Can't-Miss of 2023 (1/5): The Largely Forgotten Anthrax Attacks Shed Light on Covid Origins
One of the Top 5, Can't-Miss SYSTEM UPDATE episodes of 2023! This is an excerpt from our show that originally aired in May of this year, covering what we feel is one of the most important yet overlooked stories of 2023—the stories of massive consequence that have not yet garnered the attention and conversation they deserve. We hope you enjoy, and thanks as always for your support!
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Right before the Christmas break, we did a show where we highlighted the five stories we covered this year that we thought Garnered far less attention and impact and discussion than they merited, given the significance of the stories, the news events, the analysis.
And so we decided for this week between Christmas and New Year, when our show is off, to provide excerpts of each one of those five shows.
We hope you really enjoy it.
We hope it rejuvenates interest in these stories that, again, got some attention.
Obviously, our show covered them, but nowhere near the attention we think they deserve.
Enjoy.
Tonight, we devote the entire show we devote the entire show to one of the most significant events in American history over the last 40 years that happens to also be one of the most forgotten, namely the Just seven days after the 9-11 attacks,
While rubble from the World Trade Center still lay on the streets of New York City with thousands of corpses underneath it, news outlets began reporting that envelopes containing what was said at the time to be extremely sophisticated and highly weaponized strains of anthrax were dropped in the U.S.
Postal Service and addressed to some of the nation's most prominent journalists, including NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw And the newsrooms of ABC, NBC, CBS, and the New York Post, as well as top political officials, including then Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont.
Those anthrax spores ended up killing five people, including a photojournalist with the sun and two postal workers, and 17 others were infected, with 11 of them being seriously ill.
One could very easily argue that the anthrax attacks were at least as important in ratcheting up fear levels in the United States as the 9-11 attack itself was.
And one could even plausibly argue that they were more effective in generating widespread fear and panic.
The fear that enabled the U.S.
government to do everything from enacting the Patriot Act and imposing a pervasive domestic surveillance state, to invading Iraq and bombing nine different countries over the next 15 years.
While the 9-11 attacks were aimed at key centers and symbols of American corporate, political, and military power, two planes hit the World Trade Center in Manhattan, another crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, while the fourth plane that either crashed or was shot down by Dick Cheney was reportedly headed for the U.S.
Capitol.
The anthrax attacks, though, were delivered by mail.
As a result, it convinced Americans far away from the nation's most important cities, in the suburbs, in rural areas, in small towns everywhere, that they, too, were severely endangered, that Bond-like terrorist villains could get at them, even through terrifying biological weapons that could materialize right in their front lawn, in their mailbox, long an American symbol of friendly neighborhoods and an implicit sense of safety.
That such a dastardly plot was carried out just a week after the spectacularly frightening and traumatizing 9-11 attack created a perception that everything had become destabilized, that nothing was safe, that our enemies were simultaneously highly sophisticated and serious, yet had no limits of any kind, a completely new enemy, unlike anything we had seen before, even during the five-decade Cold War with the Soviet Union.
Looking back, there is no question that this widespread fear and panic was deliberately fostered and opportunistically exploited.
While the 2003 invasion of Iraq was largely justified based on the dangers revealed by the 9-11 attack, there was a very influential camp of neocons and militarists in the United States who were eager to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam for years prior to the September 11th attacks.
They include Joe Biden, neocons led by Bill Kristol and David Frum, who would go on to write George W. Bush's post-911 speeches, John McCain and Dick Cheney.
And they wasted little time, many of them did, encouraging Americans to blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks.
Inventing outright lies in the days and weeks after the 9-11 attack that they laundered through America's most influential news outlist that wasted no time in priming Americans to believe that their safety depended on overthrowing the Iraqi leader, long one of America's closest allies in the region, but who now was said to be both a close ally of Al Qaeda and the likely perpetrator of these anthrax attacks.
It took the FBI more than seven full years to claim in 2008 that they had finally solved the case and found the perpetrator of the attacks.
After first trying to pin the blame on an American bioweapons expert named Stephen Hatfield, only to pay him almost $6 million in a lawsuit after admitting he had no role whatsoever, the FBI announced in 2008 they had finally found the perpetrator, an American microbiologist who worked at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Detrick, Maryland, named Bruce Ivins.
