From http://antiwar.com/justin/
In September 2001 – before the news of the anthrax letters broke, but after they had been postmarked – a letter addressed to the “Town of Quantico police” was received that accused Assaad of being a terrorist who was planning to wage biological warfare against the U.S. on American soil. As the first anthrax letters were opened, Assaad got a call from the FBI. Agent Gregory Leylegian wanted to have a little talk with him.
The meeting, also attended by Assaad’s lawyer, proved quite a shock to Assaad. As the agent read the accusing letter aloud, one thing became readily apparent: the Camel Club was getting its revenge.
Whatever the motives of the Quantico letter’s author, one fact seems fairly obvious: whoever wrote it very likely had foreknowledge of the anthrax attacks. Yet all attempts to examine this vital piece of evidence have been deflected by the FBI. Don Foster, a professor of English at Vassar and an expert in the field of textual analysis – it was Foster who identified Joe Klein as the author of Primary Colors – was asked to analyze the anthrax letters, and on the subject of the Quantico letter he had this to say in Vanity Fair:
“It was now December 2001, yet Dolan and Altimari’s Hartford Courant story was the first I had heard of the Quantico letter. [Supervisory Special Agent James R]. Fitzgerald had not heard of it, either. In fact, there were quite a few critical documents that Fitzgerald had not yet seen. What, I wondered, has the anthrax task force been doing. Hoping that the Quantico letter might lead, if not to the killer, at least to a suspect, I offered to examine the document. My photocopy arrived by FedEx not from the task force but from FBI headquarters in Washington. Searching through documents by some 40 USAMRIID employees, I found writings by a female officer that looked like a perfect match. I wrote a detailed report on the evidence, but the anthrax task force declined to follow through: the Quantico letter had already been declared a hoax and zero-filed as part of the 9/11 investigation.”
“The trail that leads us to the perpetrators of the anthrax letter terrorist attacks ends at Ft. Detrick” – I wrote those words in July, before the suicide of Ivins, yet we haven’t quite yet reached the end of this particular road.
Foster refers to the yeoman’s work done by the Hartford Courant’s team of reporters in uncovering the chaotic and dangerous conditions that existed at Ft. Detrick for years, as well as the victimization of Assaad. One Courant story in particular, which detailed the wide variety of pathogens the facility lost track of over the years – including one developed by U.S. scientists known simply as “Pathogen X” – sent chills down my spine. In exposing this laxity, the Courant reported an incident in which a former employee, Dr. Philip Zack, was videotaped sneaking into the supposedly secured facility where pathogens were stored, assisted by his “good friend” Dr. Marian Rippy. They were both involved in conducting unauthorized experiments, according to Dolan and Altimari, and were charter members of the Camel Club. Indeed, the reason for Zack’s departure reportedly had much to do with his constant harassment of Assaad.
