Battelle was in partnership with BioPort of Lansing, Michigan in officially producing the anthrax vaccine for the United States.
The New York Times reported in 1998 that BioPort's owners included Admiral William Crowe, Jr., a former chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff and Ambassador to Britain during the Clinton years. One of Crowe's partners is the mysterious Fuad El-Hibri, a German citizen of Lebanese descent and a reported business associate of the bin Laden family.
BioPort is partly owned by a top-secret British biowarfare consortium Porton International. Laura Rozen pointed out in a salon.com article that El-Hibri, then BioPort's CEO, "made a fortune" for Porton International from its monopoly on the anthrax vaccine during the first Gulf War.
Alibek has been listed as both a classified consultant with the CIA and Battelle. A 1998 New Yorker article outlines the joint work of Alibek and William C. Patrick, III. Patrick wrote a report on the potential of sending anthrax through the mail.
Unless federal officials are willing to think the unthinkable, but obvious, and have the tularemia samples independently tested, we'll never know whether a deliberate attack occurred against peaceful U.S. citizens exercising their First Amendment rights, or some freakish and bizarre coincidence occurred.
In another coincidence, it was the Battelle Memorial Institute that "botched" the exit polls in the 2002 election that would have served as protection against the unexplainable defeat of Senator Max Cleland of Georgia who was up 9-12 points in the tracking polls just prior to Election Day.
The Free Press calls for an independent investigation of the tularemia bacteria found on the mall on September 24, not to be conducted by any federal officials in the Bush administration or Battelle.
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Bob Fitrakis is the author of The Fitrakis Files: Spooks, Nukes and Nazis.He is editor of the Free Press and freepress.org. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science and a J.D.
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