|
Bill Quick: More on anthrax...
Bill Quick points to David Tell's column at The Weekly Standard. Tell asks "Who is Syed Athar Abbas?" Tell's premise is that the FBI investigators' ideological PC blinders are causing them to look in the wrong places for the perpetrators of the anthrax attacks last October.Tell convincingly points a finger, not an American researcher, but at Syed Athar Abbas. Abbas is a Pakistani, which would be the first place I would be looking if I were an FBI agent. That doesn't mean I'd discard any clues that didn't point there, but a Pakistani would ring a lot more alarm bells than some guy in Frederick, Maryland, or a Sri Lankan, or even a bio-Wen Ho Lee. Digging into the machinery of terrorism doesn't lead to Frederick; it leads to Pakland. That's where al-Qaeda is. Al-Qaeda is the group that declared war on the U.S. and attacked us in September â lest we forget. In April, Abbas signed a plea agreement acknowledging guilt in a check-kiting scheme that netted him $100,000. Abbas was one of the guys the FBI tried to look up in the days immediately following 9/11. Abbas wasn't there, having skipped a month before. His lawyer says he'd gone home to Pakland to care for Dear Old Dad, who was dying. Before leaving, Abbas had bought a $100,000 "fine-food particulate mixer" that could be used to mix chemicals â really finely ground chemicals, as small as a single micron in diameter. Abbas didn't go into business creating cake mixes. In fact, he didn't take delivery of the machine, but had it transported... elsewhere. We don't know where "elsewhere" is. Despite his plea agreement, Abbas has refused to cooperate with the investigators who'd like to have a look at the mixer, and the folks who ran it. I was surprised when the investigation of the anthrax attacks veered toward domestic sources. We can only guess what evidence led it there. The evidence that's available to us, the Great Unwashed, points toward an Islamist: the timing, the fact that the first anthrax letter sent overseas went to Daily Jang, another to the U.S. consulate in Lahore, and then, as though to fog those two, to the consulate in Ekaterinburg in Russia, to a joint venture company in Vietnam, and to a doctor in Chile â I'd guess each of these last three was a red herring. If Abbas is a part of the terror machine, he's not the one who mixed up the anthrax, but he could well be a part of the logistics machine that supported the guys that did. It would be a really good idea to pump this guy full of happy juice and listen really closely as he babbles... Posted by: Fred Pruitt 2002-07-18 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=5800 |