20th Annaversary of the fairytale of Big Lies

[Peter Lemkin]

The Lone Nut
As Lisa Pease points out in her volume on the RFK assassination, when intelligence agencies plan complex operations they plan both for the success of these operations and for their possible flaws and failures.[9]
Lisa Pease [Source: audible.com]
There were plenty of failures in the 9/11 operation (such as the ill-timed destruction of Building 7), and there is evidence of rapid moves to conceal these failures. Although the anthrax operation failed in an even more thorough way than the 9/11 operation, those in control moved quickly and smoothly to repair the damage.
One of their first moves was to shift from a hypothesis of multiple attackers (multiple attackers were widely assumed prior to the collapse of the narrative) to a hypothesis of a single attacker.[10] The single attacker, or “lone wolf” hypothesis, is a common fallback position when an intelligence operation falters. Being alone, this wolf implicates others only weakly. He or she is ultimately uninteresting and raises few questions.
There is a subcategory of the lone wolf hypothesis that, for better or worse, is often called the “lone nut.” This narrative is extremely valuable for intelligence planners. A “lone nut”—a mentally unbalanced perpetrator—is even less interesting, in terms of connections and motives, than other types of lone wolves.
We may say that the lone nut’s story is “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” (Macbeth). Since the tale signifies nothing, there is no need to look for rational motives, patterns, or links to groups and institutions.
The anthrax attacks had, during their early days, been blamed on insane (fanatical, suicidal, erratic) foreign Muslims. The shift was made, after the failure of this narrative, to an insane domestic individual. It was Ivins’ misfortune to have had mental health problems and to have been chosen for the role of perpetrator.
I have argued at length in my book that the anthrax operation was not carried out by a lone nut but by a rational group, and, without repeating that argument here, let me suggest we experimentally put the lone nut in storage and look for both connections and motive.
Restoring the Missing Connections
I will be content here to make one simple point: There was overlap in personnel in the 9/11 and anthrax operations. Because of this overlap it is clear that the two operations were planned by a single group.
Here are two sets of evidence of overlapping personnel:
(1) Locations[11]
There was a 71-mile strip along the coast of Florida where 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were active. Robert Stevens, the first anthrax victim, died in the middle of this strip.
If this fact were insignificant we would expect this to become clear as we examined the situation closely. We find the reverse. Connections come to light that cannot be accidental.
Anthrax victim Stevens was employed by a tabloid in Boca Raton called the Sun. The editor-in-chief of this tabloid, Mike Irish, had a wife, Gloria Irish, who was a real estate agent. In her professional capacity she had, in the summer of 2001, found apartments for two of the 9/11 hijackers, Marwan al-Shehhi and Hamza al-Ghamdi.

• Marwan al-Shehhi [Source: wikipedia.org]
  
• Hamza al-Ghamdi [Source: wikipedia.org]
  
• Gloria Irish [Source: realtor.com]
  

