Here's a link to this week's column for Antiwar.com, in which I took advantage of the publicity over Bruce Ivins -- I'm still skeptical he was the sole perpetrator or even the perpetrator at all, though he does seem to have been a very strange duck -- to offer a little perspective on anthrax as a big threat and in fact on chemical and biological weapons as a real threat. There's no question both chemical and biological weapons are scary, but when it comes to actually killing large numbers of people, they really don't deserve to be classified along with nukes as Weapons of Mass Destruction. Theoretically enough anthrax was distributed in 2001 (based on what a lethal dose is) to kill most of the U.S. population, but just five people were killed -- not that each of those deaths wasn't a tragedy. Yet the anthrax scare, and the fairly commonplace suggestion at the time that Saddam Hussein was the most likely mastermind, had a great deal to do with preparing the American people for an invasion of Iraq.
For a little more detail specifically on anthrax, here's Stratfor.com's valuable recent piece.
Showing posts with label anthrax. Show all posts
Showing posts with label anthrax. Show all posts
Monday, September 08, 2008
Thursday, August 14, 2008
Anthrax: just too neat
Damned Olympics sucking me in! So much to catch up on.
The suicide of Army scientist Bruce Ivins just as the FBI seemed to be closing in on him as the prime suspect in the anthrax letters case strikes me as just too neat and clean to be completely credible. I know, Occam's Razor, simplest-explanation-best and all that. But even with all the stuff they released about Ivins being pretty mentally unstable, I'm not completely convinced. I'm not sure I go all the way with this writer who suggests the Bush-Cheney cabal staged it, but I do remember how helpful the anthrax letters were to creating the impression that it might have been Saddam Hussein, which the Bushies were pushing as hard as they could -- and which contributed to the psychological build-up to the Iraq war -- until the FBI seemed to settle unjustly on Stephen Hatfill, who ended up getting $5.8 million from the taxpayers for all the harassment to which he was subjected.
The best on this issue has been Glenn Greenwald, who has pursued various inconsistencies in the case against Ivins, here, here, here, and here. Very lawyerly, which in this case and context is a compliment. But even the WSJ has run pieces (by a former Ft. Detrick scientist who worked with him) saying that it just couldn't have been Ivins, and probably not any single individual.
Full-scale congressional investigation, anyone?
The suicide of Army scientist Bruce Ivins just as the FBI seemed to be closing in on him as the prime suspect in the anthrax letters case strikes me as just too neat and clean to be completely credible. I know, Occam's Razor, simplest-explanation-best and all that. But even with all the stuff they released about Ivins being pretty mentally unstable, I'm not completely convinced. I'm not sure I go all the way with this writer who suggests the Bush-Cheney cabal staged it, but I do remember how helpful the anthrax letters were to creating the impression that it might have been Saddam Hussein, which the Bushies were pushing as hard as they could -- and which contributed to the psychological build-up to the Iraq war -- until the FBI seemed to settle unjustly on Stephen Hatfill, who ended up getting $5.8 million from the taxpayers for all the harassment to which he was subjected.
The best on this issue has been Glenn Greenwald, who has pursued various inconsistencies in the case against Ivins, here, here, here, and here. Very lawyerly, which in this case and context is a compliment. But even the WSJ has run pieces (by a former Ft. Detrick scientist who worked with him) saying that it just couldn't have been Ivins, and probably not any single individual.
Full-scale congressional investigation, anyone?
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