Review: Against Our Better Judgment, by Alison Weir
The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel
BY RICHARD C. COOK • UNZ REVIEW • NOVEMBER 1, 2023
As the crisis involving the Israelis and Palestinians deepens after the October 7 Hamas attack, we might pause to examine how the state of Israel was created in the first place. At the current juncture, as World War III looms on the horizon, as massacres are currently being perpetrated by Israel against the civilian population of Gaza, with a death toll exceeding 9,000, of which over 4,000 are children, and as a Western armada is gathering in the eastern Mediterranean, it is befitting to review journalist Alison Weir’s book Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel. The book was published in 2014, is packed with often hard-to-access details, and is masterfully documented. Alison Weir is also head of a group she has founded: If Americans Knew.
Alison Weir’s book is crucially important in considering ways to gain a broader perspective in order to defuse the situation. It is also of keen interest with respect to the larger potential conflict, where U.S. political leaders are again trotting out the phrase, “Axis of Evil,” this time to describe the nations of Russia, China, and Iran. (Sometimes North Korea is tossed in for good measure.) It’s Iran, of course, that U.S. leaders are identifying as an alleged sponsor of the resistance groups in and around Palestine, including Hamas.
Following are what I view as the main points from Alison Weir’s book. My own interspersed editorial comments are in italics. Page numbers are given in parentheses only for quotations from the book.
Origin of Zionism in the U.S. Against Our Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Was Used to Create Israel begins by explaining that support for Zionism, defined as the desire for creation of a Jewish national state somewhere in the world, goes back in U.S. history to the late 1880s, around the time that the Zionist Movement was becoming prominent in Europe. By the 1910s, there were thousands of U.S. adherents, though many Jews opposed Zionism as not in the interests of the Jewish people and certain to result in antagonism toward them. Probably a majority of Jews in the U.S. had never even heard of Zionism and/or were happy to have assimilated into American society. In fact, there was nothing that could even be viewed remotely as an “anti-Semitism problem” in the U.S. at this time.
Role of U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Louis Brandeis and Creation of the Parushim. Still, some very powerful people became Zionists, including U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, whose main disciple was future Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter. Brandeis formed a secret organization called the Parushim, whose sole purpose was to bring about the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. This Zionist organization required an oath that appeared to give life and death power over its sworn members.
“Parushim,” also spelled “Purushim,” is the Hebrew word from which the name “Pharisees” is derived, meaning “separatists.” From the Pharisees came Rabbinical Judaism and the idea that, “We should not assimilate or acculturate at all.” (prezi.com) I would note that Alison Weir’s book did not aim at giving an account of the deeper motivations of the Zionist movement, other than its claim to be a reaction to European “anti-Semitism.” For more depth, I would recommend a careful reading of the classic The Controversy of Zion by British journalist Douglas Reed (1895-1976).
Justice Louis Brandeis was close to Wall Street banker Jacob Schiff. Brandeis was also closely involved with the creation of the Federal Reserve System, as was Schiff, though Brandeis’s involvement in political issues was largely behind the scenes.
The Federal Reserve, I would add, was largely a project of the U.S. Money Trust and the British/European Rothschilds. The Rothschilds were also heavily involved in Zionism and in the creation and support of the Zionist state. The fact that Zionism was sponsored by some incredibly rich people might cause us to ask to what extent financial rewards played a role in the rapid conversion of many Jews and non-Jews to Zionism during this period. For information on creation of the Federal Reserve, see my own book, Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023).
Collaboration Between the Parushim and Great Britain. Justice Louis Brandeis’s Parushim worked closely with Zionists in Great Britain, including travel back and forth, to persuade the British government to designate Palestine as a future Jewish homeland. This was after Zionist leaders had rejected such locations as Kenya. Thus was created a “contract” between Britain and the Parushim that if the British would generate what became the Balfour Declaration, the U.S. Zionists would endeavor to assure U.S. entrance into World War I against Germany on the side of Britain. This contract was fulfilled by both parties, though, as in the U.S., many British Jews opposed Zionism for similar reasons—as a threat to Jewish assimilation.
The Balfour Declaration specified that it should be “clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” (p.97) At the time, non-Jewish communities made up 92 percent of the population of Palestine.
Zionism and the Failure to Make Peace with the Ottoman Empire. World War I begin in 1914. By 1915-1916, the Ottoman Empire, which was allied with Germany but not at war against the U.S., offered to make a separate peace with the U.S. The Ottomans had also offered to allow the Jews of Europe to live at peace anywhere in their empire. The U.S. sent a delegation to negotiate this separate peace, but Brandeis informed the British Zionists that the delegation was on its way. The British Zionists then send their leader, Chaim Weizmann, to intercept the U.S. delegation at Gibraltar, where he prevailed on it to call off the negotiations. The reason was that the British were going to lay claim to Palestine after the war as a homeland for the Jews, so they wanted to assure that Palestine was going to be available for British control. The British design was to break up the Ottoman Empire, not leave it intact through a separate U.S.-instigated peace.
Warnings Against the Zionist Project. Diplomats within the U.S. State Department both in Washington, D.C., and in the Middle East were aware of and warned against the Zionist project, arguing that a million Palestinians would be displaced or made virtual servants/slaves of the invaders.
World War I. In 1917 the U.S. entered the war on the side of Britain, per the Zionist agreement, and Germany was defeated, along with the Ottomans. Britain also signed a secret agreement with France by which it would get control of Palestine after the war. Control was implemented through the vehicle of a British Mandate approved by the League of Nations.
During this period, antagonism against Jews had begun to grow within U.S. society, partly in reaction to perceptions that Jews controlled the banks and other financial institutions. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” had also appeared. While claimed to be a forgery from Czarist Russia, the Protocols received credence and publicity from Henry Ford and others.
Germany was aware that the Zionists had contributed to the defeat of Germany in WWI. This contributed to the anti-Jewish attitudes of Germans after the war and was a factor in the later Nazi anti-Jewish policies.
During WWI, the Parushim gave the FBI a list of Americans who were opponents to Zionism or the war. Many of these people were arrested and sent to prison. Through all of this, Brandeis was directing matters from behind the scenes. He was arguably the most powerful person in the U.S., but his political activities were secret or carried out through proxies.
At the end of WWI, President Woodrow Wilson sent a commission to Palestine to investigate the situation. Known as the King-Crane Commission, its report “recommended against the Zionist position of unlimited immigration of Jews to make Palestine a distinctly Jewish state.” The report stated that “the Zionists looked forward to a practically complete dispossession of the present non-Jewish inhabitants of Palestine,” that “armed force would be required to accomplish this,” and that “the project for making Palestine distinctly a Jewish commonwealth should be given up.” The report of the King-Crane Commission “was suppressed.” (p.25)
Zionism After World War I. Between the two world wars, a growing number of U.S. Zionists worked to further the project for the creation of Israel. In Germany, the Zionists supported the rise of the Nazis, as this would lead to German Jews wanting to emigrate to Palestine. In Iraq, where the Jewish leaders did not support Zionism, Iraqi Jews were attacked, even murdered, to force them to emigrate to Palestine. Without arousing the anxiety of Jews around the world that they were unsafe in their homelands, Zionist planners believed there would not be enough Jewish settlers to create a Zionist state and force the Palestinians out.
Opponents of Zionism in the U.S. diplomatic service were threatened with having their careers destroyed if they did not support the claims that Jews in foreign countries were suffering discrimination so should want to move to Palestine. The Zionists worked to limit immigration opportunities for Jews elsewhere than Palestine, including the U.S. The Zionists opposed measures by the British government to limit the number of Jews who could enter Palestine.
Collaboration Between the Zionists and Nazis. Building on work by author Hannah Arendt, Edwin Black wrote The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact Between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine. Click Here According to author Tom Segev, “Arendt stated that many Jews would have survived ‘had their leaders not helped the Nazis organize the concentration of Jews in the ghettos, their deportation to the east, and their transport to the death camps.’” (p.146) This was called the “Haavara Agreement.”
The famous 1930s Jewish boycott of German products may have been instigated by Zionists to promote anti-Jewish sentiment leading to more desire among Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Other Zionists made claims that persecuted Jews were prone to becoming revolutionary communists for the same purpose.
Zionist Activities Between the World Wars. In the U.S. during the 1920s and 1930s, Zionist leaders muffled talk of a Jewish state in Palestine and focused on creating new institutions there as altruistic enterprises. An example was Hebrew University, opening in Jerusalem in 1925. Zionist leaders complained that most U.S. Jews saw themselves first and foremost as American citizens. Organizations like the American Zionist Emergency Council and the United Jewish Appeal were founded to generate funding and support. Donations to the United Jewish Appeal in 1948 was four times that of the American Red Cross. Pro-Zionist publicity and lobbying efforts were unleashed across the U.S. Some Jews, like the American Council for Judaism, still opposed Zionism as inimical to real Jewish interests. The ACJ opposed the Zionists’ “anti-Semitic racialist lie that Jews the world over were a separate, national body.” (p.152)
Zionist advocacy in the U.S. had powerful political adherents. New York Congressman Emanuel Celler told President Harry Truman, “We’ll run you out of town,” if he did not support the program. Senator Jacob Javits said, “We’ll fight to the death and make a Jewish state in Palestine if it’s the last thing that we do.” (p.38) Zionist propaganda included funding of best-selling pro-Zionist books by non-Jews. Zionists such as wealthy Wall Street lawyer Samuel Untermyer began to interject “dispensationalist” ideas of “Christian Zionism” into the discourse through sponsorship of the “Scofield Reference Bible.” (Untermyer was also a leading backer of the Federal Reserve and advocate of the worldwide Jewish boycott of Germany.)
Today, as we all know, “Christian Zionism” among “evangelicals” is part of the bedrock support of the Israel Lobby. Leading evangelical ministers like Jerry Falwell received large donations from Zionist supporters. An entire “dispensationalist” mythology involving the “Rapture,” etc., has been constructed and promoted to justify the political union between this group of American religionists and the most extreme factions of Israeli politics led today by such figures as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Though Netanyahu has surfaced this mad mythology to cover Israeli genocide in Gaza, the topic is not covered in detail in Alison Weir’s book, so will not be dealt with further here.
Protestant Support of Zionism. By the 1930s, U.S. Zionists were trying to organize American Protestants in their support. By the end of WWII the Christian Council on Palestine had grown to 3,000 members and the American Palestine Committee to 6,500. The appeal to Protestants was based on generating sympathy for refugees, though no mention was made of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinians becoming refugees due to the Zionist takeover. During the Israeli war of independence in 1947-1949, Christian churches and institutions in Palestine were assaulted by the Zionists along with the Palestinians.
Beginnings of Terrorism and U.N. Partition of Palestine. In Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionists tried to buy Palestinian land but few inhabitants wished to sell. The Zionists then began to organize terrorist forces to drive them out. These terrorist groups also targeted British government officials, as Palestine was still a British Mandate. Author Alison Weir cites a statement by David ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, that suggests this was at least part of what started today’s worldwide phenomenon of terrorism.
By the start of the 1947-1949 war, Jews made up 30 percent of the Palestinian population but owned only 6-7 percent of the land. In 1947, Britain turned its Palestine Mandate over to the U.N. A General Assembly resolution to partition gave the Zionists 55 percent of the land of Palestine. The U.S. State Department opposed the partition plan as against the wishes of local people and in violation of U.S. interests and of democratic principles. Officials warned that partition “would guarantee that the Palestine problem would be permanent and still more complicated in the future.” (p.45) Officials said the proposal was for “a theocratic racial state” that discriminated “on grounds of religion and race.” (p.45) The leading anti-Zionist Department of State official, Loy Henderson, was exiled by his superiors to a post as ambassador to Nepal.
U.S. Government Opposition to Zionism. Nevertheless, virtually the entire U.S. executive branch was opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. Statements and reports were made by a 1946 commission headed by Ambassador Henry F. Grady, the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Undersecretary of State Dean Acheson. A 1948 report of the Joint Chiefs of Staff stated that, “The Zionist strategy will seek to involve [the U.S.] in a continuously widening and deepening series of operations intended to secure maximum Jewish objectives.” (p.47)
Jewish leaders were well aware that U.N. partitioning of Palestine was temporary and that over time, the Jewish state would expand to absorb the entire region. The concept of “Eretz Israel” was formulated, whereby the Zionist state would encompass Transjordan, as well as parts of Lebanon and Syria. Zionists also had begun using U.S. antagonism toward the Soviet Union as an argument for creation of a pro-Western Jewish state. This hearkened back to the early days of Zionism, when Zionist leaders characterized their proposed state as a bulwark of British influence in the Middle East; i.e., as an extension of British colonialism and geopolitics.
Today, pro-Zionists make the argument that Israel is an outpost of benign “Judeo-Christian” influence in the Middle East, as they try to arouse antagonism toward the one billion Muslims in the world in a purported “clash of civilizations.” Such attitudes became prominent in U.S. politics during the “War on Terror” of the Bush/Cheney administration that continues today through U.S. labeling of anti-Zionist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah as “terrorist” organizations. This is despite the historical fact cited above that it was the Zionists who introduced terrorism into the Middle East.
U.S. Recognition of Israel and the Role of President Truman. The U.S. was the first country to recognize Israel as an independent state when on May 14, 1948, President Harry Truman issued a statement of recognition following Israel’s proclamation of independence on the same date. Truman’s main motivation was believed at the time, and still is today, the winning of Jewish support in the presidential election that year. His decision was strongly opposed by Secretary of State George Marshall, Secretary of Defense James Forrestal, the CIA and National Security Council, and top State Department official George Kennan. Intelligence agent Kermit Roosevelt wrote: “The present course of world crisis will increasingly force upon Americans the realization that their national interests and those of the proposed Jewish state in Palestine are going to conflict.” (p.51) Contrary to the belief that U.S. oil interests promoted the Zionist project, officials argued that U.S. ability to access Middle Eastern resources would be adversely affected. Truman also had pro-Zionist insiders at high levels of his administration.
