Anthrax Is A Health Hazard  

The wave of anthrax attacks on various Democrat senators and New York media outlets during the period immediately following the 9/11 incidents (while the "Patriot" Act was rapidly being forced through congress) was one of those strange events that made me a little prone to paying more attention conspiracy theories than I might have otherwise done.

The fact that the anthrax involved came from a US biological warfare facility was one of the more discordant notes in the whole saga, so it comes as no surprise to see that the alleged perpetrator died very rapidly after being fingered for the crime.

According to the SMH, more than a few people have their doubts about the guilt of the now deceased suspect - Doubts arise on FBI anthrax suspect.

For nearly seven years, a scientist, Bruce Ivins, and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick's army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: they served as occasional consultants to the FBI in the investigation into the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects.

Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire defence lawyers.

In tactics the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed as early as 2002, and reinterviewed many times. Their labs were searched, and their computers and equipment carted away. The FBI eventually focused on Mr Ivins, whom federal prosecutors were planning to indict when he committed suicide last week.

The FBI believed Mr Ivins had the skills and access to equipment needed to turn anthrax bacteria into an ultra-fine powder that could be used as a lethal weapon. Court documents and tapes also reveal a therapist's deep concern that Mr Ivins, 62, was homicidal.

Yet colleagues and friends of the vaccine specialist remained convinced he was innocent. They contended that he had neither the motive nor the means to create the lethal powder that was sent by mail to news outlets and congressional offices in 2001. Mindful of previous FBI mistakes in fingering others in the case, many are sceptical that the FBI has it right this time.

"I really don't think he's the guy. I say to the FBI, 'Show me your evidence,"' said Jeffrey Adamovicz, formerly of the US Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases. But investigators are so confident of Mr Ivins's involvement that they have been debating since Friday whether and how to close the seven-year-old anthrax investigation. The move would amount to a strong signal that the FBI and Justice Department think they got their man - and that he had died, excluding the possibility of a prosecution.

Jaye Holly, who lived next door to Mr Ivins until she and her husband moved to New York a month ago, said she could not believe that her former neighbour would endanger others for financial gain. "That's not the Bruce we knew. He was sweet, friendly. I mean, he was into grass recycling," Ms Holly said.

Glenn Greenwald also has his doubts it seems - Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News.

The FBI's lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks -- Bruce E. Ivins -- died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the attacks. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where he was one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID).

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters -- with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 -- that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax -- sent directly into the heart of the country's elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw, and other leading media outlets -- that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks.

The letter sent to Leahy contained this message:

We have anthrax.
You die now.
Are you afraid?
Death to America.
Death to Israel.
Allah is great.

By design, those attacks put the American population into a state of intense fear of Islamic terrorism, far more than the 9/11 attacks alone could have accomplished.

Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent -- indispensably aided by ABC News -- to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. In my view, and I've written about this several times and in great detail to no avail, the role played by ABC News in this episode is the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade. News of Ivins' suicide, which means (presumably) that the anthrax attacks originated from Ft. Detrick, adds critical new facts and heightens how scandalous ABC News' conduct continues to be in this matter.

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax -- tests conducted at Ft. Detrick -- revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since -- as ABC variously claimed -- bentonite "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

ABC News' claim -- which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" -- was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It's critical to note that it isn't the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

That means that ABC News' "four well-placed and separate sources" fed them information that was completely false -- false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein. ...

Clearly, Ross' allegedly four separate sources had to have some specific knowledge of the tests conducted and, if they were really "well-placed," one would presume that meant they had some connection to the laboratory where the tests were conducted -- Ft. Detrick. That means that the same Government lab where the anthrax attacks themselves came from was the same place where the false reports originated that blamed those attacks on Iraq.

It's extremely possible -- one could say highly likely -- that the same people responsible for perpetrating the attacks were the ones who fed the false reports to the public, through ABC News, that Saddam was behind them. What we know for certain -- as a result of the letters accompanying the anthrax -- is that whoever perpetrated the attacks wanted the public to believe they were sent by foreign Muslims. Feeding claims to ABC News designed to link Saddam to those attacks would, for obvious reasons, promote the goal of the anthrax attacker(s).

Seven years later, it's difficult for many people to recall, but, as I've amply documented, those ABC News reports linking Saddam and anthrax penetrated very deeply -- by design -- into our public discourse and into the public consciousness. Those reports were absolutely vital in creating the impression during that very volatile time that Islamic terrorists generally, and Iraq and Saddam Hussein specifically, were grave, existential threats to this country. As but one example: after Ross' lead report on the October 26, 2001 edition of World News Tonight with Peter Jennings claiming that the Government had found bentonite, this is what Jennings said into the camera:

This news about bentonite as the additive being a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program is very significant. Partly because there's been a lot of pressure on the Bush administration inside and out to go after Saddam Hussein. And some are going to be quick to pick up on this as a smoking gun.

