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| Islam,Terrorism and Jihad | |
| 02 Aug 2008, NewAgeIslam.Com | |
| Man Suspected in Anthrax Attacks Said to Commit Suicide | |
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By DAVID STOUT and MITCHELL L. BLUMENTHAL, New York Times Published: August 2, 2008
WASHINGTON — The seven-year investigation into the anthrax attacks that traumatized and baffled the nation just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks has taken a stunning new turn with the apparent suicide of a scientist who was the prime suspect in the case.
With investigators close to filing charges against him, the scientist — Bruce E. Ivins, 62 — apparently took his own life with a prescription painkiller, Tylenol mixed with codeine. He died Tuesday at a hospital in Frederick, Md., about an hour's drive north of Washington.
Dr. Ivins, who was a biodefense researcher at Fort Detrick, had been told of the investigation into the anthrax incidents, said his lawyer, Paul F. Kemp of Rockville, Md., who issued a statement insisting that his client was innocent.
"For six years, Dr. Ivins fully cooperated with that investigation, assisting the government in every way that was asked of him," Mr. Kemp said. "The relentless pressure of accusation and innuendo takes its toll in different ways on different people, as has already been seen in this investigation. In Dr. Ivins' case, it led to his untimely death."
Dr. Ivins, who the Associated Press said had received three degrees, including a doctorate from the University of Cincinnati, appeared to have been a brilliant but deeply troubled man, according to a portrait emerging from legal documents and the recollections of friends and acquaintances.
He was a church-going family man, and a dozen of his fellow parishioners gathered Friday morning to pray for him at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Frederick, where the Rev. Richard Murphy recalled him as "a quiet man ... always very helpful and pleasant," the A.P. said.
But he was clearly in great mental anguish in recent weeks. Maryland court documents show he had been under psychiatric treatment and had been served with a restraining order directing him to stay away from a woman he was accused of stalking and threatening. And a lab colleague told the A.P. he was recently removed from his workplace by the police because of fears that he had become a danger to himself or others.
One of his scientific specialties was working on a vaccine that would be effective against anthrax infection, even in difficult cases in which different strains of anthrax were mixed. In a scientific journal last month, Dr. Ivins wrote of the limited supply of monkeys available for testing the vaccine, and how, in any event, testing on animals would not necessarily indicate how humans would react.
The death of Dr. Ivins, who grew up in Ohio, is the most dramatic development in the case of the anthrax attacks, which killed five people and made 17 others ill in the fall of 2001 when they were exposed to anthrax spores sent through the mails. Letters containing anthrax powder was also sent to lawmakers' offices on Capitol Hill, causing great alarm in the capital when it was still jittery from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Letters were also found containing a similar-looking powder but no anthrax.
Little more than a month ago, the Justice Department agreed to pay $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit by another bio-defence researcher at the same facility, Steven J. Hatfill. The settlement ended a five-year legal battle over Dr. Hatfill's allegations that investigators violated his privacy by leaking information on the investigation to journalists.
At the time, the Department of Justice emphatically denied any liability in connection with Dr. Hatfill's claims, despite agreeing to settle with him, and it was far from clear whether the suicide of Dr. Ivins might bring an end to the anthrax case — or point the way to further developments.
Justice Department officials have not decided whether to close the investigation.
Federal officials were caught off guard by Dr. Ivins's death, and were limited in what they could say by grand jury secrecy rules. "All of that stuff is sealed — we have nothing we can talk about," an official said, adding that federal officials also needed to brief the victims' families before making any public statements.
Dr. Ivins, who was married and the father of two, died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital, according to an obituary published Friday in The Frederick News-Post, which said that he is survived by his wife of 33 years, Diane, and by a son and a daughter.
The obituary said Dr. Ivins had worked at Fort Detrick for 36 years, was a member of the American Red Cross, and was a parishioner at St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church in Frederick, "where he was as a musician for many years for church services."
The Los Angeles Times first reported the investigation of Dr. Ivins and the apparent connection to his death on Friday. But it was clear from the comments of Dr. Ivins's lawyer and officials close to the case that the researcher had been under suspicion for many months.
