2002 Death of Long-Time Associate of Dr. David Kelly Raises New Questions
The UK Guardian revealed Monday that the US and Britain jointly ran a highly secret program to build radiological "Dirty Bombs". A 2002 accidental detonation killed a British scientist, a long-time colleague of Dr. David Kelly, whose death a year later led to the major scandal over the British Government's role in the Iraq WMD deception.
Before the invasion, Dr. Steven Hatfill, the accused anthrax killer, had headed a parallel U.S. program to contruct "replica" Iraqi bioweapons trailers of the type which never existed in Iraq, but which the Bush and Blair governments used to justify the invasion.
Judy Miller was a key common figure in both the Kelly and Hatfill stories, one which also involves former Undersecratary of Defense for Intelligence Stephen Cambone and Gen. Petraeus in the fraudulent program to sell the world on the invasion of Iraq.
Much more below . . .
That joint dirty bomb construction program was made public for the first time in a long-delayed court inquest into the June 2002 death of a British weapons expert, who died of injuries from the accidental explosion of one of these devices at a secret test site in south-eastern England.
The victim worked in the same UK weapons program for some 25 years with Dr. David Kelly, who died a year later amid a scandal that followed his leak of "sexed-up" WMD intelligence, exaggerating evidence that Iraq was building mobile biowarfare laboratories. The scandal exposed the British role in falsifying intelligence used by the Bush and Blair Administrations to invade Iraq in March, 2003.
Saddam Hussein's Iraq, along with al-Qaeda, had been accused of developing both radiological dirty-bombs and biological warfare programs.
A parallel U.S. biological weapons program employed Steven Hatfill, a South Africa germ warfare expert, who was treated as the prime suspect in the anthrax attacks that immediately followed 9/11. Before the invasion, the Pentagon built several trailers to match the description provided by "Curveball" and other Iraqi defectors.
Yet another strange twist in this story is the role of Judith Miller, the NYT reporter who originally broke the story about Hatfill's role in the Iraqi WMD replicas also one of the last journalists who Dr. Kelly communicated with before his controversial death.
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Other prominent names attach to the WMD deceptions that sprang from these replication programs, including Steven Cambone and General Petraeus.
The Guardian reports about the deadly 2002 dirty bomb accident: http://www.guardian.co.uk/...
Curious case of the dead scientist and the bomb experiment
Ian Cobain
The Guardian,
Monday March 24 2008
A mysterious bomb-making experiment that ended with the accidental death of a government scientist has remained an official secret for more than five years, leaving his family in the dark about what went wrong. Terry Jupp, a scientist with the Ministry of Defence, was engulfed in flames during a joint Anglo-American counter-terrorism project intended to discover more about al-Qaida's bomb-making capacities.
There has been no inquest into his death, as the coroner has been waiting for the MoD to disclose information about the incident. An attempt to prosecute the scientist's manager for manslaughter ended when prosecutors said they were withdrawing the charge, but said the case was too "sensitive" to explain that decision in open court.
The Guardian has established that Jupp was a member of a small team of British and US scientists making bombs from ingredients of the sort that terrorists could obtain. There is also evidence pointing to experiments to discover more about radiological dispersal devices - so-called dirty bombs - which use conventional explosives to scatter radioactive material.
...
Crown Prosecution Service sources said the case was hampered because one of the American scientists refused to testify, while other officials said there was concern in both countries that a trial could expose the nature of the experiment.
...
Asked whether it has carried out such experiments at Shoeburyness, the MoD would say only: "The Dstl is involved in classified work that is of national importance, protecting UK armed forces and the public from very real threats." What is clear is that Shoeburyness has hosted some highly unusual activities involving radioactive material.
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A major twist in this report, not yet pointed out in the Guardian or any other major media, is the tie in with the role of Steven Hatfill in a contemporary U.S. program. Both projects appear to have been started in 2000. Hatfill is best known as the prime suspect in the Ames strain anthrax attacks. Hatfill, a South African, worked at the US Army's chemical biological warfare (CBW) center at Ft. Detrick, MD. Dr. Kelly was an expert on international CBW programs, and had worked for 25 years for British in that field. Among Hatfill's duties for the Army was to "replicate" the very same mobile biological warfare trailers which Iraq was accused of possessing -- another uncanny coincidence.
In an article co-written by Judith Miller, The New York Times broke the story of Hatfill’s role building these trailers on July 2, 2003. See, http://query.nytimes.com/...
