Vacationing as I am, with little internet access, I can’t really delve into the anthrax attacks. The government’s prime suspect apparently killed himself on Tuesday with an overdose of Tylenol with codeine. Turns out the guy was a scientist at the U.S. Army bioweapons laboratory in Fort Detrick, Maryland. Turns out that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it, despite Brian Ross and ABC’s repeated claims in the fall of 2001. A scientist in charge of a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) lab in Maryland is the prime suspect in mailing lethal anthrax to the Senate Majority Leader and the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as well as Tom Brokow and other media luminaries. For some reason, at a very early stage in the investigation, Brian Ross was being told by a lot of people that the anthrax had Iraqi-specific additives.
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 (sic) 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 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.
Now, seven years later, on the eve of an indictment, Bruce E. Ivins joined British scientist David Kelly in committing suicide. Dead men don’t talk. And it would have been fascinating to know how Ivins came to his decision to send anthrax in the U.S. mail to some of the most powerful and famous people in the country. That’s a normal reaction to the trauma of 9/11. And it is only made more suspicious by the fact that the terror attacks were immediately seized on by numerous unnamed officials that gave false information to the press that pointed the blame not to a United States WMD facility, but to a fictional Iraqi one.
Who points fingers without evidence? Who coordinates something like that? Why didn’t any Republicans get anthrax in the mail? You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to ask these questions. Even the government says that it was the government that made and delivered the anthrax attacks. But the prime suspect is dead now. Maybe he was depressed. Maybe he knew too much. Maybe both.