A Government Insider Speaks Out

At AfterDowningStreet.org, Steven Watson writes:

Is it possible that the anthrax attacks were launched from within our own government? A former Bush 1 advisor thinks it is.

Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.

"After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration tried to ram the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress," Boyle said in a radio interview with Austin-based talk-show host Alex Jones. "That would have set up a police state.

"Senators Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)
were holding it up because they realized what this would lead to. The
first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas
corpus [which protects citizens from unlawful imprisonment and
guarantees due process of law]. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere,
come these anthrax attacks."

"At the time I myself did not know precisely what was going on, either
with respect to September 11 or the anthrax attacks, but then the New
York Times revealed the technology behind the letter to Senator
Daschle. [The anthrax used was] a trillion spores per gram, [refined
with] special electro-static treatment. This is superweapons-grade
anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly
proclaimed programs, had never developed before. So it was obvious to
me that this was from a U.S. government lab. There is nowhere else you
could have gotten that."

Boyle's assessment was based on his years of expertise regarding
America's bioweapons programs. He was responsible for drafting the
Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed
unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President
George H.W. Bush.

After realizing that the anthrax attacks looked like a domestic job,
Boyle called a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism
and counterterrorism, Marion "Spike" Bowman. Boyle and Bowman had met
at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School.
Boyle told Bowman that the only people who would have the capability to
carry out the attacks were individuals working on U.S. government
anthrax programs with access to a high-level biosafety lab. Boyle gave
Bowman a full list of names of scientists, contractors and labs
conducting anthrax work for the U.S. government and military.

Bowman then informed Boyle that the FBI was working with Fort Detrick
on the matter. Boyle expressed his view that Fort Detrick could be the
main problem. As widely reported in 2002 publications, notably the New
Scientist, the anthrax strain used in the attacks was officially
assessed as "military grade."

"Soon after I informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorized
the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," the professor
said. The Ames strain turned out to be the same strain as the spores
used in the attacks.

The alleged destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames,
Iowa, from which the Fort Detrick lab got its pathogens, was blatant
destruction of evidence. It meant that there was no way of finding out
which strain was sent to whom to develop the larger breed of anthrax
used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led
directly back to a secret government biowarfare program.

"Clearly, for the FBI to have authorized this was obstruction of
justice, a federal crime," said Boyle. "That collection should have
been preserved and protected as evidence. That's the DNA, the
fingerprints right there. It later came out, of course, that this was
Ames strain anthrax that was behind the Daschle and Leahy letters."

At that point, recounted Boyle, it became very clear to him that there
was a coverup underway. He later discovered, while reading David Ray
Griffin's book on the 9/11 attacks, The New Pearl Harbor, that Bowman
was the same FBI agent who allegedly sabotaged the FISA warrant for
access to [convicted co-conspirator] Zacharias Moussaoui's computer
prior to 9/11. Moussaoui's computer contained information that could
have helped prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.

In 2003, Bowman was promoted and given the Presidential Rank Award by
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a
letter to Mueller, chastising the organization for granting such an
honor to an agent who had so obviously compromised America's security.

During the anthrax scare, the House of Representatives was officially
shut down for the first time in the history of the republic. Once
opposition from Leahy and Daschle evaporated in the wake of the
attempts on their lives, the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through.
Testimony by Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that most
members of Congress were compelled to vote for the bill without even
reading it.

"They were going to move to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is
all that really separates us from a police state," Boyle said. "And
that is what they have done now with respect to enemy combatants [in
the Military Commissions Act of 2006]." Boyle added that lawmakers are
now arguing that Amendment XIV, which guarantees due process of law to
all Americans, does not mean what it has been taken to mean and that,
under the Military Commissions Act, any U.S. citizen can be stripped of
citizenship and be labeled an enemy combatant.

Continued Boyle: "In other words, they have taken the position that at
some point in time, if they want to, they can unilaterally round up
United States native-born citizens, as they did for Japanese-Americans
in World War II, and stick us into concentration camps." Boyle asserted
that top officials, such as White House legal advisor John Yoo and
former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith (now a professor at
Harvard Law School), are pushing for the legalization of torture as
well.

"The Nazis did the exact same thing," said Boyle. "They had their
lawyers infiltrating law schools. Carl Schmidt was the worst, and he
was the mentor to Leo Strauss, the [ideological] founder of the
neoconservatives. So the same phenomenon that started in Nazi Germany
is happening here, and I exaggerate not. We could all be tortured; we
could all be treated this way."

Boyle stressed that it is vital to keep up the pressure on Senator
Leahy, who now chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, giving him
subpoena power. Since Leahy was himself a target, he may have
sufficient motivation to get to the bottom of the attacks. The FBI and
the Justice Department have so far refused full disclosure to Congress.

