After 8 years and little to show for all the effort except a lot of questions, it looks like they will pin it on Dr. Ivans and be done with it.
So we have all the theories on JFK, the moon landing and 9-11, what do the CT’s say about the anthrax murders? People died, nobody was prosecuted, it was a huge story.
Why American Media? There are thousands of better targets. The person with the biggest motive against them would be O.J. Simpson and, even though he went to So. Cal., I don’t think he was spending his nights in the chem lab learning how to handle anthrax.
Is there any structure or motive to the story? What happened? Who did it and why wasn’t the case solved years ago?
Well, they never caught the Tylenol killer, either (though there seems to be a likely suspect). Nutty loners are the hardest to track down, probably because the only people they tell about their crimes are the voices in their heads.
You might find this segment from Nova scienceNOW last month about the investigation interesting. It goes through some of the techniques developed and used to point the finger in the direction of Dr. Ivans.
If you accept that Ivins did it, and I think that’s the best explanation, he apparently had some reasons that were incomprehensible and some that were related to his feeling that more attention needed to be drawn to the possibility of a bioterrorist attack. So he made one to show how underprepared the U.S. was. The case wasn’t solved in part because Ivins was involved with the FBI’s efforts to solve the case. The FBI wrongly focused on Steven Hatfill, one of his colleagues, for a long time. When that didn’t work out they seemed not to have a clue until other people got suspicious of Ivins.
The really weird thing about the whole anthrax letters affair is that no significant conspiracy theories about it seem to have developed.
Obviously this can only be the result of the most complete and successful government cover-up of all time! :eek:
Seriously though, does anyone have any idea why this does *not* seem to have attracted the conspiratologists? On the face of it, it looks like exactly their sort of thing. Bacteria from government labs, attacks on opposition politicians and journalists, no apparent motives or (for ages) suspects: it is like a script for The X-Files.
Or do the 911 truthers include it as being part of the larger plot? If so, I have not heard. In any case, it seems to me that you would not have to be all that crazy to think that the 911 plane attacks were what they appear to have been, but still to think there was a plot behind the anthrax letters.
The whole incident sort of vanished from the national consciousness after the Iraq War started, and the war itself became a conspiracy theory magnet. But when the FBI concluded Ivins was responsible, some people did speculate they were just concluding the investigation by blaming a dead man.
Let’s just put this in perspective for a moment…sure, the anthrax attacks were scary. But, if you really wanna mess with American’s heads, you attack the most powerful cultural force in this country. TV.
Let’s go back to November 22, 1987. Someone managed to interrupt a television feed in Chicago, twice in one night, with some rather bizarre footage of a person in a Max Headroom mask. Now, a little deadly white powder is one thing, but this is television. It made national headlines. And still, almost 22 years later, no suspect has been identified. If that case wasn’t solved, the anthrax thing won’t be. Priorities.
(By the way, I’m being more than a little facetious here. But not entirely Also, you can see the footage of the event at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj1mUk04_ho. It’s more than a little creepy, and somewhat NSFW at the end.)
I don’t think you can meaningfully compare high jacking a broadcast signal for a couple of minutes in one city, and serial acts of terrorism across several states that left five dead and seventeen seriously ill.
After so many years of bungling, perhaps the FBI finally got things right. Heckuva Job guys!
All Americans can breath easier tonight for sure, knowing that you’re always on the trail of the evildoers.
There was a near death from Anthrax in December. They still can’t pin point where she picked it up. It was at a local college and possibly from a chem lab on campus?