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Five years after the anthrax attacks that killed five people, the FBI is now convinced that the lethal powder sent to the Senate was simply made and contained nothing that conclusively links the case to any specific source, widening the pool of possible suspects in a frustratingly slow investigation.

The finding, which resulted from countless scientific tests at numerous laboratories, appears to undermine the widely held belief that the attack was carried out by a government scientist or someone with access to a U.S. biodefense lab.

What was initially described as a near-military-grade biological weapon was ultimately found to have had a more ordinary pedigree, containing no additives and no signs of special processing to make the anthrax bacteria more deadly, law enforcement officials confirmed. In addition, the strain of anthrax used in the attack has turned out to be more common than was initially believed, the officials said.

As a result, after a very public focus on government scientists as the likely source of the attack, the FBI is today casting a far wider net, as investigators face the daunting prospect of an almost endless list of suspects in scores of countries around the globe.

"There is no significant signature in the powder that points to a domestic source," said one scientist who has extensively studied the tan, talc-like material that paralyzed much of Washington in the deadliest bioterrorism attack in U.S. history.

The FBI says it remains optimistic that it will find whoever killed five people — two of them from the Washington area — in a series of bioterrorism-by-mail attacks that rocked a nation still in shock from the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The bureau has assigned fresh leadership to the case — Special Agent Ed Montooth — and retains a full-time investigative force of 17 agents and 10 postal inspectors. "There is confidence the case will be solved," said Joseph Persichini Jr., acting assistant director in charge of the FBI's Washington field office.

The prevailing views about the anthrax powder, meanwhile, have been coalescing among a small group of scientists and FBI officials over several years but rarely have been discussed publicly. In interviews and a recently published scientific article, law enforcement authorities have acknowledged that much of the conventional wisdom about the attack turned out to be wrong.

Specifically, law enforcement authorities have refuted the widely reported claim that the anthrax spores had been "weaponized" — specially treated or processed to allow them to disperse more easily. They also have rejected reports that the powder was milled, or ground, to create finer particles that can penetrate deeply into the lungs. Such processing or additives might have suggested that the maker had access to the recipes of biological weapons made by the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.
 
In fact, the anthrax powder used in the 2001 attack had no additives, writes Douglas J. Beecher, a scientist in the FBI laboratory's Hazardous Materials Response Unit, in an article in the science journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

"A widely circulated misconception is that the spores were produced using additives and sophisticated engineering supposedly akin to military weapons production," Beecher writes in the journal's August edition, in what is believed to be the most expansive public comment on the nature of the powder by any FBI official. "The idea is usually the basis for implying that the powders were inordinately dangerous compared to spores alone."

The FBI would not allow Beecher to be interviewed about his article. But other scientists familiar with the forensic investigation echoed his description. Whoever made the powder produced a deadly project of exceptional purity and quality -- up to a trillion spores per gram -- but used none of the tricks known to military bioweapons scientists to increase the lethality of the product. Officials stressed that the terrorist would have had to have considerable skills in microbiology and access to equipment.

"It wasn't weaponized. It was just nicely cleaned up," said one knowledgeable scientist who spoke on the condition he not be identified by name because the investigation is continuing. "Whoever did it was proud of their biology. They grew the spores, spun them down, cleaned up the debris. But there were no additives."

Moreover, scientists say, the particular strain of the anthrax used in the attack has turned to out to be a less significant clue than first believed. The highly virulent Ames strain was first isolated in the United States and was the basis for the anthrax weapons formerly created by the United States. The use of the Ames strain in the 2001 attack was initially seen as a strong clue linking the terrorist to the U.S. biodefense network.

But the more the FBI investigated, the more ubiquitous the Ames strain seemed, appearing in labs around the world including nations of the former Soviet Union.

"Ames was available in the Soviet Union," said former Soviet bioweapons scientist Sergei Popov, now a biodefense expert at George Mason University. "It could have come from anywhere in the world."