Unfortunately, said the FBI, Dr. Ivins had just committed suicide as they were just about to arrest him, meaning the FBI would never have to prove their allegations in a court of law against him, would never have to have their case and the evidence on which it was based, that they found the real attacker subjected to the rigors of cross-examination, judicial scrutiny, or public examination.
Almost instantly, serious doubts emerged about the FBI's evidence and their claim to have found the real killer, both circumstantial and scientific.
And those doubts emerged not from obscure or marginalized venues, but from the nation's most mainstream newspapers and scientific journals.
And when the FBI finally made its scientific evidence available to a body of independent scientific investigators, that body concluded in 2011 that the FBI's scientific evidence was far weaker than the FBI claimed and raised more questions than it answered.
That a crime of this magnitude, one whose effects included radical changes in how the U.S.
government operates, the powers they claim, and the wars and regime change operations they would end up launching and executing for the next 15 years, that a crime of that magnitude is still unsolved by itself justifies its revisiting, especially given that each year there are more and more Americans who have either forgotten this incident or have never lived through it in the first place.
But the relevance of this event and the need to revisit it extends far beyond one of historical interest.
That the FBI itself claims that the worst bioweapons attack in American history came from a U.S.
Army lab, perpetrated by a U.S.
Army scientist, sheds significant light on the type of research the U.S.
government does into bioweapons.
And that shed significant light onto the ongoing competing claims regarding the origins of the COVID pandemic.
I spent years reporting on the Santhrax case, and as I did, I became more and more convinced that from the very start, lies and deliberate deceit drove the narrative about it from the start.
There's no question about that.
And every year that went by, I believed that more and more, and now I believe it more than ever.
We'll walk you through the key event, show you the most central evidence, and examine the vital questions all of this raises so that you can recall everything that happened as part of this now deliberately forgotten episode and draw your own conclusions from it.
The most important ingredient for state propaganda is historical ignorance.
The observation typically attributed to the philosopher George Santayana, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it, is based exactly in that recognition.
The more history is forgotten, the easier it is to use the same exact methods of deception, falsehoods, and propaganda to manipulate the public.
One of the realizations you have as you get older is that every year, the number of people who never lived through the events that you lived through and that you remember vividly increases.
And even for those who did live through those events, the confluence of our rushed lives, our need to focus on our work and family, the deliberate memory holing of those events, and the memory erosion fostered by social media ensure that many simply have forgotten that which they learned and that which they lived through.
And I can think of no major political event of the last 40 years for which this is more true than the anthrax attacks of 2001.
There is no question That the so-called War on Terror launched by the United States after 9-11 is, along with the 2008 financial collapse, the most consequential political event in our lifetime.
It radically transformed how the U.S.
government functions and its relationship to the U.S.
citizenry, enabled it to seize previously unthinkable powers of detention and surveillance that endure to this very day.
And it led to endless wars, occupations, bombing campaigns, drone warfare, a torture regime, mass domestic spying, due process free imprisonment, and all sorts of atrocities all around the globe.
And few, if any, events fueled and enabled this multi-headed, quote, war on terror, like the September 2001 anthrax attacks.
And yet few people remember much about it at all.
And that's because once it served its purposes, it was rarely discussed, including when, especially when, the FBI claimed it had solved the case by heaping blame for it on a dead man who would never have to stand trial, and thus would ensure that the FBI's evidence never received real scrutiny.
That's why we decided to devote a special episode tonight to reviewing this long-forgotten, yet indescribably important event.
The facts of the anthrax attacks as they were presented to us at the time were quite simple.
Starting on September 18th, just seven days after the 9-11 attack, when obviously Americans were already in a state of fear and heightened concern, when things seemed like they were unraveling in terms of our public security, a mass casualty attack By a foreign power on American soil that took down the World Trade Center, crashed a plane into the Pentagon, killed 3,000 Americans just seven days after that while we were all still reeling from that.
Media outlets began reporting that what they claimed was a highly sophisticated and extremely weaponized version of anthrax had been dropped in the mail and sent to numerous news outlets and American politicians.
And over the next six weeks, anthrax continued to appear, new letters continued to emerge, and they were accompanied by a very alarming statement that was clearly designed to link it to the 9-11 attack through which we had all just And here you see on the screen one of the letters.
This is the one that was sent to the NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw along with the anthrax that we were told was highly sophisticated that only extremely advanced parties, very few on the planet, would be capable of producing.
And there you see the letter.
It says, this is next.
Take penicillin now.
Death to America.
Death to Israel.