In addition to his credentials as a government advisor, Boyle also
holds a doctorate of law magna cum laude and a Ph.D. in political
science, both from Harvard University. He teaches international law at
the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Boyle also served on
the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-92) and
represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court.

Boyle alleged that due to his activities as a lawyer, he was
interrogated by an agent from the CIA/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in
the summer of 2004. The agent tried to recruit him as an informant to
provide the FBI with information on his Arab and Muslim clients. When
he refused, according to Boyle, the FBI placed him on the government's
terrorism watch lists.

Anthrax Coverup: A Government Insider Speaks Out

At AfterDowningStreet.org:

Is it possible that the anthrax attacks were launched from within our own government? A former Bush 1 advisor thinks it is.

Francis A. Boyle, an international law expert who worked under the first Bush Administration as a bioweapons advisor in the 1980s, has said that he is convinced the October 2001 anthrax attacks that killed five people were perpetrated and covered up by criminal elements of the U.S. government. The motive: to foment a police state by killing off and intimidating opposition to post-9/11 legislation such as the USA PATRIOT Act and the later Military Commissions Act.

"After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Bush Administration tried to ram the USA PATRIOT Act through Congress," Boyle said in a radio interview with Austin-based talk-show host Alex Jones. "That would have set up a police state.

"Senators Tom Daschle (D-South Dakota) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont)
were holding it up because they realized what this would lead to. The
first draft of the PATRIOT Act would have suspended the writ of habeas
corpus [which protects citizens from unlawful imprisonment and
guarantees due process of law]. Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere,
come these anthrax attacks."

"At the time I myself did not know precisely what was going on, either
with respect to September 11 or the anthrax attacks, but then the New
York Times revealed the technology behind the letter to Senator
Daschle. [The anthrax used was] a trillion spores per gram, [refined
with] special electro-static treatment. This is superweapons-grade
anthrax that even the United States government, in its openly
proclaimed programs, had never developed before. So it was obvious to
me that this was from a U.S. government lab. There is nowhere else you
could have gotten that."

Boyle's assessment was based on his years of expertise regarding
America's bioweapons programs. He was responsible for drafting the
Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989 that was passed
unanimously by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President
George H.W. Bush.

After realizing that the anthrax attacks looked like a domestic job,
Boyle called a high-level official in the FBI who deals with terrorism
and counterterrorism, Marion "Spike" Bowman. Boyle and Bowman had met
at a terrorism conference at the University of Michigan Law School.
Boyle told Bowman that the only people who would have the capability to
carry out the attacks were individuals working on U.S. government
anthrax programs with access to a high-level biosafety lab. Boyle gave
Bowman a full list of names of scientists, contractors and labs
conducting anthrax work for the U.S. government and military.

Bowman then informed Boyle that the FBI was working with Fort Detrick
on the matter. Boyle expressed his view that Fort Detrick could be the
main problem. As widely reported in 2002 publications, notably the New
Scientist, the anthrax strain used in the attacks was officially
assessed as "military grade."

"Soon after I informed Bowman of this information, the FBI authorized
the destruction of the Ames cultural anthrax database," the professor
said. The Ames strain turned out to be the same strain as the spores
used in the attacks.

The alleged destruction of the anthrax culture collection at Ames,
Iowa, from which the Fort Detrick lab got its pathogens, was blatant
destruction of evidence. It meant that there was no way of finding out
which strain was sent to whom to develop the larger breed of anthrax
used in the attacks. The trail of genetic evidence would have led
directly back to a secret government biowarfare program.

"Clearly, for the FBI to have authorized this was obstruction of
justice, a federal crime," said Boyle. "That collection should have
been preserved and protected as evidence. That's the DNA, the
fingerprints right there. It later came out, of course, that this was
Ames strain anthrax that was behind the Daschle and Leahy letters."

At that point, recounted Boyle, it became very clear to him that there
was a coverup underway. He later discovered, while reading David Ray
Griffin's book on the 9/11 attacks, The New Pearl Harbor, that Bowman
was the same FBI agent who allegedly sabotaged the FISA warrant for
access to [convicted co-conspirator] Zacharias Moussaoui's computer
prior to 9/11. Moussaoui's computer contained information that could
have helped prevent the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.

In 2003, Bowman was promoted and given the Presidential Rank Award by
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller. Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote a
letter to Mueller, chastising the organization for granting such an
honor to an agent who had so obviously compromised America's security.