Author Alison Weir points out that bribery also played a part. “Gore Vidal wrote: ‘Sometime in the late 1950s, that world-class gossip and occasional historian, John F. Kennedy, told me how, in 1948, Harry S. Truman had been pretty much abandoned by everyone when he came to run for president. Then an American Zionist brought him two million dollars in cash, in a suitcase, aboard his whistle-stop campaign train. ‘That’s why our recognition of Israel was rushed through so fast.’” (p.167) Jewish businessman Abraham Feinberg explained his raising of cash for Truman in an oral history interview published by the Truman Library in 1973. The CIA also discovered Feinberg’s illegal gun-running to Zionist groups.
I may be the first writer to point out that Truman’s action in accepting bribes, if discovered, could have been seen and treated as an impeachable offense.
Zionist Takeover of Palestine. At the time of Israel’s proclamation of independence and immediate U.S. recognition, the U.N. resolution of partition had been passed, with war ensuing between Zionist and Arab forces. The U.N. General Assembly adopted the partition plan by 33 votes to 13 with 10 abstentions, with many nations subjected to intense Zionist lobbying and threats. For instance, “Financier and longtime presidential adviser Bernard Baruch told France it would lose U.S. aid if it voted against partition.” (p.55) A Swedish U.N. mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte, was killed by Zionist assassins. To this day, no accepted legal authority for the U.N. in its partitioning of Palestine has ever been demonstrated. In other words, it was likely an extra-legal action in response to Zionist lobbying.
Though sporadic violence between Jews and Palestinian Arabs had taken place over the previous two decades, the Zionists committed wholesale massacres of Palestinians after the U.N. resolution for partition. By the end of Israel’s war of independence in 1948, over 750,000 Palestinians had been expelled from Zionist-controlled territory. Israeli historian Tom Segev wrote: “Israel was born of terror, war, and revolution, and its creation required a measure of fanaticism and cruelty.” (p.58) Today this is called in Arabic the “Nakba”—“catastrophe.”
The most well-known massacre took place at the village of Deir Yessin in April 1948, before any Arab armies had joined the fight. There, 254 villagers were murdered in cold blood. The heads of two militias present at Deir Yessin, Irgun and the Stern Gang, were Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, both of whom later became prime ministers of Israel. The Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1947, killing 86. The Stern Gang also solicited aid from the Axis powers during WWII.
Zionist Front Organizations in the U.S. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Zionists created a number of front organizations to raise money used to finance militant activities in Palestine. After WWII, the U.S. maintained an arms embargo against Israel and the Middle East. Foremost among the sponsors of the front organizations intended to skirt the embargo was Irgun. One group, the Jewish Army of Stateless and Palestinians Jews, claimed it was formed to fight the Nazis in Europe, but was intended instead to fight the British and Arabs in Palestine. These groups espoused such radical ideologies as the idea that “non-Jews are the embodiment of Satan, and that the world was created solely for Jews.” (p.67) Another group, headed by Orthodox Rabbi Baruch Korff, hatched a plot to blow up the British foreign office in London that was exposed in the New York Herald Tribune. Through political influence, U.S. charges against Korff were dropped. Later he “became a close friend and fervent supporter of President Richard Nixon, who called him ‘my rabbi.’” (p.71) Nixon’s support for Israel manifested in the gigantic airlift of military supplies that helped save Israel from defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Another major organization raising money for sending arms to the Zionists in Palestine was the Sonneborn Institute. Between 1939 and May 1948, the Jewish Agency for Israel was also active, raising the equivalent today of $3.5 billion.
Zionism and Organized Crime. Financial backers of Israeli independence included members of organized crime, including Meyer Lansky, head of the Jewish Mafia in the U.S. In an April 19, 2018 article in Tablet (tabletmag.com) entitled “Gangsters for Zion: Yom Ha’atzmaut: How Jewish mobsters helped Israel gain its independence. Robert Rockaway wrote: “In 1945, the Jewish Agency, the pre-state Israeli government headed by David Ben-Gurion, created a vast clandestine arms-purchasing-and-smuggling network throughout the United States. The operation was placed under the aegis of the Haganah, the underground forerunner of the Israel Defense Forces, and involved hundreds of Americans from every walk of life. They included millionaires, rabbinical students, scrap-metal merchants, ex-GIs, college students, longshoremen, industrialists, chemists, engineers, Protestants and Catholics, as well as Jews. One group, who remained anonymous and rarely talked about, were men who were tough, streetwise, unafraid, and had access to ready cash: Jewish gangsters.” Rockaway, a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University, also wrote that through their control of U.S. ports, the Jewish mob arranged for arms deliveries to Israel aboard vessels flying the flag of Panama.
Recruiting Jews to Relocate to Palestine. “Zionist cadres infiltrated displaced persons’ camps that had been set up to house refugees displaced during WWII. These infiltrators tried secretly to funnel people to Palestine. When it turned out that most didn’t want to go to Palestine, they worked to convince them—sometimes by force.” (p.74) Another recruiting source was Jewish foster children in Christian homes. The Zionists claimed to be the sole representative of all the world’s Jews in order to legitimize efforts to divert war survivors to Israel, not to countries like the U.S. to which many preferred to go. “After a voluntary recruitment drive netted less than 0.3 percent of the DP [displaced persons] population, a compulsory draft was implemented.” (p.79) Some draftees were required to fight in Palestine in the Zionist war of independence. Meanwhile, the secretive Sieff group was formed in Washington, D.C., to carry out back channel lobbying for the Zionist project. The group was protected by such powerful individuals as Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., and the aforementioned financier and presidential adviser Bernard Baruch.
Fate of the Palestinian Refugees. Three-quarters of a million Palestinian refugees fled to neighboring regions in a gigantic humanitarian disaster. A 1948 State Department report stated “The total direct relief offered…by the Israeli government to date consists of 500 cases of oranges.” (p.83) The value of land confiscated by the Zionists amounted to $5.2 trillion in today’s dollars. Christians also suffered as “numerous convents, hospices, seminaries, and churches were either destroyed or cleared of their Christian owners and custodians.” (p.83) Efforts by U.S. government officials to withhold aid to the Israeli government due to the refugee crisis were overruled by President Truman.
Zionism and the media. Even as early as WWI, the Zionists exerted almost complete control over the U.S. press. This included placing pro-Zionist articles in prestigious newspapers like The New York Times. In 1953, author Alfred Lilienthal wrote: “The capture of the American press by Jewish nationalism was, in fact, incredibly complete. Magazines as well as newspapers, in news stories as well as editorial columns, gave primarily the Zionist views of events before, during, and after partition.” (p.86) Zionist coercion extended to withdrawal of advertising, cancellation of subscriptions, and blacklisting of journalists and authors, even those offering a mere trace of sympathy toward the displaced Palestinians. Particularly emotional in their support of Zionism were the journals the Nation and the New Republic. An example of how the Zionists could destroy an author’s career was the attack on then-famous journalist Dorothy Thompson after “she began to speak about Palestinian refugees, narrated a documentary about their plight, and condemned Jewish terrorism. (p.92)
We all know that the complete slanting of U.S. media coverage toward Zionism and Israel dominates news reporting at all levels and across the ideological spectrum, from the top newspapers and networks to what is left of small town journalism. This includes so-called “independent” outlets like Breitbart. The start of this bias began, perhaps not coincidentally, during the time before WWI when the newsrooms of U.S. newspapers were taken over by propagandists sympathetic to the Federal Reserve System and the Money Trust. Today, of course, we have the internet, which has begun to make inroads into the control of the news by pro-establishment media corporations and Deep State censors. Internet outlets also must be cautious, however, so are often reduced to the role of “limited hangouts,” reporting only selected stories that protest particularly egregious Israeli offenses, but never the “big picture.”
In conclusion we can say that, as Alison Weir’s book makes clear, it was largely American Zionists who financed and enabled the violent takeover of Palestine and who thereby share responsibility over the past three-quarters of a century for the atrocities committed against a diverse population whose forebears had been living in peace and rooted in the region for millenniums. This population also inhabited the holy city of Jerusalem, sacred to the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions.
The book also makes it clear that people can oppose Zionism—the forceful establishment of a Jewish national state in Palestine—without being anti-Jewish or “anti-Semitic.” Of course, most of the indigenous people of Palestine are “Semites” in ethnicity and language. Also, the most forceful opponents of the original Zionist movement in Great Britain, the U.S., and possibly other nations, have been, and still are, Jews themselves who had successfully assimilated into their host cultures. Examples are the Hassidic Jews of Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jews in Iran who refuse to support Israel.
Many more volumes could or should be written about U.S. enabling of Israel and Zionism and about Israel’s and Zionism’s interference in internal U.S. affairs. I would include an examination of Israel’s possible participation in the JFK/RFK assassinations and the 9/11 attacks, U.S. acquiescence in Israel’s nuclear weapons program, Israel’s links with the Neocons who control today’s U.S. foreign policy, and today’s courting of World War III against more than half the world’s countries, starting with Israel’s nemesis, Iran. Will the U.S. stumble into WWIII because of its pro-Zionist captivity?
Copyright 2023 by Richard C. Cook. Comments are welcome and will be read at monetaryreform@gmail.com.
Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst who served with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he broke the story of the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Shuttle. After serving at Treasury, he exposed the disastrous flaws of a monetary system controlled by private finance in his book We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform. As an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and while working with Congressman Dennis Kucinich, he advocated the replacement of the Federal Reserve System with a genuine national currency. His latest book is Our Country, Then and Now (Clarity Press, 2023).
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014.
Why I Support Hamas
And you should too
BY KEVIN BARRETT | OCTOBER 29, 2023
In this week’s False Flag Weekly News I outperformed Cat McGuire (for once) in saying things the ADL won’t like. Angered by the genocide of Gaza, I uttered many uncomplimentary and/or inflammatory remarks about the Chosen People and their Chosen State. But of all of the “oy vey” things I said, what the ADL will hate the most is my open declaration of support for Hamas.
And that, of course, is the most obvious reason to support Hamas: “They” really, really don’t want you to. The strategists who are trying to keep the genocide of Palestine going apparently realize that if significant numbers of Westerners start openly supporting Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian resistance, the Zionist goose will be well and truly cooked. That’s why they’ve used advanced propaganda techniques to inject the obligatory “I don’t support Hamas, but” disclaimer deep into the collective unconscious of the West in general and its relatively-Palestine-savvy people in particular.
“They” don’t really care if you deplore the massacre of thousands of Gazan women and children. “They” don’t mind if you support a two-state solution, or even a one-state solution. “They” can live with you calling for a ceasefire. “They” could care less if you utter words like apartheid or even genocide.
It’s like when Joel Stein said “I don’t care if Americans think we’re running the news media, Hollywood, Wall Street or the government. I just care that we get to keep running them.” The Zionist position is: “I don’t care if Americans think we’re committing human rights violations, apartheid, or genocide. I just care that we get to keep committing them.”
Americans complaining about Zionist human rights violations, apartheid, and genocide won’t stop those things. They will only be stopped at gunpoint. And it really does matter that people support the right of genocide victims to pick up guns and stop the genocide.
Jews, who think of themselves as paradigmatic genocide victims, should be the first to support armed resistance against genocide. And indeed, the smartest and most courageous Jews do. Check out what David Rovics has to say about Al-Aqsa Flood being the new Warsaw Ghetto uprising:
Hamas is the closest thing to an elected government the Palestinians have. In fact, the last time they had a real election in the Occupied Territories of the West Bank and Gaza, Hamas won by a landslide….Physically fighting back against an occupying army, according to international law that all the countries in the world have signed on to long ago, is justified, and is not “terrorism.”
Why Supporting Hamas Is Strategically Savvy
In any struggle between two sides, the outcome will be largely determined by the intensity of support enjoyed by each party to the conflict. Small, weak countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan were able to defeat the mighty USA because they were far more intensely committed to ending US occupation than Americans were committed to maintaining it. Like the Palestinians today, they were willing to accept a lopsided casualty ratio as they continued raising the price of occupation to the point that the occupier opted to stop paying it.
The Western propaganda apparatus currently allows and tacitly encourages pro-Zionist intensity, while making pro-Resistance intensity taboo. “I stand with Israel” is acceptable, even mandatory; “I stand with Hamas” is practically illegal and unthinkable.
When Side A is passionately and intensely supporting its fighters, while Side B mumbles apologies and obligatory disclaimers, obviously Side A will enjoy a morale advantage that will translate into an advantage on the battlefield. But when Side A is a criminal aggressor and genocide perpetrator, it may find it difficult to maintain its intense support, and to prevent neutral people who care about justice from becoming passionate supporters of the other side. So it will use every propaganda trick in the book to prevent neutrals and lukewarm supporters of the other side from becoming brazen and passionate.
The best way to change that pro-genocide Overton Window is to throw a brick through it. And tied to that brick, a simple message: “I SUPPORT HAMAS.”
Pro-Vietnam-War people really hated it when Jane Fonda high-fived Hanoi as thousands of Americans gathered in the streets to shout their support for the Viet Cong: “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, the NLF is going to win!” But that, and US troops fragging their officers, is what ended the war. Humanitarian complaints about napalmed babies and My Lai massacres were only useful insofar as they pissed off enough people to the point that they realized that the Vietnamese resistance fighters were the good guys, and Uncle Sam was the villain, and that all decent people had a moral duty to support the Vietnamese resistance. That shifted the Overton Window radically, to the point that “withdraw ASAP and to hell with the consequences” became a middle-of-the-road position and then a political reality.
If we can get a small but noticeable number of Americans openly and brazenly cheering for Hamas at the top of their proverbial lungs, it will have the same effect on ZOG that Al-Aqsa Flood had on Israelis: It will drive them crazy, puncture their inflated sense of invulnerability, and incite them to lash out in irrational and strategically counterproductive ways. ZOG’s mask will come off, and it will show its psychotic, genocidal face to America, just as the Israelis have shown theirs to the region, the BRICS nations, and the Global South.