Allah is great.
So the letter was clearly intended to suggest that this was an extension of the 9-11 attack carried out by the same people, and that it was going to be not just one one-day cataclysmic event, but a series of new events.
This is next, it said, as though this was just the next terror in a long line of what was to come.
Now, to remind you of how alarmist was the reporting around this anthrax attack, and justifiably so, it was supposedly this never-before-seen-in-the-wild, extremely sophisticated version that was highly fatal and that could just be sent to you through your mailbox and all you had to do was open a letter and you would be killed when the spores dispersed.
Let's show you just a few real-time network news reporting and cable news reporting about this event just to give you a sense for how this was talked about.
Welcome back everybody.
It certainly has been a tough day and days for all of us at NBC News because of course the press conference that announced yesterday that an NBC News staff member actually had been tested positive for anthrax.
A Florida man has contracted a very rare and potentially deadly form of anthrax.
Rare, inhaled form of anthrax.
Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson calls it an isolated case and says there is no threat of terrorism.
In Boca Raton, Florida today, a memorial service for Bob Stevens.
He is almost certainly the first American to be killed in a deliberate anthrax attack.
Now to the home front and those concerns over anthrax in Florida.
After one man died from the illness and his co-worker was contaminated, the FBI has taken over the investigation.
America strikes back.
Anthrax, another infection.
This time at NBC News in Rockefeller Plaza.
Good evening.
Tonight we find ourselves in the unusual and unhappy position of reporting on one of our beloved colleagues, a member of my personal staff who has contracted a cutaneous anthrax infection.
That's an infection of the skin that is responding favorably to treatment and her full recovery is expected.
There were two letters that were suspicious that both arrived on the same day.
One contained a white talcum powdery like substance.
The other contained a brownish granular almost sandy like substance.
In just a week's time we have had four confirmed cases of anthrax all with media connections and a number of anthrax scares as well.
ABC News In Nevada.
In New Jersey tonight.
The U.S.
House of Representatives is closing offices today until Tuesday to allow a complete sweep for traces of anthrax.
And 29 SAFRs for Senator Tom Daschle's office have tested positive for exposure to anthrax.
The letters sent to NBC and the New York Post were the same.
This is next.
Take penicillin now.
Death to America.
Death to Israel.
Allah is great.
The letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle had similar wording.
You cannot stop us.
We have this anthrax.
You die now.
Are you afraid?
Death to America.
Death to Israel.
Allah is great.
All carried the date 9-11-01 at the top.
All were sent from Trenton, New Jersey.
I don't have anthrax.
Good morning.
President Bush tries reassuring the nation after anthrax is found at a facility that handles mail going to the White House.
President Bush is calling those people who are mailing these anthrax letters evildoers and he says any attempt to terrorize this nation is going to fail.
Another day of germ warfare and still no sign the worst case of bioterrorism in this country is close to being solved.
So you see how it unfolded over the course of six weeks.
It began with one person, one case, and then over the course of six weeks more and more letters appeared so that by the end President Bush was announcing this was done by evildoers.
It was called germ warfare.
It was said to be the greatest worst attack of bioweapons attacks ever carried out on American soil.
So you can imagine how much of a role this played in escalating the fear that Americans already felt as a result of the 9-11 attack.
By the end of October, when these multiple attacks had already manifested, there was almost literally nothing the government could demand that the American public didn't immediately acquiesce to as long as these new powers were described as being necessary to keep us all That's how terrorized overnight the population become, not only because of the 9-11 attack, but also because of these anthrax attacks.
And they had no idea who perpetrated them, they said.
But very quickly, the media started claiming, as a result of sources high up inside the government, that they began to learn who they thought the most likely suspect was of these attacks.
It turned out, according to these media reports, that government tests had revealed the presence of something called bentonite.
in the anthrax.
Through analysis of the anthrax strains, they discovered bentonite.
Now, bentonite sounds like a very terrorizing and highly sophisticated substance in reality.
It's basically the clay that holds together kitty litter.
Because the challenge with weaponizing anthrax is it's extremely light and is likely to disperse.
And in order to weaponize it, you have to find a way to clump it together, to keep it together so that it only disperses when it's touched or moved, such as when opening an envelope.
And according to these reports, the use of bentonite in weaponized anthrax was done only by one person on the entire planet.
It just so happened to be the hallmark, they said, of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, who many of the same people claiming this had been wanting to go to war with and topple his government for years before 9-11.