During the anthrax scare, the House of Representatives was officially
shut down for the first time in the history of the republic. Once
opposition from Leahy and Daschle evaporated in the wake of the
attempts on their lives, the USA PATRIOT Act was rammed through.
Testimony by Representative Ron Paul (R-Texas) revealed that most
members of Congress were compelled to vote for the bill without even
reading it.

"They were going to move to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, which is
all that really separates us from a police state," Boyle said. "And
that is what they have done now with respect to enemy combatants [in
the Military Commissions Act of 2006]." Boyle added that lawmakers are
now arguing that Amendment XIV, which guarantees due process of law to
all Americans, does not mean what it has been taken to mean and that,
under the Military Commissions Act, any U.S. citizen can be stripped of
citizenship and be labeled an enemy combatant.

Continued Boyle: "In other words, they have taken the position that at
some point in time, if they want to, they can unilaterally round up
United States native-born citizens, as they did for Japanese-Americans
in World War II, and stick us into concentration camps." Boyle asserted
that top officials, such as White House legal advisor John Yoo and
former Assistant Attorney General Jack Goldsmith (now a professor at
Harvard Law School), are pushing for the legalization of torture as
well.

"The Nazis did the exact same thing," said Boyle. "They had their
lawyers infiltrating law schools. Carl Schmidt was the worst, and he
was the mentor to Leo Strauss, the [ideological] founder of the
neoconservatives. So the same phenomenon that started in Nazi Germany
is happening here, and I exaggerate not. We could all be tortured; we
could all be treated this way."

Boyle stressed that it is vital to keep up the pressure on Senator
Leahy, who now chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, giving him
subpoena power. Since Leahy was himself a target, he may have
sufficient motivation to get to the bottom of the attacks. The FBI and
the Justice Department have so far refused full disclosure to Congress.

In addition to his credentials as a government advisor, Boyle also
holds a doctorate of law magna cum laude and a Ph.D. in political
science, both from Harvard University. He teaches international law at
the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. Boyle also served on
the Board of Directors of Amnesty International (1988-92) and
represented Bosnia-Herzegovina at the World Court.

Boyle alleged that due to his activities as a lawyer, he was
interrogated by an agent from the CIA/FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force in
the summer of 2004. The agent tried to recruit him as an informant to
provide the FBI with information on his Arab and Muslim clients. When
he refused, according to Boyle, the FBI placed him on the government's
terrorism watch lists.

Anthrax Detected At 2 Mailrooms

Another postal facility was closed Tuesday as concern spread over the detection of anthrax in two pieces of mail at military mailrooms. Hundreds of workers were offered antibiotics as a precaution, though no unusual health problems were reported.

The AP reports:
Officials said the mail in question had been irradiated, so any anthrax in them was inert when they triggered alarms at the Pentagon mail facility and another nearby facility that handles military mail.

Environmental testing was being conducted on the two military mail facilities and on a third postal facility in the District of Columbia, which was closed Tuesday because it may have handled the mail that went to the two military mailrooms.

Antibiotics were offered to some 200 workers at the D.C. facility and to workers at the military mailrooms. Hospitals were told to be on the lookout for symptoms like respiratory problems, rashes or flu-like symptoms that could signal exposure to anthrax, which can be used as a biological weapon.

"This is a prudent course of action. I don't think there's cause for alarm or panic or undue worry," said Dr. Gregg Pane, director of the city's Department of Health. "We've also mobilized our strategic national stockpile so we have enough antibiotics available should the need arise."

Also on Tuesday, a hazardous materials team was called to a building occupied by the Internal Revenue Service after a report of a powdery substance found in a letter. IRS officials said in a statement later that "initial tests were negative for chemical or biological substances."

At the Pentagon, officials on Tuesday corrected inaccurate information about when mailroom sensors were triggered over the possible presence of anthrax.

Spokesman Glenn Flood said the mail that tested positive for anthrax passed through the Pentagon's mail handling facility on Thursday, not Monday, as he previously said. The test results on the mail did not come back until Monday.

Anthrax was confirmed in two items of mail at the two military mail facilities. The Pentagon's mail delivery site, which is separate from the main Pentagon building, was evacuated and shut down Monday remained closed, along with a nearby satellite facility in Fairfax County, Virginia.

Officials disclosed no information about the origins of the two pieces of mail.

About 175 people work at the Pentagon's mail facility, and an additional 100 may have been in contact with deliveries for the Pentagon, officials said.

Follow-up tests were being conducted at the U.S. Army Research Institute for Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Md., officials said. They would take two to three days to complete.

Anthrax can be spread through the air or by skin contact. Officials noted that sometimes anthrax sensors can give false-positive results.

