On September 11th, 2001, the Bush administration started inoculating themselves with Cipro, the antibiotic to prevent anthrax infection. Several journalists were also told to take Cipro by government officials, yet the precautionary advice wasn’t provided to the American public.

On October 5th, Robert Stevens, writer for the Florida Sun was diagnosed with anthrax and died soon after. Two postal workers, a nurse and an elderly widow also died from subsequent infection. The journalists in the know about taking Cipro could have saved the lives of these five people.

Four more letters containing high grade weaponized anthrax were sent to Senator Tom Daschle, Senator Patrick Leahey, NBC’s Tom Brokaw, and the New York Post. Meanwhile, the Bush administration, along with many establishment journalists (including those given the early Cipro tip), spread fear by implying the anthrax letters were the ‘second wave’ of terrorism perpetrated by Al Qaeda or Saddam Hussein. Officials continued to release ‘leaks’ linking anthrax to Hussein up until the 2003 Iraq invasion.

Once the Iraq war was in full swing, the FBI announced it had its first suspect, a US government scientist named Steven Hatfill, and proceeded to smear his reputation without bringing any criminal charges against him. Hatfill eventually fought back against the agency and settled out of court for nearly nearly six million dollars.

The FBI initiated a campaign to destroy its next suspect, Dr. Bruce Ivins, a bio-weapons expert who previously consulted on the investigation into the anthrax letters, going as far as trying to bribe his hospitalized daughter and convince his son to turn him in. Allegedly, Ivins committed suicide with an overdose of Tylenol while he was under 24-hour surveillance. Since the main suspect died before facing trial, the FBI unequivocally maintains Ivins was guilty of the attacks. Yet the case relies purely on circumstantial evidence, made even weaker by the National Academy of Sciences debunking the supposed DNA evidence linking Ivins to the anthrax used in the letters.

On the newest segment of Media Roots Radio: The 9/11 Bulletin, Robbie Martin speaks in-depth with author Graeme MacQueen about the timeline and anomalies surrounding the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Born in Nova Scotia, Graeme MacQueen received his Ph.D. in comparative religion (with a specialization in Buddhism) from Harvard University. He taught in the Religious Studies department of McMaster University in Canada for 30 years. In 1989 he became founding Director of the Centre for Peace Studies at McMaster, after which he helped develop the B.A. programme in Peace Studies and assisted with peace-building projects in Sri Lanka, Gaza, Croatia and Afghanistan. He has published numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters as well as several books. He is Co-editor of the Journal of 9/11 Studies, and has just released his book  The 2001 Anthrax Deception: The Case for a Domestic Conspiracy.

Follow @fluorescentgrey aka Robbie Martin 

Photo by Wikimedia 

Media Roots Radio presents ‘The 9/11 Bulletin’, featuring an in-depth discussion between Robbie Martin and 9/11 justice seeker and activist Jon Gold. They dissect the mountain of evidence that points to foreknowledge of the terrorist attacks and subsequent cover-up by the 9/11 commission.

More Resources

*Jon Gold’s YouTube channel is an excellent and plentiful resource of rare 9/11 videos

*In-depth fact sheet providing bullet-proof evidence that the Bush administration lied about 9/11

*Cindy Sheehan’s Soapbox blog

*Jon Gold’s book 9/11 Truther: the Fight for Peace Justice and Accountability

If you would like to directly download the podcast click the down arrow icon on the right of the Soundcloud display. To hide the comments to enable easier rewind and fast forward, click on the icon on the very bottom right.

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Listen to all previous episodes of Media Roots Radio here.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR– US signals intelligence – the much-vaunted ability of American military and spy units to eavesdrop on the radio calls and other electronic communications of an adversary – failed at crucial moments during the Vietnam War, according to a just-declassified National Security Agency history of the effort.

The 10,000 cryptographers and other signals personnel in Southeast Asia at the time did not predict the start of the Tet offensive on Jan. 31, 1968. Prior to that, signals intelligence may have actually misled President Johnson and other top policymakers about the nature of the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, in which a supposed North Vietnamese attack on US forces triggered a major escalation in the war.

US eavesdroppers had many successes during the war, according to the lengthy document, particularly in picking up the tactical communications of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters in the field.

But when it comes to major events, signals intelligence is not magic, as the history makes clear. That is a point current policymakers would do well to remember as they struggle to interpret intelligence dealing with the complex modern problems of nuclear proliferation and Islamist extremism.

In both the Tet and Gulf of Tonkin cases, “critical information was mishandled, misinterpreted, lost, or ignored,” writes NSA historian Robert Hanyok in the agency history.

Yet both were major turning points of the Vietnam conflict. The Gulf of Tonkin led to open US involvement in the fighting. Tet, though a tactical military defeat for the North, was a surprise for a US public that had been led to believe victory might be imminent. It may have contributed to declining support for the American intervention.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident occurred in early August 1964. On Aug. 2, North Vietnamese patrol boats attacked a US destroyer, the USS Maddox, in the Gulf of Tonkin, an arm of the South China Sea off Vietnam’s northeastern coast. Mr. Johnson warned the North that another such attack would bring “grave consequences.” On Aug. 4, Johnson announced that another attack had occurred and asked Congress to vote him powers to respond. On Aug. 7, Congress gave him those powers in the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which became the legal foundation for increased US involvement.

Even at the time, some doubted that the second attack had occurred. Yet the Johnson administration produced what seemed a key piece of evidence – a North Vietnamese Navy after-action report, intercepted by the NSA, which appeared to discuss the battle.