Many law enforcement officials believe that ever-improving technology could eventually lead to a break in the case. Ongoing tests could lead authorities to the lab where the anthrax originated — something authorities have said for years could help close the case.

More traditional tactics are still being used: The FBI has conducted 9,100 interviews and issued 6,000 subpoenas in one of the most exhaustive and expensive investigations in the bureau's history. Authorities say investigators continue to have a number of specific individuals in their sights, describing the suspect list as "fluid."

One prevailing theory among investigators is that the attack came from within the United States rather than from an overseas terrorist organization.

However, a law enforcement official said, "we have not closed the door on any possibilities. There's a discrete number of individuals who continue to be investigated, both internationally and domestically."

Over the years, officials have publicly identified only one "person of interest," and that was more than four years ago. Steven J. Hatfill, a former Army scientist, has denied wrongdoing and has never been charged. He is suing the Justice Department, alleging that officials leaked false information about him that caused great harm.

Law enforcement officials won't talk about Hatfill.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, in a meeting this month with Washington Post reporters and editors, would not say whether any single individual continues to draw special attention as a "person of interest."

"I'm not telling you that right now the bureau is focused on someone or not focused on someone," Chertoff said. "There are in my experience a lot of instances where we might know or have a good reason to believe who committed a criminal act, but we may not be able to prove it. So when you say something is not solved, you should not assume from the fact that there is no criminal prosecution we don't have a good idea of what we think happened."

Persichini, of the FBI's Washington office, acknowledged frustrations but said that "no one in the FBI has for a moment stopped thinking about the innocent victims of these attacks, nor has the effort to solve this case in any way been slowed.

"While not well known to the public, the scientific advances gained from this investigation are unprecedented and have greatly strengthened the government's ability to prepare for — and prevent — biological attacks in the future," Persichini said.

Nonetheless, failure to solve the mystery has bred public skepticism.

"If the FBI's investigation has become a cold case, then it's time for [FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III] to acknowledge that and take steps to deal with it," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), a frequent critic of the FBI. "I'm concerned that the FBI may have spent too much time focusing [on] one theory of what happened and too little effort on the other possibilities."

Source: MSNBC
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/14991957/

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With the 2006 Midterm elections just weeks away, many progressives have expressed a fear of possible manipulation of the vote by conservative republicans. Hundreds of scholarly articles and semi-scientific studies have been published this year alone which take a hard look at elections presidential exit polling and the technology used to record votes.

Steven Freeman, a Visiting Scholar and Affiliated Faculty in the Center for Organizational Dynamics at University of Pennsylvania, and co-author Joel Bleifuss, editor of In These Times Magazine, recently published Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen?: Exit Polls, Election Fraud, and the Official Count on Seven Stories Press. The book is a fascinating analysis of election polling, and the flawed Direct Recording Electronic (DRE) machines deployed in several states with funds provided by the 2001 Help America Vote Act. I interviewed Professor Freeman by phone and on the internet.

Larry Sakin: In the first chapter of your book, Was the 2004 Presidential Election Stolen? President Bush seems very worried about the election outcome. If the Republicans stole the election, why would Bush be so concerned?

Steven Freeman: Good question. Actually, I did not want to include that story in the book. It was there at the behest of my publisher and co-author, who felt it made a compelling narrative. I agreed to include it because it happened on Election Day, involved exit polls, President Bush, was well sourced, and consistent with other evidence (e.g., the cancelled Election Day broadcasts in the critical battleground state of Florida).

It could be argued that it suggests that the Bush/Cheney campaign did not steal the election or that if they did, George Bush did not know about it. On the other hand, it also indicates that the president, who is after all a highly seasoned politician, was concerned about the exit polls. On face value it suggests that, of course the exit polls and corollary indicators (high turnout, low approval ratings) were right. All knowledgeable observers understood it; Tony Blair went to bed believing that Kerry had won. Even George Bush understood it. Our source indicates he was furious because he had been assured that he would win; he may have not understood, or forgotten, or been temporarily confused that he was going to win*despite* the exit polls and corollary indicators, indeed despite how people cast their ballots.

