December, isnt a bunch of terrorists conducting an act that pretty much fails to inspire terror, and then not telling anyone that they did it just as a much a movie plot? What about the spectacularly lame notes? Terrorists with a sense of humor?
And if it is so obvious, why is the government so hush about it? This could have been the justification for the Iraqui war that people have been clamoring for. Why would they even bother with all the really unspectacular “evidence” when they’ve got their smoking gun right there. It’s pretty darn clear that a lot more is going on.
Well, not really. I think the Ashcroft=fascist stuff can stand on its own on the basis of the all the civil liberties violated post-911 in the handling of “enemy combatants”, visa violators and other non-desirables.
The absence of sufficient evidence to make an arrest in the anthrax case is just incompetence.
So we have an incompetent fascist as our Attorney General.
You aren’t making sense. If he can manufacture evidence against all the other innocents he has arrested in his drive to create the Fourth Reich, why doesn’t he do the same against some Iraqi and justify a greater crackdown? Why is he competent enough to manufacture evidence against them, but not Iraqis?
Or are you saying that if he does his job, he is a fascist, but if he doesn’t, he is an incompetent? In other words, it is the fact that he is rounding up people who shoot at us, trespass into the US illegally, and are (as you and I agree) undesirable that makes him a member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy[sup]TM[/sup]?
Shodan, the charge of nascent fascism against Ashcroft isn’t that he has manufactured evidence against anyone, but that he claims he doesn’t need any and that they don’t need lawyers or due process, either.
This comment of yours was interesting, to say the least:
. Shoot at us? Trespass? What’s the evidence, what is the proper punishment, and why doesn’t it matter to you? “Undesirability” isn’t even a crime, either. One man is making all of those decisions on his own, with no recourse or review - does that worry you at all?
As a Microbiologist, and a member of ASM (American Society of Microbiologists) I received a letter over a year ago asking me to report anyone that I thought might be the perpetrator.
The strain apparently is that developed at Fort Dietrich. Without getting too technical, bacterial strains that have been genetically altered are relatively easily tracked by genetic markers. The strain that was used was the Ames strain. It was developed in Ames Iowa, hence the name, but the final “polishing” was done in a military lab.
The strain was altered in Ames to be more pathogenic. Keep in mind that B. anthrasis is not a rare pathogen, and is rather commonly found in both carcases and sheep wool or fleece. However, it isn’t terribly pathogenic since the advent of antibiotics. The military further enhanced the pathogenicity by “polishing” the strain. Normally bacterial spores clump together, and don’t aerosol well. The Fort Dietrich lab alleviated this problem by making their military strain far more powdery. Thus the bacteria were far more easily inhaled or ingested, and more pathogenic.
Not having worked in a bio-weapons lab, I can not answer the question of whether this is an easy task, or a difficult one. I can tell you, that growing B. anthrasis is not at all difficult, and the amount sent could have easily been grown in my kitchen with a incubator smaller than a mailbox, and a fridge to keep the strains viable. The polisher may be a huge machine that means the strain would have had to been taken “as is” or the process could be easily done at home. This is something I don’t know.
In 2001? This is flat-out wrong. I’ve never heard anyone credible suggest a foreign source, and all the evidence I’ve heard points to a domestic one - mainly the fact that American technology and facilities were clearly used (see the Ames strain stuff).
True, of course. Of course, it’s also true that nothing about any of these attacks had a thing to do with Iraq. But why let that get in the way?
Then he would claim that he doesn’t need any evidence to arrest Iraqis for the anthrax mailings. But he hasn’t. Therefore the claims of nascent fascism are not justified.
“Shooting at us” referred to the "“enemy combatants” that jsc1953 mentioned, trespassing referred to the “visa violators”, and he mentioned (although he later withdrew) that these were “non-desirables”. So apparently he does not feel that “enemy combatants” and illegal aliens are undesirables. I do.
The evidence is the war in Afghanistan and the eyewitness testimony that they were shooting at US soldiers, which is how they wound up in Gitmo. Evidence of visa violations is handled by the INS. It matters very much to me that people are trying to kill US citizens and other innocents, so please don’t make false accusations against me.
The idea that only Ashcroft is handling all these different arrests is idiotic. All his decisions have been repeatedly reviewed (and affirmed) by an independent judiciate.
Fascism does not refer to anything realistic in this context; it is simply a general term of abuse applied by the Left to those with whom it disagrees.