familiar with the Hebrew
alphabet as being the printer.
2)since only about 2.1% of the US
population is Jewish, and many of
these totally secular Jews who have had no reason/opportunity to use
the Hebrew alphabet in any way, EVEN if we throw in Near East scholars,
journalists who have learned Hebrew as part of their work, seminary
students/ministers who learned Hebrew as part of their education, and
other Gentiles who have learned Hebrew to one degree or another, we are
still looking at a US population of which no more than 3% can be said
to know the Hebrew alphabet to any degree.*
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_population#Populations_as_a_percentage
3) The value of this is eliminative: anyone who DOESN'T know the Hebrew
alphabet to a considerable degree, can be eliminated as a PRINTING
suspect.
and HERE
he says:
Bruce Ivins left no
indication
that he knew Hebrew in the slightest.
Anyone
can see that there is a definite hint
of
anti-Semitism in what he writes. He somehow sees Hebrew elements
in the writing on
the anthrax documents. He claims
that what he sees shows that the anthrax writer learned to write in
Hebrew at some point
in time, but he
doesn't appear to have any actual
evidence to support his claims about Hebrew elements in the
handwriting. He also provides statistics about Jews to
support his beliefs. And, although he doesn't seem to be able
to justify his beliefs, he seems totally unshakable in what he
believes. Plus, and he won't name or even describe how his
suspect can be a better suspect than Dr. Ivins.
Of
course, he denies
that his claims are anti-Semitic and says:
What's Anti-Semitic about
it?
(none of my Anthrax Gang is Jewish, as if that matters!).
When
I press him for evidence to support his claim that there's a Hebrew
aspect to the anthrax writings, he points to past
discussions, but those past discussions only show his claims, not any actual
evidence. He
uses the same
tactics as the Anthrax Truther/True Believer who claims that Islamist
militants were
behind the attacks, i.e., he says the evidence is in his
past
writings and in articles for which he has provided links. I just
need to hunt for the evidence in those places, and if I don't find it,
then it's my fault. If I don't want to hunt for something that
seems to be non-existent, then I'm not interested in learning about
any evidence that doesn't support my own personal beliefs.
There seems to be enough evidence to argue that that Anthrax Truther is
just another anti-Semite blaming the Great Jewish Conspiracy for
everything. But, could there be some other explanation for the intensity
of his apparently baseless beliefs?
In my
debates with Anthrax Truthers, I constantly
do research,
not only to look for new facts and evidence, but also to
look for better ways to explain
the facts and evidence.
I
find it mindboggling that
Truthers absolutely refuse to understand the
importance of facts and evidence. Even more mindboggling is their
repeated argument that they see NO EVIDENCE
to support the FBI/DOJ's claim that Bruce Ivins was the anthrax
mailer. Yet, they see their own muddled arguments as being
unquestionablely correct and they feel they have solid evidence that
their own suspect sent the anthrax letters.
There may be a clue to understanding that kind of thinking in the way
the quasi-anti- Semite Truther also endlessly goes off into bizarre
debates over the meanings of words. For example, we went round
and round on the difference between "argument" and
"evidence." We also argued at length about the difference
between "lay witness" and "eyewitness" and what an eyewitness can
testify about versus what an expert witness testifies about. So
far, we've reached no clear agreement on anything.
A Colorado State
University writing class web page titled "Distinguishing
Between Fact, Opinion, Belief and Prejudice" says:
A fact is verifiable.
We can determine whether it is true by researching the evidence. This
may involve numbers, dates, testimony, etc. ... The truth of the fact
is beyond argument if one can assume that measuring devices or records
or memories are correct. Facts provide crucial support for the
assertion of an argument. However, facts by themselves are worthless
unless we put them in context, draw conclusions, and, thus, give them
meaning.
An opinion is a judgment
based on facts, an honest attempt to draw a reasonable
conclusion from factual evidence. ... An opinion is potentially
changeable--depending on how the evidence is interpreted. By
themselves, opinions have little power to convince. You must always let
your reader know what your evidence is and how it led you to arrive at
your opinion.
Unlike an opinion, a belief is a conviction based on cultural
or personal faith, morality, or values. Statements such as
"Capital punishment is legalized murder" are often called "opinions"
because they express viewpoints, but they are not based on facts or
other evidence. They cannot be disproved or even contested in a
rational or logical manner. Since
beliefs are inarguable, they cannot
serve as the thesis of a formal argument.