In October 2001, someone sent anthrax in letters through the mail to media and government offices in Washington, Florida and elsewhere, raising fears of bioterrorism. Five people were killed and 17 more sickened. Those cases have never been solved.

CIA Hunts Iraq Tie to Soviet Smallpox

For the NYTimes, Judith Miller writes:

The C.I.A. is investigating an informant's accusation that Iraq obtained a particularly virulent strain of smallpox from a Russian scientist who worked in a smallpox lab in Moscow during Soviet times, senior American officials and foreign scientists say.

The officials said several American scientists were told in August that Iraq might have obtained the mysterious strain from Nelja N. Maltseva, a virologist who worked for more than 30 years at the Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow before her death two years ago.

The information came to the American government from an informant whose identity has not been disclosed. The C.I.A. considered the information reliable enough that President Bush was briefed about its implications. The attempt to verify the information is continuing.

Dr. Maltseva is known to have visited Iraq on several occasions. Intelligence officials are trying to determine whether, as the informant told them, she traveled there as recently as 1990, officials said. The institute where she worked housed what Russia said was its entire national collection of 120 strains of smallpox, and some experts fear that she may have provided the Iraqis with a version that could be resistant to vaccines and could be more easily transmitted as a biological weapon.

The possibility that Iraq possesses this strain is one of several factors that has complicated Mr. Bush's decision, expected this week, about how many Americans should be vaccinated against smallpox, a disease that was officially eradicated in 1980.

The White House is expected to announce that despite the risk of vaccine-induced illness and death, it will authorize vaccinating those most at risk in the event of a smallpox outbreak — 500,000 members of the military who could be assigned to the Middle East for a war with Iraq and 500,000 civilian medical workers.

More broadly, the Russian government's refusal to share smallpox and other lethal germ strains for study by the United States, or to answer questions about the fate of such strains, has reinforced American concerns about whether Russia has abandoned what was once the world's most ambitious covert germ weapons program.

A year ago in Crawford, Tex., Mr. Bush and Russia's president, Vladimir V. Putin, issued a statement vowing to enhance cooperation against biological terrorism. But after an initial round of visits and a flurry of optimism, American officials said Russia had resisted repeated American requests for information about the Russian smallpox strains and help in the investigation into the anthrax attacks in the United States in October 2001.

"There is information we would like the Russians to share as a partner of ours," William Winkenwerder Jr., assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, said in an interview. "Because if there are strains that present a unique problem with respect to vaccines and treatment, it is in the interests of all freedom-loving people to have as much information as possible."

Cooperation on biological terrorism was not discussed at the meeting last week between Mr. Bush and Mr. Putin in St. Petersburg, American officials said, mainly because administration officials are not certain just how willing Mr. Putin is to enhance cooperation in this delicate area. They wonder if he is not doing more because of the military's hostility to sharing the information.

"The record so far suggests he is either unable or unwilling to push the military on this front," an administration official said. "We think it may be a little of both, but we're not really sure at this point or what to do about it."

Administration officials said the C.I.A. was still trying to determine whether Dr. Maltseva traveled to Iraq in 1990, and whether she shared a sample of what might be a particularly virulent smallpox strain with Iraqi scientists.

World Health Organization records in Geneva and interviews with scientists who worked with her confirmed that Dr. Maltseva visited Iraq at least twice, in 1972 and 1973, as part of the global campaign to eradicate smallpox.

Formerly secret Soviet records also show that in 1971, she was part of a covert mission to Aralsk, a port city in what was then the Soviet republic of Kazakhstan, north of the Aral Sea, to help stop an epidemic of smallpox. The Soviet Union did not report that outbreak to world health officials, as required by regulations.

Last June, experts from the Monterey Institute of International Studies, drawing on those Kazakh records and interviews with survivors, published a report saying the epidemic was a result of open-air tests of a particularly virulent smallpox strain on Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea.

The island, known as Renaissance Island in English, is between Kazakhstan and another Central Asian country, Uzbekistan. The United States recently spent $6 million to help both countries, which are now independent, to decontaminate anthrax that the Soviet military buried in pits on the island.

Alan P. Zelicoff, co-author of the Monterey report and a scientist at Sandia National Laboratories, said the Aralsk outbreak was a watershed because it demonstrated that the smallpox virus was more easily spread than previously thought and that there may be a vaccine-resistant strain.

The organism can indeed be made to travel long distances, city-size perhaps, and there may be a vaccine-resistant strain or one that is more communicable than garden-variety smallpox, he said in an interview.

The Monterey report led American officials to question whether America's smallpox vaccine would be effective against the Aralsk strain or whether new vaccines or drugs might be needed if the strain was used in an attack. American concern increased in recent months after the White House was told that Dr. Maltseva might have shared the Aralsk strain with Iraqi scientists in 1990, administration officials said.