And the anthrax attack became the perfect attack to pin on him by laundering anonymous claims to the media that he was to blame.
It's hard to overstate how frequently this was done and with how much certainty.
So probably the worst offender at first was ABC News, Repeatedly, the investigative reporter Brian Ross went on the network news show of probably the most trusted television anchor of the time, Peter Jennings, and continuously pinned the blame on Iraq.
Let's look at one example.
ABC's Brian Ross.
Brian.
Peter, from three well-placed but separate sources tonight, ABC News has been told that initial tests on the anthrax sent to Senator Daschle have found a tell-tale chemical additive whose name means a lot to weapons experts.
It is called bentonite, a substance which helps keep the tiny anthrax particles floating in the air by preventing them from sticking together.
It's possible other countries may be using it too, but it is a trademark of Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program.
Does mean for me that Iraq becomes the prime suspect as the source for the anthrax used in these letters?
So here you have a major television network, and at the time cable was nowhere near as influential as it, well, became.
It's not very influential now, but it was nowhere near its peak.
The network news was really where everything mattered, where everything happened.
And arguably the most trusted show began laundering this claim over and over.
Iraq was the most likely suspect.
This was a hallmark and a telltale sign of the Iraqi weapons program.
And the fact that this was done when Americans had very little defenses up Well, we were in a state of great fear, desperately wanting to find out who was attacking our country in these very dastardly ways, obviously meant that claims of this sort were instantly accepted.
Now, after 9-11, David Letterman, who at the time was the highest rated late night comedy show, went on a hiatus because he thought it inappropriate to have a comedy show and be making jokes in the wake of the 9-11 attack and the anthrax attack.
And when he came back, one of his very first guests was Senator John McCain of Arizona.
And John McCain went on David Letterman's show.
It had huge ratings because it was David Letterman coming back.
It wasn't the very first show, but it was one of the first shows.
And obviously, this is what Americans were interested in.
And John McCain was heralded as one of the most knowledgeable and important foreign policy experts.
And let's show you what he said to David Letterman about the anthrax attacks.
I'm going to pull this video up for you in just a second.
The second phase, if I could just make it very quickly, the second phase is Iraq.
There is some indication, and I don't have the conclusions, but some of the sand tracks may, my ancestors may have come from Iraq.
Oh, is that right?
So there you see John McCain.
He's not being definitive about it, but he's certainly saying that Iraq is the most likely or one of the leading culprits, just continuously putting into the
Ethos into the ether that when we think about the anthrax attacks It's almost certainly Saddam Hussein who did it and that's based on very technical complex analysis Conducted at the highest levels of the US government that revealed the telltale sign of Iraqi Bioweapons and the use of anthrax which is bentonite.
That was the claim made over and over.
In October, John McCain appeared with his then sidekick, the Democratic neocon senator from Connecticut, Joe Lieberman, who just nine months earlier had been the vice presidential candidate running with Al Gore on the ticket that lost to George Bush and who just nine months earlier had been the vice presidential candidate running with Al Gore on the ticket And here you see Joe Lieberman right at John McCain's side agreeing with everything
John McCain had to say Joe Lieberman, like John McCain, were two of the people, along with Joe Biden, who had long advocated overthrowing Saddam Hussein way before the 9/11 attack.
And they went on Meet the Press.
Obviously, lots of Americans were watching that program at the time.
This is just six weeks or five weeks after the 9-11 attack.
And listen to what they said.
John McCain, quote, Recently in Rio, I believe an envelope was received, which gives me the idea that perhaps this is an international organization and not one within the United States of America.
Joe Lieberman.
I've got mixed reports, but I'll tell you what I've concluded, and this is consistent with every report I've been given.
The stuff that is being sent out, most of it, including the stuff that went to Tom Daschle's office, is significantly refined anthrax.
In other words, when we hear the stories that there's anthrax in labs all over this country, that's basically bacteria in a lab tube.
Dr. Fauci, Dr. Anthony Fauci, can tell you more detail on that.
To take it from that, to make it into the stuff that's being sent in envelopes, and that requires a real effort, and frankly, more than a couple of guys in somebody's kitchen stirring things up.
So, it says to me that there's either a significant amount of money behind this or this is state-sponsored or this is stuff that was stolen from the former Soviet program.
September, in September, I believe it's October 14th actually, 2021, is a headline in the Guardian.