Another kind of assertion that has no place in
serious
argumentation is prejudice, a half-baked opinion based on
insufficient or unexamined evidence. ... Unlike a belief, a prejudice is testable: it can be
contested and disproved on the basis of facts.
It appears that the only part of this that is understood and accepted
by "Truthers" is:
facts by themselves
are worthless unless we put them in context, draw conclusions,
and, thus, give them meaning.
And, they seem to view things slightly differently:
facts by themselves
are worthless BECAUSE
we put them in context, draw conclusions,
and, thus, give them OUR OWN
meaning.
In other words, facts are worthless and mean nothing. It's only
the interpretation of the
facts which means anything. But Truthers seem to go one step
further and dismiss the need for facts altogether. Why even
bother with discussing facts if it is only personal interpretations
that have
meaning?
I would ask: Interpretations of what? If you don't start
with the facts, what is it you are interpreting?
The answer seems to be: They are interpreting the situation.
sit·u·a·tion
n
1.
a.
The way in which something is positioned vis-à-vis its
surroundings.
b.
The place in which something is situated; a location.
2.
Position or status with regard to conditions and circumstances.
3.
The combination of circumstances at a given moment; a state of affairs.
4.
A critical, problematic, or striking set of circumstances.
The
Anthrax Truthers with whom I've been arguing seem to seriously believe that they
know better than anyone else in the world (particularly "the
government" or the people in authority) how to correctly interpret
a situation.
They seem to have an unshakable "faith" in their
own
ability to correctly figure things out, and
an unshakable "belief" that "the government" and/or people in authority
failed to correctly figure things out. So, it can be argued that
their
beliefs are based
upon prejudices, not on
faith. They're steadfastly prejudiced towards their own
interpretations of situations.
On the other hand, maybe "faith" is
what you
have when you talk about your own
beliefs, and "prejudice" is what you have when you talk about someone else's opinions.
The Anthrax Truthers who believe that al Qaeda was behind the anthrax
attacks seem to have developed that belief because the anthrax attacks
occurred so soon after the horrific al Qaeda
attacks of 9/11. They cannot see any possible way the two events
coming so close together could just be "a coincidence." Their
interpretation of the situation
is that the two events MUST
be the work of the same people.
The DOJ's case against Ivins is just a "flawed
chain of reasoning" and a "total
mess."
The
quasi-anti-Semitic Anthrax Truther
has been arguing that some
kind of criminal mastermind sent the anthrax letters, the
Assaad letter, the St. Petersburg letters,
the B'nai
B'rith package, etc., etc.
Why does he believe that? His explanation HERE
doesn't really provide reasons. It's just the way he views the situation. It appears he
simply can't believe that many different people would all be doing
similar things at the same time due to pure coincidence. That
evidently doesn't make sense to him. So, he doesn't believe what
the government says. He has his own ideas about how the world
works. He sees the same person (or group) as being behind them all. And he
believes "the DoJ case against Bruce Ivins is
chockful of mindreading, bad psychology, over- stated evidence,
evidence that bears no logical relation to Ivins' guilt or evidence
etc."
Truthers
simply prefer their own
interpretations to those of people who seem to have a different view of
the way the world works. That's where prejudices come into
play. The Truthers argue that
"the government" has been
wrong in the past, so they are wrong now. The Truther may also
have been wrong in the past, but he's not
wrong now.
That's pure prejudice.
According
to that Colorado State University writing class web page:
An opinion is potentially
changeable--depending on how the evidence is interpreted. By
themselves, opinions have little power to convince. You must always let
your reader know what your evidence is and how it led you to arrive at
your opinion.
That's the way I like to do things. And, in an ideal world it
would be the way everyone does things. But what if you're arguing
with people who have a totally different view of the world, a different
view of evidence, a different interpretation of the rules of evidence
and a different interpretation of how evidence is viewed in court and
how a legal case is made? And, if you try to explain to them that
that is not the correct way, they simply believe that they know more
than you do. They know what facts mean, you don't. They
know what evidence is, you don't. They know how the legal system
works, you don't.
When encountering such people, the most common response would be to
just walk away. But, I'm not
here to just walk away. I'm here to explain my understandings to
people. If I can't explain the facts to Anthrax Truthers, I can
still explain to the other readers of this web site. That's what
I've been doing for nearly
12 years. The more I argue, the more I learn, the more I understand, the more experience I get in arguing with
Anthrax Truthers, and the more interesting the debates often become -
for me.
And, maybe --- just MAYBE --
I'll someday find the "trick" to getting
an Anthrax Truther to realize that his view of the world may not be the correct view.
