Fbi Again Refuses To Release Anonymous Anthrax Letter

The FBI has refused for the third time to release an anonymous letter it received in early October 2001 warning about a potential bio-terror attack.

In a note apologizing for the long delay in their latest decision, justice department officials last week wrote that releasing the letter ``could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of the personal privacy of third parties'' or to ``disclose the identities of confidential sources and information furnished by such sources.''

But for nearly two years the FBI has publicly maintained that the anonymous letter -- which arrived after three deadly anthrax letters were mailed from New Jersey, but before the first victim fell fatally ill in Florida -- was just a strange coincidence, irrelevant to the actual attacks.

The government's prolonged secrecy about the letter has helped convince Ayaad Assaad, a former Army bio-weapons researcher it names as a potential terrorist, that the warning was among the clues that led investigators to the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (known as USAMRIID) in Frederick, Md, where he once worked.

The letter said that Assaad had the ``means and the will'' to carry out a biological terrorist attack against the United States, and that he had instructed his two sons to carry out the crusade if anything happened to him. It also contained precise details of his work at Fort Detrick, and his current job at the Environmental Protection Agency.

Assaad, who has been a U.S. citizen for decades, believes that whoever sent the deadly anthrax letters also sent the anonymous warning in an effort to set him up as a scapegoat. That possibility seems bolstered by the fact that Assaad had his share of enemies at USAMRIID.

He was at the heart of a bitter internal feud at the Army lab in the early 1990s. Colleagues calling themselves the ``Camel Club'' mocked his ethnic origin cruelly and openly. Their conduct sparked an internal Army investigation that led to at least one of the Camel Club's ring leaders losing his job, and others believing that their career paths were severely limited within the Army.

The investigation also turned up astonishingly poor inventory control at USAMRIID's pathology lab. At one point, more than two dozen samples of pathogens including the Ebola virus and Ames anthrax -- the strain used in the mail attacks -- went missing. Investigators also found evidence of late night, off-the-books research being done with what appeared to be anthrax.

http://articles.courant.com/2003-07-18/news/0307180601_1_release-anonymous-anthrax-letter-anonymous-letter-anthrax-laced-letters

Special Categories: Camel Club (Corpus, Dementia, Disease, Entropy, Extremis, Histrionics, Paranoia, Pathos, Purge, Trance, Void, Wasteland)

Categories: Dishonesty, Documents, False Flag Terrorism