There you see it, Iraq quote, behind US anthrax outbreaks.
No caveatting, no uncertainty, a bold statement quoting some unknown person that We should just blame Iraq.
We should assume this is Saddam Hussein attacking the United States in the most dastardly and ethically limitless ways.
Quote, American investigators probing anthrax outbreaks in Florida and New York believe they have all the hallmarks of a terrorist attack and have named Iraq as prime suspect as the source of the deadly spores.
Their inquiries are adding to what U.S. hawks say is a growing mass of evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved possibly indirectly with the September 11th hijackers.
So you see here, they weren't using the anthrax attacks only to claim Saddam did it.
They were using it to claim Saddam was in an alliance with Al Qaeda, which of course was necessary to convince Americans to go and invade Iraq.
And a poll at the time, six months after the invasion, in fact showed that 70% of Americans, 70%, Believe that Saddam Hussein had personally participated in the planning of the 9-11 attacks.
You had Jeffrey Goldberg, who has since been promoted to one of the most important and prestigious positions in journalism.
At the time, he was a New Yorker correspondent writing articles claiming Saddam Hussein was in an alliance with Al Qaeda.
Jeffrey Goldberg, of course, was part of the neocon camp that long wanted to overthrow Iraq.
Do you see how they were using, exploiting, These events to advance an agenda they had long craved to execute.
Quote, US intelligence believes Iraq has the technology and supplies of anthrax suitable for terrorist use.
Quote, they aren't making this stuff in caves in Afghanistan, the CIA source said.
This is prima facie evidence of the involvement of a state intelligence agency.
Maybe Iran has the capability, but it doesn't look like politically that leaves Iraq.
That's as definitive as it gets.
Now, as it turns out, this CIA source and all these sources laundered through the Guardian and other sources turned out to be right.
There was a government involved, a very sophisticated government involved in manufacturing this weaponized anthrax.
Just turns out it wasn't the United States, or it wasn't Iraq or Iran, but the United States.
On June 1st, 2002, so as we're building up to the question of whether we need to go and invade Iraq, there's an article in the Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch entitled, Does Al Qaeda Have Anthrax?
Better assume so.
Quote, The operatives and allies of al-Qaeda have something in mind for the United States, of which there can be little doubt, something nasty.
Vice President Dick Cheney said in May, it is, quote, Almost certain the terrorists will strike again.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned that terrorists inevitably will get their hands on weapons of mass destruction.
They would not hesitate one minute to use them.
Question, what if they already did use them and are preparing to do so again?
Were last year's anthrax attacks, which caused five fatalities, a preview?
In November, the FBI issued a sub-suspect profile identifying the likely anthrax attacker as a single adult male, probably an American with a scientific background, lab experience, poor social skills, and a grudge.
Some people, I was one of them, viewed this interpretation with skepticism.
What would be the motive?
Why the timing so close to September 11th?
A number of analysts, including David Tell in a useful article in the Weekly Standard on April 29th, that was the Neocon Journal founded and edited by Bill Kristol, have subsequently cast doubt on the disgruntled scientist's hypothesis.
And an FBI spokesman said in May that the Bureau, far from being convinced that the attacks were carried out by an American loner, has, quote, not precluded any category of suspect, motive, or theory.
If anything, hints that anthrax and al-Qaeda may be linked have grown harder to dismiss.
All of this was significantly elevated from very influential media outlets, like ABC News, Meet the Press, The Guardian, John McCain, Joe Lieberman, into a presidential pronouncement.
When at the start of 2002, George Bush, in January of that year, gave his State of the Union address that was notoriously written by the neocon David Frum, That was the speech that notoriously proclaimed that we were fighting an axis of evil that was composed of Iraq, Iran, and North Korea because these neocons were not content with only getting to Iraq and overthrowing Iraq.
They also wanted to overthrow the government of Iran in the name of 9-11 and anthrax.
And here you see George Bush take this same claim and elevate it to a State of the Union address.
Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror.
The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax and nerve gas and nuclear weapons for over a decade.
This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens, leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children.
So that was David Frum's work, Circulating Absolute Lies, designed to put into Americans' mind that the state responsible for these anthrax attacks was Iraq and Saddam Hussein as part of the already well underway effort.
Just weeks after September 11th, this was barely three months after September 11th, to prime Americans to blame September 11th on a state that had no involvement of any kind, either in the 9-11 attacks or in the anthrax attacks, which was Iraq.