Maybe it's just a matter of finding the right argument.
Yesterday's discussions ended with me trying to show the
quasi-anti-Semitic Truther that a
claim is not the same as evidence. He seems to think they are the
same, probably because "facts by themselves are worthless." If
facts are worthless, then making claims is all that matters. Let
the other fellow prove the claims are incorrect or provide better
claims.
Sometimes I feel I should assemble a collection of "debate
enders," so when an Anthrax Truther starts arguing some old subject all
over again, I can just quote from or provide a link to the "debate
ender" which
shows the solid points I made in the past that caused various Truthers
to walk away or change the subject. Examples:
I could create similar pages for "the rabbit argument" (how much
time it took Ivins to care for rabbits and how it relates to his
"unexplained" overtime hours in his lab), for "the ZIP code
argument" (how the ZIP code on the senate letters relates to Ivins'
apparent obsession with all things named
"Monmouth"),
for "the lay witness argument" (what a lay witnesses can and cannot
testify
about in court), and for numerous other subjects that Anthrax Truthers
will
endlessly
argue about
because they seemingly believe that claims
are
evidence and that they just need to convince me of that in order
to win their argument.
I just need to summon up the will-power to create those new
pages. Or maybe I'll
just lay on a couch, eat a bowl of warm butterscotch pudding and watch
a movie.
|
Updates
& Changes: Sunday, May 26, 2013, thru Saturday, June 1,
2013
May 31, 2013 - There's been a number
of news stories (click HERE
or HERE
or HERE)
about President Obama's likely choice to replace Robert Mueller as FBI
Director. Robert Mueller officially became Director of the FBI on
September 4, 2001, just one week before 9/11. The appointment
term for FBI Director is 10 years. However, in 2011, President
Obama asked that Mueller remain on the job for an additional 2 years,
and the Senate agreed. So, Director Mueller is expected to step
down in early September, just over 3 months from now.
Coincidentally, September 11, 2013 will be the 12th anniversary of 9/11
and September 18 will be the same anniversary for the first anthrax
letter mailing.
It seems to me that, if the General Accountablity Office (GAO) is going
to ever produce their review of the Amerithrax investigation, the
perfect time for it would be in late September or early October, right
after Mueller leaves office. The report could then theoretically
provide information to the new
Director on how to do things better in the future, and there wouldn't
be any need to discuss anything with the previous Director. I'm
not speculating or predicting, I'm really just hoping.
May 30, 2013 - Although I said I wouldn't write anything
else about the Amanda Berry case, I can't resist commenting on the
controversy over her phone call to 911
and the response from the 911 dispatcher (also HERE,
HERE,
HERE,
HERE
and HERE).
I can't understand how so
many people can think that the 911 operator called Amanda a "f--king
b--ch" at the very end of the call. What I hear is the 911
operator just trying to get the
facts from a
nearly hysterical woman. I also notice that earlier in the call
the operator responds,
"I got that, dear," after
Amanda says she's been on the news for ten years. That's not
usually what an angry person calls someone else.
I've played the controversial part at the end of the call at least two
dozen times with the volume
turned up as far as it will go, and what I hear at the very end, is
this:
911
Dispatcher: Talk to them [the police] when they get there.
Amanda
Berry: All Right. Okay.
911 Dispatcher. Thank
you.
Amanda Berry: Bye.
Unknown voice: What was
that?!
It's at about the 1:34
mark. That third voice very clearly
says, "What was that?!"
It's not the same 911
dispatcher and it's definitely
not a
curse. My best guess is that it's the voice of another
911 dispatcher who had been listening in. It's incomprehensible
to me
how anyone could hear it as a
curse from the dispatcher.
I think there's more than enough real
controversy going on without people imagining
things and demanding that the 911 operator be fired because of what
they imagined.
As another example, the
media is reporting that the father of Ibragim Todashev, who was
shot by an FBI agent during an interrogation related to three grizzly
murders in Waltham, MA in 2011, is claiming that his
son was
"executed." What appears in photos to be a cut on the top of Ibragim's head - possibly
from being hit with a gun barrel during a struggle - is described by
the father as a
bullet hole in the back of
his son's head. So, we can expect the media to generate a lot of
controversy over this.
And, by now everyone has probably heard about the two
letters containing ricin that were sent to New York City Mayor
Michael Bloomberg and Mark
Glaze, the director of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a group Bloomberg
helps run and finance. The letters threatened Mayor Bloomberg and
made reference to the real
controversy and debate over gun control laws. According to
ABC
News,
The letters – with identical text --
were printed from a computer and are postmarked May 20 from Shreveport,
La.