AFTER THE WAR: BIOLOGICAL WARFARE; Subject of Anthrax Inquiry Tied to Anti-Germ Training
THIS ARTICLE WAS REPORTED AND WRITTEN BY WILLIAM J. BROAD, DAVID JOHNSTON AND JUDITH MILLER.
Published: July 2, 2003
Three years ago, the United States began a secret project to train Special Operations units to detect and disarm mobile germ factories of the sort that Iraq and some other countries were suspected of building, according to administration officials and experts in germ weaponry.
The heart of the effort, these officials said, was a covert plan to construct a mobile germ plant, real in all its parts but never actually ''plugged in'' to make weapons. In the months before the war against Iraq, American commandos trained on this factory.
The tale of the mobile unit provides a glimpse into one of the most secretive of military and intelligence worlds, that of germ warfare defense. But here, two stories intersect. The first involves this previously unknown aspect of the Iraq war. The second involves the investigation into who sent letters containing anthrax that killed five people in the United States in late 2001.
Officials familiar with the secret project say that to design an American version of a mobile germ unit, the government turned to Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, then a rising star in the world of biological defense but more recently publicly identified by the Justice Department as ''a person of interest'' in the anthrax investigation.
It was unclear why investigators focused on Dr. Hatfill. Officials now say a major reason he came under suspicion was his work on the mobile unit.
Dr. Hatfill has been subjected to greater scrutiny than anyone else in the anthrax investigation, but the government has brought no charges. He has repeatedly denied any role in the attacks and has said he knows nothing about anthrax production.
Judy Miller and "the dark forces"
Miller’s article appeared as the Iraq Survey Group, a joint US-UK inquiry, showed the Iraq WMD allegations to be false, as it was starting to become clear that claims of mobile weapons trailers and dirty bomb programs were part of an elaborate deception campaign and intelligence disinformation effort to justify the invasion.
Judy Miller had a strange e-mail exchange with Dr. Kelly shortly before he was found dead on July 17 which referred to "the dark forces" that were closing in on Kelly after he leaked information to the press casting doubt about the purpose of trailers found in Iraq. Those vehicles, as Kelly had said, "didn't even resemble" Mobile Weapons Labs, and turned out to contain weather balloon equipment.
Miller is widely blamed as having played a major role in selling the Iraqi WMD deception to the public, and later was jailed for withholding information about the White House orchestrated campaign to reveal the identity of Valerie Plame and the CIA Counter-Proliferation Unit where she worked.
Here's what seems to be most significant so far about this story. The victim in this case worked for 25 years for the same UK advanced warfare laboratory as Dr. David Kelly, who's "suicide" followed his leaking of the fact that British intelligence has "sexed up" Iraq WMD reports about alleged Iraqi mobile biological warfare labs. What's really scary about this is that the UK weapons program of which Kelly and the second British weapons expert worked intersects with Steven Hatfill, the South African biological warfare expert who was the prime suspect in the anthrax attacks. Hatfill’s role in constructing these replica trailers was revealed by Judith Miller, who in turn "outed" the identity of Valerie Plame, the CIA counter-proliferation officer whose unit had most actively resisted Bush-Blair misrepresentation of Iraq WMD program intelligence.
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All this raises some interesting questions about Curveball's sponsors and those within the US and UK governments who embraced the Iraq WMD deception:
Why did DIA so aggressively embrace Curveball, while CIA held back for some time?
Who authorized the programs that produced faux Iraq WMD that employing Drs. Kelly, Hatfill and Jupp?
Events have shown -- and this revelation of a MOD dirty bomb certifies -- the US and UK were chasing shadows in Iraq they had created themselves, with some help from abroad.
As for the Americans, DIA definitely had the lead on Iraq and its assumed WMDs, and as the fabrications wormed into CIA, it was WINPAC that bit the biggest piece of the infested apple. The split between WINPAC and CIA/CPD over Iraq WMDs has revealed even before they were fleshed out in the Scooter Libby trial. This from Drogin in a 2005 LA Times article: http://www.commondreams.org/...
The case began when Curveball, a chemical engineer from Baghdad, first showed up in a German refugee camp in 1998. By early 2000, he was working with Germany's Federal Intelligence Service, known as the BND, in exchange for an immigration card.
The Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency, which handled Iraqi refugees in Germany, furnished the engineer with the Curveball code-name. He soon began providing technical drawings and detailed information indicating that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein secretly had built lethal germ factories on trains and trucks.