Do you see this barrage of lies?
How it was laundered by the very media outlets that still claim that they're the only ones who can be trusted?
Manufactured by the very people who ended up constantly being promoted and elevated.
David Frum is also at The Atlantic with Jeffrey Goldberg.
Bill Kristol is one of the favorite guests of CNN and MSNBC, a hero of American liberalism.
George Bush has been completely rehabilitated as is Dick Cheney thanks to the liberal worship of his daughter Liz Cheney.
And the CIA continues to be a highly trusted source for American media outlets who just leak to them anonymously, as they did over and over here, and are just constantly believed.
Now, at the time, there was all kinds of reasons to believe that this was a lie.
To begin with, It isn't just that bentonite is an extremely common substance.
Like I said, it's the thing that is used to produce cat litter.
The idea that it's some specialized ingredient that only the sophisticated Iraqi scientists could possibly use to weaponize anthrax was a joke from the start.
But the much more important point is that there was never any government analysis, as ABC News ended up admitting, that detected the presence of Bentonite.
It was a totally false story from the start.
The sources who went to ABC News and told ABC News that Bentonite was detected in government analysis completely lied.
If you go to journalism school or read journalistic ethics books, one of the things you will read is that the only taboo in journalism is revealing who your sources are if you promise them anonymity.
Now, you may remember during Russiagate, that was supposed to be a sacred principle.
So sacred, in fact, that Americans are supposed to go to jail, American journalists are supposed to go to jail in order to not reveal their sources, even if you're ordered by a court to reveal it.
And American journalists have gone to prison before by defying court orders.
That's how sacred this principle is.
During Russiagate, a obviously unwell blogger named Marcy Wheeler had promised anonymity to a source of hers, but she became convinced, because she's unwell, that this source was some sort of smoking gun, some critical part proving collusion that this source was some sort of smoking gun, some critical part proving collusion between Trump
And without even being asked to do so, let alone subpoenaed her order to turn over the identity of her secret source, she begged the Mueller team and the FBI to give her a few She fantasized that she was part of the Mueller team, that she had in her hands the smoking gun proof of collusion.
And she, on her own, voluntarily went to snitch on her own source to whom she had promised anonymity.
The greatest taboo in all of journalism And American journalists applauded her.
People like Margaret Sullivan, the then media reporter for the Washington Post, CNN, wrote articles glorifying what this woman had done, this obviously unhinged woman.
Now, it turns out she snitched on her source.
He wasn't even mentioned by the Mueller report.
He had no involvement in any of this.
It was all a sick fantasy that she had concocted in her head.
She wanted to be part of the Mueller team.
And so they applauded her.
The American media applauded somebody who voluntarily, without being asked, let alone subpoenaed, turned over her own source.
And to this day, she's like a favorite of the dead and your Russiagators.
Usually, that had always been a very sacred ethical precept, is you don't ever reveal the identity of your sources to whom you prove anonymity.
Except in one case, when it not only becomes permissible, but required, ethically obligatory, to reveal the identity of your anonymous sources.
And that's when they deliberately lie to you.
When they use you to disseminate to the public Lies that they know are lies at the time and there is no question that the three or four high-level sources that Brian Ross claimed went to him to tell him that government tests had detected betonite deliberately lied to him as a way of trying to get the American public to blame Saddam Hussein in Iraq for the anthrax attacks because those are the very people in the government who are so eager long before 9-11 to invade Iraq.
And I spent two years badgering ABC and Brian Ross about this.
How is it that you continue to protect the identity of these high-level government officials who on one of the most crucial issues of our time lied to ABC News and all these other sources You had Joe Lieberman and John McCain and The Guardian and then finally George Bush through David Frum's speech writing disseminating the same lie that led to the Iraq War.
How can you possibly protect the identity of these people?
ABC finally, as a result of that badgering, admitted the stories were false, admitted there was never any government test that revealed the presence of Bentonite, and they finally retracted them.
But to this day, They refused to reveal their own sources who lied to them.
High-level government sources.
That's the reason people in the CIA and the FBI and Homeland Security and the FBI know that they can lie to the media on purpose without any accountability because they do so while hiding behind a shield of anonymity.
So even if you know they lied, the media will protect these liars, people who are deceiving the public on purpose through the use of their media platforms, even though It is journalistic ethics 101 that you not only have the right for the duty to expose sources who do that, they never do, because they don't want to lose their sources.
