You’ve probably heard by now that a suspect in the anthrax poisonings of 2001 committed suicide just before he allegedly was to be charged. How … convenient.
Glenn Greenwald covers this in minute detail, so I will lean on him for background. As Glenn says, it appears the anthrax was being dispersed from a top U.S. Army scientist working in a U.S. government lab. And the anthrax certainly added to the climate of fear that infested the nation after 9/11, which in turn benefited … well, you know. Y’all are champs at connecting dots; you don’t need me to do it for you.
Richard Preston, one of my favorite authors, wrote an interesting account of the anthrax release. I believe it was in his book Demon in the Freezer (note: most of the book is about smallpox). Through interviews with experts and a riveting retelling of what eyewitnesses and victims experienced, he makes the point that both bioweapons are easier to get hands on than we thought, and frighteningly easy to spread.
I have one question….what is the name of the company that povided security for the lab this muderer worked at? They should be banned from any future contracts with the US government.
the most significant biological attack in America since the indians were given smallpox infected blankets now need not be scrutinized since the obvious perp killed his own self……
What f’in planet am I living on??????
The stench is overwhelming……………
I’ve long said that the thing I most resent about the Bush administration is the way they’ve convinced me to believe in seemingly preposterous government conspiracies. To wit:
Glennzilla quotes Richard Cohen as saying that a government source told him to get a hold of Cipro after 9/11. Now, it might be nothing, BUT I’m led to believe that many forms of anthrax are killed by other antibiotics. The Ft. Detrick strain, however, requires Cipro.
Did Richard Cohen’s source anticipate a release of spores from Ft. Detrick? Was there, perhaps, not a lone homicidal MD, but a coordinated, intentional release?
Given what we know about Dick Cheney, is it possible to imagine that he might be willing to actually engineer release of US Govt. anthrax spores against the media and Congress? What if it would provide a pretext for attacking Saddam? What if it could be used to quiet Congressional opposition? What if the congressional Democratic cave-ins are somehow related? Has the White House hinted, in a completely deniable way, that it might do it again?
I really hate thinking this way. But… it isn’t too far beyond things they’ve done which are documented fact.
I’d like an investigation that didn’t end with a surprising ‘suicide’. I don’t think we can close the book on the anthrax attacks with Dr. Bruce Ivins.
What kills me — as per what Biggerbox said above — is that just a few short years ago, I would never in a million years have believed that the anthrax attacks could have been carried out by the U.S. government. We would no more do that, I would have said, than we would torture prisoners of war, or declare war on innocents without provocation.
I’m not sure I’ll ever forgive George Bush, Dick Cheney, and their cronies for what they’ve done to America.
What Biggerbox and Falstaff said. Thanks for forcing me into the tinfoil hat set, BushCo.
And Annie makes three. I hate being a conspiracy theorist, yet that is what I’ve become, thanks to Bush, Cheney, et al.
And it’s guaranteed that as far as the national media is concerned, this will blow over in a few days and be forgotten and ignored. Nothing to see here, folks, just a dead body, please keep moving.
We’ll see the same lack of real investigating that never happened with WMD’s, with the missing billions in Iraq contracts, the mis-delivered Katrina services, electronic voting machines, our trashed system of Congressional checks and balances, the list goes on and on.