Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld has quit as prosecutor, claiming that, potential exculpatory evidence has not been provided to the defense in the case of a teenager accused of throwing a grenade at US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Good for him, though the fact that he has refused to testify without immunity indicates that this is worse than just ignoring a bit of evidence.
We have US sources accusing Pakistani forces aiding the Taliban, and reports that the Pakistanis have shot down a US drone.
This is not moving in a positive direction.
We have a major truck bombing in Islamabad, with 53 dead.
Pakistan has never been a particularly stable place, but it appears to be getting worse.
Yep, some of the whiz kids at the National Defense University are pitching the idea that they need funding to protect us all from terrorists who would use Wizard of Warcraft to rehearse attacks on all of us.
Yes, it’s real, see, they’ve got PowerPoints, and everything, complete with a conversation using code words, simulated, of course.
See how they simulate some seriously Kule d00dz haxor terrorists?
So they need to pay someone play Warcraft in order to look for this non-existent problem.
I want the job….I REALLY want the job.
In reality, if terrorists want to engage in virtual training, they will do it on a private server…Just like you see people do with Doom….
After all, who wants to be in the middle of planning to nuke the VP residence, when some n00b comes up and starts asking stupid questions?
If this is why my taxes are so fracking high, I’d rather pay for Sarah Palin’s bridge to nowhere.
It appears that the Pakistanis have gotten a bit hot under the collar about US incursions, as they have just authorized firing on US troops if they cross the border:
“The orders are clear,” Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said in an interview. “In case it happens again in this form, that there is a very significant detection, which is very definite, no ambiguity, across the border, on ground or in the air: open fire.”
Jeff Stein of CQ politics, makes a very good point here, that Pakistan increasingly seems to resemble Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge.
There is one difference though, which Mr. Stein notes: Pakistan has nuclear weapons.
Because, seriously for Bush and His Evil Minions™ to try to spin the continued breathing of Osama bin Laden with this:
Q: But Osama bin Laden is the one that — you keep talking about his lieutenants, and, yes, they are very important, but Osama bin Laden was the mastermind of 9/11 —
MS. PERINO: No, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11, and he’s sitting in jail right now.
I guess that bin Laden was some 6 foot 6 inch tall dude suffering from Marfan’s related kidney failure who occasionally attended meetings of the Ladies Sewing Circle & Terrorist Society, or some such.
Every time I think that I’ve grown too cynical to be shocked, they kick it up a notch.
The mendacity of these folks, even after 7 years, continues to stun me.
My first thought was that their might be a Chilean connection, since it was on 9/11 that Allende was assassinated, my second thought was that it was a Reichstag fire, and there were dozens, if not hundreds of other odd thoughts.
The oddest one, and the one that sticks with me was driving home.
I was taking the outer loop of the Baltimore Beltway (I-695), and at the junction with I-83, which sucks, I blew through in no time at all. There were perhaps a dozen other cars on my stretch of interstate, and I remember thinking, “So this is what it takes to fix the traffic here.”
Completely inappropriate, slightly demented, and it is the feeling that I still remember the most vividly.
I’m not sure if it’s just me that is weird, or all of humanity.
Way to piss off an essential ally against terrorism in the region, by sending in a helicopter based infantry assault, and killing some number of civilians.
I’m not sure if this is the start of a new policy, a statement of displeasure regarding Pakistan’s Ramadan cease fire, or some attempt to gin up something for the us elections, but in either case, the consequences, in terms of destabilizing a nuclear armed Pakistan, are very concerning.
Note that this was not the NATO force that did this, as, “American troops in Afghanistan operate under a NATO chain of command, the Special Operations forces who carried out this attack answer only to American commanders.”
In any case, this does not bode well for US-Pakistani relations.
The UN has confirmed this, and it is another indicator of how ill suited and ill prepared the 4 US fixed wing air forces* for counter insurgency.
They killed 90 civilians, and probably created 3x that number of insurgents.
*USAF, USN, and USMC but particularly the USAF.
First, we have an editorial in Nature, one of the most prestigious scientific publication in world, suggesting that the data provided this far by the FBI has been incomplete and not properly reviewed. They strongly suggest that the FBI is using selective information releases to make their case, and I agree.
Meanwhile, this breathless article detailing the efforts to identify the sample genetically seems to be exactly what the editors of Nature are objecting to.
I again would note that none of the information provided by the FBI has shown how the samples might have been weaponized, a capability that was not present at Bruce Ivin’s lab.
Additionally, the FBI will be releasing more evidence to buttress their claims.
Personally, I’m not as concerned about the timeline to mail the letter from New Jersey as the complete lack of evidence of weaponization equipment or experience.
It’s clear that he could lyophilize (freeze dry) his anthrax, but then it would have to be milled in some manner to a very small particle size, and then coated with a substance that gives it a static charge so that it would aerosolize well, and this was not something done at the lab.
It appears that the only question left is whether he will leave the country.
Good riddance.
What this appeal means is that he does not have the votes to forestall impeachment, and he knows it.
We are now seeing reports where people are suggesting that he would move to Turkey when he steps down.
I’m not claiming a conspiracy, after all, if you were going to do this, you would not choose someone in Arkansas like Bill Gwatney, which is not a likely location for a Republican pickup in Congress or an Obama victory in November.
I will say, however that the tenor of political discourse, with such things as David Boehner calling for Pelosi’s lynching contributes to these events.