...
Asked if he was angry, Bloomberg said he wasn't.
"There are people that do things that might appear
irrational - things that are wrong," he said. "But it's a complex world
out there. And you just have to deal with that."
One Bloomberg insider told ABC News the mayor himself
made the decision to go public with news of the ricin-laced letters as
soon as a second, more reliable round of tests returned positive
results for the poison.
Technically,
the ricin letters are probably classified as a "terrorist" attack,
since the motive behind the letters appears to be to intimidate Mayor
Bloomberg and others to get them to change government policies about
gun control.
Added note:
Later in the day, The
New York Times reported that it appears an identical letter was
also sent to President Obama. It hasn't yet been examined.
Other than that, there's nothing more to say. Hopefully, the FBI
and other investigative organizations will find the ricin mailer and
lock him up.
And, hopefully, the Cleveland authorities have listened to Amanda
Berry's
911 call and can tell that that there's nothing seriously wrong with
the 911
operator's reponses.
May 28, 2013 - I was just provided a
link to an amusing blog page where an Anthrax Truther attempted in 2006
to explain his views of the differences between "fact" and
"fantasy." Click HERE
to go to the page.
It's a very bizarre blog page because most of the fantasies are
nonsense made up by the Truther and then debunked by the same
Truther. And, in many instances, he clearly cannot tell the
difference between fact and fantasy. One of the best examples:
2. Fantasy: The Ames strain was obtained
from Ft. Detrick.
Fact: The Ames strain had been distributed to at least a score of known labs,
and the genetic investigation
could not
pinpoint the source of the anthrax, though it may have narrowed
the field to four labs at least known to have had genetically identical
Ames.
In that one, it seems to
me that there is more fact in what the Truther thinks is fantasy than
in what the Truther thinks is fact. The Ames strain came from Ft.
Detrick, they distributed it to 17 other labs, and the genetic
investigation did
pinpoint the source.
In the item below, the "fantasy" is blatantly created by the Truther,
since no one ever made such a preposterous claim:
4. Fantasy: The fact that the hijacker with the
black leg lesion was dead proves his black lesion was not related to
anthrax.
Fact: In June 2001, hijacker
Ahmed Alhaznawi told a doctor that he had gotten a gash associated with
blackened lesion -- such as occurs with cutaneous anthrax -- in
Afghanistan after bumping into a suitcase. He had come from the Darunta camp where Al Qaeda's
anthrax production program at Kandahar was located and where virulent
anthrax was found.
The Truther's "fact" is just a fantasy.
According to a
more reliable source, there was nothing found at Darunta camp that
related to anthrax:
Working in a crude
laboratory at the Darunta terrorist training camp, eight miles south of
Jalalabad, al-Masri led a group that experimented with several World War I-era chemical agents,
including hydrogen cyanide, chlorine, phosgene, and mustard gas.
After the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001, U.S. troops
searched the Darunta camp and found training manuals detailing the
synthesis of nerve agents and how to enhance conventional explosives
with toxic chemicals.
Below is one where fact is described as fantasy by the Truther, and
then the deliberate mis-classification is justified by explaining that
terrorists sometimes lie:
8. Fantasy: Shortly after the mailings, Al
Qaeda denied responsibility for the anthrax letters, and there
was no claim of responsibility.
Fact: Bin Laden and
Zawahiri also initially denied involvement for the 1998 embassy
bombings and initially denied responsibility of 9/11.
Osama bin Laden did
deny responsibility for the anthrax letters. Click HERE.
The Truther just doesn't believe him, so he claims that fact is fantasy.
While there are many other
fact-fantasy items that are also largely nonsense because of
distortions, to bring an close to this comment, here's an item labeled
as "Fantasy" that was a solid FACT:
14. Fantasy: The FBI suspects someone who
is not a supporter of the militant islamists
Fact: In a press conference
in October 2005, Director Mueller said that the FBI was pursuing all
domestic and international leads. He said "remember Oklahoma City.
Remember 9/11." He declined to say if they had a suspect. That year,
FBI agents reportedly had visited Asia, Africa and Afghanistan in the
course of the Amerithrax investigation.
On September 23, 2006,
when the Truther created that blog page, Dr. Bruce Ivins was already a suspect in the case (he
was not known to be a supporter of militant Islamists), and flask
RMR-1029 (the "murder weapon") was already
becoming a major piece of evidence in the investigation.