David Kelly, a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq, said there was a "resurgence of interest" in smallpox vaccine in Iraq in 1990, "but we have never known why."

A spokesman for the Russian Research Institute for Viral Preparations declined to comment on Dr. Maltseva or her work. Her daughter, a physician in Moscow, said she had no recollection of her mother's ever going to Iraq.

Svetlana Sergeyevna Marennikova, Dr. Maltseva's deputy in the Moscow laboratory, said in an interview that Dr. Maltseva had never gone to Iraq as far as she knew.

"She worked, and then when she got sick, she took a sick leave when she was no longer able to work," she said. "I don't know about Iraq. I didn't know about a trip there. I don't think she was there. I would know."

Donald A. Henderson, a senior adviser to the Department of Health and Human Services and a leader of the smallpox eradication campaign, described Dr. Maltseva as an "outgoing, hard-working scientist." He said she had traveled widely for the W.H.O in the eradication campaign.

While the organization's records show that she visited Iran, Iraq and Syria, Dr. Henderson recalled that he had also sent her to Pakistan to follow up on an outbreak there. "She clearly enjoyed the international travel circuit," he said.

Scientists and American officials have speculated that Iraq may have tried to buy the Aralsk strain from Dr. Maltseva, whose institute, like so many other scientific labs in Russia, has fallen on hard times since the Soviet Union's collapse.

Dr. Henderson said he was deeply disappointed that Dr. Maltseva and other Russian scientists with whom he had worked closely had helped cover up outbreaks of infectious diseases that should have been reported to the W.H.O.

The Russian government has never publicly acknowledged that Aralsk outbreak or that it tested smallpox in the open air. At a World Health Organization meeting in Lyon, France, last August, officials said, Russian virologists argued privately, in response to the Monterey report and news accounts, that there was no reason to believe that the Aralsk incident was anything other than a natural outbreak and that the strain was not particularly virulent — assertions with which some American experts concur.

American officials familiar with discussions about Aralsk said Russians scientists had confirmed that Dr. Maltseva took tissue samples from Aralsk back to her Moscow lab in 1971. But Russians have insisted that the material was destroyed when Russia quietly moved its smallpox strain collection from the Moscow lab to Vector, where the collection is now stored.

Many American scientists and officials, even those who doubt that the Aralsk strain is unusually potent, are deeply skeptical that the strain was destroyed. Former Soviet germ warfare scientists have privately told American officials that the military took control of these strains when the collection was moved.

American health and defense officials have tried without success to press Russia for help in securing a sample of the strain from the Aralsk smallpox outbreak.

The American officials have also been unable to obtain information that they believe could help federal investigators with their stalled inquiry into the anthrax attacks of October 2001, in which 5 people died and at least 17 were infected

Building The Case Against Iraq

The Telegraph reports:

The Taliban regime may be the current target in America's war on terrorism but the Bush administration is already building a case against a much bigger foe - Iraq.

James Woolsey, a former director of the CIA, ambassador and Pentagon official who now describes himself as a "private citizen", is the man entrusted with investigating Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks and anthrax outbreaks.

The Iraqi National Congress, the exiled group that opposes Saddam Hussein, said it recently held meetings in London with Mr Woolsey. Administration sources have said his trip was funded and approved by Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary.

Such is the sensitivity of the Iraq issue, Mr Woolsey will make no comment about the exact nature of his brief. He told The Telegraph: "I was in London and that's it."

But he made clear that he believed there were "substantial and growing indications" that a state was behind the attacks.

The milled, "weaponised" anthrax that virtually shut down Congress and killed two postal workers has increased his suspicions. So too have reports of meetings involving Mohammad Atta, a leading hijacker, in Prague.

Atta travelled to the Czech Republic at least twice and was refused entry to Prague airport on another occasion.

According to the Wall Street Journal, on one occasion Atta was observed meeting Ahmed Khalil Samir al-Ani, an Iraqi diplomat subsequently expelled for spying.

Mr Woolsey said: "I doubt very seriously if this was simply a social relationship or that they liked to drink Czech beer together."

It has also emerged this week that intelligence reports have stated that Osama bin Laden sent an al-Qa'eda delegation to Baghdad on April 25, 1998 to attend Saddam's birthday celebration.

Saddam's son Uday, it is claimed, agreed to train al-Qa'eda recruits and establish a joint force of bin Laden's elite fighters and the Iraqi intelligence unit 999.

All this, Mr Woolsey, said, made it imperative that America "should look under that rock" to establish whether Iraq helped al-Qa'eda to carry out the September 11 or anthrax attacks.