That's exactly what happened. The Weekly Standard published two lengthy articles attacking the FBI for focusing on a domestic culprit and -- relying almost exclusively on the ABC/Ross report -- insisted that Saddam was one of the most likely sources for those attacks. In November, 2001, they published an article (via Lexis) which began:

On the critical issue of who sent the anthrax, it's time to give credit to the ABC website, ABCNews.com, for reporting rings around most other news organizations. Here's a bit from a comprehensive story filed late last week by Gary Matsumoto, lending further credence to the commonsensical theory (resisted by the White House) that al Qaeda or Iraq -- and not some domestic Ted Kaczynski type -- is behind the germ warfare.

The Weekly Standard published a much lengthier and more dogmatic article in April, 2002 again pushing the ABC "bentonite" claims and arguing: "There is purely circumstantial though highly suggestive evidence that might seem to link Iraq with last fall's anthrax terrorism." The American Enterprise Institute's Laurie Mylroie (who had an AEI article linking Saddam to 9/11 ready for publication at the AEI on September 13) expressly claimed in November, 2001 that "there is also tremendous evidence that subsequent anthrax attacks are connected to Iraq" and based that accusation almost exclusively on the report from ABC and Ross ("Mylroie: Evidence Shows Saddam Is Behind Anthrax Attacks").

Lots more at the link.

Over on the right, AntiWar.com asks Who Planned the Anthrax Attacks ?.

The ideological flavor of the Camel Club's jibes isn't too hard to fathom: they sound just like the participants in the hate-fest over at Little Green Footballs, or, come to think of it, the editorial board of the Weekly Standard. The anthrax-laden letters read "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," and invoked the name of Allah. Clearly this wasn't just an attempt to set up a particular Arab, Dr. Assaad, but to finger all Arab-Americans, and Muslims, as potential terrorists – weeks after bin Laden and his boys downed the World Trade Center and took out the Pentagon.

The trail that leads us to the perpetrators of the anthrax letter terrorist attacks ends at Ft. Detrick, where the "Camel Club" held court. Check out this Courant story that details the incredible laxity of the security controls in place at one of the U.S. government's most sensitive military facilities – and then imagine how easy it was for the terrorists to have smuggled out anthrax and other even more lethal toxins.

Doesn't any of this merit investigation by our "law enforcement' agencies – or are they too busy reading ordinary people's email and spying on antiwar organizations to bother going after a gang of dangerous poisoners and murderers?

In settling with Hatfill for mega-bucks, the U.S. government isn't officially admitting any wrongdoing, – and we shouldn't hold our breath waiting for anything like an apology – but clearly something was going on behind the scenes that looks very much like obstruction of the investigation. Of course it's easy for a libertarian like me to scoff at the inefficiencies of government agencies: that's comes with the territory – and is, furthermore, a well-known fact [.pdf]. Yet there seems something a bit more dicey than mere incompetence at work here.

And to close this little off-topic expedition (well, unless you think all that anthrax stuff had something to do with Iraq and oil, in which case its been entirely on-topic), here's Wired looking at a range of FBI denials, including one that will have the free energy buffs muttering angrily - FBI: We Don't Have Tesla's Death Ray.

As part of its centennial celebration, the FBI just released a list of the "Top Ten Myths in FBI History." Among other things, the list debunks the silly urban legend that the FBI spies on innocent Americans -- you know, like war protestors and people with phones. "We won't have a 'file' on you unless you're a spy or terrorist or criminal or are suspected of being one."

This entry, though, is genuinely reassuring:

Myth #10) The FBI has Nikola Tesla's plans for a "death ray."

If you don’t know the name, Nikola Tesla was a prolific inventor and gifted physicist and engineer -- most known for developing the basis for AC power -- who was born in Croatia in 1856 and settled in the United States in 1884. When Tesla died in New York in January 1943, his papers -- which were thought to include plans for a particle beam weapon, dubbed a "death ray" by the press -- were temporarily seized by the Department of Justice Alien Property Custodian Office ("alien" in this case means "foreigner," although Tesla was a U.S. citizen).

Despite long-standing reports and rumors, the FBI was not involved in searching Tesla's effects, and it never had possession of his papers or any microfilm that may have been made of those papers. Since 1943, we have told a consistent story to all who have asked. Reports to the contrary appear to be based on an initial confusion of FBI agents with other government officials -- especially Alien Property Office personnel. These rumors have long been repeated in biographies and articles on Tesla without double-checking the facts as reported in our files.

The death ray has only evil applications, so I'm relieved that its blueprints are safely stowed with the anti-gravity coil and the tachyon generator at the Alien Property Office.

Before I go I might just throw one more note in.

I quite like Robert Anton Wilson's concept of fnords, but I've long since tired of spotting them and now seem to filter them out entirely. As a result, I was somewhat surprised at a BBQ on the weekend when one of my friends started ranting away about a Canadian news story involving a guy who stabbed a fellow (sleeping) bus passenger to death then decapitated him and started eating him.

Having been (unwillingly) attuned to this sort of stuff, I noticed a similar story in today's paper as well. Cryptogon is already a little paranoid about the first story - I'm sure there will be self-congratulation tomorrow if he notices the second episode. Meanwhile the White House is babbling away about aliens...