WASHINGTON — A conservative group is suing the Bush administration for access to documents surrounding last fall’s anthrax attacks, saying that top officials may have known that the bioterrorist assault was coming.
Judicial Watch said Friday it has yet to receive documents from several agencies after filing requests under the Freedom of Information Act. The group says the documents will show who knew what and when they knew it.
Judicial Watch, which also has sued for documents about Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy task force, represents U.S. postal workers at the Brentwood mail-handling facility in Washington. Two workers from Brentwood died of inhalation anthrax before officials shut down the facility, which had handled anthrax-laden letters headed for Capitol Hill.
Larry Klayman, chairman of Judicial Watch, noted that administration officials said last fall that some White House staff had begun taking the antibiotic Cipro on Sept. 11, weeks before the anthrax attacks were made public.
@Carbazel ...and where they originated ....
Nonetheless Fort Detrick, as it was renamed in 1956, remained Gottlieb’s chemical base. After the end of MK-ULTRA, he used it to develop and store the CIA’s arsenal of poisons. In his freezers, he kept biological agents that could cause diseases including smallpox, tuberculosis and anthrax as well as a number of organic toxins, including snake venom and paralytic shellfish poison. He developed poisons intended to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba.
During this period, Fort Detrick’s public profile rose uncomfortably. No one knew the CIA was making poisons there, but its role as the country’s principal center for research into biological and anti-crop warfare became clear. From mid-1959 to mid-1960, protesters convened once a week at the gate. “No rationalization of ‘defense’ can justify the evil of mass destruction and disease,” they wrote in a statement.
One of the most well-known victims of the MK-ULTRA experiments was Frank Olson. Olson was a CIA officer who had spent his entire career at Detrick and knew its deepest secrets. When he began musing about quitting the CIA, his comrades saw a security threat. Gottlieb summoned the team to a retreat and arranged for Olson to be drugged with LSD. A week later, Olson died in a plunge from a hotel window in New York. The CIA called it suicide. Olson’s family believes he was thrown from the window to prevent him from revealing what was brewing inside Camp Detrick.