Rule #1 for people trying to separate fact from fantasy: Understand the
difference.
May 27, 2013 - This morning I
stumbled across this:
The 45 rpm record appears
to contain recordings of Dr. Bruce Ivins singing "Pass Me By"
and "All
Shook Up."
The
links are from a
blog posting by Dick Destiny dated April 13, 2011 which says:
As promised, here’s the newly
found recording career of Bruce Ivins, the USAMRIID scientist declared
the anthrax mailer by the US government.
But Ivins, in addition to
being the best bioterrorist US money could buy, was by all accounts a
man of many talents. His fondness for entertaining with music and
keyboard playing is documented in newspaper stories worldwide.
And so the founder of Bona
Fide Records, Rick Noll of Pennsy, has discovered, recovered and
brought to the attention of a fascinated country, the bioterror
scientist’s 7-inch vinyl, recorded as Bruce Ivins and the Country Boys.
Is it really THE Bruce Ivins, or is it someone
else named Bruce Ivins? In
an earlier article from GlobalSecurity.org titled "Bruce
Ivins, first bioterrorist/recording artist ever?" dated April 8,
2011, George Smith (a.k.a. "Dick Destiny") wrote:
Maybe so. We don’t know for
sure. Perhaps it’s all phlogiston, Bruce Ivins and the Country Boys
another Bruce Ivins — not the Bruce Ivins at the center of the anthrax
case. It’s all just a coincidence, what Klaatu was to the Beatles, sort
of. It’s just one more mysterious embellishment contributing to the
fascination over lore connected to the nation’s most famous
bioterrorist. Like the FBI/DoJ case against Ivins, the evidence is
circumstantial yet still compelling.
Maybe time will sort it out.
Maybe. If it is THE Bruce Ivins, then his friends
and family probably have copies of the record. In the articles,
the experts seem to be saying that all the backup music and background
singing cannot be created
digitally with the keyboard Ivins was using in the photos, but knowing
how to play that kind of keyboard would
have provided him with all the basics he would need to use
the type of keyboard used to make the recordings. So, the
recordings most likely involved playing a more sophisticated studio keyboard.
I don't recall ever seeing those articles by Dick Destiny before, and
the only reason I found them this morning was because of an
article on GlobalSecurity.org from last week which mentions that ricin
letter mailer James Everett Dutschke is also a musician who produced
some recordings, and so is another guy associated with ricin, Robert
Alberg, of Kirkland, WA.
Like Alberg, J. Everett
Dutschke stands accused of making ricin. Unlike Bruce Ivins, the
anthrax mailer, recent American history has shown that castor bean
pounders kill and sicken no one.
...
American bioterrorists are few in number. But they are a very modern
phenomenon.
And the most famous
bioterrorist of all, Frederick, Maryland's anthrax mailer, the research
scientist Bruce Ivins, was also a recording musician.
Ivins, the only accused
bioterrorist whose work killed people, five in the anthrax mailings of
2001, ignited a national panic and launched a bioterrorism defense
industry boom that lasted for over a decade.
I'd seen the pictures of
Ivins singing at his keyboard before. But, it never occurred to
me to wonder what kind of
music he sang. "Pass Me By " is a Country and Western tune.
And "All Shook Up" is an old Elvis Presley Rock and Roll song.
Does that mix say anything about Ivins? If it does, I have no
clue to what it says.
May 26, 2013 - It's been almost a
full week since a
couple
Anthrax Truthers last posted comments about the anthrax
attacks of 2001 on my
interactive blog. But at 7:11 a.m. yesterday morning, "DXer"
posted this to Lew Weinstein's blog:
A prolific poster named Ed, a
retiree in Wisconsin, argues regularly that a First Grader wrote the
anthrax letters. He did not take care to inform himself about the FBI’s
manhunt for Adnan El-Shukrijumah — and still studiously avoids the facts relating to
the issue (Very uncivil and adopting ad hominem labels rather than
analysis of the facts relating to El-Shukrijumah was the mailer, he would not address the facts when over
the course of years it would be pointed out). Instead,
his argument was that because the FBI did not talk about its hunt for
an unidentified accomplice, such an accomplice must not exist.
Instead, Ed imagined a First
Grader
— who does not exist — to have written the anthrax letters.
Since I'm banned from
posting to
Weinstein's blog, it seems I'll have to respond here.
It's difficult to decipher exactly what "DXer" is saying in his
convoluted and largely incoherent ramblings. "Unidentified
accomplice?" What
"unidentified accomplice?" Accomplice to what? And where did I ever
argue that this "unidentified accomplice" doesn't exist?