The source was equally clear that his political operative Karl Rove calmly assured him everything would be okay. And this is consistent with other reports. Despite widespread Election Day predictions that Kerry had won, the Bush/Cheney campaign team remained highly confident. Political scientists and journalists reported that confidence was based on their “on-the-ground intelligence,” the details of which has never been explicated.

Sakin: You write extensively about the long poll lines and lack of voting machines in heavily Democratic areas in various places across the country. What measures can voter integrity activists take to counteract these problems?

Freeman: There is clear evidence that Ken Blackwell, Ohio’s Secretary of State, held voting machines in warehouses to create long lines in Democratic strongholds. Blackwell is now running for Governor, while continuing to serve as Secretary of State; in other words, he’s overseeing the counting of votes in his own election

What can be done? Activists at the local level can advocate for more voting machines in their precincts. But even better, we can demand paper ballots. This removes the expense that is the excuse for shortages. Paper ballots counted by optical scan machines provide a method that is far cheaper than touch-screen machines, and the paper ballots are there as an audit trail to check the integrity of the machine count and to permit a manual count as necessary.

Where Direct Record Electronic (DRE) machines are used despite their nearly universal rejection by computer scientists, voters should demand absentee ballots. As anyone who has read my book or recent studies from NYU, Princeton, and John Hopkins Universities will understand, voting on DRE machines is a “faith-based” exercise. Moreover, the companies to whom we entrust the count have done nothing to justify any faith whatsoever. In fact, it’s just the opposite.

I’d like to note though, that in my analyses, I have *not* dwelt at length on long poll lines and lack of voting machines in heavily Democratic areas. In the book, we do document these instances in part to show what the Bush/Cheney campaign did to manipulate results and Democratic weakness in standing up for their constituencies. But many elections have been manipulated through obstacles to registration, differential treatment of absentee ballots by county and demographic group, artificially long lines and other voting mishaps in poor precincts, and disproportionate vote “spoilage,” wherein poor precincts can “lose” ten percent or more of the votes that are cast despite these other obstacles. Unfortunately, these obstacles and inequities have been institutionalized in our system. So successful are vote suppression efforts that the US ranks # 139 out of 172 nations in the world in Federal election turnout below such hotbeds of as Burma/Myanmar and the Cent African Republic. Moreover, this ranking is based on turnout; recall that in the US about 2% of ballots cast are also lost; if it were a ranking based on percentage of votes counted, the US would rank even lower yet.

When I have asked whether the election was stolen, I am not talking about these suppressed votes. If the election were won through such tactics, it would be unjust and undemocratic and even unprecedented in scale of sophistication, but not new. If such were the case, we might simply say that the Bush/Cheney campaign “stole it fair and square” because such tricks are part of the game, and that Democrats are complicit because for decades such tricks have helped white and “moderate” Democrats win primary battles and maintain control of the party.

What we are saying is they did not steal it fair and square. Rather, that even by the rules of the game, which amount to something like a hockey game played on a 10 degree incline; Bush & company still couldn’t win; and that had the votes been properly counted, Kerry would have won the presidency with something on the order of a five million vote plurality. In short, the official count is off by something on the order of nine million votes!

Many voter integrity activists work to counteract vote suppression. But my point would be that these efforts are in vain unless we also ensure that votes are counted as cast.

Sakin: You make a [case] for the accuracy of exit polling, but many well regarded pollsters have publicly disagreed with the idea that exit polling as an absolute measure for predicting election results. Why is there such a wide chasm of thought on this issue?

Freeman: There is not a wide chasm of thought on this issue. What specific statements lead you to conclude there is? Most respected pollsters would concur that exit polls properly conducted will closely mirror how voters do, in fact, cast their ballots.

That said professional pollsters for the news media have devoted their careers to the goal of forecasting official election results. Their entire methodology is calibrated by official vote counts, and over the years, they have resorted to sampling methods that are more and more skewed toward white, male suburban voters – read “Republican” – in order to make their results agree more closely with the official tally.

