Bongblaster
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 Posted: Thu Aug 21, 2008 12:42 am Post subject: There's more evidence that Robert Mueller is the anthrax ter |
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There's NO evidence that Dr. Ivins is the anthrax terrorist, but
Robert Mueller is doing such a great job of not solving the seven-year
old crime that he casts suspicion on himself.
No FBI investigator would ever question Robert Mueller about where he
was on the day the anthrax was mailed, or letters he mailed that day.
The top of the law enforcement chain-of-command is G O D . Robert
Mueller can get away with almost any crime he wants to commit.
Also, Robert Mueller was hanging out with an anthrax salesman, Donald
Rumsfeld, the once-owner of the anthrax that was mailed.
Robert Mueller had the means, the motive, the opportunity, and
guaranteed impunity.
Dr. Ivins, the sacrificial lamb, didn't have any of those things.
Looks like I'm "closing in" on the anthrax suspect. Now if he would
just commit suicide, I can prove his guilt.
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Double Standards in the Global War on Terror
http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/18/11055/
Anthrax Department
by Tom Engelhardt
Oh, the spectacle of it all -- and don't think I'm referring to those
opening ceremonies in Beijing, where North Korean-style
synchronization seemed to fuse with smiley-faced Walt Disney, or
Michael Phelp's thrilling hunt for eight gold medals and Speedo's one
million dollar "bonus," a modernized tribute to the ancient Greek
tradition of amateurism in action. No, I'm thinking of the blitz of
media coverage after Dr. Bruce Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army
Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick,
Maryland, committed suicide by Tylenol on July 29th and the FBI
promptly accused him of the anthrax attacks of September and October
2001.
You remember them: the powder that, innocuously enough, arrived by
envelope -- giving going postal a new meaning -- accompanied by hair-
raising letters ominously dated "09-11-01" that said, "Death to
America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." Five Americans would die
from anthrax inhalation and 17 would be injured. The Hart Senate
Office Building, along with various postal facilities, would be shut
down for months of clean-up, while media companies that received the
envelopes were thrown into chaos.
For a nation already terrified by the attacks of September 11, 2001,
the thought that a brutal dictator with weapons of mass destruction
(who might even have turned the anthrax over to the terrorists) was
ready to do us greater harm undoubtedly helped pave the way for an
invasion of Iraq. The President would even claim that Saddam Hussein
had the ability to send unmanned aerial vehicles to spray biological
or chemical weapons over the east coast of the United States (drones
that, like Saddam's nuclear program, would turn out not to exist).
Today, it's hard even to recall just how terrifying those anthrax
attacks were. According to a LexisNexis search, between Oct. 4 and
Dec. 4, 2001, 389 stories appeared in the New York Times with
"anthrax" in the headline. In that same period, 238 such stories
appeared in the Washington Post. That's the news equivalent of an
unending, high-pitched scream of horror -- and from those attacks
would emerge an American world of hysteria involving orange alerts and
duct tape, smallpox vaccinations, and finally a war, lest any of this
stuff, or anything faintly like it, fall into the hands of terrorists.
And yet, by the end of 2001, it had become clear that, despite the
accompanying letters, the anthrax in those envelopes was from a
domestically produced strain. It was neither from the backlands of
Afghanistan nor from Baghdad, but -- almost certainly -- from our own
military bio-weapons labs. At that point, the anthrax killings
essentially vanished... Poof!... while 9/11 only gained traction as
the singular event of our times.
Those deaths-by-anthrax ceased to be part of the administration's
developing Global War on Terror narrative, which was, of course, aimed
at Islamist fanatics (and scads of countries that were said to provide
them with "safe haven"), but certainly not military scientists here at
home. No less quickly did those attacks drop from the front pages --
in fact, simply from the pages -- of the nation's newspapers and off
TV screens.
Unlike with 9/11, there would be no ritualistic reminders of the
anniversaries of those attacks in years to come. No victims, or
survivors, or relatives of victims would step to podiums and ring
bells, or read names, or offer encomiums. There would be no billion-
dollar (or even million-dollar) memorial to the anthrax dead for the
survivors to argue over. There would be little but silence, while the
FBI fumbled its misbegotten way through an investigative process
largely focused on one U.S. bio-weapons scientist, Steven J. Hatfill,
who also worked at Fort Detrick and just happened to be the wrong man.