He said: "If a state is involved, obviously it seems to me to be important for us to know whom we're at war with."

Focusing solely on proof that would be admissible in a court of law would be a mistake.

He said: "Hearsay is not admissible as evidence and almost all intelligence is hearsay. Evidentiary standards are the wrong standards. I would talk about indications, information."

He added: "The United States has not yet decided it is at war with Saddam Hussein but Saddam Hussein may have decided he is at war with the United States."

The Clinton administration, he said, had had "a propensity sometimes to reason backwards from public relations to policy, to the facts one was looking at".

This had resulted in the question of Iraqi involvement in the World Trade Centre bombing of 1993 being pushed aside.

In Washington, the debate over global terrorism was continuing to develop as the effects of the anthrax attacks grow more serious.

Having suffered thousands of civilian casualties, most Americans would prefer a pre-emptive strike against a known enemy such as Saddam than risk a biological or chemical attack that could kill tens of thousands.

Mr Woolsey said: "We ought to seriously consider removing Saddam's regime, if he has been involved in any terror in recent years against us."

Saddam had attempted to assassinate President Bush Snr in 1993. He had also defied UN mandates by developing weapons of mass destruction.

He added: "In my judgment that's enough."

President Clinton's response to the assassination attempt was "to shoot some Cruise missiles back into empty buildings in the middle of the night" but this type of limited, ineffective action had been discredited by September 11.

Mr Woolsey said: "Some of the states, such as Iraq, and some of the people, such as bin Laden, saw our behaviour over the last decade or two and may have a false impression that they can bludgeon the United States into submission.

He added: "I think some day - hopefully soon - they will come to the same conclusion that Admiral Yamamoto did after Pearl Harbor, which was to remark that Japan had awakened a sleeping giant.

" If the government chooses, based on the information that it has, to take military action against any other state outside Afghanistan, I believe that the world will see our reaction in that case will be ruthless, relentless and devastating.

He concluded: "In the American vernacular - you ain't seen nothing yet."

Coming from the man entrusted with gathering that "information", Saddam would perhaps be well advised to mark Mr Woolsey's words.

The Iraq Connection

For the Wall Street Journal, former CIA director James Woolsey writes:

The professionally prepared and precisely sized anthrax spores that have infected some 30 congressional staffers and closed down the Capitol and the office of the governor of New York have made the point forcefully: When you are at war, the primary task should be to determine whom you are at war with.

In most wars this is not a problem. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 the way the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor--with flags flying. Even in our war two centuries ago with the Barbary Pirates, an enemy with some loose parallels to al Qaeda, we had no doubt which North African government sheltered them. Stephen Decatur knew whom to attack.

This time it's different. Although the administration's decision to move first against the obvious target--the Taliban and their demonic al Qaeda guests--is sound, there are rising doubts that even a victory in Afghanistan, and even the capture or death of Osama bin Laden and his cohorts, will solve the problem. And this is not only because of al Qaeda operatives and street demonstrations in other countries. Removing bin Laden and his associates may only amputate one hand of our enemy. There are substantial and growing indications that a state may, behind the scene, be involved in the attacks. This is hard for us to deal with because, as Sen. Dianne Feinstein said recently, "It's a very sobering thing for Americans, who tend to be upfront dealing with everything, to be faced with something so clandestine and unknown."

When an enemy has a face and a name, this country can be awesome in its ability to mobilize quickly for war and win, as we did in both world wars. But we are now facing an enemy from a part of the world where the major aspects of war, for many centuries, have been clandestine raids, assassinations, terror against civilians, and deception. In response to the challenge "Come out and fight like a man," we will get only smirks in the shadows and more anthrax, or worse.

Some hold the view that no degree of sophistication--precisely prepared anthrax, coordination across continents, sophisticated training, professionally-stolen identities--is enough to indicate the strong probability of a state's being involved. Such a position was most succinctly stated by an unnamed FBI official to Seymour Hersh (in the Oct. 8 New Yorker), speaking of the Sept. 11 attackers: "These guys look like a pickup basketball team. In your wildest dreams, do you think they thought they'd be able to pull off four hijackings?" But for those of a more suspicious cast of mind, the degree of complexity and the sophistication of the attacks against us suggest that we have enough indications of possible state involvement for the government to be carefully and vigorously investigating.

One central issue is state involvement in what? If we define the problem in such a way as to require proof (and make it proof beyond a reasonable doubt) of state involvement in the Sept. 11 attack itself, we will quite likely define ourselves out of being able to understand who is at war with us. Instead, we need to look at the pattern of terrorism against us over the last decade and reach a considered judgment in light of the whole picture, even if we cannot prove, to the demanding standards of criminal law, a state's involvement in the Sept. 11 atrocity itself.