Like political scientists who have spent their career analyzing election results, pollsters are highly resistant to any suggestion that the official tally is questionable. The official count is their North Star, without which their analyses are lost. Moreover, in today’s political climate, any suggestion of the possibility of a corrupted count will be attacked as a partisan bias, and if they are perceived as partisan, they will never see another polling contract.

For my part, I have never said that exit polls as an absolute measure for predicting election results. Moreover, no one I know has said that the discrepancy itself indicates that Kerry must have really won the election. Rather, the evidence that cast doubts on the election results come from diverse sources. The exit polls have never been cited as primary evidence of fraud, but only as a reason to take that primary evidence to heart. US Representative John Conyers, the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and author of the foreword to our book says the discrepancy is "but one indicia or warning that something may have gone wrong -- either with the polling or with the election."

The discrepancy is an undisputed fact. The question thus becomes, “What caused it?” Those who defend the election say that Bush voters must have participated in the polls at a lower rate than Kerry voters did. But the math is such that Bush voters were far less likely to participate, a presumption that has never been substantiated by any data or even coherent theory. In fact, the data that has been made available by the pollsters not only fail to validate the presumption, they undermine it entirely.

All indicators on poll participation suggest not lower, but slightly higher response rates among Bush voters. For example, if Bush voters were responding at lower rates, then response rates should be lower in precincts where Bush voters predominated as compared to Kerry precincts. The opposite is true. Response rates in Bush precincts are slightly higher, not lower.

Whereas we could find no evidence regarding lower participation of Bush voters, we observed more than a dozen indicators of a corrupted count. I’ll mention just two of them. First, consider: If you are going to steal an election you go after votes most vigorously where they are most needed. In this case, the 11 swing states where the election was close. As it turns out, even though there is no reason why exit polls should be more or less accurate in key states, the discrepancy is significantly higher in the swing states than other states and significantly higher yet in the three critical battleground states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania.

If fraud was afoot, it would also make sense that the president's men would steal votes in their strongholds, where they control the machinery of government and few people would be in a position to challenge the result. Lo and behold, we learn that in those precincts where Bush won 80 percent or more of the vote, the average disparity between the exit poll predictions and the official count was a whopping 10 percentage points. In these Bush strongholds, Kerry received only about two-thirds of the votes that voters said they cast for him.

Sakin: One of the main problems in the 2004 election was with DRE [voting machines] recording votes inaccurately. You wrote that there was no way for officials to check the machines after the fact to ensure the quality of the vote count. Mark Crispin Miller charges in his book “Fooled Again” that the internal logs could have been checked, but elections officials refused to do so. Can internal logs show how someone voted, or only how the machine recorded a vote?

Freeman: In principle, internal logs show only how the machine recorded a vote. A Princeton group demonstrated last week that in 1 minute’s time they could modify the software in a voting machine in a way that left no trace, and even erased itself, automatically restoring the original software after the election was ended.

Machine experts may, however, be well able to detect some kinds of fraud. It depends on the skill and care with which the voting machines were hacked. After a 2-year lawsuit in Alaska, machine records from the 2004 election have recently been released, and they reveal massive disparities with the totals recorded at the county level.

That is why some election integrity advocates requested machine logs and access to machines. Statistical analysis and polling data suggest large anomalies in precincts throughout the country. For example, in Snohomish County, Washington there was an unusual situation wherein two thirds of the residents voted on paper and one third on machines. We learned that the Democratic Gubernatorial Christine Gregoire won on paper (a result confirmed by the recount); but that Republican Dino Rossi won big on electronic voting machines, bigger yet in precincts where machines were serviced shortly before the election, and by 50% on machines which had to be removed for overt malfunction. That election officials refused access to machines under these conditions shows just how degraded and corrupt our election system is.

Sakin: On the same subject, Diebold and other DRE manufacturers are unwilling to share their programming codes under the rubric of these codes being “proprietary information”. Are there any manufacturers offering machines which offer their codes in the public domain and if so, are they getting any state contracts?