And the Overton Window will shift. Pretty soon “end aid to Israel” and “one-state solution” will become middle-of-the-road positions and then political realities.
Why Supporting Hamas Is Your Moral Duty
I began by explaining why supporting Hamas is strategically savvy, rather than addressing the moral argument, because much of my audience already understands what I am now about to say. For them, the strategic benefits of supporting Hamas may not be evident, even though the moral arguments are.
So I risk belaboring the obvious in stressing that the most important point—the forest that people miss while peering at the trees—is that the Palestinian cause is just, and the Zionist one unjust. Every just war theory, whether Christian, Islamic, or secular, is based on the non-aggression principle: The side that initiates aggression, in this case by crossing the seas to invade and murder and steal the other side’s land and property, is in the wrong, while those fighting to stop that aggression are in the right. No sane person who takes the time to study the history of Palestine in a reasonably comprehensive and unbiased way can fail to conclude that there has never been a war in history that has been more obviously and completely just than the Palestinian war against Zionist invasion, occupation, and genocide.
And of all the big lies uttered in history, there has never been a bigger one than “The Israeli-Palestine conflict? It’s complicated.” No it isn’t. And it isn’t a conflict, it’s a genocide. The rights and wrongs are not the least bit complicated.
Zionist attempts to obfuscate the injustice of their genocidal project are so absurd that they would be hilarious if there were not right now more than a thousand Gazan children buried beneath the rubble of what used to be their homes, suffering and dying slowly in some cases, expiring quickly and mercifully in others. Consider the most popular excuses:
“Yahweh gave us Palestine 3,000 years ago. Surely that should count for something! What?! You don’t honor Yahweh’s 3000-year-old real estate deals?!!”
*“We deserve Palestine because of the Holocaust. So why isn’t Israel in Germany? Umm… next excuse!”
“We are an ethnic group so we deserve a state of our own. And yes, we know that there are tens of thousands of ethnic groups on Earth, and that virtually none of them have states, but we are just so special that we deserve one! And if you don’t agree, you are anti-Semitic!”
“We have gotten into terrible conflicts with every neighbor we’ve ever had, and have been expelled from more than 100 countries for no reason at all except that our neighbors like to pointlessly persecute us, so you ought to sympathize and side with us no matter what we do.”
“There are lots of terrible injustices, so if you complain about this one, you must be an anti-Semite!” Alternate version: “Genghis Khan (or Pol Pot or Stalin or Hitler) killed more people than we have, so why are you attacking us, you anti-Semite?”
“The Palestinians and their supporters, as we portray them in our propaganda machine, are very bad, wicked people, so you should cheer for us as we steal their stuff and exterminate them.”
“We are a democracy even though we murdered or expelled most of the people who should be voting in our elections.”
“Israel’s existence is really, really beneficial to US national security, even though it makes billions of people in geopolitically-crucial energy-rich countries hate America’s guts.”
“You have to support us because we call our enemies ‘terrorists’ and other nasty names.”
And when all else fails:
“Support us and do what we say, or you’ll never work in this town again!”
Refuting the extant arguments for Israel’s existence would be superfluous and an insult to the reader’s intelligence. They are not even arguments, just inarticulate, incoherent grunts and howls of tribally-intoxicated psychopathy.
But it may be worth unpacking one of them: the “terrorist” blood libel. Terrorism is usually defined as “A military tactic consisting of deliberately attacking civilians to incite fear and achieve a political objective.” And that is exactly what “Israel” is: A terrorist organization. Zionist terrorists have been attacking and terrorizing the civilian population of the territory they invaded, namely Palestine, ever since they got there. The various Zionist terror groups were so drunk on terrorism that they even terrorized each other, as well as their fellow aggressors and invaders, the British, in a bloody orgy of terror that has no parallel in modern history. Much of the story can be found in Thomas Suarez’s State of Terror: How Terrorism Created Modern Israel.
So the conflict is between terrorists who crossed the seas to attack the Palestinian civilian population in order to kill some and scare the others into leaving; and the civilian population they have been terrorizing. On one side, the Zionist terrorists; on the other, the Palestinian anti-terrorist Resistance. In this as in so much else, the Zionist propaganda machine has turned reality on its head.
Today, the Zionist terrorists continue to deliberately target and mass-murder Palestinian civilians by the thousands. About two-thirds of the Palestinians they kill are women and children. The Zionists probably kill about a hundred civilians for every Hamas fighter. Compare that to al-Aqsa Storm, the Hamas operation that killed roughly equal numbers of Israeli military fighters and civilians. And of the civilians killed in al-Aqsa Storm, the majority were killed by the Israeli military, whether accidentally in crossfire, or deliberately in accordance with the Hannibal Directive, which recommends eliminating both hostage-takers and hostages using overwhelming firepower in order to prevent the enemy from using hostages as a bargaining chip.
Hamas, unlike the Zionists, primarily targets the Israeli military, when it can. Clearly, al-Aqsa Storm primarily targeted the IDF. Hamas’s orders were to take hostages, but to avoid killing unarmed civilians. And while there may have been a few instances of Palestinians killing civilians, photo evidence proves that the worst carnage—music festival goers caught in heavy artillery crossfire, houses and kibbutzes and other buildings full of people destroyed by tank and artillery shells—was perpetrated by the IDF. Hamas soldiers, carrying light weapons, could not possibly have caused that kind of damage, or killed those large numbers of people.
This and most of the rest of the damage to civilians on October 7 was meted out by Israeli heavy weapons, not Hamas’s light firearms
But what about the rockets? Since unlike Israel, Hamas doesn’t enjoy billions of dollars worth of of US-taxpayer-provided weaponry, it fires relatively unsophisticated rockets that cannot take out hardened military targets, but do frighten and occasionally harm Israeli “civilians.” So… is that terrorism? No—because Israelis are settlers, not civilians. Under international law, military resistance against occupation, including targeting settlers, is legitimate. So we can argue about proportionality—I would assert that Hamas errs on the side of mercy by doing a whole lot less settler-killing than it has every right to be doing — but at the end of the day, international law, morality, and basic common sense dictate that Hamas’s use of rockets to retaliate against massive genocide is justifiable… and rational, as part of a multi-pronged strategy to keep raising the costs of occupation to the point that the genocidal occupier will finally take Helen Thomas’s advice and “get the hell out of Palestine.”
Arguing with Orwell’s O’Brien
You know who has lost the argument not only by Godwin’s law a.k.a. reducto ad Hitlerum, but also by which party feels the need to use coercion to force the other party to shut up. The Zionist terrorists have not only lost the argument, they have no argument. No wonder they ceaselessly invoke Hitler and the Nazis. And no wonder they constantly run professors out of universities, get media personalities fired, launch specious persecutions and prosecutions, and generally terrorize everyone into going along with their genocidal absurdities.
Arguing with a Zionist is like arguing with Orwell’s O’Brien: He knows he’s full of shit, has no compunctions about it, and is going to do whatever it takes to ruin your life.
By saying “I like Hamas,” I’m supporting an anti-terrorist group that the Zionist terrorists have falsely and mendaciously labeled, in true Orwellian fashion, “terrorists.” Maybe they’ll try to get me prosecuted for “material support for anti-terrorism,” though I haven’t mailed so much as a dirham to Hamas, POB 123, Gaza Strip, Occupied Palestine, nor have I contributed to any Hamas GoFundMe’s or bought any donuts from the nice little old Hamas ladies at the local mosque. (If they were selling baclava, I’d consider it.)
If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll probably have to admit that the reason that you haven’t yet come around to openly supporting Hamas is fear: fear of what the Zionists might do to you. Well, I’m here to tell you that fear isn’t the right word for that. The correct word is cowardice.
The Palestinians continue to unite in resistance to genocide, even as the Zionists respond by forcing their children to die agonizing deaths, by the thousands, beneath mountains of rubble. And you can’t even openly and publicly admit that you support that Resistance? Come to think of it, maybe cowardice isn’t the right word. It isn’t strong enough.
Come on, grow some stones. Say it with me: “I… SUPPORT… HAMAS.”
Why are the Israelis massacring civilians in Gaza? Because they can get away with it
By Michael Hoffman | Revelation of the Method | October 23, 2023
Israeli forces terror-bombed Beirut throughout the summer of 1982. In the West in English there is exactly one book about it: God Cried by Catherine Leroy and Tony Clifton. The Lebanese have almost no memorial and certainly no museum devoted to the bombing of hospitals, schools and apartment blocks, just like now, in Gaza. The Israeli government is well aware of this forgetfulness and they calculate their atrocities and war crimes accordingly.
If the Palestinians were bombing Tel Aviv to the extent the Israelis have bombed Gaza (5,000 deaths thus far), in the aftermath there would be books, movies, diaries, poems, plays, museums, and annual, solemn commemorations throughout the West.
Gaza was heavily bombed in 2009 and 2014. The Arab and Muslim world do not engage in the same level of memory and commemoration, other than personal recollection. There are a few exceptions, but they are comparatively minuscule.
Furthermore, if, as in Gaza, day-in and day-out Tel Aviv’s civilian centers were being blown to bits, and its food, fuel and even its water (!) were shut down, the International Court in The Hague and the European Union would be charging the Palestinian leadership responsible, with war crimes. The US would be heavily sanctioning those leaders and humanitarian supplies would be dropped by parachute if necessary to sustain the Israeli civilians.
Instead, the Court and the EU are frozen in mute assent to crimes against Arab children committed as I write these words, by the Israelis who suffered a holocaust in Europe and have been granted by Europe and Britain a license to perpetrate atrocities in Palestine. Hamas terrorists copied this perverse victims-have-the-right-to-be executioners “logic” on Oct. 7.
As for the casual, business-as-usual aspect of the atrocities against Palestinian civilians, it is rooted in the Zionist weaponization of the Talmudic halacha which few in the West, on the Left or the Right, care to learn about – http://talmudical.blogspot.com – and without which they will have no key to comprehending the depth of contempt for Palestinian life.
There are hundreds of books in English harshly critiquing the Quran. Meanwhile this writer’s two banned books [Judaism Discovered and Judaism’s Strange Gods] containing a sustained critique of Talmudism, which in English are among the only credible and charitable texts compassionately documenting Talmudic hate speech, which causes real world harm to Palestinian children, women, elderly and non-combatant men, in the form of their relentless mass murder.
The hate speech is real: on Oct. 9 Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant referred to the Palestinian people as “human animals.”
Israeli Prime Minister Meachem Begin termed them “two-legged animals.”
Israeli Army Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan called the Palestinians: “cockroaches in a bottle.”
The Allied incineration by more than 800 bombers leveled the German city and burned alive tens of thousands of civilians.
The murder of civilians, including by Hamas, is always wrong. Murder is murder. Dressing it up with alibis and platitudes does not make the heinous war crimes any less criminal.
Wounded Palestinian child and man receiving medical treatment at Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City following an Israeli bombing, Oct. 11, 2023
How can the daily Israeli massacre of kids and their mothers be parsed, justified or mitigated? It is right, but abortion is wrong? The bipolar nature of such thinking is depraved.
(Israeli victims of Hamas terrorism are no less innocent. They are extensively mourned in the West however, and rightly so; that’s not the case for the Palestinian civilian dead, not in any sustained memorial).
How can the Israeli mass murder of kids and their mothers be justified? I will answer my own question:
The record shows that bombing civilians in cities is the default method of Allied warfare: Tokyo, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Dresden, Hamburg, Hanoi, Baghdad.
As noted previously, Israelis terror-bombed Beirut throughout the summer of 1982 and Gaza in 2009 and 2014. These war crimes are justified by media ghouls in America, ensuring more of the same, as in Gaza now.
The bombing of Afghan villages and weddings contributed to the defeat of US forces, after the people became fed-up with the transparently lame excuses for the massacres by the likes of David Petraeus, who is now being touted by the media ghouls as a master of statecraft and generalship.
President Biden’s last act in Afghanistan was to approve a missile attack on an SUV that was transporting a large family. Seven children and three adults were incinerated; that’s how the US will be remembered in that nation.
Adolf Hitler was responsible for the brutal, mass expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Judaic people from Germany. For the past 20 years conservative wunderkind Ben Shapiro has advocated the forced extrusion (“transfer”) of the Palestinian people from Palestine. In his own words: “Here is the bottom line: If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper.”
Each of us must bear witness and do what we can to document, teach and remember.
FOR FURTHER RESEARCH
On the Palestine issue, Amy Goodwin’s podcast today, Oct. 23, is recommended. It can be accessed here at her Democracy Now! website.
A righteous Jew and an extraordinary human being, the brilliant Israeli journalist Amira Hass, is interviewed in two parts.
Take the time to listen to Amira:
If you’re in haste, at least listen to the interview in part two.
All of these broadcasts should be saved and conserved by citizen-journalists (like you), for posterity, and compiled into a permanent data base. I propose the following title for the proposed repository: Witness of War Crimes in Gaza.
History Lesson: Leftist Daniel Denvir conducts a “Palestine Teach-In“ on his podcast, which is accessible at The Dig website: the first hour contains a generally excellent history of the rise of Zionism in Palestine. Too many people don’t know how it all started. The historical context has been missing. Caveat : Mr. Denvir’s guests are mostly of the Left and their analysis of Britain’s role in the ascendance of Zionism in Palestine is limited to a perspective of British colonialism as the root cause. The influence of Freemasonry on the British government, and the masonic objective of rebuilding the Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, is missing from their analysis. However, don’t let that omission keep you from accessing the history offered.
Michael Hoffman is a former reporter for the New York bureau of the Associated Press and the author of ten books of history and literature, including Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare (2001), The Occult Renaissance Church of Rome (2017) , Twilight Language (2021), as well as a textbook (Judaism Discovered), and five other books published in the United States, as well as overseas in Japanese and French translation; and 122 issues of Revisionist History® newsletter, 1997-2022. His truth mission is made possible by donations, paid Substack subscriptions, and the sale of his books, newsletters and recordings. Podcast: here. X (Twitter): here. Rumble here.
