Answer Time

As I spoke with Andrea Andrews, press secretary for U.S. Sen. Richard Shelby, a Republican from Alabama, I was beginning to feel a bit like Mel Gibson’s character in Conspiracy Theory, a babbling, raving lunatic. Albeit one who just happened to be right.

These are busy times for Andrews and her boss. Shelby is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, a staunch critic of this nation's intelligence community in the days after Sept. 11, and a key member of a joint House-Senate subcommittee that, on Tuesday, began investigating who knew what when, who didn't and why.

Whether Shelby and his fellow members of Congress -- many of whom will be fighting for precious moments in the white-hot spotlight of international media attention -- actually accomplish anything by their stated January goal remains to be seen.

But as the FBI and the CIA and the White House duck and weave and spin and dump blame on each other, I wanted somebody, anybody, to at least hear, if not answer, a couple of questions that have been bugging me for months.

Hence my call to Andrea Andrews. She was patient and good-natured, listening intently to my conspiracy-theory spiel.

Knowing that a senator's spokesperson doesn't have a whole lot of time for nutjobs, I tried my best to make two very long and convoluted stories short and understandable.

I am afraid that I sounded a bit like Gibson's Jerry Fletcher character instead.

"I know you guys are busy," I said to Andrews, "but there are a couple of things you should look into."

The first line of questioning I wanted Shelby’s staff to pursue involved the strange saga of the Saudi Binladin Group’s (SBG) website, a deep dark Mulderian rabbit hole I fell into about a month after the twin towers came down. SBG is a major Saudi construction conglomerate, spawned by the same Binladins (who use an alternate spelling of the family name) who gave the world Osama.

What's so strange about the seemingly innocuous SBG website, that to the naked eye was a mundane compilation of the company's achievements?

How about this: According to VeriSign, an Internet domain registry firm, saudi-binladin-group.com was registered on Sept. 11, 2000, with a preset expiration date of Sept. 11, 2001.

I am no mathematician, but I have played my share of games of chance and I know that the odds of a random association between Sept. 11, 2001 and the Binladin (bin Laden) family is just about astronomic. Last October, when I first wrote about this, one expert in the art of steganography -- the hiding of data, or in this case, the go-date for an attack hidden as an expiration date -- expressed his feelings that the domain's expiration date was probably a coincidence.

As the evidence mounts that the Bush administration had at least some inkling into plans for an attack -- the BBC is now reporting that, last year, Egypt warned the U.S. of an imminent attack in September -- I am not buying it. And given the Bush family's close business association with the Binladin (bin Laden) family, it is imperative that Sen. Shelby's committee investigate the SBG website saga. The committee should also search for Philip Lumsden, a Brit with Middle Eastern ties who created the SBG site for a now-defunct British Web firm called Arq Limited. (And Arq may or may not be tied to a mysterious September 1996 death in Fairfax County, Virginia, in which the charred remains of an attorney named Paul Gabelia was found bound in the trunk of his car. Family members told police that Gabelia was on his way to meet some Middle Eastern businessmen from a company which they knew phonetically as ARC Limited.)

Both the FBI and Scotland Yard were uninterested in the SBG site or the Arq/ARC Limited connection when they were contacted eight months ago. Here's hoping Shelby can shake the tree and see where the coconuts fall.

My other question for spokeswoman Andrews concerned a possible link between the anthrax attacks that killed five people and Mr. Fantastic, a shadowy figure who tried to sell me access to Site R, home of the so-called shadow government and underground hiding place of the president and vice president.

Again, making a long story short, I explained to Andrews my story of being stopped at Site R by MPs (Cover story, "Chasing Shadows," March 14), then returning to my office to find e-mails from Mr. Fantastic, wanting to sell me access. I also told her a new twist to this story. An analysis of the deadly anthrax attack -- by Barbara Hatch Rosenberg of the Federation of American Scientists -- concluded that not only did the FBI drag its feet on investigating the matter, but that the likely source of the anthrax was Fort Detrick, Md., which also oversees operations at Site R. Dozens of Fort Detrick employees were recently interviewed by the FBI in connection with the anthrax attack. According to Rosenberg, "security [at Fort Detrick] has been lax."

Because I stopped cooperating with the FBI in its effort to turn me into a spy, the bureau has shut me off. But maybe Shelby's committee can answer the same question I posited to various FBI officials and the U.S. Attorney's office: Could the man who tried to sell me pictures and access to one of the nation's most secure facilities be connected to whoever it was over at Fort Detrick who may have cooked up the anthrax-laced letters?

Browse The
June 6, 2002
Issue

Join the
City Paper
Mailing List




	search citypaper.net