(Bruce Ivins, eerily enough, would work closely with, and aid, the
FBI's investigation for years until the spotlight of suspicion came to
be directed at him.)
This essentially remained the state of the case until, as July ended,
Ivins committed suicide. Then, what a field day! The details, the
questions, the doubts, the disputed scientific evidence, the lists of
kinds of drugs he was prescribed, the lurid quotes, the "rat's nest"
of an anthrax-contaminated lab he worked in, the strange emails and
letters! ("I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind... I get
incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times, and there's nothing
I can do until they go away, either by themselves or with drugs.")
Case solved! Or not... The "mad scientist" from the Army's Fort
Detrick bio-wars labs finally nabbed! Or not...
It was a dream of a story. And the mainstream media ran with it,
knowledgeably, authoritatively, as if they had never let it go. Now,
as the coverage fades and the story once again threatens to head for
obscurity (despite doubts about Ivins's role in the attacks), I
thought it might be worth mentioning a few questions that came to my
mind as I read through recent coverage -- not on Ivins's guilt or
innocence, but on matters that are so much a part of our American
landscape that normally no one even thinks to ask about them.
Here are my top six questions about the case:
1. Why wasn't the Bush administration's War on Terror modus operandi
applied to the anthrax case?
On August 10th, William J. Broad and Scott Shane reported on some of
the human costs of the FBI anthrax investigation in a front-page New
York Times piece headlined, "For Suspects, Anthrax Case Had Big Costs,
Scores of the Innocent in a Wide F.B.I. Net." They did a fine job of
establishing that those who serially came under suspicion had a tough
time of it: "lost jobs, canceled visas, broken marriages, frayed
friendships." According to the Times (and others), under the pressure
of FBI surveillance, several had their careers wrecked; most were
interviewed and re-interviewed numerous times in a "heavy-handed"
manner, as well as polygraphed; some were tailed and trailed, their
homes searched, and their workplaces ransacked.
Under the pressure of FBI "interest," anthrax specialist and
"biodefense insider" Perry Mikesell evidently turned into an alcoholic
and drank himself to death. Steven Hatfill, while his life was being
turned inside out, had an agent trailing him in a car run over his
foot, for which, Broad and Shane add, he, not the agent, was issued a
ticket. And finally, of course, Dr. Ivins, growing ever more
distressed and evidently ever less balanced, committed suicide on the
day his lawyer was meeting with the FBI about a possible plea bargain
that could have left him in jail for life, but would have taken the
death penalty off the table.
Still, tough as life was for Mikesell, Hatfill, Ivins, and scores of
others, here's an observation that you'll see nowhere else in a media
that's had a two-week romp through the case: In search of a
confession, none of the suspects of these last years, including Ivins,
ever had a lighted cigarette inserted in his ear; none of them were
hit, spit on, kicked, and paraded naked; none were beaten to death
while imprisoned but uncharged with a crime; none were doused with
cold water and left naked in a cell on a freezing night; none were
given electric shocks, hooded, shackled in painful "stress positions,"
or sodomized; none were subjected to loud music, flashing lights, and
denied sleep for days on end; none were smothered to death, or made to
crawl naked across a jail floor in a dog collar, or menaced by guard
dogs. None were ever waterboarded.
Whatever the pressure on Ivins or Hatfill, neither was kidnapped off a
street near his house, stripped of his clothes, diapered, blindfolded,
shackled, drugged, and "rendered" to the prisons of another country,
possibly to be subjected to electric shocks or cut by scalpel by the
torturers of a foreign regime. Even though each of the suspects in the
anthrax murders was, at some point, believed to have been a terrorist
who had committed a heinous crime with a weapon of mass destruction,
none were ever declared "enemy combatants." None were ever imprisoned
without charges, or much hope of trial or release, in off-shore,
secret, CIA-run "black sites."
Why not?
2. Why wasn't the U.S. military sent in?
Part of the reigning paradigm of the Bush years was this: police work
was not enough when the homeland was threatened. The tracking down of
terrorists who had killed or might someday kill Americans was a matter
of "war." Those who had attacked the American homeland and murdered
U.S. citizens would, as our President put it, be "hunted down" by
special ops forces and CIA agents who had been granted the right to
assassinate and brought in "dead or alive."