But the DIA never sought to check his background or information. Instead, the commission found, the DIA saw itself as a conduit for German intelligence, and funneled nearly 100 Curveball reports to the CIA between January 2000 and September 2001.
Except for a brief meeting between Curveball and a DIA medical technician in May 2000, German authorities refused to let U.S. intelligence officials interview their source until March 2004, a year after the war began.
But warnings mounted from the start.
After the meeting in May 2000, the DIA medical technician questioned the validity of Curveball's information. Another warning came in April 2002, when a foreign spy service told the CIA it had "doubts about Curveball's reliability," the commission reported.
With skepticism rising about Curveball, Drumheller said he arranged a lunch meeting with a German counterpart at Pavitt's behest in late September or early October 2002 to ask for an American meeting with Curveball.
By then, Drumheller said, German intelligence officials were increasingly wary of Curveball. But he said they didn't want to acknowledge their doubts in public and risk embarrassment.
Drumheller said the German intelligence officer used the lunch to convey a stark warning: "Don't even ask to see him because he's a fabricator and he's crazy."
Drumheller said he passed that warning up to Pavitt's office. He said he also informed another senior official in the European division and sent a notice to WINPAC, where the chief bioweapons analyst was considered the Curveball expert.
It becomes clear that the official line is that Curveball was virtually the sole source for all this bad Iraqi WMD intel. One has to question that assertion. Aside from the German BND, who else might have had input about Iraq WMD? In her autobiography, Valerie Plame referred to her meetings at CIA during the early 2000s with chain-smoking Middle East intelligence officers she exhanged information with after her return to CIA from maternity leave in 2001. Having dropped that hint about which liason service -- the next page of the book was redacted by the CIA censor -- it's obvious that CIA/CPD had other sources about Iraq WMD.
Yet, officially, everyone still wants to lay everything on a lone Iraqi defector and the INC, which claims it didn't control Curveball as an agent. For instance, consider this from the Commission that reported on the Iraq WMD "intelligence failure": http://www.globalsecurity.org/...
One of the most painful errors, however, concerned Iraq's biological weapons programs. Virtually all of the Intelligence Community's information on Iraq's alleged mobile biological weapons facilities was supplied by a source, codenamed "Curveball," who was a fabricator. We discuss at length how Curveball came to play so prominent a role in the Intelligence Community's biological weapons assessments. It is, at bottom, a story of Defense Department collectors who abdicated their responsibility to vet a critical source; of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts who placed undue emphasis on the source's reporting because the tales he told were consistent with what they already believed; and, ultimately, of Intelligence Community leaders who failed to tell policymakers about Curveball's flaws in the weeks before war.
Curveball was not the only bad source the Intelligence Community used. Even more indefensibly, information from a source who was already known to be a fabricator found its way into finished pre-war intelligence products, including the October 2002 NIE. This intelligence was also allowed into Secretary of State Colin Powell's speech to the United Nations Security Council, despite the source having been officially discredited almost a year earlier. This communications breakdown could have been avoided if the Intelligence Community had a uniform requirement to reissue or recall reporting from a source whose information turns out to be fabricated, so that analysts do not continue to rely on an unreliable report. In the absence of such a system, however, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which disseminated the report in the first place, had a responsibility to make sure that its bad source did not continue to pollute policy judgments; DIA did not fulfill this obligation.
The official line is that a "foreign liason agency" warned CIA about disinformation coming from INC, and INC denies that Curveball was their send-up. One would certainly want to know more about that, as well as what the full range of sources were actually saying. As Tyler Drumheller tells us, the Germans delivered their package with a bright orange warning label, "fabrikator" attached.
The Robb Silberman commission identified a second confirming source for Curveball's fabrications about mobile bio weapons labs who was forwarded to the Defense Intelligence Agency by ranking DC representatives of INC. But, that was long after the bait had been taken, and a long series of events were already in motion. As the commission reported: Ibid.
Another source, associated with the Iraqi National Congress (INC) (hereinafter "the INC source"), was brought to the attention of DIA by Washington-based representatives of the INC. Like Curveball, his reporting was handled by Defense HUMINT. He provided one report that Iraq had decided in 1996 to establish mobile laboratories for BW agents to evade inspectors. Shortly after Defense HUMINT's initial debriefing of the INC source in February 2002, however, a foreign liaison service and the CIA's Directorate of Operations (DO) judged him to be a fabricator and recommended that Defense HUMINT issue a notice to that effect, which Defense HUMINT did in May 2002. Senior policymakers were informed that the INC source and his reporting were unreliable.