Al-Shehhi is the man who supposedly piloted United Airlines 175 into the South Tower. He is said to have been a close friend of Mohamed Atta, his fellow martyr.
Gloria Irish had driven al-Shehhi and al-Ghamdi around town numerous times, and she remembered them well. Interviewed by the press, she said: “I mean, Marwan called me all the time.” She said they had a joking and friendly relationship.
But Gloria Irish had known anthrax victim Robert Stevens for 25 years and had helped him purchase a house. She was, therefore, the real estate agent of the first anthrax victim and of men alleged to have carried out the 9/11 attacks.
Indeed, the hijacker-real estate connection went beyond al-Shehhi and al-Ghamdi. The apartment Irish found for them became home to four of the hijackers.
The links between Gloria Irish, the hijackers, and the anthrax attacks were reported in the media in October 2001.
In Florida, The St. Petersburg Times noted, when speaking of the apartment Gloria Irish had found for the hijackers:
“The Delray apartment is central to a massive federal investigation into the terrorist attacks. Investigators trying to piece the puzzle together created a diagram that includes photos of the 19 hijackers who seized control of four airplanes on Sept. 11.”
The journalist continued: “It is clear that the apartment was a meeting ground for terrorists, authorities say. Now they must determine whether unit 1504 was also a hatching ground for the anthrax attacks.”
Reporting all of this openly was not only permitted at the time but, I believe, encouraged.
This is because the insiders responsible for the anthrax attacks were then assuming the attacks would successfully be pinned on al-Qaeda and Iraq. Revealing the anthrax attacks to have been perpetrated by the parties responsible for 9/11 was part of the plan.
We were all to have followed the trail of gigantic breadcrumbs and concluded that the connected sets of 2001 attacks were the result of a collaboration between al-Qaeda and its sponsor, Iraq.
Though few remember the Florida connections today, they have not gone away. And if we choose to ignore them we are extremely poor sleuths.
(2) Crop-dusters[12]
On September 23-24, 2001, all crop-duster planes in the U.S. were grounded.
Attorney General John Ashcroft explained to Congress that crop dusters could be used to “distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction.” He added that the ubiquitous Mohamed Atta “had been compiling information about crop-dusting before the Sept. 11 attacks.”
But there was more. Groups of “Middle Eastern men” had apparently visited an airport in Belle Glade, Florida—“about an hour’s drive from Delray Beach, the coastal community where some of the alleged hijackers are believed to have lived”—to inspect and inquire about crop dusters.
Willie Lee, “general manager of South Florida Crop Care,” said the men described themselves as flight students. The apparent leader of the group was especially visible and aggressive. Employee James Lester identified this man as Mohamed Atta.
“I recognized him because he stayed on my feet all the time. I just about had to push him away from me,” Lester said.
[Source: steven-war-ran.blogspot.com]
Atta supposedly visited twice more over the following months, while a variety of other Middle Eastern men came back repeatedly, taking photographs and video footage of the planes. To say they made themselves visible and unforgettable is to understate the case. Willie Lee said, “They were asking the types of questions that other people didn’t ask.” They were such a pain in the neck that Lee asked the police to “run them off.”
As with the related tale of Atta’s visit to the office of the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Florida, we are offered a trail of breadcrumbs.
But what is the significance of crop-dusters? If they played a role in the theater of 2001, what do they signify? The answer is that they signified anthrax, and anthrax signified Iraq.
Iraq had possessed, at one time, an anthrax program, and it had experimented with aerial dispersion. The program had been shut down after the 1991 Gulf War and the materials destroyed, but U.S. planners were able to befog the issue and keep alive the fear of aerial dispersion by Iraq. One Western news story revealingly referred to crop dusters—a kind of poor man’s aerial dispersion technology—as Saddam Hussein’s “doomsday option.”[13]
During his spectacularly deceptive performance for the UN Security Council in 2003, preparing the world for the U.S.-led assault on Iraq, Colin Powell covered all the bases.[14]
He held up a vial of simulated anthrax, talked about how an equivalent amount of anthrax had closed down the Hart Senate Office Building in 2001, discussed Iraq’s anthrax program, and showed photos of Iraqi aerial dispersion planes.
Colin Powell holds up vial of anthrax in making his case for war in Iraq before the UN on February 5, 2003. [Source: wired.com]
He thereby narratively (not evidentially) connected anthrax to aerial dispersion and therefore WMD, to Iraq, and to the 2001 anthrax attacks on the U.S. homeland and Congress. There was little work to be done to lasso crop dusters into the field of guilt.
The crop-duster stories of the time remain extremely important today for sincere researchers, even though they are largely forgotten. They reveal the anthrax-9/11 connection.
They also, of course, show the false links being made to Iraq. Crop-duster stories were but one of the methods of implicating Iraq in the anthrax attacks. The idea that the anthrax in the attacks had come from Iraq was pushed vigorously in the media in the weeks after the first anthrax diagnosis.
The phrase repeatedly used in the press was (with some variations): “they aren’t making this stuff in caves.” What this meant was: al-Qaeda foot soldiers evidently have delivered this material, but these guys could not have manufactured such a sophisticated bioweapon in caves in Afghanistan—they must have had a state supplier.
And that supplier, went the story, was Iraq. ABC News went so far as to claim repeatedly that the spores in the attack letters had been coated in bentonite—the Iraqi method of weaponization.[15]
But this was just more fiction: The claims went up in smoke when unbought scientists examined the spores. Far from being weaponized with bentonite, they were weaponized (here I speak of the sophisticated spores sent to the senators) in a far more complex way that had the signature of U.S. domestic military/intelligence labs.
There were other Iraq tales circulated. One of the most famous was the tale of Mohamed Atta meeting in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent.[16] The story was supposed to support the idea that Iraq had sponsored al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attacks, but it was also used to suggest that Atta was arranging to get chemical or biological weapons from Iraq.
“Some federal officials have wondered whether chemical or biological weapons might have been a subject of discussion when Mohamed Atta, one of the Sept. 11 hijackers, met last year with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. Iraq is known to have worked on the development of such weapons.”
Widely spread by the media, this story turned out to be yet another piece of misinformation. No such meeting ever took place.
To sum up: The story promoted in the fall of 2001 was that the hijackers allegedly responsible for the 9/11 attacks were, in the lead-up to that event, also preparing to attack the U.S. with anthrax. Being simple fellows with limited technological expertise, they were exploring the idea of using U.S. crop-dusters, and in the end they chose an even more crude method—sending the spores in letters. But the anthrax spores were not their own preparation: They came from Iraq, al-Qaeda’s sponsor.
Thus were two military invasions, that of Afghanistan and that of Iraq, simultaneously justified in advance.