Frankfurt Book Fair slammed, boycotted for ‘shutting down’ Palestinian voices
Press TV – October 20, 2023
The Frankfurt Book Fair in Germany, the world’s largest forum for books and literature, and a literary association have come under fire after they postponed a Palestinian writer’s award ceremony and canceled a public discussion with her.
In an open letter, hundreds of prominent authors and publishers from around the world slammed the organizers of the Frankfurt book fair, saying the forum has “a responsibility to be creating spaces for Palestinian writers to share their thoughts, feelings, reflections on literature through these terrible, cruel times, not shutting them down.”
The 350 authors who signed the letter included the Irish novelist Colm Toibin, the American-Libyan Pulitzer winner Hisham Matar, the British-Pakistani novelist Kamila Shamsie, and the British historian William Dalrymple.
Palestine-born novelist and essayist Adania Shibli was scheduled to be granted the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, an annual prize given to female writers from Africa, Asia, Latin America, or the Arab world, on 20 October for her novel “Minor Detail” which is about the suffering of the Palestinian people.
However, the LitProm association that hands out the prize said last week that it would postpone the award ceremony “due to the war started by Hamas, under which millions of people in Israel and Palestine are suffering.”
LitProm, which had hailed the novel as a “rigorously composed work of art that tells of the power of borders and what violent conflicts do to and with people”, said it had taken the step as a “joint decision” with the author, but Shibli’s literary agency stressed that the decision was not made with her consent.
The agency told the Guardian that Shibli would have taken the opportunity to reflect on the role of literature in these cruel and painful times.
Meanwhile, the international book fair has also explicitly voiced support for Israel, with Juergen Boos, director of the Frankfurt Book Fair, publishing a statement detailing plans “to make Jewish and Israeli voices especially visible” during the literary event. Boos has expressed “complete solidarity on the side of Israel.”
Indonesia and Malaysia boycotting FBF
The forum’s statement prompted Indonesia and Malaysia to boycott the fair that started on Wednesday, with writers from the two countries backing their countries’ decision.
Malaysian writer Faisal Tehrani told Arab News on Thursday that the approach of the fair’s organizer completely disregarded the situation in Gaza, where more than 3,800 people, mostly women and children, have been killed since the start of the Israeli aggression.
Meanwhile, Indonesian novelist Laksmi Pamuntjak, who won the LiBeraturpreis in 2016, issued a statement in support of her country’s decision to withdraw.
The fair’s decision to side with the Israeli regime “shows that this book fair no longer represents the voice of the world, where all nations and countries have the right and deserve a platform to voice their own truths,” she said.
Indonesian novelist Okky Madasari also said her country’s decision to boycott the fair was valid as it was important for writers, publishers and intellectuals to remind the world “that such a support disregarding the context and history can provide Israel with justification to kill more people and do more violence.”
Moreover, Indonesian writer Andina Dwifatma declined an invitation to speak at a literary event associated with the fair over its organizers’ stance.
“I’ve been following the news with a broken heart. And after I saw what FBF posted … I told them that I can’t attend the festival now that they made clear that they stand in complete solidarity with Israel,” she said.
“I think everybody must do something within their means … This is not a bilateral problem between Israel and Palestine; it’s a genocide, a humanitarian tragedy. So, declining that invitation is the least I can do as a writer.”
Israel launched the war on Gaza on October 7 after the Palestinian resistance movement Hamas waged the surprise Operation Al-Aqsa Storm against the occupying entity in response to the Israeli regime’s decades-long campaign of bloodletting and devastation against Palestinians.
American Pravda: The Forgotten Anthrax Attacks
BY RON UNZ • UNZ REVIEW • OCTOBER 17, 2023
The Immense Historical Importance of the Anthrax Attacks
We just recently passed the 22nd anniversary of the 9/11 Attacks, the greatest terrorist strike in human history and an event whose political reverberations dominated world politics for most of the two decades that followed. Our Iraq War was soon triggered as a consequence, a disastrous decision that dramatically transformed the political map of the Middle East and eventually led to the death or displacement of many millions, while our failing twenty-year retaliatory occupation of Afghanistan only finally came to a humiliating end in 2021.
American society also underwent enormous changes, with a considerable erosion of our traditional civil liberties. On the fiscal side, by 2008 Economics Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his collaborators had conservatively estimated that the total accrued cost of our military response had exceeded $3 trillion, a figure that later studies raised to $6.4 trillion by 2019, or more than $50,000 per American household.
In the days after those dramatic events, the images of the burning World Trade Center towers and their sudden collapse were endlessly replayed on our television screens, accompanied by the near-universal verdict that American life would forever be changed by the massive terrorist assault that had taken place. But a tiny handful of skeptics argued otherwise.
The Internet was then in its childhood, with the initial dot-com bubble already deflating, while Mark Zuckerberg was still in high school and social media did not yet exist. But one of the earliest pioneers of web-based journalism was Mickey Kaus, a former writer at The New Republic, who had recently begun publishing short, informal bits of punditry one or more times each day on what he called his “web log,” a term soon contracted to “blog.” Along with his fellow TNR alumnus Andrew Sullivan, Kaus became one of our first bloggers, and was inclined to take contrarian positions on major issues.
Thus, even as a stunned world gaped at the smoking ruins of the WTC towers and the talking heads on cable declared that American life would never be the same again, Kaus took a very different position. I remember that not long after the attacks, he argued that our cable-driven 24-hour news cycle had so drastically shrunk the popular attention-span that coverage of the massive terrorist attacks would soon begin to bore most Americans. As a result, he boldly predicted that by Thanksgiving, the 9/11 Attacks would have become a rapidly-fading memory, probably displaced by the latest celebrity-scandal or high-profile crime, and that the long-term impact upon American public life would be minimal.
Obviously, Kaus’ forecast was wrong, but I think it never had a fair test. Very soon after he wrote those words, our national attention was suddenly riveted by an entirely new wave of terrorism, as the offices of leading media and political figures in Manhattan, DC, and Florida began receiving envelopes filled with lethal anthrax spores together with short notes praising Allah and promising death to America.
Although nearly all Americans had seen the destruction of the WTC towers on their television screens and become outraged at the blow to our country, probably few had felt personally threatened by those September attacks. But now during October, the dreadful spectre of biological terrorism moved to the forefront of popular concerns, staying there for many months.
Those anthrax mailings had targeted particular high-profile individuals and the letters were tightly sealed, but the media soon revealed that rough handling at postal centers during the automatic sorting process had caused the tiny seeds of death to leak through the pores of the envelope paper, contaminating both the buildings and the other mail being processed. As a result, some of the subsequent fatalities were those of random individuals who had received an accidentally-contaminated letter, seeming to place all Americans at terrible risk.
Moreover, despite all the visual scenes of massive destruction inflicted on 9/11, only about 3,000 Americans had died, but then our political and media figures soon warned that terrorists could use anthrax or smallpox to kill hundreds of thousands or millions of our citizens. Indeed, we were told that just a few months earlier during June 2001, the government’s Dark Winter simulation exercise had suggested that over a million Americans could die in a smallpox attack unleashed by foreign terrorists.
According to early news reports, the anthrax in the letters had been highly weaponized using techniques far beyond the rudimentary capabilities of al-Qaeda terrorists, facts that therefore indicated a state sponsor. Numerous anonymous government sources stated that the deadly spores had been coated in bentonite, a compound long used by the Iraqis to enhance the lethality of their anthrax bombs, thereby directly fingering Saddam Hussein’s regime, and although those claims were later officially denied by the White House, large portions of the American public heard and believed them.
As the weeks went by, the FBI and most of the media declared that the anthrax had apparently come from our own domestic stockpiles, suggesting that the mailer was probably a lone domestic terrorist merely pretending to be an radical Islamicist, but much of the public never accepted this.
Indeed, a year later when Colin Powell made his famous presentation to the UN Security Council, attempting to justify America’s planned invasion of Iraq, he held up a small vial of white powder, explaining that even such a tiny quantity of anthrax spores could kill many tens of thousands of Americans. His public focus demonstrated the continuing resonance of the biological warfare attacks that our country had suffered more than a year earlier, and which many die-hard Americans still stubbornly believed had been a combined effort by al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.
The handful of anthrax letters had only killed five Americans and sickened 17 more, a tiny sliver of the 9/11 casualties, and the last envelope sent had been postmarked on October 17, 2001. But I think the impact upon American public opinion during the year or two that followed was fully comparable to that of the massive physical attacks we had suffered a few weeks earlier, or perhaps even greater. For all the death and destruction inflicted on 9/11, without the subsequent anthrax mailings, the Patriot Act would never have passed Congress in anything like its final form, while President Bush might not have gained sufficient public support to launch his disastrous Iraq War.
The anthrax mailings were almost totally forgotten within just a few years and today my suggestion that their impact had matched or even exceeded that of the 9/11 Attacks themselves might seem utterly preposterous to most Americans, but when I recently reviewed the articles of that period, I discovered that I had hardly been alone in that appraisal.
Renowned investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald was just beginning his career, joining Salon in 2007. He soon began publishing a number of columns on the anthrax case, with one of the first including this paragraph near the beginning:
The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters — with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 — that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax — sent directly into the heart of the country’s elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets — that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.
So I think it’s perfectly possible that without those now long-forgotten anthrax mailings, Kaus might have been proven correct in his predictions and the 9/11 Attacks would have become a fading memory by the end of 2001. Without a handful of small envelopes filled with anthrax, there might never have been an Iraq war nor a Patriot Act nor all the other momentous political and social changes in America during the years after September 11, 2001.
There were also some very direct consequences. American government support for biodefense had been strong under Clinton, then sharply reduced once Bush came into office. But those few deadly envelopes changed everything, and during the years 2002-2011, our government spent an estimated $70 billion on biowarfare and biodefense, vastly more than ever before. These days our total biowarfare outlays have far surpassed the hundred billion dollar mark, but almost all of that gusher of funding was triggered by a handful of envelopes bearing $0.23 stamps. During September 2001, a biological defense contractor named BioPort was on the verge of collapse and bankruptcy, but once the mailings reached the headlines, the company was saved by a flood of anthrax-vaccine government contracts; later renamed Emergent BioSolutions, it played a controversial role in the production of our Covid vaccines nearly twenty years later.
If Americans were asked to name the half-dozen most consequential global events of our young 21st century, I doubt whether even one in a thousand would include the forgotten anthrax attacks of 2001 on that list; but without those mailings our entire history and that of the world might have followed a very different trajectory.
The Assaad Letter as the Crucial Evidence
Although the anthrax letters have never attracted more than a small fraction of the public debate surrounding the associated 9/11 Attacks, they were also shrouded in considerable controversy, with the true perpetrators and circumstances hotly debated from the very beginning. Back then and for many years afterward, I had never seriously questioned the official 9/11 narrative nor even closely investigated its details. But the glaring omissions in the news coverage of the anthrax mailings had always seemed very strange and suspicious to me, and thus had played an important role in my growing doubts about the reliability of our mainstream media. When I published my original American Pravda article a decade ago, I’d given pride of place to the anthrax story and included several paragraphs summarizing my own contrary analysis, which had remained unchanged during the dozen years since 2001:
Consider the almost forgotten anthrax mailing attacks in the weeks after 9/11, which terrified our dominant East Coast elites and spurred passage of the unprecedented Patriot Act, thereby eliminating many traditional civil-libertarian protections. Every morning during that period the New York Times and other leading newspapers carried articles describing the mysterious nature of the deadly attacks and the complete bafflement of the FBI investigators. But evenings on the Internet I would read stories by perfectly respectable journalists such as Salon’s Laura Rozen or the staff of the Hartford Courant providing a wealth of additional detail and pointing to a likely suspect and motive.
Although the letters carrying the anthrax were purportedly written by an Arab terrorist, the FBI quickly determined that the language and style indicated a non-Arab author, while tests pointed to the bioweapons research facility at Ft. Detrick, Md., as the probable source of the material. But just prior to the arrival of those deadly mailings, military police at Quantico, Va., had also received an anonymous letter warning that a former Ft. Detrick employee, Egyptian-born Dr. Ayaad Assaad, might be planning to launch a national campaign of bioterrorism. Investigators quickly cleared Dr. Assaad, but the very detailed nature of the accusations revealed inside knowledge of his employment history and the Ft. Detrick facilities. Given the near-simultaneous posting of anthrax envelopes and false bioterrorism accusations, the mailings almost certainly came from the same source, and solving the latter case would be the easiest means of catching the anthrax killer.
Who would have attempted to frame Dr. Assaad for bioterrorism? A few years earlier he had been involved in a bitter personal feud with a couple of his Ft. Detrick coworkers, including charges of racism, official reprimands, and angry recriminations all around. When an FBI official shared a copy of the accusatory letter with a noted language-forensics expert and allowed him to compare the text with the writings of 40 biowarfare lab employees, he found a perfect match with one of those individuals. For years I told my friends that anyone who spent 30 minutes with Google could probably determine the name and motive of the likely anthrax killer, and most of them successfully met my challenge.
This powerful evidence received almost no attention in the major national media, nor is there any indication that the FBI ever followed up on any of these clues or interrogated the named suspects. Instead, investigators attempted to pin the attacks on a Dr. Steven Hatfill based on negligible evidence, after which he was completely exonerated and won a $5.6 million settlement from the government for its years of severe harassment. Later, similar hounding of researcher Bruce Ivins and his family led to his suicide, after which the FBI declared the case closed, even though former colleagues of Dr. Ivins demonstrated that he had had no motive, means, or opportunity. In 2008, I commissioned a major 3,000-word cover story in my magazine summarizing all of this crucial evidence, and once again almost no one in the mainstream media paid the slightest attention.
- Our American Pravda
Ron Unz • The American Conservative • April 29, 2013 • 4,500 Words
When I recently decided to revisit the story of the anthrax attacks and reexamine all the accumulated information from the last couple of decades, I felt that a good starting point might be that TAC cover story by Christ0pher Ketchum that I’d published back in 2008, which effectively summarized what I’d always considered the most crucial information:
As early as November 2001, the New York Times was reporting that the bureau’s “missteps” were “hampering the inquiry.” Indeed, from the beginning, the FBI has been in possession of a key piece of evidence that it apparently ignored.