I'm not sure that Chalabi's INC is really the chief culprit in this, and that group was set up as a tool of several intelligence services. Indeed, it may be naive to even assume that the real authors of the trumped up evidence against Iraq were anything other than native English-speakers. If we have to narrow it down to a particular U.S. agency that embraced Curveball and the anthrax trailer story, there's a consensus that was DIA.
Who, then, might have been Curveball's string pullers at that agency? Obvious question - never has been publicly explained. Who within DoD did Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld later reward for this? Hint: look in the chain of command over DIA HUMINT - but that would only give you the operational guy(s). So, we're finally left with the ultimate question, who was in a policy position to sponsor this strategy to invade Iraq, and who would their friends and sources be?
Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld's Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, now heads the US subsidiary of QintetiQ, the privatized UK agency that employed Judd and Kelly. Cambone was at the top of the command for over Hatfill at DIA. Cambone's company is part of the Carlyle Group
Here's one operational guy who seems to meet all the criteria mentioned above. Note the UK MOD connection. See, "Stephen Cambone," Right Web Profile (Somerville, NM: International Relations Center, May 9, 2007), http://rightweb.irc-online.org/... :
In November 2007, Stephen Cambone, the controversial undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Donald Rumsfeld-led Pentagon, became vice president for strategy of QinetiQ North America, a subsidiary of the United Kingdom-based defense contractor QinetiQ (Washington Technology, November 12, 2007). Cambone served under Rumsfeld until December 2006, when he resigned shortly after his boss stepped down. Before joining the George W. Bush administration in 2001, Cambone had collaborated with a number of hardline and neoconservative groups including the National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP) and the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), shaping policies that would later be championed by the administration after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Contracts for QinetiQ
QinetiQ was created in 2001, having evolved out of a research arm of the British Ministry of Defense (MOD) called the Defense Evaluation Research Agency. After the MOD partially privatized the agency in 2001, the U.S.-based Carlyle Group purchased a large stake in the new company (see BBC, November 23, 2007).
In early 2008, two months after Cambone took the position at QinetiQ North America, it was awarded a lucrative contract by the Pentagon’s Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office (CIFA)—an office that Cambone had created while in the Bush administration. In a widely cited article for CorpWatch, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock reported that as part of the five-year, $30 million contract, QinetiQ’s Mission Solutions Group is to provide unspecified "security services." Wrote Shorrock: "The new CIFA contract comes on the heels of a series of QinetiQ deals inked with the Pentagon in the booming new business of ‘network centric warfare’
SNIP
Controversies in the Bush Administration
In 2003, Rumsfeld appointed Cambone the first-ever undersecretary of defense for intelligence—the so-called defense intelligence czar. The move sparked criticism among some analysts, who felt that the Pentagon was inappropriately expanding its range of activities. At the time, John Prados of the National Security Archive argued that the new position would "allow the Defense Department to consolidate its intelligence programs in a way that could undermine CIA head George Tenet's role" (TomPaine.com, April 14, 2003).
Summarizing Cambone’s first three years as undersecretary, the New York Times reported: "Overseeing Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s drive to broaden the military's clandestine reconnaissance and man-hunting missions is Stephen A. Cambone, the Pentagon's intelligence czar and one of Mr. Rumsfeld's most trusted aides, whose low public profile masks his influence as one of the nation's most powerful intelligence officials. Since his office was created three years ago, Mr. Cambone and his deputy, Lt. Gen. William G. Boykin, a former commander of the Army's elite Delta Force, have carried out a wide-ranging restructuring of the Pentagon's sprawling intelligence bureaucracy.... In one of the boldest new missions, the Pentagon has sharply increased the number of clandestine teams of Defense Intelligence Agency personnel and Special Operations forces conducting secret counterterrorism missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and other foreign countries.
SNIP
Even before his involvement in the prison abuse scandal, Cambone had become a target of criticism, in part because of his close relationship with Rumsfeld. Tom Donnelly, a writer based at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in the Weekly Standard that, "fairly or not, Cambone has long been viewed as Rumsfeld's henchman, almost universally loathed—but more important, feared—by the services" (Weekly Standard, September 2002). The Washington Monthly reported in late 2001: "It would be hard to exaggerate how much Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top aide Stephen Cambone were hated within the Pentagon prior to September 11. Among other mistakes, Rumsfeld and Cambone foolishly excluded top civilian and military leaders when planning an overhaul of the military to meet new threats, thereby ensuring even greater bureaucratic resistance. According to the Washington Post, an Army general joked to a Hill staffer that 'if he had one round left in his revolver, he would take out Steve Cambone.'