Freeman: The Open Voting Consortium* has recently developed a system that is in the public domain, and offers opportunities for inspection at all levels as shields against fraud. I don’t believe that any state has yet adopted their system. I can’t say exactly why, although it’s worth looking into.

Even if the big three of Diebold, ES&S, Sequoia (or #4 Danaher) were to sell machines with open code, it would not hardly represent a satisfactory answer. While a big improvement over the current situation, even if the code were open, it is unlikely that investigators could detect vote-altering code buried within a million lines of programming code. Even with open code, “Easter eggs” could easily change an election’s outcome.

In a voting machine, such code would do nothing until Election Day, when it would change how votes were recorded. Such code could be loaded into a voting machine in many ways: in the voting software itself, in the tools that assemble the software (complier, liner and loader), or in the tools the program depends on (database, operating system scheduler, memory management and graphical-user-interface controller). Easter eggs could be activated by the real time clocks that are curiously mandated by HAVA for all new voting machines.

Secure voting systems are not technically difficult. The problem is not technological, but political. There are many systems incomparably superior to extant ones. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a worse system than what we have, unless one's intent is to control the outcome of elections.

But the only way to consider election systems on their merits and demerits would be to somehow spur an inert public to action, a promethean task given a vacuous mass media, a single blockheaded "opposition" party, and an over-cautious class of professionals easily veered into comfortable, non-controversial pathways.

If massive evidence of a stolen presidential election is insufficient to even elicit barks from these watchdogs, then it's hard to imagine how a technical discussion on voting system merits will somehow do so. In my opinion, the only chance we have of seeing fair elections in this country is by a rise of a new, independent media, which will arouse America from its slumber by effectively communicating the outrages of our current system, beginning with what transpired in the 2004 presidential election.

Sakin: If Democrats win big in the 2006 midterms, will voter integrity issues fall off the progressive’s radar screen?

Freeman: Given what we have found about shortcomings in election integrity, I would be shocked if the Democrats win big no matter how unpopular the Republicans are.

I cannot say what will be on anyone’s radar screen. Indeed, when I embarked on this investigation, I never in a million years would have imagined that massive, compelling evidence of a stolen president election could be treated so cavalierly.

*http://openvotingconsortium.org

Source: MYTOWN
http://www.mytown.ca/e101/freeman/

USOs (Unidentified Submerged Objects)Awesome or Off-Putting is a weekly delve into cryptozoology, ufology, medical marvels, scientific wonders, secret societies, government conspiracies, cults, ghosts, myths, religion, strange facts or just the plain unexplainable.

Everyone knows what a UFO is - it's an unidentified flying object - but few people are familiar with it's sister phenomenon the USO - the unidentified submerged object. USOs are reported far less frequently than it's relative, as so few people have access to underwater visuals. The encounters do happen however, and we've a small collection of them for you right here.

A USO is an unidentified submerged object which is to the water what UFOs are to the sky. Although USOs are reported far less frequently, they are reported. They're generally seen by fisherman, naval radar or locals in the vicinity of a body of water.

One sighting comes from an area just 20 miles south of Malta, where some men were fishing in their own small ship. They saw what they first took to be a monster (which they later described as looking a bit like a black submarine) floating on the water's surface, and panicked. They brought in their nets and started their engine when a bright light flashed from the craft. When it did, several creatures were seen running around on its deck. The men said the creatures were about the size of a ten-year-old boy, and had an apparatus around their waists that could only be seen during the ship's periodic flashes of light. When the small creatures clambered back into their craft, it glowed so bright it couldn't be looked at, and submerged under water.

In 1973 a Mississippi fisherman had an encounter with a submerged craft. It was after a month of unusually high UFO sightings, and happened in the Pascagoula river later in the day. The man claims there was a bright metallic object 4-6 feet below the surface. The craft was moving at a speed of 4-6 knots, and was emitting an amber beam of light. In a somewhat funny twist, the fisherman also claims to have had to beat it back with an oar as it kept coming in too close to his boat.