The weakest argument against the possibility of state involvement is usually implicit--that since al Qaeda is clearly involved in the Sept. 11 and other attacks, a state probably is not. But haven't such people heard of joint ventures? Do they think that international law imposes some sort of sole-source contracting requirement for terrorism?

But which state? Well, whichever one turns up when you start looking. Iran, for example, has to be considered a possibility because--in spite of a rational president, a number of elected reformers, brave newspaper editors, and an electorate that solidly supports reform--murderous mullahs still run the country's intelligence services and instruments of state power. Iran sponsors Hezbollah and other terrorist groups that are targeted principally against Israel today but that have attacked us in the past, including quite possibly at Khobar Towers. Iranian involvement with al Qaeda, even across the bitter divide between extreme Wahhabi Sunnis and extreme Shiites, is not impossible.

But by far the more likely candidate for involvement with al Qaeda is Iraq, for several reasons.

Saddam has gone to great lengths to court Sunni Islamists in recent years, even restructuring the Iraqi flag to put Allahu Akbar ("God is great") in his own handwriting across its face. (Even Saddam's soulmate and fellow hater of religion, Joseph Stalin, didn't think of courting the Russian Orthodox Church when he needed it after Hitler's invasion by writing across the face of the Soviet flag in his own hand, "In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.") This courtship has included terrorist meetings in Iraq and, according to press reports, at least one visit to the Taliban capital of Kandahar by the infamous Faruk Hijazi, a senior official in Iraqi intelligence although nominally the Iraqi ambassador in Ankara, Turkey.

Saddam has a festering sense of revenge for his humiliation of the Gulf War, and our conduct at, and after, the war's end has given him added hope, he believes, for vengeance. In the aftermath of the war, the Iraqi resistance controlled much of the country, but we watched from the skies while Saddam mobilized the Republican Guard that we had spared and used it to massacre the rebels. He is not grateful to us. He has concluded that we are weak and irresolute, and that we do not dare to confront him even when we are in a position as strong as we were in the spring of 1991. If he has confidence that he has successfully hidden his hand in attacking us, he doubtless has even more confidence in our fecklessness.

His confidence in our fecklessness has some reasonable basis. If the first Bush administration made one major mistake in not helping the Iraqi resistance, in the spring of 1991, to finish the job that we had started, the Clinton administration made eight years of them. In the spring of 1993, Iraqi Intelligence (i.e., Saddam) tried to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait, as confirmed by both CIA and FBI investigations of an unexploded bomb. President Clinton responded by shooting some cruise missiles into an empty intelligence headquarters in the middle of the night. The message--we will ruthlessly use high technology weapons against cleaning women, night watchmen and masonry--may not have struck as much fear into Saddam's heart as the administration hoped.

There then began eight years of using law enforcement as the principal investigative tool and principal sanction against what came to be called "loose networks" of terrorists. For two reasons, neither one the fault of those who were doing their best to enforce the law, this had the effect of making it very difficult to establish any links between terrorists and foreign governments (although the FBI reportedly found ties between Iran and the Khobar Towers terrorists).

First, a prosecutor's team is not the right institution to use to look for an overall assessment of whether there is state sponsorship of a terrorist act. Indeed, the better the prosecutors are, the more likely they are to focus like a laser on proving that the people they can get their hands on have committed the elements of the crime set out by the law--not on a general search for background information useful to the rest of the government. A criminal trial is not a general search for truth but rather, in a sense, a legally circumscribed trial by combat. It makes as much sense to expect a prosecutor's team to make an overall assessment of state sponsorship of a terrorist event as it does to ask a Marine company commander, in the midst of taking a hill, to advise you about the international alliances of the enemy whose troops he is facing.

Second, Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure (perhaps now being modified by Congress) severely restricts the flow of information to the rest of the government from investigations when information is obtained pursuant to a federal grand jury's subpoena. A federal judge might approve some sharing with, say, a state prosecutor, but there is no provision that permits sharing with, e.g., the National Security Council or the CIA. Any such sharing must await the trial, creating a delay of months to years after the terrorist event.

As a result, during the many months of investigation and the trials of the defendants for the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, little was done to discover the implications of the fact that one of the indicted plotters, Abdul Rahman Yasin (who held Iraqi and American citizenship) fled to Baghdad after talking the FBI in New Jersey into releasing him. There are indications that both he and Ramzi Yousef, now in prison in Colorado, may be Iraqi agents, but on some important aspects the trail is very cold. Other investigations of terrorist incidents in the 1990s were similarly less than thorough on the question of state sponsorship. One can take the view that this was an unfortunate side effect of an otherwise desirable law enforcement focus.

