[Peace-discuss] Did Bush manipulate the anthrax scare?

[C. G. Estabrook]

	August 7, 2008
	Did Bush manipulate the anthrax scare?
	ABC News should reveal its ‘anonymous sources’
	and clear up the scare that led to war on Iraq
	ALEXANDER COCKBURN
	
Just five weeks shy of the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terror 
attacks on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon, a mystery linked to those attacks 
has burst once again into active life, prompting a hail of speculation about 
just how far Bush and Cheney were prepared to go in inflaming public fears, as 
part of their master plan to justify the attack on Iraq in the spring of 2003.

The mystery concerns the envelopes of white powder containing anthrax spores 
that were mailed out to prominent Americans, starting on September 18, 2001. 
They went to US Senate Majority leader Tom Daschle, to US Senator Pat Leahy, to 
NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw. Directly inhaled into the lungs, the spores can be 
deadly. In the post-September 11 mailings five died.

Back in the autumn of 2001 the anthrax envelopes convinced millions of Americans 
reeling from the collapse of the Trade Towers that Yes, this was war and Islam 
was the enemy. The crudely written notes accompanying the spores said "Death to 
America, Death to Israel, Allah is Great."

Within hours the Bush administration was leaking stories to the effect that 
analysis of the anthrax in the envelopes disclosed the presence of bentonite and 
this chemical footprint - so the anonymous sources insisted to their favoured 
outlet, Brian Ross of ABC News - was characteristic of products from the 
bio-terror labs of Saddam Hussein.

Oddly enough, the mention of bentonite had a soothing effect on me. If this was 
the spoor of al-Qaida, then California's wine industry had been taken over by 
Osama bin Laden. Bentonite is a derivative of lava and has many homely 
applications, from sealing leaky ponds to purging wine of unsightly protein 
haze. I use it myself to clarify my home-made cider.

But ABC's stories about bentonite-laced anthrax spores carried the day and were 
hugely effective in helping prepare public sentiment for the attack on Iraq. 
Subsequent memoirs such as those of Bush's first Treasury Secretary, Paul 
O'Neill have disclosed that Bush was working on this even before September 11.

Soon politicians such as Senator John McCain were gravely confiding to TV 
network interviewers that if, as seemed likely, Saddam's anthrax was in the 
envelopes, then this cemented excited suspicions of an Osama-Saddam terror 
connection already inflamed by a long and totally inaccurate report in the New 
Yorker magazine.

The lead government agency investigating the anthrax envelopes was the FBI and 
the Bureau was under huge pressure to come up with a suspect. The White House 
leaned on FBI chief Robert Muller to say that the trail pointed to Baghdad. But 
the Bureau's trail led in a very different direction. Soon a fresh tide of leaks 
to the New York Times and a few other sources fingered Steven Hatfill, who had 
worked at the end of the 1990s as a civilian researcher at the United States 
Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), the US 
Department of Defense's medical research institute for biological warfare 
defense at Fort Detrick, Maryland.

By 2004 Iraq had been invaded and Hatfill was suing his detractors in the New 
York Times and other publications for destroying his career. The US Department 
of Justice disclosed that in March of this year it had taken Hatfill off the 
suspects list and was compensating him for false allegations, giving the 54-year 
old $5.8m, with a down payment of $2.825m in cash and $150,000 a year for 20 years.

But the FBI had another suspect, one it had identified but cleared in its 
initial investigation. This was Bruce E. Ivins a career anthrax researcher at 
Ft. Detrick, on the team at the US Army Medical Research Institute. With Hatfill 
out of the picture, the heat was on Ifill and he buckled. On July 29 of this 
year he died from a mix of Tylenol and codeine, diagnosed as a suicide.

Exactly like Hatfill when the FBI had him in its sights, Ivins has been the 
target of a torrent of disobliging stories in the aftermath of his death, many 
of them apparently inspired by the FBI. A social worker who

counselled him claims he was a drunk and a time-bomb of resentments. A 
practising Catholic, he wrote letters to a local newspaper which called Jews the 
chosen people and which were hostile to Islam. The Bureau's charge, as with 
Hatfill, is that with his alleged dispatch of the anthrax-filled envelopes Ivins 
was setting up Muslims as the originators of the anthrax attacks.

Ivins's suicide has reignited deep suspicions among a handful of journalists, 
most consistently voiced down the years by Glen Greenwald (a lawyer and blogger 
on the Salon site), that the US government certainly used, and perhaps even 
sponsored, the anthrax attacks as a way of ratcheting up national panic after 
9/11 to a level where the public would gladly endorse special emergency powers 
sought by the White House, accepting a Saddam-Osama linkage into the bargain.

Those - I count myself among them - who most emphatically do not believe that 
George Bush and Dick Cheney masterminded the 9/11/2001 attacks on the Trade 
Towers and Pentagon - have much less difficulty in agreeing with these dark 
surmises. Greenwald, who has written powerfully for a number of years on the 
dictatorial powers sought and mostly won by the Bush administration, is now 
calling on Ross (left) and ABC to identify their "four separate sources" who 
promoted what turned out to have been an entirely bogus discovery of bentonite 
in the anthrax, and an equally bogus suggestion that anthrax plus bentonite 
equals Saddam's terror labs in Baghdad.

As Greenwald writes this week, ABC News is not protecting sources. "The people 
who fed them the bentonite story aren't 'sources'. They're fabricators and liars 
who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely 
consequential and damaging falsehood."

True enough. ABC News is clearly embarrassed by Greenwald's soundly-based 
charges. Will Ross 'fess up to who fed him the stories? I doubt it. He's been a 
useful conduit for government leaks on matters such as the utility of 
water-boarding as a vital weapon in the war on terror. He'll keep his mouth 
shut, even as public cynicism about Bush and Cheney, and the press, soar to new 
highs.

http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk/45079,opinion,did-bush-and-cheney-invent-the-anthrax-scare