Why then, when acts of murderous bio-terror had been committed on
American soil, was the military not called in? Why were no CIA "death
squads" -- the tellingly descriptive phrase used by Jane Mayer in her
remarkable new book, The Dark Side -- dispatched to assassinate likely
suspects? Why were no Predator unmanned drones, armed with Hellfire
missiles, launched to cruise the skies of Maryland and take out Ivins
or other suspects "precisely" and "surgically" in their homes
(whatever the "collateral damage")? Why, in fact, weren't their homes
simply obliterated in the manner regularly employed in Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Somalia, and elsewhere? (In fact, it seems to have taken the
FBI two years after their first suspicions of Ivins simply to search
his house and even longer finally to take away his high-level security
clearance.)
Once U.S. weapons labs were identified as the sources of the anthrax,
why were no special ops teams sent in to occupy the facilities, shut
them down, and fly those found there, shackled and blindfolded, to
Guantanamo or other more secret sites?
Why, when the administration went to great lengths to squeeze off
funding for terrorists elsewhere, was funding for those labs
significantly increased?
Why, when those swept up or simply kidnapped by the Bush
administration and then discovered to be innocent, were -- after
secret imprisonment, abuse, and torture -- regularly released without
apology or reimbursement (if released at all), did the U.S. government
pay Hatfill $4.6 million to settle a lawsuit he filed in response to
his ordeal?
Why when, according to the Vice President's "one percent doctrine," no
response was too extreme if even a minuscule chance of a catastrophic
attack against the U.S. "homeland" existed, were no extreme acts taken
with a WMD killer (or killers) on the loose, possibly in Maryland's
suburbs?
3. Once the anthrax threat was identified as coming from U.S. military
labs, why did the administration, the FBI, and the media assume that
only a single individual was responsible?
Read as much of the coverage of the anthrax killings as you want and
you'll discover that the FBI has long taken for blanket fact that a
single "mad scientist" was the culprit -- and, no less important, that
that theory has been accepted as bedrock fact by the media as well. No
alternative possibilities have been seriously considered for years.
For instance, it is known that a set of the anthrax letters was sent
from a mailbox in Princeton, New Jersey, some hours from Ivins's home
and the Fort Detrick lab in Frederick, Maryland. The question the FBI
puzzled over -- and the media took up vigorously -- was whether, on
the day in question, Ivins had time to make it to Princeton and back,
given what's known of his schedule. The FBI suggests that he did;
critics suggest otherwise. No one, however, seems to consider the
possibility that the lone terrorist of the anthrax killings might have
had one or more accomplices, which would have made the "problem" of
mailing those letters into a piece of cake.
Is it that Americans, as opposed to foreigners bent on terrorism, are
assumed to be unstoppable individualists, loners canny enough to carry
out plots by themselves? Does no one recall that the last great act of
American terrorism in the United States, the bombing of the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, was a crime
committed by at least two American "loners"? (The earliest reports in
that case, too, blamed Arab terrorists -- plural.)
There seem to have been no serious al-Qaeda "sleeper cells" in this
country, but how do we know that there isn't a "sleeper cell" of
American bio-killers lurking somewhere in the U.S. military lab
community?
4. What of those military labs? Why does their history continue to
play little or no part in the story of the anthrax attacks?
In reading through reams of coverage of Ivins's suicide and the FBI
case against him, I found only a single reference to the work his lab
at Fort Detrick had been dedicated to throughout most of the Cold War
era. Here is that sentence from the Washington Post: "As home to the
Army Biological Warfare Laboratories, the facility ran a top-secret
program producing offensive biological weapons from 1943 until 1969."
And yet, if you don't grasp this fact, the real significance of the
anthrax case remains in the shadows.
As with the continuing story of nuclear dangers on our planet, the
terrors of our age are almost invariably portrayed as emerging from
bands of fanatics, or lands like Iran said to be ruled by the same, in
the backlands of our planet (some of which also just happen to be in
the energy heartlands of the same planet). And yet, if we are
terrified enough of loose or proliferating weapons of mass destruction
to threaten or start wars over them, it's important to understand
that, from 1945 on, these dangers -- and they are grim dangers --
emerged from the heartland of the military-industrial machines of the
two Cold War superpowers, the U.S. and the USSR.