The other, less generous possibility is that the Clinton administration was engaged here in its trademark behavior of focusing first and foremost on spin, expectation-adjustment, and short-term public relations, and deriving policy therefrom. If you assume that all terrorism flows from loose networks and not state action, then you will usually be able to find at least someone who was involved in a terrorist attack to convict. You can then claim success, get some good press and avoid confronting a state. The alternative approach--a thorough search for any state actor--presents two PR risks, neither attractive. If you find no state actor, there might be the appearance of an investigative failure. If, on the other hand, you find that a state was involved, you might then risk confrontation, even conflict, and possibly body bags on the evening news.

This may help account for the spate of recent stories in the press that seem to suggest that Iraqi government ties to terrorism are not being checked out, and that reports of such ties surprise senior government officials. It has been widely reported that the hijacker (some say the lead hijacker) Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi intelligence in Prague just before he came to the U.S. One report suggests that he met with senior Iraqi intelligence official Hijazi. And, as noted, another report puts Hijazi in the Taliban capital in 1998. Such reports are invariably followed by background statements from senior government officials to the effect that, "We don't know what they talked about so it doesn't prove anything."

Then on Oct. 1, William Safire wrote in the New York Times that al Qaeda's Abu Abdul Rahman, "financed by bin Laden and armed by Saddam," ambushed and killed 36 Kurds in Halabja in Northern Iraq. The Kurds retaliated, took 19 terrorists prisoner, and got valuable information from them about the terrorist-Iraqi connection. "Our top NSC officials," Mr. Safire wryly notes, "were unaware of this engagement until they read it in The Times."

Then on Oct. 12, Jim Hoagland wrote in the Washington Post that an Iraqi ex-intelligence officer has told the Iraqi National Congress of specific sightings of Islamic extremists training for hijacking a Boeing 707 in a suburb of Baghdad, Salman Pak, a year ago, but that he "was treated dismissively by CIA officers in Ankara this week. They reportedly showed no interest in pursuing a possible Iraq connection to Sept. 11." (I checked yesterday and essentially the same situation still obtains.)

What is going on here? Government bureaucracies do have a way of getting into comfortable ruts and staying there through inertia. In the present circumstances, we need to be especially sure that if any of our government agencies became infected during the 1990s with the Clinton administration malady of backward reasoning (start with the conclusion you want, then select the facts you'll look at), they are given the required curative as soon as possible.

The State Department, for example, negotiates with, and normally tries to make common cause with, foreign governments. And like any normal group of people, it seeks a role in the bigger picture for what it does. So it tends to push for the importance of coalition-building and cordial relations in the big scheme of things. No doubt we will have more and happier coalition partners (at least in the short run) if we don't raise the uncomfortable issue of a possible need to confront Saddam. But is a large coalition that doesn't move against a state that is at war with us better for the nation as a whole than a small coalition that moves effectively against a state that is attacking us? Isn't the first job learning the truth and not accommodating the views of our least staunch friends?

For its part, the CIA has always had an institutional bias in favor of information coming from recruited agents rather than volunteers and defectors. There are exceptions, but in a number of circumstances--some with which I have long personal familiarity--defectors especially have been dealt with in less than exemplary fashion by the Agency. Something similar might be said for democratic resistance groups--their occasional fractiousness makes them hard to discipline. Sometime during 1995, these tendencies seem to have joined to produce substantial hostility at Langley to the Iraqi National Congress. As one wag puts it, "If the INC showed up out there with Osama's and Saddam's heads on a plate, a number of people would say, 'I'll bet that's the Pope and the Dalai Lama.' " As in the case of the State Department, it would be a tragedy of the first order if bureaucratic inertia of this sort had any hand in keeping us from learning whom we are at war with.

One must have sympathy for the president as he tries to sort all of this out. The decision whether to move against Iraq after Afghanistan will be one of the most difficult and important decisions any American president has ever made. It is much harder than deciding, even in very difficult circumstances, whether to confront a clear enemy when there is no alternative--as after the Confederacy's firing on Fort Sumter, or after Pearl Harbor.

The best analogy may be--although our condition is far from this desperate--the choice faced by Churchill at the time of Dunkirk in May 1940, when Britain stood alone and Lord Halifax was pressing for accommodation, via Mussolini, with Germany. Churchill's decision to reject Halifax's advice and fight was, in many ways, the hinge of the 20th century. Early in this new century, President Bush already faces one of its most momentous choices. He needs the best information any of us can give him.

Mr. Woolsey, former director of Central Intelligence, is a lawyer in Washington.