Among the first suspects to come into the FBI’s sights was an Egyptian-born ex-USAMRIID biologist named Ayaad Assaad. He appeared on the radar because of an anonymous letter sent to the bureau identifying him as part of a terrorist cell possibly linked to the anthrax attacks. Yet, according to the Hartford Courant, the FBI did not attempt to track down the author of the letter, “despite its curious timing, coming a matter of days before the existence of anthrax-laced mail became known.”
Assaad was quickly exonerated by FBI investigators, and the matter swiftly dropped—though the letter may have provided the best piece of evidence in the case. It was sent prior to the arrival of the anthrax letters, suggesting foreknowledge of the attacks, and its language was similar to that of the deadly mail. Moreover, it displayed an intimate knowledge of USAMRIID operations, suggesting that it came from within the limited ranks of Fort Detrick researchers—a relatively small group with access to and expertise in weaponized anthrax.
The FBI has refused to make a copy of the letter publicly available—or even to give one to Assaad himself. It did, however, share the contents with a Vassar College professor and language forensics expert named Don Foster, who famously fingered Joe Klein as the anonymous author behind Primary Colors and helped to catch the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bomber. After reading news reports, he requested a copy of the letter, and, following his review of documents written by “some 40 USAMRIID employees,” Foster “found writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match,” according to an article he authored in the October 2003 Vanity Fair. When he brought this seemingly crucial clue to the attention of the FBI’s anthrax task force, however, the bureau declined to follow up. According to Foster, the senior FBI agent on the case had never even heard of the Assaad letter. (For the record, Foster isn’t an unimpeachable source. He strayed from his area of professional expertise and published unrelated circumstantial evidence in his Vanity Fair piece that wrongly fingered Hatfill, who sued the magazine, which settled on undisclosed terms.)
“The letter-writer clearly knew my entire background, my training in both chemical and biological agents, my security clearance, what floor I work on, that I have two sons, what train I take to work, and where I live,” Assaad told reporter Laura Rozen. Since he was almost immediately cleared, attempting to frame him served no purpose, except to indulge a personal enmity. To that end, Assaad suggested that the FBI question the pair of USAMRIID colleagues most likely to carry a grudge against him, Marian Rippy and Philip Zack, who years earlier had been reprimanded for sending Assad a racist poem. Though the Courant reported video evidence of Zack making after-hours trips to labs where pathogens were stored, there is no record of the FBI ever investigating him or Rippy, a colleague with whom he was having an extramarital affair.
- The Anthrax Files
Christopher Ketchum • The American Conservative • August 25, 2008 • 3,000 Words
The lengthy and detailed Assaad letter demonstrated foreknowledge of the anthrax mailings and very likely had been sent by someone fully aware of those attacks, so it had always seemed the obvious means of cracking the case. Yet it was completely ignored by the New York Times and the rest of the elite media, and only reported in relatively small outlets such as the Hartford Courant and Salon, whose extensive coverage had played an important role in the case.
Media Coverage of the Anthrax Attacks
During the first year or two following the anthrax attacks, I’d tried to keep up with the flood of media coverage, much of it regularly highlighted for me on a daily basis by news-aggregator websites such as Antiwar.com. Under normal circumstances, now locating all those same stories two decades after they originally ran would have been an impossible undertaking given that many of those publications had long since purged their archives or even completely vanished from the Internet.
Fortunately, Edward Lake, a writer with neoconservative leanings, became deeply interested in the anthrax case, and aggregated together most of those early news stories on a website that he created, which served as a uniquely useful resource. Although that website also vanished from the Internet many years ago, its contents remain accessible at Archive.org, and here are links to several of the main sections:
- Articles from the Washington Times • 28 Items • 20,000 Words
- Articles from the Hartford Courant • 33 Items • 36,000 Words
- Other Media Articles, Part 1 • 45 Items • 57,000 Words
- Other Media Articles, Part 2 • 96 Items • 99,000 Words
- Barbara Hatch Rosenberg/FAS Articles • 9 Items • 7,500 Words
Possibly for reasons of copyright, Lake’s website had excluded pieces originally published in the largest national newspapers such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. Among these, a half-dozen Times columns published in 2002 by Nicholas Kristof had played an especially important role and provoked enormous attention. Kristof had repeatedly charged that the FBI was refusing to arrest an obvious suspect in the case and he ultimately fingered Dr. Steven Hatfill, who turned out to have been wrongly accused and successfully sued:
- Profile of a Killer • Jan 4, 2002
- Connecting Deadly Dots • May 24, 2002
- Anthrax? The F.B.I. Yawns • July 2, 2002
- The Anthrax Files • July 12, 2002
- Case of the Missing Anthrax • July 19, 2002
- The Anthrax Files • August 13, 2002
The important article by Don Foster mentioned above had originally run in Vanity Fair, but was later republished by the UCLA Department of Epidemiology, which also provided a very helpful annotated timeline of the outbreak:
- The Message in the Anthrax
Don Foster • Vanity Fair • October 2003 • 9,500 Words
Beginning in 2007, Glenn Greenwald published a lengthy series of columns in Salon, totaling well over 30,000 words, with most of his pieces sharply challenging the official FBI narrative that blamed the attacks on Ft. Detrick anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins and then declared the case closed:
- The unresolved story of ABC News’ false Saddam-anthrax reports • April 9, 2007
- Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News • August 1, 2008
- Journalists, their lying sources, and the anthrax investigation • August 3, 2008
- Additional key facts re: the anthrax investigation • August 4, 2008
- The FBI’s emerging, leaking case against Ivins • August 5, 2008
- The FBI’s selective release of documents in the anthrax case • August 6, 2008
- What’s the answer to this? • August 10, 2008
- Doubts over the anthrax case intensify — except among much of the media • August 18, 2008
- Key senators dispute FBI’s anthrax case against Bruce Ivins • September 17, 2008
- Remembering the anthrax attack • March 4, 2009
- Unlearned lessons from the Steven Hatfill case • April 21, 2010
- An Army scientist denies the FBI’s anthrax case • April 23, 2010
- Serious doubt cast on FBI’s anthrax case against Bruce Ivins • February 16, 2011
- DOJ casts serious doubt on its own claims about the anthrax attack • July 19, 2011
In 2009 attorney Barry Kissin published a long and influential memo also challenging those FBI conclusions on numerous technical grounds, which he later updated and expanded in 2011:
- The Truth About The Anthrax Attacks and Its Cover-Up
Barry Kissin • April 2, 2011 • 15,800 Words
Kissin heavily referenced a couple of columns that had run the previous year in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times by Edward Jay Epstein and Richard Bernstein respectively. These had pointed out the enormous holes in the case against Ivins, whom they argued could not possibly have created the anthrax in his Ft. Detrick facilities as claimed by the FBI:
- The Anthrax Attacks Remain Unsolved
The FBI disproved its main theory about how the spores were weaponized
Edward Jay Epstein • The Wall Street Journal • January 24, 2010 • 1,400 Words - Haste Leaves Anthrax Case Unconcluded
Richard Bernstein • The New York Times • February 24, 2010 • 1,100 Words
Finally, Wikipedia also provides a lengthy establishmentarian account of the anthrax attacks, as does the more conspiratorial wikispooks website, which also provides a helpful timeline
- 2001 Anthrax Attacks • Wikipedia • 15,500 Words
- 2001 Anthrax Attacks • Wikispooks • 2,000 Words
- 2001 Anthrax attacks/Timeline • Wikispooks • 5,200 Words
How the Media and the FBI Ignored the Obvious Suspect
I recently spent a few days carefully rereading those two hundred-odd news stories, most of them for the first time in nearly twenty years. Across the more than 250,000 words of text, I found very little to change my original analysis of the 2001 anthrax attacks.
In his numerous columns, Greenwald had described the FBI case presented against Ivins as extremely thin, while Epstein, Bernstein, and Kissin persuasively argued that Ivins could not possibly have produced the anthrax used in the mailings.
Meanwhile, just as I remembered, it seemed very likely that the long Assaad letter had been sent by someone fully aware of the anthrax being sent, and was therefore the most important lead to the culprit. Both the FBI and its strongest critics agreed that the anthrax used had originated at Ft. Detrick and Assaad’s false accuser was clearly a present or former Ft. Detrick staffer. The letter had been mailed just a couple of days after the first wave of anthrax envelopes went out but long before their deadly contents came to public attention and began inspiring any copycats, and just like those anthrax mailings, accusations of Islamic bioterrorism had been the main theme. Such close correspondences seemed far too numerous to have been simply coincidental.
Just as in early 2002, I still found it extremely strange that while the Hartford Courant and Salon had run numerous stories on the Assaad letter, almost none of the 200 other news articles in mainstream outlets had ever mentioned a word about such a central clue to the mystery, perhaps reflecting the influence of their powerful establishmentarian sources, including those near the top of the FBI.
However, in properly assessing the implications of the Assaad letter, we must sharply distinguish between the solid and the speculative. When Assaad had originally been interviewed by the FBI prior to the anthrax outbreak, he had suggested Zack and Rippy as two of the most likely culprits since they had been among his chief personal antagonists at Ft. Detrick, but that was merely speculation on his part. Zack had been an anthrax biowarfare developer and reporters later found that he’d been given improper access to the Ft. Detrick facilities by Rippy, with whom he was having an extramarital affair. Furthermore, around the same time, there was evidence that unauthorized anthrax experiments had secretly been conducted in those labs. Obviously, these facts seemed highly suspicious and the total lack of any coverage in the major news media or apparent FBI investigation was a serious omission.
But as Lake had noted in his sharp rebuttal, all of these events had occurred nearly a decade before the anthrax mailings, and also long before the particular anthrax sent in the letters had been produced at the facility. Both Zack and Rippy had left Ft. Detrick years before the attacks took place and Lake suggested that they were probably no longer living on the East Coast at the time, perhaps giving them strong alibis. Finally, Zack’s apparent deep hostility towards Arabs and Muslims had led to the widespread assumption that he was Jewish, and Lake effectively debunked that mistaken claim.
But none of those points diminishes the importance of the Assaad letter nor clears Zack. As a Ft. Detrick anthrax researcher who had previously been involved in suspicious activity, Zack was certainly an obvious suspect for the FBI to consider, although hardly an exclusive one. Determining the author of the Assaad letter was the crucial path to pursue, and according to Prof. Foster, after reviewing documents written by “some 40 USAMRIID employees,” he had “found writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match.” It hardly mattered whether or not that individual happened to be Rippy, Zack’s former confederate. Properly interrogating the author of the Assaad letter would probably have cracked the anthrax case, but the FBI refused to do so, or even make a copy of the letter publicly available to Assaad or anyone else, which raises all sorts of troubling issues.
Aside from the Hartford Courant and Salon, one of the very few publications to mention the Assaad letter was the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, whose news editor wrote an article around the first anniversary of the attacks, summarizing the facts and suggesting that the likely culprit was Zack, whom she misidentified as Jewish. Aside from outlining the evidence, her piece also included several puzzling paragraphs based upon her questions to Dr. Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, a key figure in the anthrax case:
When the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs asked Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, Ph.D., a biological arms control expert at the State University of New York, if the allegations regarding Dr. David Hatfill now took the heat off Lt. Col. Philip Zack, she replied, “Zack has NEVER been under suspicion as perpetrator of the anthrax attack.”
It is hard to believe that, with his connection to Fort Detrick, Dr. Zack is not one of the 20 to 50 scientists under intense investigation.
When asked if Hatfill was part of the group that ganged up on Dr. Ayaad Assaad, Dr. Rosenberg answered, “Hatfill was NOT one of the persecutors of Assaad.”
She is convinced that the FBI knows who sent the anthrax letters but isn’t arresting him because he knows too much about U.S. secret biological weapons research and production. But she isn’t naming names. Neither is Dr. Assaad, who did not return calls from the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
Reading this exchange more than twenty years later, it’s unclear to me whether Rosenberg was arguing that Zack had never been considered a suspect because he had an ironclad alibi or whether the FBI was simply unwilling to investigate him for some other reason, with the latter possibility obviously being very suspicious if true.
- While Media Spotlights One Anthrax Suspect, Another Is Too Hot to Touch
Delinda Curtiss Hanley • The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs • September 2002 • 2,100 Words
Nine Books on the Anthrax Attacks
Having first established a solid foundation by rereading so much of the original anthrax media coverage, I decided to see what books had been published on the subject. Over the years, I’d read two short works on the anthrax attacks and I now reread those, along with eight others that I managed to locate, together constituting nearly all the available literature. With one very notable exception, I didn’t find the material particularly useful and indeed much of it blurred together in my mind.
First out of the gate in late 2002 was Richard Preston’s The Demon in the Freezer, a non-fiction work by a highly-successful writer of thrillers, which became a national bestseller. The book had obviously been in the works for some time, mostly focused upon deadly pathogens such as smallpox and also discussing bioweapons and Ft. Detrick’s research in that field. The sudden events of October 2001 were then incorporated into the last one-third of the narrative, with the timeliness of those recent headlines boosting sales.
According to the Ft. Detrick researchers, the second group of letters had contained highly weaponized anthrax, something far beyond what could have been produced in a simple lab, and Kissin extensively quoted some of author’s descriptions in his analysis memo. However, researchers from Battelle, a different government-affiliated bioweapons facility, had stubbornly—and rather suspiciously—disputed that conclusion. Given Preston’s focus, it’s hardly surprising that there was no mention anywhere of the Assaad letter, and although the other elements of the book were interesting from a broader perspective, they provided little useful additional information on the anthrax mailings, which constituted only a small portion of the text.
The cover jacket on Marilyn W. Thompson’s 2003 book The Killer Strain identified the author as the award-winning Assistant Managing Editor for Investigations at the Washington Post, while noting that her team had won two Pulitzer Prizes for public service, and also included favorable blurbs from such notable journalistic figures as Benjamin Bradlee, Jimmy Breslin, Michael Isikoff, and David Maraniss.