And, the first grader doesn't exist?
Don't you have to have some idea of who the first grader might be before you can say that he
doesn't exist? Or is "DXer" claiming he can prove that NO first
graders existed anywhere near Bruce Ivins in 2001, even though his wife
ran a day care center in their home and had friends with children?
"DXer"
seems to now be
arguing that Adnan
El-Shukrijumah was the anthrax mailer, and he seems
to want me to
examine his "evidence." I'm translating this:
He did not take care to
inform
himself about the FBI’s manhunt for Adnan El-Shukrijumah — and still studiously avoids the facts relating to
the issue (Very uncivil and adopting ad hominem labels rather than analysis of the facts relating to
El-Shukrijumah was the mailer, he
would not address the facts when over the course of years it would be
pointed out ).
to mean this:
He ... still studiously avoids the facts relating to
the issue ... rather than [analyzing]
the facts relating to El-Shukrijumah [being] the mailer. He would not address the facts when over the
course of years [the facts were] pointed out [to him].
In reality, I created a web page titled "The illogical
al Qaeda theory"
on June 17, 2012, which addressed some of the so-called
"evidence" against al Qaeda. I got bored with it after a couple
days, and I never finished it. But, I'm
certainly willing to debunk more of "DXer's" highly and easily
debunkable beliefs. It's just
difficult to figure out exactly what he's saying.
As
you may
recall, two
weeks ago, "DXer"
he was arguing that
The anthrax letters are in
the
handwriting of [Mohamed] Atta.
To me, it looks like
"DXer" is trying to recover after being shown to
be wrong when I showed him
solid evidence that Mohamed
Atta did NOT
write the anthrax letters. So, it seems that "DXer" is now
trying to start some kind of a new
debate.
He now seems to have turned to arguing
that El-Shukrijumah
mailed and probably wrote the
anthrax letters, although there do not appear to be
any handwriting "exemplars" to analyze. That
means there is no current risk that I or anyone else can also prove
that
El-Shukrijumah handwriting does
not match the writing on the anthrax documents.
"DXer's" new belief
about the handwriting is evidently supported only by his primary unshakable belief:
militant Islamists were behind the anthrax attacks of 2001.
At 6:32 a.m. this morning, "DXer" stated on
Lew Weinstein's blog:
I have been publicly
explaining the importance of Adnan El-Shukrijumah to the solution of
the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings for over a decade.
On Friday, "DXer" declared in one
post on Lew Weinstein's blog:
I have argued that Adnan El-Shurkijumah
was the mailer of anthrax
letters in the Fall 2001. He stayed with Al-Hawsawi in safe
houses in
Karachi from February – April 2002. Al-Hawsawi had the anthrax
spraydrying documents his laptop.
And in
another post on Friday:
KSM and El-Shukrujumah, who I have argued is
the Fall 2001 anthrax mailer for over a decade, likely knew each
other from fighting in Bosnia in 1995. Adnan’s Dad’s mosque in Brooklyn
was a conduit for fighters going to Bosnia.
However, 12 days ago, on a thread titled "FOIA
Suit Relating to Theory That Aberaouf Jdey Is The Anthrax Mailer,"
"DXer" evidently wasn't as certain as he now seems to be:
Let’s first more fully
visit Ken
Dillon’s theory that Jdey was the anthrax mailer — notwithstanding my
argument below that as between Jdey and El-Shukrijumah, El-Shukrijumah
is the more likely candidate
for mailer.
and
finding that Jdey is alive
will
not serve to debunk [Kenneth] Dillon’s brilliant hypothesis that Jdey
was the mailer (He first shared it with me almost a decade ago
and I
knew then he was on to something).. As I’ve said, I’ve suggested that
alternatively maybe
El-Shukrijumah was the mailer
Using Google, I cannot find any posts on
Lew Weinstein's site prior to March 2012
that even mention El-Shukrijumah (or El-Shurkijumah or El-Shukrujumah). The way I recall it, for many years "DXer" seemed to be
focused on pointing at Ali
al Timimi as
being somehow responsible for the mailings. At a
seminar on November 29, 2010, "DXer" used a slide presentation that
doesn't even appear to mention El-Shukrijumah. Click HERE
to access the slide presentation.
So,
what
kind of "evidence" does "DXer"
have to support his
strong belief that militant Islamists were behind the anthrax
attacks? An August
8, 2011 post lists some of what he considers to be "evidence."
