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October 16,
2001
The CIA and Poison
Letters
Black
Valentines?
By Douglas
Valentine
As everyone is aware by now,
the anthrax postal attacks began on 4 October in Florida, when
a photo editor at a Boca Raton tabloid inhaled the bacteria form
of anthrax, and died. His was the first such death in the US
since 1976. Two other Sun employees also were infected, but
survived, and are being treated. Unidentified FBI agents, with
their hats pulled down low over their eyes, said their hands-off
investigation is now a criminal probe, while other unnamed officials
(CIA?) said there is no evidence linking the outbreak to the
September 11 terrorist attacks.
Then in New York, teeny-tiny
anthrax spores were found on the police officer and two lab technicians
who were investigating a totally unrelated case in which an anthrax
infected letter was sent to government propagandist Tom Brokaw.
Basking in the limelight of
the recent tragedy, New York Mayor (and adulterer) Rudolph Giuliani
said Brokaw had not, repeat, not been contaminated. The Greatest
Generation could relax, he said, urging calm, and asking that
the usurper issue an emergency order allowing to him remain as
mayor indefinitely.
Like the isolated case in Florida,
the New Yorkers who contracted the deadly disease had touched
envelopes that contained anthrax spores, the type that have been
artificially produced across America for years, in order to develop
antidotes in case a Three Mile Island-type accident spread the
military's purely defensive (unlike Saddam's) anthrax arsenal
o'er our beloved Homeland.
Then on Saturday the Microsoft
office in arid Reno, Nevada received a piece of mail sent from
Malaysia containing anthrax dust. None of the six people who
accessed the envelope are known to have been infected by the
bacteria (not virus) or offended by the pornography the envelope
also contained. (The pictures were not released to the public,
but are rumored to be of you-know-who in his snorting days, cavorting
with a donkey in Tijuana.)
The latest and most newsworthy
of these unrelated incidents came on Monday, when the senate
office of Bush Administration rubberstamp, Tom Daschle, was suddenly
struck. Camera shy FBI agents said the package was postmarked
Trenton, New Jersey, same as the anthrax-laced letter sent to
Brokaw.
When asked if the object of
Eternal Hot Pursuit, Osama bin Laden, had sent the black valentines,
the idiotic unpresident replied, "I wouldn't put it past
him."
All kidding aside, while the
sending of anthrax to U.S. citizens seems to be yet another bizarre
aspect of the on-going terror attacks on America, there is a
precedent, and it is connected to America's on-going woes with
the Arab world.
The problem began in 1958,
with the formation of the United Arab Republic by Egypt and Syria.
To protect Israel, the CIA armed Iraq's Kurds and encouraged
them to revolt and attack Syria, which was considered a Soviet
pawn. In response, Colonel Abdul Karim el-Kassem overthrew Iraq's
King Faisal and restored relations with the Soviets. The coup
d'etat incited nationalists in Lebanon's Arab community and in
May 1958, armed revolt erupted in Beirut. The U.S. Information
Agency building was burned and sacked and the ARAMCO pipeline
from Saudi Arabia to Tripoli was severed. To placate King Hussein,
America began selling arms to Jordan and mounting covert operations
against Iraq, including an MKULTRA operation in which the infamous
CIA officer, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb sent, from India, a handkerchief
laced with poison to Colonel Kassem.
According to CIAnik Seymour
Hersh in his JFK-bashing book, The Dark Side of Camelot (page
194): "the (CIA's Technical Services Division) created a
poisoned handkerchief that was mailed with the approval of the
agency's top management to the home of General Abdul Karim Kassem,
the military strongman of Iraq. Kassem had seized power in a
bloody coup and, to the dismay of the U.S., immediately restored
diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and lifted a ban on
the Communist Party in Iraq. Sidney Gottlieb came up with the
idea of infecting a handkerchief and mailing it to Iraq via the
CIA station in New Delhi, India. 'It was not an assassination,'
Gottlieb told (Hersh) in an interview. 'They [the CIA's Near
East division] just wanted him to get sick for a long time. I
went to (CIA Deputy Director of Plans, Richard) Bissell and he
said go ahead.'
"Others in the agency
saw it differently. One senior officer, in an interview for this
book, revealed that the men running the Near East division were
interested in getting rid of General Kassem permanently."
(Incidentally, in a Frontline
story aired on 25 January 2000, titled The Survival of Saddam,
it was revealed that Saddam Hussein, then an up-and-coming CIA
asset and dictator, and other members of the Ba'ath party worked
with "the Americans" to overthrow General Kassem. According
to Frontline, "With CIA help, the Iraqi Ba'ath Party seized
power in 1963. General Kassem was killed in the coup. The CIA
provided lists of suspected communists for Ba'ath Party hit squads,
who liquidated at least 800 people. Saddam Hussein rushed home
to join in as a interrogator, torturer and killer.")
So, if the FBI is looking for
motive and method (meaning modus operandi), the CIA must rate
as a prime suspect in the anthrax black valentines that are currently
being sent across the country. The motive, of course, is to keep
the threat of terrorism alive and widespread, so more assaults
can be made on our Civil Liberties, thus strengthening the National
Security elite. The method of sending envelopes packed with
poison, as we know, was developed and perfected by the CIA.
Over to you, Governor Ridge.
CP
Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch.
He is the author of The
Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIA's
torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel
about the CIA and the drug trade.
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