-Caveat Lector-
>From http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A59509-
2001Oct26.html
>>>Now. If McVeigh did indeed have contacts with some imported
groups prior to his "act", might there not be some possibilities
here? McVeigh was in the Army and the source of this bacterium is
determined to be from whose pantry? A<>E<>R <<<
}}}>Begin
FBI and CIA Suspect Domestic Extremists
Officials Doubt Any Links to Bin Laden
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By Bob Woodward and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, October 27, 2001; Page A01
Top FBI and CIA officials believe that the anthrax attacks on
Washington, New York and Florida are likely the work of one or more
extremists in the United States who are probably not connected to
Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist organization, government
officials said yesterday.
Senior officials also are increasingly concerned that the
bioterrorism is diverting public attention from the larger threat
posed by bin Laden and his network, who are believed to be planning a
second wave of attacks against U.S. interests here or abroad that
could come at any time, officials said.
None of the 60 to 80 threat reports gathered daily by U.S.
intelligence agencies has connected the envelopes containing anthrax
spores to al Qaeda or other known organized terrorist groups, and the
evidence gleaned from the spore samples so far provides no solid link
to a foreign government or laboratory, several officials said.
"Everything seems to lean toward a domestic source," one senior
official said. "Nothing seems to fit with an overseas terrorist type
operation."
The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are considering a wide
range of domestic possibilities, including associates of right-wing
hate groups and U.S. residents sympathetic to the causes of Islamic
extremists. But investigators have no clear suspects, and are not
even certain whether there are other undetected letters that
contained the deadly microbe.
But federal health officials said yesterday that a new case of
pulmonary anthrax in a man who worked at a State Department mail
facility in Northern Virginia has persuaded them that more than one
contaminated letter may have been sent to the Washington area. Health
experts previously believed that a single letter, sent to the office
of Senate Majority Leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.), likely caused
all the anthrax reports in the Washington area as it came in contact
with other pieces of mail in the system.
Now the "working hypothesis would be that this is not cross-
contamination," said Jeffrey Koplan, director of the Centers for
Disease Control and Prevention. "There is not enough infectious
material from cross-contamination to do that."
However, ongoing searches of truckloads of undelivered mail to the
U.S. Capitol and other government buildings has turned up no other
letters laced with anthrax bacteria, leading FBI officials to assume
that the Daschle letter may still be the only local source. Two
employees at the U.S. Postal Service's Brentwood facility in
Washington have died from inhaling the lethal bacteria, and three
other local postal workers have contracted inhalational anthrax.
"This envelope, Daschle's envelope, is not watertight or airtight or
anything like that," one law enforcement official said. "It's porous.
At one or two microns, there's plenty of room for the spores to
escape."
Although there is consensus at the FBI and CIA that al Qaeda
associates are planning more serious attacks, "nobody believes the
anthrax scare we are going through is" the next wave of terrorism,
one senior official said. "There is no intelligence on it and it does
not fit any [al Qaeda] pattern."
No links between known foreign terrorist groups and the anthrax
letters have shown up on the daily Top Secret Threat Matrix, which
includes the latest raw intelligence on potential bombings,
hijackings or other terrorist attacks, one official said. Though
"lots of things are alarming" on the list, there is little agreement
on how, when or where an attack might be launched, officials said.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III warned earlier this week that
additional terror attacks are a "distinct possibility."
President Bush and other top U.S. officials have publicly voiced
their suspicion that bin Laden and al Qaeda -- accused of carrying
out the Sept. 11 suicide assaults on the World Trade Center and
Pentagon -- may be responsible for the anthrax mailings.
But Mueller, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft and other law enforcement officials
have said they have discovered no links between the mailings and bin Laden.
Authorities, speaking on condition of anonymity yesterday, sai
d they are increasingly doubtful that any connections will be found.
One official said the only significant clue raising the possibility of foreign
terrorist involvement is the conclusion of FBI behavioral scientists, who believe that
whoever wrote the three letters delivered to Daschle, N
BC News and the New York Post did not learn English as a first language.
But the writer could have lived in this country for some time, and the other evidence
gathered so far points away from a foreign source, several officials said.
The anti-Israel message in the anthrax letters and bin Laden's statements are echoed
by U.S. extremist groups, said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate director of the Simon
Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles.
One group, Aryan Action, praises the Sept. 11 attacks on its Web site and declares:
"Either you're fighting with the jews against al Qaeda, or you support al Qaeda
fighting against the jews."
Cooper said a meeting this year in Beirut was attended by neo-Nazis and Islamic
extremists united in their hatred of Jews. "Some extremists are now globalized," he
said.
White supremacists have been linked with anthrax in the past, but not in relation to
an attack.
Larry Wayne Harris, an Ohio microbiologist and former member of the Aryan Nations, was
convicted of wire fraud in 1997 after he obtained three vials of bubonic plague germs
through the mail. He was arrested the next year
near Las Vegas when the FBI acted on a tip that he was carrying anthrax. But agents
found harmless anthrax vaccine in the trunk of his car.
Cooper and officials at the Southern Poverty Law Project, which monitors U.S. hate
groups, said they have seen no evidence of a domestic group capable of launching a
sophisticated anthrax attack.
One of the challenges that a would-be terrorist faces is learning how to alter the
anthrax so that it will float in the air and disperse widely. The Washington Post
reported this week that the spores in the Daschle letter
had been treated with a chemical additive using technology so sophisticated that it
almost certainly came from the United States, Iraq or the former Soviet Union.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said yesterday, however, that investigators
believe a broad range of people are capable of the crime. "The qualityanthrax sent to
Senator Daschle's office could be produced by a Ph.D. m
icrobiologist and a sophisticated laboratory," he told reporters.
U.S. officials said the evidence so far does not point to either Russia or Iraq.
However, FBI checks of private and government laboratories in the United States have
not yet revealed any missing anthrax stockpiles, disgru
ntled scientists or other suspicious circumstances, one top official said.
Koplan, the CDC director, said he suspects more than one letter was involved based on
his understanding of how difficult it is to contract inhalational anthrax. To cause
the disease, 8,000 to 10,000 anthrax spores must en
ter a person's lungs.
Although some officials said it is possible for that many spores to have sloughed off
the Daschle letter onto another piece of mail, Koplan said that is hard to imagine.
"We all think that would be highly unlikely to virt
ually impossible," he said.
Koplan speculated that there may have been multiple mailings and that "there may be
several places within the federal government that have been deemed targets."
By contrast, the minuscule amounts of anthrax bacteria discovered at
Walter Reed Army Medical Center and the CIA "may well represent cross-
contamination," Koplan said.
William C. Patrick, who is retired from the U.S. Army installation at
Fort Detrick, Md., said extensive studies show that once anthrax
spores hit the ground or other surfaces they stick, and are very hard
to "re-aerosolize.
There's a theoretical possibility that a few spores picked up by an
envelope might cause a skin anthrax infection, but a case of
inhalational anthrax "is highly unlikely," Patrick said.
Staff writers David Brown, Ceci Connolly, Ellen Nakashima and Peter
Slevin and researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.
� 2001 The Washington Post Company
End<{{{
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