1. The
"cloud"
evidence:
While the anthrax letters themselves were copies on plain paper, the J-Lo letter (which facts say did NOT contain anthrax and had nothing to do with the attacks) was
reported in The National Enquirer to
have been written on
a business-size sheet of
stationery decorated with pink and blue clouds around the edges.
And according to "DXer,"
In admitting that he had
taken
over
supervising the development of anthrax for use against the U.S. upon
Atef’s death (in November 2001), Khalid Sheikh Mohammed separately
noted that “I was the Media Operations Director for Al-Sahab or ‘The Clouds,’ under Dr.
Ayman Al-Zawahiri.”
This seems to be the item of "evidence" that "DXer" mentions most
often. The J-Lo letter was reportedly written on stationery
decorated with clouds,
and a Muslim terrorist organization was called "Al-Sahab" or "The Clouds." So, the
clouds on the stationery were evidently some signature code
for "The Clouds"
organization.
Yet, "DXer" evidently sees no
evidence
in the FBI's finding that Ivins put a
coded message into the anthrax letters sent to the media (a
coded message relating to his two co-workers)
and was observed throwing away the code books.
Obviously, "DXer" has a different standard for "evidence" when it's
evidence that doesn't support his personal beliefs.
2. The
"green
bird" evidence:
The anthrax letters were mailed in pre-stamped Post Office
envelopes. The stamp on those envelopes was an American Eagle
design:
While the eagle looks to
me to
be light blue (as in red, white and blue), "DXer" sees it as
being
blue-green:
The “Federal Eagle” stamp
used in
the anthrax mailings was
a blue-green. It was
widely published among the militant Islamists that
martyrs go to paradise “in the hearts of green birds.”
Blue? Green? Blue-green? There's apparently no
difference when looking for evidence to support a belief. So, the
stamp (with USA printed
on it) was a code
for the "green birds" in the hearts of which militant Islamists
will travel to paradise. Again, he shows that he has a totally
different standard when looking at what he considers to be "evidence"
versus the FBI's evidence.
3. The
"Greendale
School" evidence:
The return address on the anthrax letters sent to Senators Daschle and
Leahy was:
4TH GRADE
GREENDALE SCHOOL
FRANKLIN PARK NJ 08852
According to "DXer":
The mailer’s use of
“Greendale
School” as the return
address for the letters to the senators is also revealing. A May 2001
letter that al-Zawahiri sent to Egyptian Islamic Jihad members abroad
establish that he used “school”
as a code word for the Egyptian
militant Islamists.
So, according to "DXer's" theory, the fact the senate letters had a
return address that included the word "school" is another code
used by militant
Islamists. And, of course, "green" is also part of "Greendale,"
which again relates to the "green birds" inside which the Islamists go
to heaven.
4. The "4th
grade" evidence:
According to "DXer":
The “4th grade” in the
return
address “4th Grade,
Greendale School,” is American
slang for “sergeant” — the rank of the
head of al-Qaida’s military commander Mohammed Atef, who along with
al-Zawahiri had overseen Project Zabadi, al-Qaida’s biochemical program.
4th grade is American slang
for sergeant? Really? And sergeant is also the rank of an
Islamist
military commander? So,
that's the reason "DXer" believes the Islamists used it in the return
address? It's another code?
Of course, "4th grade" is also the actual grade of student who was
given
corporal punishment at the Greendale Baptist Academy in Wisconsin,
which was the subject of a feature story in The American Family Journal just
prior to the attacks, a magazine to which Ivins and his wife
subscribed. But, according to "DXer," that isn't
"evidence." If he doesn't believe it, then it isn't "evidence."
5. The
"Franklin
Park" evidence:
According to a
post by "DXer" in 2012:
On the return address,
Greendale
School purported to be in
Franklin Park. Padilla, the former Broward man suspected of plotting to
explode a ”dirty bomb” to spread radiation in the United States,
worshipped at a Broward County mosque, Masjid Al-Iman, in Fort
Lauderdale. That mosque was
across the street from Franklin Park.
Of course, the town of Franklin Park, NJ, is just 10 miles beyond where
the anthrax letters were mailed, so it could also be where Dr. Ivins
planned to mail the letters before he was sidetracked by a visit to the
KKG sorority location in Princeton. For all we know, the
first anthrax letters could have been mailed
in Franklin Park, NJ. The first powder wasn't as pure and fine as
the second powder and wouldn't have leaked through the envelopes as
much.
But, "DXer" says "Franklin Park" relates to a mosque used by
El-Shukrijumah.