The text did a perfectly adequate job of telling the basic story of the attacks, and to its credit devoted three paragraphs of its 250 pages to the Assaad letter, though providing no indication of its potential importance and not even bothering to include the term in the lengthy index. One important fact that I did learn was that prior to the anthrax attacks, the new Bush Administration had planned deep cuts in biodefense preparedness.
Although I had hardly regarded Thompson’s scanty coverage of the Assaad letter as adequate, it was far more than I found in The Anthrax Letters, published that same year by Prof. Leonard A. Cole of Rutgers University, described as an expert on bioterrorism, who entirely excluded the Assaad letter from his 280 pages of text.
Like the Thompson book, his work provided a useful account of the basic narrative, attracting favorable blurbs from several major news outlets and Sen. Daschle, but seemed much less useful for someone primarily interested in solving the case.
The book had originally appeared in 2003, but was reissued in 2009 following the FBI’s declaration that the case had been closed with Ivins’ suicide, though the author emphasized the extreme skepticism of so many prominent figures, including members of Congress, on that verdict.
Also originally published in 2003 was Amerithrax: The Hunt for the Anthrax Killer by Robert Graysmith, a bestselling author of books on crime and terrorism, whose past works had become the basis for several major motion pictures. This background was apparent in the long text, which seemed to have the strongly fictional feel of an prospective screenplay rather than an analytical work, and also included extensive descriptions of the 9/11 Attacks and the broader history of American, Soviet, and Iraqi biowarfare programs.
On the positive side, the author did devote a couple of pages to the Assaad letter, which he described as obviously connected to the anthrax mailings, even claiming that it had been a crucial factor convincing government investigators that the attacks were domestic in origin, but he never emphasized that it could have been used to crack the case.
The book was later reissued with an Afterword in 2008, pointing to the deceased Ivins as the apparent culprit and even suggesting that he had written the Assaad letter. That latter notion seemed very unlikely to me since if there had been the slightest evidence for that possibility it would have been promoted as a centerpiece of the FBI case against Ivins.
Edward Lake, whose website usefully aggregated so much of the early media coverage, self-published Analyzing the Anthrax Attacks in 2005. Lake was strongly critical of many of the arguments made by both Rosenberg and Foster, and very briefly mentioned the Assaad letter, arguing that it probably had no connection to the actual anthrax mailings and he therefore dismissed its significance.
Although I obviously disagreed with this analysis, the author deserved considerable credit for explicitly arguing this point rather than just ignoring the issue.
Lake also provided some interesting speculation that the anthrax killer probably lived and worked in central New Jersey and even suggested that the letters might have been written by a young child acting under adult supervision.
The following year, Harvard University Press released Anthrax: Bioterror as Fact and Fantasy, a short book by Phillip Sarasin, a professor of Modern History at the University of Zurich.
His entire approach to the subject was cultural and ideological, including a focus upon popular literature and even videogames, while tying the discussion of biological terrorism to the 9/11 attacks and even broader themes such as globalization.
Although I didn’t find the work very useful for my own purposes, others interested in the particular cultural framework under which our society experienced the attacks might react differently.
Subject to severe pressure and facing indictment, Bruce Ivins committed suicide in 2008, allowing the FBI to declare the case closed, though many senior members of Congress and journalists remained extremely skeptical that Ivins had been responsible or had acted alone.
With the anthrax mailings temporarily back in the media headlines, new book contracts soon went out, and American Anthrax by Jeanne Guillemin, an academic affiliated with MIT, appeared in 2011.
The author devoted a couple of paragraphs to the Assaad letter, and Zack was even mentioned as a subject with a reference to one of the Salon articles, but the author stated that the lead never “panned out,” without providing any source for that supposed fact, so it probably represented her own interpretation of the puzzling later silence.
She did mention that under severe FBI pressure an additional suspect besides Hatfill and Ivins apparently drank himself to death, perhaps further indicating that Ivins’ suicide was not necessarily proof of his own guilt.
I was especially disappointed by the most recent book in the collection, Recounting the Anthrax Attacks, published in 2018 by R. Scott Decker, one of the top FBI agents running the investigation. His coverage of the story was overwhelmingly procedural and quite dull, providing little broader perspective despite winning a non-fiction prize from the Public Safety Writers Association.
Given his background and role, I was hardly surprised that he fully accepted Ivins’ guilt, minimizing or excluding any contrary evidence, and he never mentioned the Assaad letter, perhaps even being unaware of it. If the enormous FBI investigation did ultimately prove unsuccessful, this book may help to explain that failure.
Considerably superior to most of these other texts was The Mirage Man published in 2011 by David Willman, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter at the Los Angeles Times, which ran a hefty 450 pages and heavily focused upon Bruce Ivins, the suspect whose suicide had allowed the FBI to declare the case closed.
Willman himself had been given the original Ivins scoop in 2008, so he naturally expressed few doubts about the guilt of the dead vaccine researcher, but he did do his best to refute the extreme skepticism of Greenwald and numerous others, not entirely successfully but more than I had expected. Nearly a decade had passed since the attacks themselves and Willman was portraying the case as fully resolved with Ivins’ guilt, so I couldn’t really fault the author for making no mention of the Assaad letter.
Relative to its apparent purpose, the book seemed a very solid work of investigative journalism, including a lengthy personal and family history of its central subject, and it carried a strongly favorable endorsement from Seymour Hersh, a towering figure in the author’s own field.
I personally made some effort to weigh Willman’s arguments against those of Greenwald, Epstein, Bernstein, and Kissin on the other side, but much of the dispute revolved around technical claims made by different experts that were difficult for me to judge.
One critical question was whether or not the anthrax sent in the second set of envelopes had actually been “weaponized” with a silicon coating to enhance its effectiveness, with some experts sharply disputing that claim, though I thought that the weight of evidence favored that conclusion. Ivins’ himself had no expertise nor equipment for such weaponization, so such a verdict would probably have cleared him.
When the FBI had originally declared Ivins’ guilty, Greenwald noted that the timeline provided of the suspect’s movements was completely impossible based upon the postmarked date of the letters sent and his own lab time-card. As a result, the Bureau had quickly modified its story to claim that Ivins had actually driven all night on an eight-hour round-trip in order to drop the letter in a Princeton mailbox, a suggestion that Greenwald ridiculed. But Willman strongly defended that theory, noting that Ivins had admitted sometimes taking long drives at night.
Although Willman hardly convinced me on this and other issues, I came away from his long book at least admitting the possibility of Ivins’ guilt, something that I had previously dismissed as almost totally absurd.
Graeme MacQueen and The 2001 Anthrax Deception
These nine books totaled more than a million words and spending a couple of weeks reading them greatly refreshed my memory of those important events of two decades ago. But although they highlighted interesting elements here and there, taken together they added very little to my framework, nor shifted any of my original conclusions. If I hadn’t bothered reading any of them, none of my views about the 2001 anthrax attacks would be any different today.
However, the impact of the tenth book was completely different. Although the shortest of them all, The 2001 Anthrax Deception published in 2014 by the late Prof. Graeme MacQueen drastically transformed my understanding of those events, making a case in its 80,000 words that was entirely different from anything that I had previously read on the subject. MacQueen persuasively argued that first impressions had actually been correct and that the anthrax mailings were directly connected with the 9/11 Attacks of a week or two earlier. This had been the original assumption but was then very soon dismissed as a possibility and afterward completely ignored by almost everyone else analyzing the case during all the years that followed.
MacQueen’s own background allowed him to boldly go where others did not. The authors of the previous nine books I have discussed were mainstream journalists or academics, therefore being quite reluctant to stray too far outside the safe confines of the standard narrative endorsed by establishmentarian sources, and none of them appear to have ever questioned the official story of 9/11. MacQueen himself had very respectable credentials, including a Ph.D. from Harvard and thirty years on the faculty of McMaster University in Canada, being the founder and director of its Centre for Peace Studies. But in the years after 2001, he had become an important figure in the 9/11 Truth movement, serving as co-editor of The Journal of 9/11 Studies. So unlike those other writers, he was willing to explore controversial possibilities and highlight obvious connections that they had carefully ignored.
As I have already emphasized, without the anthrax mailings, the political impact of the 9/11 Attacks themselves might have quickly faded, perhaps being insufficient to reorient our country towards the many years of warfare that followed, including our invasion of Iraq, an invasion justified by Saddam’s alleged stockpile of anthrax and other WMDs. So if we accept that the 9/11 Attacks were orchestrated by a conspiracy for that purpose, it becomes natural to ask whether the accompanying anthrax mailings were an entirely unexpected, fortuitous coincidence benefiting those plotters or whether they were instead an intrinsic element of the original plan. Without those anthrax deaths, Colin Powell’s later UN presentation and the vial of white powder he employed as a stage prop would not have been possible, nor President Bush’s public speeches on the deadly danger we faced from Iraqi WMDs.
MacQueen notes that although the 9/11 Attacks had involved entirely different types of terrorism—large-scale airplane hijackings—our East Coast media and political elites almost immediately began to focus upon the deadly risks of biowarfare attacks by Islamic radicals, especially involving anthrax, and they did so before the first anthrax letter had even been postmarked. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen later revealed that he’d been warned by a high-ranking Bush Administration official to get a prescription for Cipro, the recommended antibiotic treatment for anthrax, and according to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, well-connected NYC residents also began carrying Cipro in the days immediately after 9/11. Not only was there a great deal of such apparent foreknowledge in the weeks before the first reported anthrax case, but fears of a looming anthrax attack by state-sponsored terrorists had actually long predated 9/11 itself. Perhaps this was all purely coincidental, but we should naturally be suspicious when such fearful concerns quietly promoted in elite media circles were immediately followed by actual anthrax mailings to very high-profile members of the same media establishment.
MacQueen and other members of the 9/11 Truth movement have long argued that the very public activities of Mohammed Atta and the other hijackers were intended to lay down a false narrative trail for their supposed plot, and he noted that important elements of that trail seemingly revolved around biological warfare, including the terrorist ringleader’s audacious talk of acquiring a crop-dusting plane that could release clouds of deadly anthrax over a major American city. Indeed, before the first anthrax case was even reported, there were frantic government investigations of all crop-dusters nationwide.
From very early on I had always regarded the Assaad letter as the key to unraveling the anthrax plot, but MacQueen focused my attention upon several other threatening hoax letters that had been sent out almost simultaneously with the first wave of anthrax mailings, letters that were also addressed to leading media figures but filled with harmless white powder instead of anthrax, together with strangely-formulated notes somewhat similar to those of their deadly counterparts. These envelopes had been postmarked St. Petersburg, Florida, and MacQueen argues that they were probably intended to provide an apparent link to the 9/11 Attacks, since most of the hijackers had been living in that state.
An additional connection has been regularly dismissed as merely an astonishing coincidence, but may have been more than that. The first anthrax death was that of Robert Stevens, a photo editor at the American Media offices in Florida, and Mike Irish was the top editor of his publication. Irish’s own wife was a real estate agent, and she had personally arranged the rental home for a couple of the 9/11 hijackers, with whom she’d become friendly, while most of the other hijackers were also living in the close vicinity. As MacQueen notes, in a country of 285 million people, we are forced to believe that mere chance had caused the 9/11 hijackers to have such a direct personal connection to the first anthrax victim. But under his own very different reconstruction, the anthrax mailing to Irish’s publication was meant to falsely suggest that the Islamic terrorists responsible for 9/11 had been directly involved in the biowarfare attacks.
Soon after the 9/11 Attacks, Neocon pundits and media outlets began promoting spurious links between the al-Qaeda Islamicists allegedly responsible and Saddam’s secular, anti-Islamicist Iraqi regime. The anthrax mailings became a central element of their case given that the purity of the deadly spores could only have been produced by a regime possessing sophisticated biowarfare facilities. As Greenwald later noted with outrage, four separate official government sources also soon falsely informed ABC News that the anthrax had been weaponized with bentonite, regarded as proof that it was Iraqi in origin. So the weaponized anthrax represented the crucial evidence connecting the 9/11 Attacks with Saddam.
Unfortunately for those plotters, the FBI quickly determined that the anthrax was of the Ames strain rather than the type used by Iraq, and this pointed to the ultimate source being one of our own bioweapons facilities. MacQueen argues that the conspirators may have assumed that Ames was much more widely distributed internationally than it proved to be. So once their intended narrative of a foreign plot linked to Iraq had collapsed, they quickly shifted gears and began promoting the fallback theory of a lone wolf domestic terrorist, thereby deflecting attention away from any consideration of the sort of organized domestic conspiracy that might have eventually implicated them.
Based upon the facts presented by MacQueen, I would add one important caveat with which the author might or might not have agreed. He opens Chapter 6 by declaring his hypothesis that members of our own executive branch had carried out the anthrax attacks in accordance with their plan, and I support that theory. However, I think that this plot only involved certain elements of our government rather than its leadership as a whole. Later lawsuits revealed that George Bush, Dick Cheney, and other top White House officials had secretly begun taking Cipro immediately after September 11th, indicating that they believed they faced the personal threat of a large-scale anthrax attack rather than the tiny handful of false-flag letters that were actually sent out. I think this suggests that none of them were involved in the conspiracy and they were instead being manipulated by a few of their aides and advisors, just as I believe was the case with regard to the 9/11 Attacks themselves. This framework also helps to explain the contradictory claims and conflicting arguments that soon developed within the executive branch.
MacQueen had spent many years as a leading 9/11 researcher and his deep understanding of those issues allowed him to make this important case in merely a hundred-odd pages of text, perhaps lacking solid proof but in reasonably convincing fashion. His analysis successfully tied together many loose ends that would otherwise remain mysterious, while he also devoted a portion of his short book to sketching out some of the overwhelming evidence that the conventional 9/11 story itself was completely false. And in all fairness, I should mention that MacQueen sometimes drew upon the material in several of the other nine anthrax books that I had personally found much less useful.