A sighting often considered the mother of all USO sightings happened in Nova Scotia's Shag Harbour circa 1967. A 60' ship had been hovering in the air flashing orange-ish lights when it suddenly crashed (or flew) into the harbour. After it submerged, a yellow light could still be seen underwater - moving and leaving a trail of air-bubbles and yellow foam on the surface. The Canadian Coast Guard were called in thinking the crashed craft could have been an airplane. By the time they got there the only sign left was the 80' wide, half mile long trail of yellow foam. A thorough search in the water by divers, and on land for possible missing planes was conducted, but both searches turned up nothing.

Other reports claim that a second ship later dove into the water alongside the first. Speculation has it the second ship was helping repair its fallen comrade, and when those repairs were complete, the two ships flew off into the atmosphere. The actual crash had a witness list comprised of at least 11 people, and was reported to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In fact, three mounties were on site to see that first ship's yellow light moving about underwater.

On June 30 1967 a group of people on board of the Argentinian ship "Naviero" recognized a cylindrical-shaped object in the sea. The object emitted a blue-white light and was approximately 33 metres long. The most surprising fact: there came no noise from the object and - although it was moving with moderate speed trough the water - there were no waves. While the people were watching the strange submarine it changed its course in direction of the "Naviero", accelerated and dived - short before a collision with the ship - and disappeared fast in the deeper sea.

On July 26 1980 the sailors on board of the Brazilian ship "Caioba-Seahorse" saw a grey round object with a diameter of approximately 10 metres drifting in the water. At the same time a bright light appeared on the horizon and came nearer to the ship. All technical equipment on the ship stopped working as the light was approaching the grey object in the sea which was illuminated from green, red, blue and yellow lights (see image above). The light - appearing now as a very bright disc shaped object - sank down to the metalish USO in the water and connect with it. Both objects rose from the water, hovered some minutes over the sea and accelerated then with very high speed up to the sky and disappeared.

Especially the Bimini area in the Bermuda triangle is famous for hundreds of sightings of unidentified and strange submarines and unexplainable lights beneath the sea (some people claim that Atlantis was located in this area and there are in fact some very unusual and maybe artificial structures on the ground of the sea there.) But appear USOs only in the ocean? No, there are also sighting reports about such objects in rivers and even in lakes.

On April 30 1976 an unidentified object broke with great power trough the ice of the frozen lake Siljan in Sweden. The ice was over 20 cm thick, but witnesses report about a grey object which was approximately 9 metres long. This USO came from the ground of the sea and caused an over 800 metres long and 4 metres wide "channel" in the ice while it was moving and cracking with a speed of nearly 100 km/h trough the frozen surface of the sea before it was flying up to the sky without any damage.

But why are USOs moving trough the water? What is their task? Maybe they have the same reason as the flying UFOs in the sky. Unfortunately we dont know their task. Are UFOs and USOs parts of the same phenomena and have they a common origin? Can all UFOs also be USOs? Is it no problem for them to move in space, air and water? It seemed so. Are there alien bases beneath the sea? Who knows. At last: are there any normal and natural explanations for the sightings of USOs. Maybe. Some tiny plants and animals (plankton) in the sea are in fact able to emit light and to produce "glowing spots" on the water and also chemical reactions can cause such phenomena (the mysterious "white water" in the Bermuda triangle is maybe a result of chemical reactions.) But can plankton produce "illusions" of solid and metalish cylindrical and disc-shaped objects moving with high speed? How can plankton rise from the water and start flying trough the air (as many USOs have done)?

The ocean is deep and relatively unexplored. Some think USOs to be the inhabitants of the lost Atlantis scoping us out, as opposed to extraterrestrials in for an inter-stellar visit. We think that whatever they are, they add to Earth's mystique - and that makes us a fan.

Sources: Awesome or Off-Putting/UFO Evidence
http://www.hecklerspray.com/awesome-or-off-putting-usos-unidentified-submerged-objects
/20065003.php

http://www.ufoevidence.org/documents/doc1782.htm