Comments from "DXer" (using a
different name) located HERE
say:
On
the
return address, Greendale School purported to be in Franklin Park
where fugitive Adnan El-Shukrijumah
worshipped along with others
who
now have been indicted.
But, a little research finds a private detective's web site HERE that says,
Darul Uloom Institute &
Islamic Training Center 7050 Pines Blvd. Pembroke Pines is
the mosque that Adnan El Shukruijumah attended in Pembroke
Pines, El Shukruijumah shows an address in
April 2001 at 6839 Pembroke Rd Pembroke Pines Fl.
So, it appears that El-Shukrijumah (or El Shukruijumah) went to a mosque
in Pembrook Pines that was 13.7 miles
from a park called "Franklin
Park" in Fort Lauderdale, not
the mosque that was "across
the street from Franklin Park." But, I suppose that if there was
a
Franklin Park anywhere near any militant Islamist ever traveled, it's
"evidence" of why Franklin Park was used as the return address on the
anthrax letters. You just have to use a different standard for
what is "evidence" and what is not.
6. The Kandahar "anthrax lab":
A major part of the beliefs of the Anthrax Truthers who argue that al
Qaeda was behind the anthrax attacks is their claim that al Qaeda had
an anthrax lab in somewhere
in Afghanistan. This belief is based upon some apparent "false
positives" encountered during tests for anthrax in 2004 in a lab near
Kandahar, Afghanistan. Those tests found absolutely NO ANTHRAX
OF
ANY KIND in the lab. The tests just found pieces of DNA that were supposed to
be unique to the Ames strain of anthrax. The
positive results were noted in one swab taken from the outside of an
unopened medicine dropper package, one swab taken from a
sink, and one swab from a drain hose.
I
wrote about this in my comment
for June 3, 2012 and on
my blog on May 4, 2013.
When the FBI returned to the lab to check and attempt to verify what
had been
found, they dismantled much of the lab and took the parts back to the
U.S. for thorough testing. According to page 12 of the
FBI field report on the subject:
1254 samples
were taken from these 528 items and submitted to the NBFAC for analysis.
All 1254 samples were
negative for the
presence of Ba via culture analysis at the
NBFAC and PCR at NMRC.
So, there is NO
"evidence" about any anthrax in any al Qaeda lab in
Afghanistan, it's all just wild interpretations of rumors and
speculation by "insiders" and reporters who didn't know what they were
talking about.
And the fact that Bruce Ivins created trillions
of Ames anthrax spores and was in
charge of the murder weapon isn't evidence at all to
"DXer." Nor is the fact that, at the time of the mailings, Ivins
had more than enough anthrax spores to make the powders for the
letters. And those spores were a perfect match for what was found
in the letters.
Conclusion:
There is no meaningful evidence that any militant Islamists were behind
the anthrax attacks of 2001. All that the Truthers have is vague
beliefs that they twist to use as an argument, while all the solid real evidence the FBI found which
says Bruce
Ivins was the anthrax mailer isn't really evidence to the Truthers.
On May 18, 2013, "DXer"
wrote on Lew Weinstein's blog:
It was the failure to act on
the
travel of the two key hijackers that led to 9/11.
It was the failure to act on
the
travel of El-Shukrijumah that led to the botched Amerithrax
investigation.
If we don’t learn from
history, we
are bound to repeat it.
And
on May 24, 2013, "DXer
wrote on Lew Weinstein's blog:
the Amerithrax mystery was
never
solved.
The country remains at risk.
The leading suspect for the
mailings (in my opinion) is now head of
Al Qaeda’s external operations and is planning to the attack the United
States.
As George Bush famously
said,
failure is not an option.
Dr. Bruce Edwards Ivins
was the anthrax mailer, not
some militant Islamist. And, while there's no denying
that al Qaeda would use
anthrax and other biological weapons against us if they could, it is
also clear that no evidence of any
kind will persuade "DXer" that the anthrax attacks of 2001 was a
mystery that has indeed been
solved.
"When
objective
evidence disproves strongly held beliefs,
what
occurs,
according to the theorists of 'cognitive dissonance'
is
not
rejection of the beliefs but rigidifying, accompanied by
attempts
to rationalize the disproof. The result is 'cognitive rigidity';
in
lay
language, the knots of folly grow tighter."
--Barbara
W. Tuchman: "The March Of Folly"
If
I've missed any other "evidence" that "DXer" considers to be
important and wishes to explain,
I recommend he tell me about it on the subject thread on my Interactive
blog called "Facts
vs Evidence."
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