The White House said President Bush had been informed that a major new chapter in the case was about to unfold. Thomas R. Ivins Jr., Bruce Ivins' brother, said that another brother, Charles Ivins, called him earlier this week and said that Bruce had died of the overdose, and that the death was believed to be a suicide.
Thomas Ivins, who at 73 is the eldest of the three brothers, said in an interview Friday morning from his home in Middletown, Ohio, that F.B.I. agents had contacted him about 18 months ago to ask about Bruce. He said he had been estranged from his youngest brother and had not spoken to him in 20 years, so he could tell the agents little about him or his work. "I gave them family background and history," he said.
He said his father, T. Randall Ivins, ran a pharmacy in Lebanon, Ohio, where the brothers grew up.
A relative who answered the phone at Charles Ivins' house said he was unable to talk because he was recovering from open-heart surgery following a recent heart attack. "It's a very difficult time," said the relative, who declined to give her name.
The laboratory at Fort Detrick, officially known as the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, has been at the centre of the F.B.I. and in fact Dr. Ivins had assisted in analyzing samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks.
"We are not at this time making any official statements or comments regarding this situation," Debbie Weierman, a spokeswoman for the F.B.I's Washington field office, which is investigating the anthrax attacks, told The Associated Press on Friday. The A.P. reported that prosecutors were planning to seek the death penalty in the case.
The 2001 anthrax mailings were baffling in several ways, not least because the victims — whetherthey were chosen or were struck at random — seemed to have nothing in common. The dead included an editor at a tabloid newspaper based in Florida, a woman in New York City, another woman in Connecticut, and two postal workers at a huge mail-sorting building in Washington, D.C.
Targets of the mailings included Tom Brokaw of NBC and two Democratic senators: Tom Daschle of South Dakota, then his party's Senate leader, and Patrick J. Leahy, a leading member of the Senate Judiciary Committee but arguably not an instantly recognizable figure outside Washington and his home state.
The letters were traced to a post office near Trenton, N.J., and had return addresses that, while fictional, suggested some knowledge of local geography.
Scott Shane and Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting from Washington.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/washington/02anthrax.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin |
Islam and the West 02 Aug 2008, NewAgeIslam.Com Will Bush Bully Maliki Into Backing Off a Withdrawal Timeline -- Again?
By Gareth Porter, IPS News.
Posted July 31, 2008.
Now is not the first time the Iraqi Prime Minister sought a timetable for U.S. withdrawal. Tools
WASHINGTON, Jul 28 (IPS) -- Many official and unofficial proponents of a long-term U.S. military presence in Iraq are dismissing Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's demand for a U.S. timeline for withdrawal as political posturing, assuming that he will abandon it under pressure.
But that demand was foreshadowed by an episode in June 2006 in which al-Maliki circulated a draft policy calling for negotiation of just such a withdrawal timetable and the George W. Bush administration had to intervene to force the prime minister to drop it.
The context of al-Maliki's earlier advocacy of a timetable for withdrawal was the serious Iraqi effort to negotiate an agreement with seven major Sunni armed groups that had begun under his predecessor Ibrahim al-Jaafari in early 2006. The main Sunni demand in those talks had been for a timetable for full withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Under the spur of those negotiations, al-Jaafari and Iraqi national security adviser Mowaffak al-Rubaei had developed a plan for taking over security in all 18 provinces of Iraq from the United States by the end of 2007. During his first week as prime minister in late May, al-Maliki referred twice publicly to that plan.
At the same time al-Maliki began working on a draft "national reconciliation plan", which was in effect a road map to final agreement with the Sunni armed groups. The Sunday Times of London, which obtained a copy of the draft, reported Jun. 23, 2006 that it included the following language:
"We must agree on a time schedule to pull out the troops from Iraq, while at the same time building up the Iraqi forces that will guarantee Iraqi security, and this must be supported by a United Nations Security Council decision."
That formula, linking a withdrawal timetable with the build-up of Iraqi forces, was consistent with the position taken by Sunni armed groups in their previous talks with U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, which was that the timetable for withdrawal would be "linked to the timescale necessary to rebuild Iraq's armed forces and security services". One of the Sunni commanders who had negotiated with Khalilzad described the resistance position in those words to the London-based Arabic-language Alsharq al Awsat in May 2006.