Proposing this elegant solution required an author of MacQueen’s own background. There is an official story of the 9/11 Attacks and also an official story of the anthrax mailings, and only someone who completely rejected both of those accounts could have argued that the two events were directly connected. A former UN Assistant Secretary-General urged all thinking Americans to read MacQueen’s book, and I would strongly second that recommendation, given the importance of those events in shaping the history of the decades that followed.
My own decision to finally revisit the anthrax attacks after so many years was prompted by a particular book I noticed a couple of months ago at the local Palo Alto library sale.
In the aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks, Judith Miller, a longtime reporter at the New York Times, had published numerous front-page stories on Saddam’s non-existent WMDs based upon information fed to her by her Neocon sources. Her falsehoods had played a hugely influential role in setting the political stage for our disastrous invasion, and she was forced to resign from the Times in 2005.
In a remarkably fortuitous example of timing, she had earlier been the lead author of Germs, published with her Times colleagues Stephen Engelberg and William Broad, a book that was released on the very same day that the first anthrax victim was admitted to a hospital. Subtitled “Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War” it purportedly represented a comprehensive history of biological warfare and the dangers America faced, with a major focus on the Iraqi program and its anthrax capabilities. Given such perfect timing, Germs quickly rocketed to the top of the best-seller lists in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and the anthrax mailings, further propelled when Miller herself received one of the anthrax hoax letters, containing harmless white powder. I’d always been aware of the major role her book had played in shaping the events of that period, so I purchased it for $0.50 and eventually read it, leading me to reexamine the anthrax story. Although the book obviously lacked any discussion of the anthrax letters themselves, I found it revealed much about the ideological biases of Miller and her co-authors.
Over the years I’ve noticed that respectable journalists writing books are reluctant to destroy their credibility by lying outright to their readers; instead, they prefer to mislead by selective omissions, carefully avoiding those items that would force them either to knowingly promote falsehoods or to present facts damaging to the intended sweep of their narrative. And this certainly seemed to be the case in Miller’s very influential book.
Its account of America’s own biological warfare programs and the Ft. Detrick facility correctly began with their establishment during World War II, and discussed America’s plans for the possible use of anthrax against Germany and Japan as well as Japan’s own biowarfare efforts during its invasion and occupation of China. But although the subsequent Korean War was mentioned, the narrative almost entirely skipped over that period, which I found extremely odd.
Surely the authors must have been aware of the very high-profile accusations of illegal “germ warfare” that were made against American forces during that conflict by Russia, China, and their international Communist bloc allies? These were the most serious biowarfare claims made anywhere in the world during the last eighty years, and prompted the establishment of an international commission of distinguished scientists, including Joseph Needham, one of Britain’s most eminent scholars, which eventually published a long report declaring that the accusations were probably true. Admittedly, the American government and its allied media outlets always denied those claims and especially after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union, most American academics came to regard them as false. But as I pointed out in an article two years ago, more recent evidence seems to show that the Communist charges had been correct:
- American Pravda: Waging Biological Warfare
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • August 9, 2021 • 7,500 Words
If Miller and her co-authors had mentioned those accusations only to dismiss them as debunked wartime propaganda, I would not have faulted them since that was a widely-held belief at the time the book was published in 2001. But to completely ignore the greatest international biowarfare controversy of the last three generations in a book focused on exactly that topic was inexcusable. Such total silence seems very suspicious to me and I wonder if the authors’ extensive research had led them to conclude that the accusations had probably been true and the entire subject best avoided.
Similarly, the Middle East was a leading focus of the book’s overall coverage and it repeatedly mentioned the possible development of ethnically-targeted bioweapons, a particularly alarming technological project. But just a couple of years earlier, the London Sunday Times, Wired News, and other international publications had broken the story of Israel’s extensive research in exactly that area, with the Israelis working to develop ethnic bioweapons that would selectively target Arab populations. Yet the authors strangely chose to omit the only such real-life example that had reached the global headlines. Obviously, a book meant to concentrate American public fears upon the terrible threat of Iraq’s biological warfare programs—which actually no longer existed at that point—would have lost much of its effectiveness if it had also included any mention of Israel’s far more advanced capabilities in exactly that same area. Indeed, Israel was almost never mentioned anywhere in the text, a very strange omission given the heavy focus on the alleged biowarfare efforts of its regional adversaries such as Iraq and Iran.
While I have absolutely no reason to believe that Miller’s book had been commissioned and funded by the Israeli Defense Ministry, I don’t think the contents would have been all that different if such had actually been the case.
Timothy Weiner and Enemies: A History of the FBI
Another book I read a month or two ago also contained certain extremely glaring omissions, including some that were directly relevant to the anthrax attacks.
In 2007, Pulitzer Prize-winning former New York Times reporter Timothy Weiner had published Legacy of Ashes, a widely-acclaimed history of the CIA, and in 2012, he followed it up with Enemies: A History of the FBI, running more than 500 pages and described as the first definitive history of that organization’s intelligence operations. But although he provided a great deal of interesting material, I was less than impressed by the work, which struck me as something of an authorized account, showing signs of the careful trimming of a project produced along such lines.
Some of his early mistakes jumped out at me. He characterized FDR’s Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau as a “sophisticated economist,” when the latter was actually just a wealthy dilettante and gentleman-farmer, who had never graduated either high school or college and knew little of economics, obtaining his position primarily because he was FDR’s friend and neighbor. Indeed, Morgenthau’s total ignorance had left his powerful department in the hands of his subordinate, Harry Dexter White, a notorious Communist spy.
A page later, the author described famed aviator Charles Lindbergh as “a potential Republican candidate for president in 1940,” a claim I’ve never seen made anywhere else, including in A. Scott Berg’s exhaustive biography. I suspect Weiner may have gotten the idea from Philip Roth’s alarmist 2004 novel The Plot Against America, which had similarly portrayed our greatest national hero as a secret Nazi.
Obviously, such errors were hardly central to Weiner’s subject, but they left me skeptical in accepting some of his far more important assertions. For example, these days it is very widely accepted that founding FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover lived his entire life as a deeply-closeted homosexual, with his long-time partner being Clyde Tolson, who also served as the FBI’s second-ranking official during Hoover’s half-century reign. Such factors would obviously have been very relevant to the Bureau’s operations, not least because syndicate boss Meyer Lansky had allegedly obtained hard proof of those secrets and used them for blackmail purposes; perhaps this explains why Hoover spent decades denying the existence of American organized crime and refusing to allow his FBI to combat it. Weiner attempts to casually debunk this established history in just a few paragraphs, suggesting it was mostly based upon malicious rumors spread by bureaucratic rivals and then emphasizing the statement of one of Hoover’s most loyal lieutenants that the accusations could not possibly have been true. Hoover ran the FBI in autocratic fashion for five decades and he was Weiner’s central figure, so the author hardly gave proper treatment to such a potentially explosive hidden factor influencing FBI policy during that entire period.
In his Afterword, Weiner explained that he heavily relied upon the copyrighted oral histories of the Society of Former Special Agents, which he cited with their permission, so perhaps use of that important resource had imposed constraints upon his treatment of certain delicate FBI topics.
Hoover died in 1972 but my doubts about the author’s candor obviously extended across the last one-third of the text, covering the three decades that followed, and I noticed certain absolutely glaring omissions during those years.
In 1996, TWA Flight 800 suddenly exploded in mid-air soon after taking off from JFK Airport in New York City, leading to widespread suspicions of a terrorist attack and prompting the largest, most comprehensive investigation in FBI history, an effort that involved 500 field agents. But as I explained in a 2016 article, the ultimate result was a notorious FBI cover-up. Weiner completely omitted all mention of that massive case from his lengthy FBI history.
- American Pravda: The Destruction of TWA Flight 800
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 26, 2016 • 2,800 Words
A few years later, the FBI began its six-year investigation of the anthrax attacks, deploying resources completely eclipsing even that previous project. A 2010 WSJ column characterized that new FBI effort as “the largest inquest in its history, involving 9,000 interviews, 6,000 subpoenas, and the examination of tens of thousands of photocopiers, typewriters, computers and mailboxes,” finally ending in 2008 when the Bureau declared Bruce Ivins to be the sole perpetrator and the case closed. Yet not a single word about these events appeared in Weiner’s supposedly comprehensive history published several years later, with no mention of anthrax in his index.
So largest FBI investigation ever conducted was taking place exactly during the period that Weiner was producing his exhaustive volume on the history of that organization but he chose to completely exclude it from his coverage. The likely explanation is that he knew perfectly well that the FBI effort had ended in total failure with Ivins merely being an innocent scapegoat, but he was too heavily dependent upon the goodwill of his FBI sources to mention that fact. I think this example of “the Dog That Didn’t Bark” strongly supports Ivins’ innocence.
Meanwhile, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 Attacks themselves, the FBI had rounded up and arrested some 200 Mossad agents, many of them in the New York City area, including five who had been caught red-handed apparently celebrating the destruction of the WTC towers and taking souvenir photos of the burning buildings. Thus, the FBI had successfully broken the largest foreign spy ring ever found on American soil, yet not a word appeared anywhere in Weiner’s FBI history, nor was Mossad even listed in his index. Once again, the reason for such strange silence is not too difficult to guess.
- American Pravda: Seeking 9/11 Truth After Twenty Years
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • September 7, 2021 • 7,800 Words
Launching a Hundred Billion Dollar Biowarfare Industry
The story of our forgotten anthrax attacks of 2001 is really a quite remarkable one, possessing more strange twists and ironies than we would expect to find in any work of fiction.
Merely the first of these is that an event that had the greatest possible impact upon our society and world history has almost completely vanished from our national memory.
During the decades after World War II, our government had created the world’s largest and most powerful biodefense infrastructure to protect our citizens from such deadly attack. Yet the only documented cases of American bioweapon deaths came in 2001 and resulted from the deadly anthrax spores produced in our own national laboratories, whether these had been deployed by Dr. Bruce Ivins or more likely someone else.
We soon discovered that the bioterrorism responsible for those American deaths and the resulting wave of national panic had actually been the home-grown product of our own biodefense industry, but our political response was to increase the funding for those same government biowarfare labs by ten- or twenty-fold, so that American spending on bioweapons eventually crossed the hundred-billion-dollar mark.
All of those facts are completely indisputable, but I think there may also be an additional twist.
It is obvious that the existence of a massive American bioweapons capability might produce dangerous temptations in the minds of some of our more reckless political leaders, and such temptations may have had disastrous consequences in 2019.
Over the last several years, I have published a long series of articles arguing that there is strong perhaps even overwhelming evidence that the global Covid outbreak was probably the unintended blowback from a botched American biowarfare attack against China (and Iran).
More than a million Americans died as a consequence, along with perhaps 26 million other deaths worldwide, and the lives of many billions were greatly disrupted, including those of our own entire population. So all of this massive death and devastation may have been the ultimate consequence of a handful of letters bearing $0.23 stamps that were mailed out in 2001.
- Covid/Biowarfare Series
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words
Last year I’d pointed to the analogy of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster that played a major role in bringing down the old Soviet Union.
- A Thousand Times Greater Than the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 11, 2022 • 2,300 Words
Related Reading:
- Our American Pravda
- American Pravda: Waging Biological Warfare
- American Pravda: Confronting Covid Crimestop
- The Anthrax Files by Christopher Ketchum
- The Message in the Anthrax by Don Foster
- The Truth About The Anthrax Attacks and Its Cover-Up by Barry Kissin
C-SPAN Interview on An Encounter with Evil
By Jacob G. Hornberger | FFF | October 17, 2023
At Freedom Fest last July, I had the honor of being interviewed by C-SPAN’s Book TV about my most recent book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story. It’s about a 20-minute-long interview. The interview is another good sign that interest in the JFK assassination is increasing among the mainstream media, especially as we approach the 60th anniversary of the assassination. You can watch the interview here:
If you have not yet purchased and read my book, I highly recommend your doing so. What the CIA did with the Zapruder film on the very weekend of the assassination was kept secret for some 50 years. Don’t tell me that the CIA can’t keep secrets! In fact, if it had not been for a fortuitous disclosure by former CIA analyst Dino Brugionio, there is virtually no doubt that the CIA would have succeeded in covering its role with respect to the Zapruder film secret forever.
The full details are contained in my book, but the following is the essence of what happened.
The official narrative has always been that the original 8mm Zapruder film, which captured the assassination of President Kennedy, was sent to LIFE magazine on Saturday, November 22.
Instead, what actually happened was that it was diverted to the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington on that Saturday evening.
How do we know that? Because Brugioni disclosed it during the late 2000s to assassination researchers Douglas Horne and Peter Janney. He told them that the film was brought to NPIC on that Saturday night, where he and his team made blow-ups of selected frames from the film to put on “briefing boards.”
He said that two men who represented themselves to be Secret Service agents then departed with the film. (As I explain in my book, it is a virtual certainty that the two men were actually CIA agents posing as Secret Service agents.)
On Sunday night, a 16mm copy of the Zapruder film was brought to NPIC by a man named “Bill Smith” who also represented himself to be a Secret Service agent (but who undoubtedly also was a CIA agent posing as a Secret Service agent). He told a CIA official at NPIC, Homer McMahon, that he had just brought the film from “Hawkeyeworks.”
How do we know this? Because McMahon told the Assassination Records Review Board in the 1990s that he and his NPIC team were the ones who received that 16mm copy from “Bill Smith” on that Sunday night. Their assignment was to make blow-ups from selected frames of the film and post them on “briefing boards” — in other words, the same thing that Brugioni and his team did with the 8mm original film on the previous Saturday night.
What was Hawkeyeworks? It was a top-secret CIA film facility secretly located in Kodak’s research and development section of Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, New York, where the CIA was able to do everything and anything with film that could be done in Hollywood. It was at Hawkeyeworks that the CIA made an altered, fraudulent copy of the film using a state-of-the-art “optical printer,” which “Bill Smith” then took back to NPIC on Sunday night, where, after it was converted to an 8mm film, it became the new “original” Zapruder film.
