The wiry fifty-seven-year-old man smoothed his brown goatee, then spoke into the microphone, his Brooklyn accent heavy. “My name is Barry Kissin. I am an attorney currently living and practicing law in Frederick, Maryland, the home of Fort Detrick.”
Chairman Robert Gibbons, the Democratic senator from Maryland leaned into his microphone to address the witness. “Mr. Kissin, could you briefly describe the nature of your work as it pertains to today’s hearing.”
“Over the last decade, I have been investigating US biowarfare activities, specifically as it pertains to the FBI’s blatant cover-up regarding the anthrax letter attacks on two members of Congress as well as the media in September and October of 2001.”
“Cover-up? Mr. Kissin, are you suggesting the FBI has willfully misled this committee?”
“Senator, the evidence is overwhelming. Case in point: At a prior committee hearing, held on September 17, 2008, Congressman Nadler specifically pointed out to the FBI and attending members that there are only two facilities in the world, let alone the United States, that have the equipment and personnel necessary to produce the dry silica-coated anthrax powder found in the envelopes of Senators Daschle and Leahy back in 2001. These facilities are the United States Army’s Proving Ground in Dugway, Utah, and the Battelle Memorial Institute in West Jefferson, Ohio, a private CIA contractor. Despite numerous requests, the FBI still refuses to include these facilities in their investigation.”
“Mr. Kissin, the Ames strain of anthrax was discovered in a dead cow in Texas back in 1981. The FBI’s primary suspect, the late Bruce Ivins, experimented with the Ames strain as a potential bioweapon while he worked in a biosafety-3 lab located in Fort Detrick.”
“Correct. But Bruce Ivins sent the strain to Battelle, where the anthrax was converted from Fort Detrick’s wet slurry form into the powdered weaponized form found in the letters addressed to the two senators.”
“In your opinion, Mr. Kissin, what was the motivation behind this alleged FBI cover-up?”
“The anthrax letters had ‘Death to America,’ ‘Death to Israel,’ and ‘Allah is Great’ printed in them, a crude propaganda attempt to make the public believe the letters were sent from Muslim terrorists following the events of 9/11. The Bush administration used this fear card to ram the Patriot Act through Congress, even though the evidence overwhelmingly proves that the military-grade anthrax came from labs run by our own intelligence agencies. The Amerithrax investigation metamorphosed into an FBI cover-up soon after the New York Times and Baltimore Sun reported that the Ames strain in the letters had been weaponized, meaning the anthrax had to have come from either Dugway Proving Ground or Battelle. From that point on, the FBI stonewalled, phasing out any reference to weaponization, referring to the anthrax spores as merely dried. This allowed the FBI to paint immunologist Bruce Ivins as a rogue operator in order to divert attention away from Battelle and Dugway. Ivins’s reported suicide in 2008 was a convenient way to wrap things up and close the books on this case before the evidence trail could be traced back to the US intelligence community and Battelle’s private labs. The cold harsh reality, Senator, is that the United States has embarked on a program of secret research into biological weapons that violates the global treaty banning such weapons, and threatens the lives of every citizen on this planet. These programs were begun under the Clinton administration without the president’s knowledge, then embraced during the Bush administration and the tenure of CIA Director George Tenet, who was looking for ways to quote-unquote ‘break the back of biological terrorism.’ As a result, we now have a series of covert and extremely dangerous bioweapons research programs that are being controlled for profit by our own military intelligence.”
“Can you elaborate more in regards to these secret research programs?”
“Yes, sir. As explained by the science editor of the New York Times in his book, Germs, in 1997 the CIA funded a covert project called Clear Vision, a program which focused on developing weapon systems that could effectively deliver lab-harvested biowarfare germs. President Clinton was never told about the program; in fact, only a handful of officials knew the program even existed, most of them associated with the military-intelligence industry. A second program, Project Jefferson, run by the DIA at Dugway, is focused on genetically engineering anthrax. Battelle was contracted to modify this anthrax into a weapons-grade form. The anthrax letters sent to Senators Daschle and Leahy contained two grams of this weaponized anthrax, each envelope holding over a trillion live spores per gram, more than 2 million times the average dose necessary to kill a person. It should be noted that Daschle and Leahy were the two Democrats who stood in the way of the Patriot Act being passed.”
A murmur buzzed through the Senate chambers.
“Mr. Kissin, in your opinion, how involved is Fort Detrick in this… scandal?”
“Senator, that’s not an easy question to answer. Fort Detrick serves many masters, including Homeland Security and the National Cancer Institute. I happen to know that there are many scientists at Fort Detrick who take the international treaty banning bioweapons very seriously. The problem is not Fort Detrick itself; the problem is the military-industrial complex and their insane goal to replace détente with full weapons spectrum dominance. And let’s not discount the variable of profit in those plans. What is both terrifying and criminal is the fact that the new 10-billion-dollar lab expansion at Fort Detrick is being secured and managed at a sizeable profit by Battelle, the very organization responsible for weaponizing the anthrax attacks in the first place.”
“Tell us more about Battelle. I know they’re a private corporation—”
“—a private corporation that operates in conjunction with the military-intelligence-industrial complex. Battelle maintains a national-security division that offers the services of engineers, chemists, microbiologists, and aerosol scientists that are supported by state-of-the-art laboratories that conduct research in the fields of bioaerosol science and technology. Battelle’s Pharmaceutical division, Battelle-Pharma, has developed a new electrohydrodynamic aerosol that delivers more than 80 percent of a drug into the lungs in an isokinetic cloud of uniformly sized particles, compared to 20 percent efficiency among competitors. To reiterate, the spores used in the anthrax letters were coated with a polyglass which tightly bound the hydrophilic silica to each particle. Bruce Ivins had zero access to this type of advanced technology at Fort Detrick. In short, Senator Gibbons, this is what we mean when we use the term weaponization. It’s the necessary postproduction that allows a bioterror weapon to be used on a large population, be it on pamphlets dropped from airplanes or some other means of delivering a toxin to an enemy.”
“The chair recognizes the Republican senator from Ohio.”
Kimberly Helms offered a pert smile. “Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Mr. Kissin, with all due respect, I have a serious problem with your ‘conspiracy theories’ being made part of the public record. You just testified under oath that the FBI has been involved in a massive cover-up regarding the attempted murder of two US senators, the attacks originating from a covert bioweapons program run by our own intelligence agencies without congressional oversight or even the president’s knowledge. In the process of attempting to frighten the American public watching these proceedings, you managed to smear the good name of the Battelle Corporation, a company that has never been a target of the Amerithrax investigation. As far as I’m concerned—”
“Everything I stated under oath is true, Senator Helms. Battelle worked on Project Clear Vision, Battelle was contracted to genetically modify the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks, and Battelle is now being paid to manage the biowarfare labs at Fort Detrick. What you refer to as conspiracy theory is conspiracy fact. More important, as a result of this insane black ops program, small unmonitored labs across the United States, funded by $100 billion in taxpayer money, are devising, as we speak, species-threatening agents for which there is neither a vaccine nor cure. And if that doesn’t frighten you, Senator Helms, then perhaps we need to check you for a pulse!”