With it increasingly looking like Obama will take the White House, there is a growing segment of the Republican base, who believe that God intends them to rule forever, who will be willing, even eager, to use terrorism in furtherance of their cause.
It appears that there was no autopsy of Bruce Ivins following his death?
You have the unexpected death of a suspect in what is probably the crime of the decade, and the coroner decides, “They say that it is suicide, that is enough for me.”
WTF are they thinking?
I agree with revere, “If, in fact, no autopsy was done on Ivins, the whole thing doesn’t just smell bad. It reeks”
DHS just chose Flora, MS, which was 14th out of 17th on an independent evaluation, as one of the 5 finalists for a DHS biodefense lab.
DHS Undersecretary Jay Cohen, a political appointee, made the final cut to 5.
Well, it appears that the timeline given by the FBI for the Anthrax mailings is more an alibi than it is evidence of guilt, at least according to Glenn Greenwald:
The fastest one can drive from Frederick, Maryland to Princeton, New Jersey is 3 hours, which would mean that Ivins would have had to have dropped the anthrax letters in the New Jersey mailbox on September 17 by 1 p.m. or — at the latest — 2 p.m. in order to be able to attend a 4:00 or 5:00 p.m. meeting back at Ft. Detrick. But had he dropped the letters in the mailbox before 5:00 p.m. on September 17, the letters would have borne a September 17 postmark, rather than the September 18 postmark they bore (letters picked up from that Princeton mailbox before 5 p.m. bear the postmark from that day; letters picked up after 5 p.m. bear the postmark of the next day). That’s why the Search Warrant Affidavit (.pdf) released by the FBI on Friday said this (page 8):
If the Post’s reporting about Ivins’ September 17 activities is accurate — that he “return[ed to Fort Detrick] for an appointment in the early evening, about 4 or 5 p.m.” — then that would constitute an alibi, not, as the Post breathlessly described it, “a key clue into how he could have pulled off an elaborate crime,” since any letter he mailed that way would have a September 17 — not a September 18 — postmark. Just compare the FBI’s own definition of “window of opportunity” to its September 17 timeline for Ivins to see how glaring that contradiction is.
(emphasis author’s)
Honestly, if the FBI thought that it could have convicted, it would have arrested him instead of harassing him in shopping malls.
A Baltimore Sun columnist expresses similar doubts, but throws in an interesting bit of information:
Another stretch comes with the attempt to explain the return address on the anthrax mailings, ‘4th GRADE, GREENDALE SCHOOL.’ Apparently, agents discovered that Ivins and his wife donated money in 1993 to the American Family Association one month after an article ran in the group’s journal about a lawsuit AFA had filed related to an incident involving a fourth-grade student at Greendale Baptist Academy.
Interesting, I suppose, but no more so than the link that investigators had made between ‘Greendale’ and their previous anthrax suspect, Hatfill: there is a neighborhood in Harare, Zimbabwe, near where Hatfill once lived, that is known as – you guessed it – Greendale.
(emphasis mine)
Obviously, the fact that Ivins and his wife were supporters of the extremist Christofascist organization makes me more receptive to the idea that he might be involved, but the FBI has still not shown means. The anthrax was weaponized in a very sophisticated way, and they have still not shown how he could take the pathogen past the instant coffee level, which would not aerosolize properly to infect lungs.
The FBI is under a lot of pressure to close the case, but I do not yet see the case closed.
My position remains the same as always, that until I see evidence of how Bruce Ivins might have been able to acquire the equipment, which was not at Fort Detrick, and know how, which was not at Fort Detrick, to weaponize the anthrax, I am dubious of the FBI’s case.
Had the case really been strong enough to go to court, they would have arrested him, instead of harassing him.
Meryl Nass, M.D., who has more background in this area than I do, runs down her concerns with the case, and notes that over 100 people had access to the flask.
Additionally, experts in the field are requesting a peer review of the FBI’s genetic test, which, considering the record of problems at the FBI crime lab, is not at all unreasonable.
Finally, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Rep. Rush D. Holt (D-N.J.) are calling for an investigation of the investigation, which would be a good thing.
The prosecutors were asking for 30 years to life, but it’s pretty clear that Hamdan was just some poor schmuck who chauffeured bin Laden because he needed a job:
The sentence was a stunning rebuke to prosecutors who had insisted on a prison term of at least 30 years and portrayed Hamdan throughout the trial as a hardened al-Qaeda warrior. The jury of six military officers convicted him Wednesday of supporting al-Qaeda by driving and guarding bin Laden and ferrying weapons for the terror group, but he was acquitted of terror conspiracy.
Of course, in a civilian court, much of the evidence that got him that sentence would not have been even have been admissible.
I’m not sure when he is technically due to finish his sentence, but for his sake, I hope that it is after January 20, 2009, because I would expect retribution from Bush and His Evil Minions™.
Well, looking this description of the document dump made by the FBI, the most important question has not been answered: how did he weaponize the spores.
Drying the spores with the lyophilizer is certainly possible, but this stuff was weaponized in a sophisticated way. It was reduced to tiny particles with a coating to prevent them from clumping, and it also gave them a static charge to help create an aerosol.
This is a non trivial operation, and the equipment, and expertise, was simply not available at Fort Detrick.
If he was acting alone, then we do not have the means made public yet.
I’m about 51% on this guy being the mailer, but more information needs to be released.