How do we know that the Sunday night film was a fraudulent, altered copy?
One reason is that the Saturday night film was an 8mm film. The Sunday night film was a 16mm film. It is impossible to convert an 8mm into a 16mm film. Thus, the 16mm film had to be a copy of the original 8mm film.
Another reason is that when Horne and Janney showed Brugioni the extant film (that is, the film that purports to be the original), he told them that the film he saw on that Saturday might was different from the extant film they were showing him. It’s worth pointing out that Brugioni was perhaps the foremost photographic analyst in the world. (I detail his credentials in my book but you can read what Wikipedia states about him here.)
Another reason is that there is no reason to have taken the film to Hawkeyworks except for the purpose of producing a fraudulent, altered copy of it. (Note: I should point out that there is no evidence Kodak participated in the CIA’s production of the fraudulent, altered copy of the film.)
Another reason is that there was no good reason for the Saturday and Sunday night events to be kept secretly compartmentalized — that is, the Saturday night team never knew about the Sunday night team, and vice versa.
Another reason is that, as I detail in my book, Hollywood film experts who examined the extant film stated unequivocally their opinion that the extant film is an altered copy.
Another reason is that, as I detail more fully in my book, an extremely large number of witnesses stated they saw things prior to and during the assassination that that are not in the extant film.
It should also be pointed out that the fact that the CIA kept all of these shenanigans secret from everyone, including the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the ARRB, and the American people — and continues to do so — is itself incriminating.
Again, all of this is more fully detailed in my book An Encounter with Evil: The Abraham Zapruder Story.
Why is all this significant? Because it is this evidence that convicts the CIA of participating in the assassination of President Kennedy. There is no innocent explanation for the production of a fraudulent, altered copy of a film of the assassination, especially when the CIA kept what it did with the Zapruder film for some 50 years — and continues keeping the full operational details regarding the film secret. The CIA’s top-secret production of a fraudulent, altered copy of the Zapruder film automatically proves beyond a reasonable doubt that the CIA was, in fact, embroiled in the assassination of President Kennedy.
BANNED: Book by Dr. Peter McCullough & John Leake
BY JOHN LEAKE | COURAGEOUS DISCOURSE | OCTOBER 9, 2023
I would like to open this column by stating that I have long had a great relationship with Amazon, which has sold far more of my books than have ever been sold in bookstores. I have also been extremely grateful to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program for empowering me to publish whatever nonfiction books I please, quickly and efficiently, while retaining the rights and earning the best royalty in the business.
In May 2022, Dr. McCullough and I published our book, The Courage to Face COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex, directly on Amazon. Quickly the book became a hit and within a year it had earned over 1000 5-Star Reviews. For almost 3 weeks in July 2022 it was a top 100 seller.
In the autumn of last year, Tony Lyons, President and Publisher of SKYHORSE in New York, graciously offered to bring out a special, handsome hardcover edition with a preface by U.S. presidential candidate, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who warmly endorsed our work.
A bit of Covid fatigue this year caused sales to decline, but in September the book got a second wind as more and more Americans seem to be recognize that Dr. McCullough has been right all along.
To my gratitude and delight, Amazon actually supported the effort by running a deep discount promotion while still paying the same royalty to us—an act of generosity to authors that is unheard of in traditional publishing.
And then, on September 29, seemingly out of nowhere, Amazon Account Review sent me the following notice:
We have temporarily suspended your KDP account because we found offensive content that violates our Content Guidelines in the title(s) listed below:
ASIN: B09ZLVWMD9 –
Title: THE COURAGE TO FACE COVID-19: Preventing Hospitalization and Death While Battling the Bio-Pharmaceutical Complex – Author: John Leake
Upon receiving this message, I humbly beseeched Account Review to restore my account and to let me know what “offensive content” was found in our book. Amazon restored my account and published my latest book—a conventional work of true crime—but refused to reinstate The Courage to Face COVID-19. Yesterday my third appeal was turned down without answering my query about what in our book is offensive.
My question seemed especially pertinent, given that Account Review provided me with a link to its Content Guidelines, which include a section on Offensive Content.
Offensive content
We don’t sell certain content including content that we determine is hate speech, promotes the abuse or sexual exploitation of children, contains pornography, glorifies rape or pedophilia, advocates terrorism, or other material we deem inappropriate or offensive.
Obviously, nothing in our book even remotely touches on any of these subjects. Upon reading this description, it occurred to me that it was a perfection description of 120 Days of Sodom, by the Marquis de Sade, which contains hundreds of pages that glorify the abuse and sexual exploitation of children, violent pornography, and glorifications of rape and pedophilia. I did a quick search for the title, and voila, there it is, for sale on Amazon in three formats.
None of my polite entreaties to Content Review was answered with an explanation of what, in our book, is offensive or in violation of any other published guideline. This strengthened my suspicion that the decision was the result of a sudden imposition of power for which the Content Review staff was not prepared.
Even more stunning than banning my softcover edition was Amazon’s decision to ban Tony Lyons’s SKYHORSE hardcover edition from the site without even sending the publisher notice. He learned of his edition’s demise from me.
This is a developing story about arbitrary censorship and book banning. Generally speaking, Amazon has a robust history of resisting pressure to ban books. Even during the COVID Pandemic, Amazon bucked the censorship regime that was established at Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
I believe it is no exaggeration to state that Amazon’s decision to ban our work of medical and historical scholarship, carefully vetted by Dr. Peter McCullough—who has published over 600 peer-reviewed papers in top academic medical journals—is the most egregious act of arbitrary censorship in the history of American publishing.
Many works of literature have been banned from public school systems and libraries and censured by religious organizations. However, I cannot find a single example of a banned nonfiction book that contains zero sex, zero violence, zero expletives, zero harshly expressed opinions, and zero assertions that aren’t grounded on rock solid scholarship.
Indeed, the book is a strictly factual narrative based on hundreds of published sources ranging from academic papers to standard works of medical history to documents published by U.S. federal agencies. The longest chapter in the book recounts Dr. McCullough’s U.S. Senate testimony on November 19, 2020.
This is a developing story about a gross infringement of the freedom of speech that is enshrined in the First Amendment of the U.S Constitution. Coincidentally, tomorrow (October 10) I have been invited to address the Republican Women of Greater North Texas about the critical importance of maintaining free speech for the maintenance our Constitutional Republic. I can now speak from very personal experience.
I would like to conclude by stating that I believe this decision is almost certainly the result of outside pressure being brought to bear on Amazon—the sort of outside pressure from the U.S. Executive Branch that was revealed in discovery in Missouri v. Biden.
As Jacob Siegel recently remarked in a brilliant piece in Tablet magazine titled “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century:”
At companies like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Amazon, the upper management levels had always included veterans of the national security establishment. But with the new alliance between U.S. national security and social media, the former spooks and intelligence agency officials grew into a dominant bloc inside those companies; what had been a career ladder by which people stepped up from their government experience to reach private tech-sector jobs turned into an ouroboros that molded the two together.
I strongly suspect that the banning of our book from Amazon has the fingerprints of Biden administration or intelligence agency goons all over it.
For those who would still like to purchase our book, please visit our website by clicking on the image below.
Fauci Secretly Met With CIA to ‘Influence’ COVID Origins Investigation, House Republican Alleges
By John-Michael Dumais | The Defender | September 27, 2023
Dr. Anthony Fauci visited CIA headquarters to “influence” its COVID-19 origins investigation, according to allegations disclosed Tuesday by Rep. Brad Wenstrup (R-Ohio).
Wenstrup, in a letter to Inspector General Christi Grimm at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said he had information suggesting Fauci was “escorted” into CIA headquarters “without a record of entry.”
Wenstrup is chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic. A subcommittee spokesperson told the Daily Mail the committee “has received information from multiple sources across multiple agencies regarding Dr. Fauci’s movements to and from the CIA.”
Neither Wenstrup nor any subcommittee member or spokesperson identified specific date(s) Fauci is alleged to have visited the agency.
Tuesday’s press release from the Committee on Government Oversight and Accountability, which is overseeing the subcommittee’s investigation, called attention to allegations by six CIA whistleblowers that they received “significant financial incentives” to change their stance that the SARS-CoV-2 virus may have leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in China.
In light of evidence uncovered earlier this year establishing Fauci’s involvement in the “Proximal Origin” paper claiming to disprove the lab leak theory, the subcommittee said it found Fauci’s presence at the CIA “questionable,” alleging it “lends credence to heightened concerns about the promotion of a false COVID-19 origins narrative by multiple federal government agencies.”
Wenstrup asked Grimm to send the subcommittee by no later than Oct. 10 any documents and communications related to Fauci’s movements between Jan. 1, 2020, and Dec. 31, 2022, into any facilities owned, operated or occupied by the CIA.
Wenstrup also requested the pay and bonus history of all past and current members of HHS’ “COVID Discovery Team(s)” and information about staff and contractors at HHS, National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and the U.S. Marshals Service who may have been involved.
“Our goal is to ensure the scientific investigative process regarding the origins of COVID-19 was fair, impartial, and free of alternative influence,” Wenstrup stated.
Wenstrup did not reveal the source of the information on Fauci’s CIA visit, but the letter mentioned HHS’ Special Agent Brett Rowland, requesting Grimm make him available for a “voluntary transcribed interview.”
CIA whistleblower and intelligence community reports on COVID origins
A joint letter from the subcommittee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Mike Turner (R-Ohio), sent Sept. 12 to CIA Director William Burns, outlined the testimony of a “multi-decade, senior-level, current agency officer” alleging six of the seven analysts investigating the COVID-19 origins were given a “significant monetary incentive to change their position.”
According to the unidentified whistleblower — a decorated and long-serving CIA officer with expertise in Asia, according to the Substack Public — the six analysts, all with significant scientific expertise, were paid off in order to bury their findings that COVID-19 most likely originated from the Wuhan lab.
The seventh and most senior member of the team was alone in believing the virus had a zoonotic origin, the letter stated.
The CIA whistleblower said, “Fauci’s expert opinions were a significant consideration and were part of our classified assessment … His opinion substantially altered the conclusions that were subsequently drawn,” Public reported today.
“He came multiple times and he was treated like a rockstar by the Weapons and Counter-Proliferation Mission Center. And, he pushed the Kristian Anderson [‘Proximal Origin’] paper,” the whistleblower added.
In a separate letter, the subcommittee also requested Andrew Makridis, former COO at the CIA who was known to have taken part in the investigations, participate in an interview.
Democrats from both committees told ABC News they “were given no prior notice of a whistleblower’s existence, let alone testimony. Without further information regarding this claim from the Majority, we have no ability to assess the allegations at this time.”
CIA Director of Public Affairs Tammy Kupperman Thorp told the New York Post, “At CIA we are committed to the highest standards of analytic rigor, integrity and objectivity. We do not pay analysts to reach specific conclusions. We take these allegations extremely seriously and are looking into them.”
In June, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) declassified a 10-page report on its investigation into the links between the Wuhan lab and COVID-19. In the report, the ODNI admitted the lab performed genetic engineering of coronaviruses, that people working at the lab got sick in December 2019 “consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19,” and that they found a lack of “adequate biosafety precautions.”
However, the ODNI report stated the CIA remained “unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic,“ but that “almost all IC [intelligence community] agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered” and that “all IC agencies” determined the virus “was not developed as a biological weapon.”
In February, the U.S. Department of Energy issued a “low confidence” assessment that the virus most likely originated from the leak at the Wuhan lab.
Several days later, FBI Director Christopher Ray, during an interview with Fox News, said the bureau believed the pandemic was likely the result of a lab accident in Wuhan.
‘Proximal Origin’ lab-leak-denying paper linked to Fauci
Fauci’s alleged visit to the CIA is the latest data point in a growing body of evidence gathered by the subcommittee investigating the pandemic showing the former NIAID director played a central role in directing and influencing the official COVID-19 origin narrative, chiefly by suppressing the lab leak theory.
Tuesday’s announcement included a link to the subcommittee’s July report, “The Proximal Origin of a Cover-Up: Did the ‘Bethesda Boys’ Downplay a Lab Leak?”
In the “Proximal Origin” paper, prompted by Fauci in early 2021 and written by Kristian Anderson, Ph.D., professor of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research, Anderson and his co-authors argued the virus was not laboratory-made or purposefully manipulated, and that the lab leak scenario was implausible.
The subcommittee report stated the “Proximal Origin” paper has been accessed 5.84 million times and was “one of the single most impactful and influential scientific papers in history” that was used to “downplay the lab leak hypothesis and call those who believe it may be true conspiracy theorists.”
The report further alleged Fauci was aware of the monetary relationship between NIAID, EcoHealth Alliance, and WIV, and that he funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses at the WIV.
After reviewing more than 8,000 pages of documents and 25 hours of testimony, the subcommittee concluded that “‘Proximal Origin’ employed fatally flawed science to achieve its goal … to kill the lab leak theory.”
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Children’s Health Defense’s chairman on leave, explores Fauci’s longtime involvement in gain-of-function research in his new book, “The Wuhan Cover-up: And the Terrifying Bioweapons Arms Race,” due for release Nov. 14.
John-Michael Dumais is a news editor for The Defender. He has been a writer and community organizer on a variety of issues, including the death penalty, war, health freedom and all things related to the COVID-19 pandemic.
This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.
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Is Israel Uniquely Evil?
By Irfan Chowdhury | Palestine Chronicle | July 18, 2020
… Israel has been carrying out the longest-running military occupation in modern history and the longest-running siege in modern history. These two facts alone render Israel unique in terms of the scope of its brutality and criminality.
There are other respects in which Israel stands out from other countries in its use of terror and violence; for example, it is one of the most aggressive countries in the world, having waged wars of aggression against Lebanon in 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006, and against Gaza in 2004, 2006, 2008/9, 2012 and 2014, killing huge numbers of civilians in the process (all while issuing threats and carrying out various covert attacks against Iran, which are all in violation of the UN Charter). … continue
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