Put another way, the most conceptually frightening attacks of 2001
came directly from the Cold War urge to develop offensive biological
weapons. Until 1969, the Army's biological-warfare laboratories at
Fort Detrick were focused, in part, on that task. Plain and simple.
After President Richard Nixon shut down the offensive bio-war program
in 1969, the Army's scientists switched to work on "defenses" against
the same. As with defenses against nuclear attack, however, such work,
by its nature, is often hard to separate from offensive work on such
weaponry. In other words, looked at a certain way, one focus of the
Fort Detrick lab, which fell under suspicion in the anthrax attacks by
the winter of 2001, has long been putting bio-war on the global menu.
In that, it was evidently successful in the end.
There is irony here, of course. In the post-Cold War era, our worries
focused almost solely on the deteriorating, sometimes ill-guarded
Russian Cold War labs and storehouses for biological, chemical, and
nuclear war. It was long feared that, from them, such nightmares would
drop into our world. But in this we were, it seems, wrong. The labs
with the holes were ours and -- what's more terrifying -- the
possibilities for leakage and misuse are still expanding
exponentially.
5. Were the anthrax attacks the less important ones of 2001?
If you compare the two sets of 2001 attacks in terms of death and
destruction, 9/11 obviously leaves the anthrax attacks in the dust.
Thought about a certain way, however, the attacks of 9/11, while bold,
murderous, televisually spectacular, and apocalyptic looking, were
conceptually old hat. It was the anthrax attacks that pointed the way
to a new and frightening future.
After all, the World Trade Center had already been attacked, and one
of its towers nearly toppled, by a rental-van bomb driven into an
underground garage by Islamists back in 1993. The planes in the 2001
assaults were, as Mike Davis has written, simply car bombs with wings,
and car bombs have a painfully long history. Even though in their
targeting -- the symbolic mega-buildings of an imperial power whose
citizens previously preferred to believe themselves invulnerable --
the 9/11 hijackers offered a new psychological reality to Americans,
their most striking and unsettling feature was perhaps themselves.
Those 19 men had pledged to commit suicide not for their country, as
had thousands of Japanese kamikaze pilots at the end of World War II,
or even for a potential country like hundreds of Tamil suicide bombers
in Sri Lanka, but for a religious fantasy (behind which lay non-
religious grievances). On the other hand, the 9/11 attacks were but a
larger, more ambitious version of, for instance, the suicide-by-boat
attack on the U.S.S. Cole in a Yemeni port in 2000.
On the other hand, the anthrax mailings represented something new.
(The Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult had attempted to make and use bio-
weapons, including anthrax, back in 1990s, but failed.) If the al-
Qaeda strike on 9/11 had only simulated a weapon-of-mass-destruction
attack, with the anthrax killer, no imagination was necessary. An
actual weapon of mass destruction -- highly refined anthrax -- had
been used successfully, then used again, and the killer(s) remained at
large, not in the Afghan backlands but somewhere in our midst, with no
evidence that the supply of anthrax had been used up.
And yet, even as the Bush administration, the two presidential
candidates, all of Washington, and the media remain focused on
terrorism in the Afghan-Pakistani border regions, few give serious
thought -- except when it comes to individual culpability -- to the
terror that emerged from the depths of the military-industrial
complex, from our own Cold War weapons labs. To that, no aspect of the
Global War on Terror seems to apply.
6. Who is winning the Global War on Terror?
The answer, obviously, is the terrorists. Just last week, Mike
McConnell, the director of national intelligence, made this crystal
clear when it came to al-Qaeda. He testified before Congress that the
organization "is gaining in strength from its refuge in Pakistan and
is steadily improving its ability to recruit, train and position
operatives capable of carrying out attacks inside the United States."
In fact, it's been clear enough for quite a while that the Bush
administration's Global War on Terror has mainly succeeded in creating
ever more terrorists in ever more places. And yet, arguably, the
anthrax killer or killers have, to date, gained far more than al-
Qaeda. Looked at a certain way, whatever the role of Bruce Ivins, the
anthrax killings proved to be a full-scale triumph of terrorism.
