You must be reading a history I don’t remember. I don’t remember the Bush administration tying the Anthrax attack to Iraq. And in fact, very early on the main suspect was Steven Hatfill, an American bioweapons researcher.
If anything, the Bush Administration deserves credit for NOT using the Anthrax letters to inflame anti-muslim sentiment. After all, no one would blame them if they made that assumption - the attacks happened a week after 9/11, and contained letters with phrases like “Death To America” and “Death to Israel”. But only 2 weeks later, the Secretary of HHS downplayed the terrorism aspect, and just over a month after the first attacks Tom Ridge gave a press conference where he announced that the Anthrax was the ‘Ames Strain’, which meant it probably came from a U.S. lab.
A few months later the government announced that Steven Hatfill was a ‘person of interest’ in the case.
You’ve got to stretch pretty far to see this as either a Bush administration conspiracy to build support for war, OR to see the administration being anything but completely open and honest about what they knew. If anything, I’d say they attempted to downplay what looked like another Muslim terrorist attack, to prevent hysteria from spreading.
That’s two entirely different definitions of “law”. One is a universal constant and the other is a manmade piece of legislation.
You’re right. I was misremembering what happened at the time. I retract anything I wrote that suggested that they used the anthrax letters to point to Iraq.
That is NOT splitting hairs. There is a huge difference between legislative laws and natural laws. Legislative laws are created by human beings to fill a need. If no one ever stole, theft wouldn’t need to be illegal. If no one ever killed anyone else, murder wouldn’t need to be illegal. If no one ever tried to buy influence by donating campaign money, campaign finance laws wouldn’t be needed.
Natural laws just ARE. They weren’t created by anyone…they’re just the way the universe works. The only connection they have to humans is that humans have discerned and described them. Humans definitely did not create them.
If you are, as you appear to be, positing a government cover up, exactly what do you think is being covered up? What do you think the government’s involvement was in the Anthrax attacks, and to what end?
Rather obviously, using anthrax on it’s own citizens. That would hardly something you’d want to become publicly believed.
A Republican attempt to kill Democrats, when they didn’t yet control Congress, and whip up fear of terrorism. Notably, the latter part worked regardless of who was behind it.
I don’t claim to have firsthand knowledge of anything except for this.
I happen to have a friend who works for the media (ABC, no less) who was in the Washington bureau, who was exposed to that same white powder.
“Holy shit! The letter tested positive for anthrax.”
(Mass phone calls to personal physicians, googling for anthrax and general panic.)
“The treatment is Cipro.”
“Let’s go!!!”
Anyone who says there were warnings “by unidentified government officials” to “start taking cipro” is either full of shit or a flat out liar.
To be fair to RTF, that does look like the sort of plausible deniability that was used in a lot of White House leaks: the official spokes person (Fleischer) makes a public denial that the administration believes that there is any involvement, then “a senior White House official” replants the seed while not speaking for the record.
That said, I also remember no serious effort by the Administration to make an anthrax-Iraq connection a serious issue (and it certainly was not raised again when they were pumping out the lies to get us to invade at a time when a reference to an actual link to an real attack would have given them a much more secure argument.
My trouble is that my level of trust in the government is so low that when I heard first heard the story this morning, the thought flashed through my head that the Irving had committed suicide for unrelated reasons and the FBI was going to hang the anthrax thing on him now that hew was gone.
Glenn Greenwald has a blog entry over at salon.com about why this is so fishy. With no cites of my own and not a very good recollection of the incidents, I’m in no position to comment on it one way or another.