SNIP
Policy Work and Advocacy
A longtime proponent of missile defense programs, Cambone began his career as a policy expert at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the early 1980s. In 1986, he became the deputy director of strategic analysis for SRS Technologies, a defense contractor that regularly receives lucrative contracts for a number of defense programs, including missile defense (for more on SRS contracts, see its Technologies' Defense Systems Directorate web page).
After the presidential election of George H.W. Bush, Cambone was appointed director of strategic defense policy, working under then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney.
SNIP
During the Clinton presidency, Cambone worked as staff director on two commissions chaired by Rumsfeld, on missile defense and space weapons, which both sparked criticism because of their controversial conclusions on U.S. strategic vulnerability to ballistic missiles and on space-based defense capabilities. (Also serving on the Rumsfeld commissions were Paul Wolfowitz, Malcolm Wallop, William Schneider Jr., and James Woolsey.) In the tradition of Team B, the unstated agenda of these commissions appeared to be turning up pressure on the Clinton administration to support new weapons programs and substantially increase military spending (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, November/December 1998).
SNIP
While working for the commissions, Cambone participated in two study groups sponsored by PNAC and NIPP. NIPP's 2001 report, Rationale and Requirements for Nuclear Forces and Arms Control, and PNAC's Rebuilding America's Defenses, seem to have guided the defense policies of the George W. Bush administration with respect to nuclear policy, national security strategy, and military transformation (see Michelle Ciarrocca and William D. Hartung, Axis Of Influence: Behind the Bush Administration's Missile Defense Revival, World Policy Institute, July 2002).
Affiliations
National Defense University, Institute for National Strategic Studies: Former Director of Research
Center for Strategic and International Studies: Senior Fellow for Political-Military Studies, 1993-1998
National Institute for Public Policy (NIPP): Former Study Participant
Project for the New American Century: Former Project Participant
Government Service
Department of Defense: Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, 2003-2006; Director for Program Analysis & Evaluation, 2002-2003; Principal Deputy Secretary for Policy, 2001-2002; Special Assistant to the Secretary and Deputy Secretary, 2001; Director of the Strategic Defense Policy Office, Bush Sr. Administration
Commission to Assess U.S. National Security Space Management and Organization: Staff Director, 2000
Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States: Staff Director, 1998
Los Alamos National Laboratory: Former Staffer (1982-1986)
Private Sector
QinetiQ North America: Vice President for Strategy, 2007-
SRS Technologies: Deputy Director of Strategic Analysis, 1986-1990
Education
Catholic University: B.A.
Claremont University Graduate School: M.A., Ph.D.
SNIP
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What is the QinetiQ connection?
As the following official history of the UK biological warfare establishment makes clear, QinetiQ (the US branch of which which Stephen Cambone now heads) was part of Dstl, which employed Mr. Judd and Dr. David Kelly. Dr. Kelly was head of the Microbiology Division at Dstl, Porton Down, which conducted the dirty bomb testing accident that took Judd's life. See, http://eyeball-series.org/...
In 1995, the Establishment became part of the Defence Evaluation and Research Agency (DERA), an executive agency of MOD evolved in 1994 from proposals of the "Front Line First" Defence Cost Studies. In 2001, DERA split into two organisations: QinetiQ, a private company, and DSTL (Defence Science and Technology Laboratory), which remains an agency of MOD. Porton Down is now known as DSTL, Porton Down.
NB The above text is taken from the article "Porton Down: a brief history" by G B Carter, Porton Down’s official historian. A more in-depth account can be found in Mr Carter’s book Chemical and Biological at Porton Down 1916-2000 (The Stationery Office, 2000).
I've previously written about Cambone and Gen. Patreas' role in perpetrating the Iraq weapons trailer myth. After initially announcing the trailers had been found, Cambone and Patreaus maintained the lie that they were bioweapons production. For 15 months, Cambone suppressed a DIA report that came to that conclusion in May 2003, hiding it from David Kay's Iraq Survey Group, and Gen. Patreaus never spoke on the subject again, failing to correct the false record he had helped create. For more about Cambone and Curveball, part of that is reproduced below. See,
http://journals.democraticundergroun...
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Some truly remarkable coincidences here. If, indeed, that's what they are. Perhaps, the corporate media will begin to connect the dots. One can only wonder how much more evidence they need to decompartmentalize this story.
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2008, Mark G. Levey