The Iraqi government draft was already completed when Bush arrived in Baghdad June 13 without any previous consultation with al-Maliki, giving the Iraqi leader five minutes' notice that Bush would be meeting him in person rather than by videoconference.
The al-Maliki cabinet sought to persuade Bush to go along with the withdrawal provision of the document. In his press conference upon returning, Bush conceded that Iraqi cabinet members in the meeting had repeatedly brought up the issue of reconciliation with the Sunni insurgents.
In fact, after Bush had left, Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, a Sunni, said he had asked Bush to agree to a timetable for withdrawal of all foreign forces. Then President Jalal Talabani, a Kurd, released a statement of support for that request.
Nevertheless, Bush signalled his rejection of the Iraqi initiative in his June 14 press conference, deceitfully attributing his own rejection of a timetable to the Iraqi government. "And the willingness of some to say that if we're in power we'll withdraw on a set timetable concerns people in Iraq," Bush declared.
When the final version of the plan was released to the public June 25, the offending withdrawal timetable provision had disappeared. Bush was insisting that the al-Maliki government embrace the idea of a "conditions-based" U.S. troop withdrawal. Khalilzad gave an interview with Newsweek the week the final reconciliation plan was made public in which he referred to a "conditions-driven roadmap".
Washington Post columnist David Ignatius further revealed in a June 28 column that Khalilzad had told him that Gen. George Casey, then commander of the Multi-National Force -- Iraq, was going to meet with al-Maliki about the formation of a "joint U.S.-Iraqi committee" to decide on "the conditions related to a road map for an ultimate withdrawal of U.S. troops". Thus al-Maliki was being forced to agree to a negotiating body that symbolized a humiliating dictation by the occupying power to a client government.
The heavy pressure that had obviously been applied to al-Maliki on the issue during and after the Bush visit was resented by al-Maliki and al-Rubaie. The Iraqi rancor over that pressure was evident in the op-ed piece by al-Rubaei published in the Washington Post a week after Bush's visit.
Although the article did not refer directly to al-Maliki's reconciliation plan and its offer to negotiate a timetable for withdrawal, the very first line implied that the issue was uppermost in the Iraqi prime minister's mind. "There has been much talk about a withdrawal of U.S. and coalition troops from Iraq," wrote al-Rubaie, "but no defined timeline has yet been set."
Al-Rubaei declared "Iraq's ambition to have full control of the country by the end of 2008". Although few readers understood the import of that statement, it was an indication that the al-Maliki regime was prepared to negotiate complete withdrawal of U.S. troops by the end of 2008.
Then the national security adviser indicated that the government already had its own targets for the first two phases of foreign troop withdrawal: withdrawal of more than 30,000 troops to under 100,000 foreign troops by the end of 2006 and withdrawal of "most of the remaining troops" -- i.e., to less than 50,000 troops -- by end of the 2007.
The author explained why the "removal" of foreign troops was so important to the Iraqi government: it would "remove psychological barriers and the reason that many Iraqis joined the resistance in the first place"; it would also "allow the Iraqi government to engage with some of our neighbours that have to date been at the very least sympathetic to the resistance …" Finally, al-Rubaie asserted, it would "legitimize the Iraqi government in the eyes of its own people."
He also took a carefully-worded shot at the Bush administration's actions in overruling the centrepiece of Iraq's reconciliation policy. "While Iraq is trying to gain independence from the United States," he wrote, "some influential foreign figures" were still "trying to spoon-feed our government and take a very proactive role in many key decisions."
The 2006 episode left a lasting imprint on both the Bush and al-Maliki regimes, which is still very much in evidence in the present conflict over a withdrawal timetable. The Bush White House continues to act as though it is confident that al-Maliki can be pressured to back down as he was forced to do before. And at least some of al-Maliki's determination to stand up to Bush in 2008 is related to the bitterness that he and al-Rubaie, among others, still feel over the way Bush humiliated them in 2006.
It appears that Bush is making the usual dominant power mistake in relations to al-Maliki. He may have been a pushover in mid-2006, but the circumstances have changed, in Iraq, in the U.S.-Iraq-Iran relations and in the United States. The al-Maliki regime now has much greater purchase to defy Bush than it had two years ago.
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Asadullah Syed
9:03 AM
Sultan Shahin
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