In fact, the intercept had been mistranslated, according to the just-released report. The Vietnamese word for “military operations” can also mean “long movement,” and the intercept in reality referred to the towing of two North Vietnamese patrol boats some distance for repairs.

Furthermore, US intelligence intercepted no communications or radar emissions associated with the assumed attack. Mr. Hanyok, the NSA historian, cites Sherlock Holmes, who famously once solved a case because a dog did not bark, proving something did not occur.

Continue reading about how the Gulf of Tonkin Never Happened.

© CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR, 2008

Photo by Wikipedia Common Domain from US Naval History.

ABC NEWS– In the early 1960s, America’s top military leaders reportedly drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in U.S. cities to create public support for a war against Cuba.

Code named Operation Northwoods, the plans reportedly included the possible assassination of Cuban émigrés, sinking boats of Cuban refugees on the high seas, hijacking planes, blowing up a U.S. ship, and even orchestrating violent terrorism in U.S. cities.

The plans were developed as ways to trick the American public and the international community into supporting a war to oust Cuba’s then new leader, communist Fidel Castro.

America’s top military brass even contemplated causing U.S. military casualties, writing: “We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba,” and, “casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation.”

Details of the plans are described in Body of Secrets (Doubleday), a new book by investigative reporter James Bamford about the history of America’s largest spy agency, the National Security Agency. However, the plans were not connected to the agency, he notes.

The plans had the written approval of all of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and were presented to President Kennedy’s defense secretary, Robert McNamara, in March 1962. But they apparently were rejected by the civilian leadership and have gone undisclosed for nearly 40 years.

“These were Joint Chiefs of Staff documents. The reason these were held secret for so long is the Joint Chiefs never wanted to give these up because they were so embarrassing,” Bamford told ABCNEWS.com.

“The whole point of a democracy is to have leaders responding to the public will, and here this is the complete reverse, the military trying to trick the American people into a war that they want but that nobody else wants.”

Gunning for War

The documents show “the Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government,” writes Bamford.

The Joint Chiefs even proposed using the potential death of astronaut John Glenn during the first attempt to put an American into orbit as a false pretext for war with Cuba, the documents show.

Should the rocket explode and kill Glenn, they wrote, “the objective is to provide irrevocable proof … that the fault lies with the Communists et all Cuba [sic].”

The plans were motivated by an intense desire among senior military leaders to depose Castro, who seized power in 1959 to become the first communist leader in the Western Hemisphere — only 90 miles from U.S. shores.

The earlier CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba by Cuban exiles had been a disastrous failure, in which the military was not allowed to provide firepower.The military leaders now wanted a shot at it.

“The whole thing was so bizarre,” says Bamford, noting public and international support would be needed for an invasion, but apparently neither the American public, nor the Cuban public, wanted to see U.S. troops deployed to drive out Castro.

Reflecting this, the U.S. plan called for establishing prolonged military — not democratic — control over the island nation after the invasion.

“That’s what we’re supposed to be freeing them from,” Bamford says. “The only way we would have succeeded is by doing exactly what the Russians were doing all over the world, by imposing a government by tyranny, basically what we were accusing Castro himself of doing.”

‘Over the Edge’

The Joint Chiefs at the time were headed by Eisenhower appointee Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, who, with the signed plans in hand made a pitch to McNamara on March 13, 1962, recommending Operation Northwoods be run by the military.

Whether the Joint Chiefs’ plans were rejected by McNamara in the meeting is not clear. But three days later, President Kennedy told Lemnitzer directly there was virtually no possibility of ever using overt force to take Cuba, Bamford reports. Within months, Lemnitzer would be denied another term as chairman and transferred to another job.

The secret plans came at a time when there was distrust in the military leadership about their civilian leadership, with leaders in the Kennedy administration viewed as too liberal, insufficiently experienced and soft on communism. At the same time, however, there real were concerns in American society about their military overstepping its bounds.

There were reports U.S. military leaders had encouraged their subordinates to vote conservative during the election.

And at least two popular books were published focusing on a right-wing military leadership pushing the limits against government policy of the day.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee published its own report on right-wing extremism in the military, warning a “considerable danger” in the “education and propaganda activities of military personnel” had been uncovered. The committee even called for an examination of any ties between Lemnitzer and right-wing groups. But Congress didn’t get wind of Northwoods, says Bamford.

“Although no one in Congress could have known at the time,” he writes, “Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs had quietly slipped over the edge.”

Even after Lemnitzer was gone, he writes, the Joint Chiefs continued to plan “pretext” operations at least through 1963.

One idea was to create a war between Cuba and another Latin American country so that the United States could intervene. Another was to pay someone in the Castro government to attack U.S. forces at the Guantanamo naval base — an act, which Bamford notes, would have amounted to treason. And another was to fly low level U-2 flights over Cuba, with the intention of having one shot down as a pretext for a war.

“There really was a worry at the time about the military going off crazy and they did, but they never succeeded, but it wasn’t for lack of trying,” he says.

After 40 Years

Ironically, the documents came to light, says Bamford, in part because of the 1992 Oliver Stone film JFK, which examined the possibility of a conspiracy behind the assassination of President Kennedy.

As public interest in the assassination swelled after JFK’s release, Congress passed a law designed to increase the public’s access to government records related to the assassination.

The author says a friend on the board tipped him off to the documents.

Afraid of a congressional investigation, Lemnitzer had ordered all Joint Chiefs documents related to the Bay of Pigs destroyed, says Bamford. But somehow, these remained.

“The scary thing is none of this stuff comes out until 40 years after,” says Bamford.

See Declassified Document HERE.

© COPYRIGHT ABC, 2001