Scientia Press

The assassinations of the 1960s and the tragic events of 2001 have resisted resolution for many years.  Now young Americans have an opportunity to contribute to solving them.  Steven J. Dillon and Kenneth J. Dillon of Scientia Press suggest why the investigations have not borne fruit, how we can reach more clarity, and what special strengths young Americans can bring to the effort to get to the bottom of them.  See also https://www.scientiapress.com/kgb-theory, https://www.scientiapress.com/jdey-anthrax-mailings, and www.scientiapress.com/al-qaeda-shoebomber-flight-587.

Young Americans Can Help Resolve Our Historical Tragedies

Steven J. Dillon and Kenneth J. Dillon, June 12, 2025

Both the assassinations of the 1960s–John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert F. Kennedy–and the tragic events of 2001 changed the course of the country yet left more questions than answers. Older generations of Americans have extensively researched and debated theories of these events but have failed to converge on solutions even as their views have hardened. For 2001, they don’t even agree on which events should be included. Now, however, young Americans, many of whom were not even alive in 2001, have an opportunity and a duty to investigate these events and uncover truths that have been hidden but not necessarily lost.
Investigations into the assassinations of the 1960s reveal several clues,

The apparent misdeeds and cover-ups of the administration of George W. Bush related to the terrorist attacks of 2001 remain in historical limbo.  Neither presidents, nor the Congress, nor the media have gotten to the bottom of these tragic events.  The 9/11 Commission Report, while providing hundreds of useful details, egregiously and unpardonably failed to examine the doings of senior government officials in the run-up to 9/11 and so must be considered a cover-up.  As a result, the American public has not come to closure on the 9/11 attacks or on the anthrax mailings of 2001, nor is there a shared understanding of such a critical issue as the real reasons that the US attacked Iraq in 2003.

These failures have left the field open to wild speculations regarding these events, generally termed “conspiracy theories”, though this term obscures the crucial distinction between elaborate prospective plots involving many actors (silly in the context of an open society) and retrospective cover-ups that government officials who have made embarrassing mistakes are all too prone to engage in (very realistic and plausible).  However, it is also true that simple prospective plots involving two or three individuals can occur.

Failure to reach a full, shared understanding of major events that led to interminable wars and occupations in the Middle East and Southwest Asia as well as to the undermining of civil liberties has helped to alienate Americans from their government and media, a  triumph for America’s enemies.  So we must make every effort to establish a clear common interpretation of what actually happened.

Historian and former State Department intelligence analyst Kenneth J. Dillon interprets the 2001 anthrax mailings case.  He explains why domestic Mailer theories were mistaken and why we should think that al Qaeda operative Abderraouf Jdey was the real Anthrax Mailer as well as the shoebomber of American Airlines Flight #587 on November 12, 2001.  In all likelihood, US Army scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins was the Innocent Preparer of the anthrax.  Then al Qaeda stole it.  See also Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer?

  Who Was the Anthrax Mailer?

Here are the judge’s March 16, 2020 Order and Memorandum opinion giving his final ruling.  For a general explanation of the anthrax mailings case, see Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer?  The judge does not appear to have read it.

Of the documents, the first set was released by FBI in the course of the litigation.  The second set includes selected lawsuit documents from Dillon v. U.S. Department of Justice.  Following this is a discussion of possible destruction of evidence. 

The first set includes 102 pages of emails to and from accused Mailer Bruce Ivins, released by FBI on court order on March 20, 2019, plus Laboratory Notebook 4282. FOIA request #1327397 sought Ivins’s emails and other documents for September and October, 2001. FOIA request #1329530 sought the Table of Contents and the 16 pages on Ivins from the 2000-page Interim Major Case Summary of 2006.  After repeated failures to find emails, FBI experts located them as 1A attachments in the Amerithrax file.

As readers of Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer? will appreciate, more likely than not Canadian al Qaeda operative Jdey was indeed the person who mailed the anthrax letters of 2001. But we must ask: How did al Qaeda gain access to the anthrax?

There are two sides to every story. Judges rightly admonish juries to check out both sides before coming to a conclusion. Our entire system of adversarial justice is built on this principle. But under surveillance by FBI in the 2001 anthrax mailings case, U.S. Army scientist Bruce Ivins committed suicide. So only one side got to tell its version of the story.

Upon closing the case on February 19, 2010, FBI issued an Amerithrax Investigative Summary that concludes that Ivins was the anthrax mailer. The Summary contains serious errors as well as minor ones. It also omits crucial information. So, to ensure a fair outcome, we need to look at it through the eyes of a defense attorney, to make sure that the American people can check out both sides of the story before coming to a conclusion.

As is spelled out in “Was Abderraouf Jdey the Anthrax Mailer?“, the real Anthrax Mailer was not dedicated, patriotic, psychologically vulnerable U.S. Government scientist Bruce Ivins, as FBI so unpersuasively claims. Much more likely than not, the Mailer was in fact Abderraouf Jdey, a known al Qaeda operative based in Montreal who had been detained, then released, in the summer of 2001.

[In a 2004 leak of a top secret Canadian Security Intelligence Service report, an al Qaeda detainee said that Abderraouf Jdey, a Canadian citizen of Tunisian origin, used a shoe bomb to cause the November 12, 2001 crash of American Airlines #587 from Kennedy Airport. Circumstantial evidence suggests that Jdey was also the mailer of the anthrax letters. See the analysis at the article Was Abderraouf Jdey The Anthrax Mailer?. The arguments below regarding the use of a Stinger-like missile and a northern New Jersey location of the Mailer are incorrect, but they are not being changed so that readers may follow the logic that led to the identification of Jdey as the likely Mailer. Information from October 2006 that the water used to prepare the anthrax was from the northeastern United States rules out a UK origin, as incorrectly argued below.]