One theory has long been that whoever committed the anthrax outrages
was intent on drawing attention (and probably funding) to further
research and development of U.S. bio-war "defenses." If so, then, what
a remarkable success! In the years since the attacks occurred, funding
has flooded into such labs, whose numbers have grown strikingly. On
September 11, 2001, reports the Washington Post, "there were only five
‘biosafety level 4' labs -- places equipped to study highly lethal
agents such as Ebola that have no human vaccine or treatment -- a
Government Accountability Office report stated last fall. Fifteen are
in operation or under construction now, according to the report. There
are hundreds more biosafety level 3 labs, which handle agents such as
Bacillus anthracis, which does have a human vaccine."
The few hundred people at work in the U.S. bio-defense program before
9/11 have swelled to perhaps 14,000 scientists who have "clearances to
work with ‘select biological agents' such as Bacillus anthracis --
many of them civilians working at private universities" where,
according to experts, "security regulations are remarkably lax." And
don't forget the Army's own billion-dollar plan to "build a larger
laboratory complex as part of a proposed interagency biodefense campus
at Fort Detrick." We're talking about the place where, as Ivins's crew
was evidently nicknamed, "Team Anthrax" worked and whose labs are
reputedly "renowned for losing anthrax." In these same years,
according to the New York Times, "almost $50 billion in federal money
has been spent to build new laboratories, develop vaccines and
stockpile drugs." Some of this money was pulled out of basic public
health funds which once ensured that large numbers of people wouldn't
die of treatable diseases like tuberculosis and redirected into work
on the Ebola virus, anthrax, and other exotic pathogens.
In these years, not to put too fine a point on it, the Bush
administration has exponentially expanded our bio-war labs, increasing
significantly the likelihood that a new "mad scientist" will have far
more opportunity and far more deadly material available to work with.
It has, in other words, increased the likelihood not just that terror
will come to "the homeland," but that it will come from the homeland.
Thanks to this administration, the terrorists won this round and
future terrorists can reap the fruits of that victory.
Bruce Ivins, whatever you did, or whatever was done to you, R.I.P.
Your lab is in good hands. And the likelihood is that, almost seven
years after the first anthrax envelope arrived, the world is more of a
terror machine than ever.
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the
Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of
Victory Culture, a history of the American Age of Denial. The World
According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso,
2008), a collection of some of the best pieces from his site, has just
been published. Focusing on what the mainstream media hasn't covered,
it is an alternative history of the mad Bush years.
[Note on readings: Oddly enough, back in December 2002, as this site
was going public, the very first TomDispatch guest writer, public
health expert David Rosner, took up the issue of smallpox hysteria,
pointing out that the disease was saved from total eradication on the
planet by a U.S./USSR agreement "to make sure that the virus that
causes smallpox would remain in storage awaiting a new opportunity to
terrorize the world. For decades, both countries stored it,
distributed it to various research labs and otherwise ensured that
this public health victory would be turned into a potential human
tragedy." He added: "Fear of smallpox has played nicely into the
overall strategy of the Bush administration to militarize public
health." It's a piece worth revisiting, as perhaps is "It Should Have
Been Unforgettable," a post I wrote back in 2005 when the anthrax case
had long fallen off the American radar screen.
More recently, Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com has done superb work on
the anthrax story. In 2007, he wrote a striking column, "The
unresolved story of ABC News' false Saddam-anthrax reports," on some
crucially bad reporting by Brian Ross and ABC, and he followed up
after Ivins's suicide with a piece, ("Journalists, their lying
sources, and the anthrax investigation,") that has more unsettling
questions about the anthrax case than any other 16 pieces I've seen.
It's a must read. Jay Rosen, at his always interesting PressThink
blog, took up Greenwald's challenge to Brian Ross and ABC on its
reporting and pressed the point home in two recent posts, here and
here.
Finally, Elisa D. Harris, a senior research scholar at the Center for
International and Security Studies at the University of Maryland, had
a fine, thoughtful op-ed last week in the New York Times, "The Killers
in the Lab" ("Our efforts to fight biological weapons are making us
less safe"), which laid out in an impressive way the expansion of U.S.
bio-weapons research since 2001.]
Copyright 2008 Tom Engelhardt |
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