Even if they know that those sources are feeding them false information, it's still at least somebody giving them stories.
But beyond the fact that this whole thing was a lie from the start, the whole basis of blaming Iraq, that all these people just did, The reality is, everything we knew about the Amtrak strain would have led us to believe that it was a government involved, but not Iraq or Iran or Al Qaeda, but the United States government, because the report suggested that the strain that was sent was the Ames strain.
And the reality was, that was a telltale sign of a government Weaponizing anthrax.
It was a telltale sign of the United States.
The AIM strain was a strain the United States government at Army Labs had developed.
And in 2011, Frontline on PBS did a documentary revisiting the anthrax attacks, and they interviewed one of the nation's most prestigious microbiologists, and he talked about What he realized in 2001 about the likely source of this anthrax.
Listen to him and what he said.
She said, this is the anthrax.
And I said, oh.
Dr. Paul Keim's specially equipped lab could tell the difference between the DNA of one type of anthrax and another.
We had one of the largest collections of different types of anthrax, what we call strains of anthrax from around the world.
When they looked at the FBI spores, they were stunned.
All of them came from a single strain of anthrax, the Ames strain.
We were surprised it was the Ames Strain, and it was chilling at the same time.
Because it was so virulent, the Ames Strain was the anthrax of choice for the U.S.
Army's bioweapon vaccine program.
Once you heard it was the Ames Strain, you began to think to yourself, ah, this doesn't sound like a job from the outside.
It sounds much more like an inside job.
The home of the Ames Strain was the hot suites back in Maryland at USAMRID.
So just think about what this means.
The public was flooded with outright lies about these anthrax attacks based on not a mistake, not a good faith misinterpretation of data, but an outright fabrication that bentonite was detected in these strains, something that never happened.
And that caused the top levels of government And the most influential mainstream outlets to disseminate a very devastating, destructive, and toxic lie to the public linking Saddam Hussein to these anthrax attacks.
And not only was it based on lies, not only was it completely false, but as the scientist just explained, there was every reason in the world to know in 2001 for those analyzing the strains of anthrax that by far the most likely culprit No, it's not just the United States government, but the specific microbiology lab in Fort Detrick, Maryland, the U.S.
Army lab, which eight years later, the FBI ended up blaming and saying was in fact the source of these attacks, which we'll get to.
Now, the other part about this is that what this means, what he just said, what the FBI now claims, which we'll get to, is that the U.S.
Army, the U.S.
government, was developing extremely virulent, sophisticated strains of highly fatal anthrax.
Why would it do that?
We heard the United States government over the last three years during the COVID pandemic insist that it doesn't do any kind of research like that.
When Victoria Nuland accidentally went to the US Senate and admitted there were very dangerous and sophisticated biolabs in Ukraine, That they were very worried would fall into Russian hands, which meant they couldn't just be old Soviet labs because the Russians would already have them.
It would mean that they were very dangerous new kinds of biological strains in Ukraine.
The response came when people like me noticed what she said was, oh, this is a crazy conspiracy theory.
We don't do offensive biological weapons research.
We're banned by conventions we signed from doing it.
That's something China does.
That's something Iran does and Russia does.
We don't do that.
And yet one of the things the anthrax episode revealed, and it's one of the reasons why they've worked so hard to make sure you don't know about it and have forgotten it, is it was proof that there were very virulent fatal strains of anthrax being researched and developed and stored in U.S.
Army labs.
That's the version of events from the FBI itself.
Now they justify it by saying, OK, fine, we do this research.
But we don't do it because we intend to use it offensively against anybody.
We do it just because we have to manipulate these strains and make them more fatal so we can research defenses to them in case one of the bad countries breaks the convention and does it.
Who knows what their intention was.
What we know for sure is they're developing these kinds of bioweapons and making them more fatal and more dangerous.
Exactly what Anthony Fauci denied.
When it came time to discuss the origins of the COVID pandemic and he said, we would never do gain-of-function research.
We would never take dangerous agents and make them more contagious or make them more fatal, even though we learned that's exactly the kind of research that was being done in the Wuhan lab with US funding.
But the anthrax attack sheds a lot of light On to those questions, and it's one of the main reasons they've wanted you to forget them.
Now, just to show you a couple of examples of how dangerous these lies ended up being about anthrax and the lies about where they came from, let me just show you an article from
Maureen Dowd in 2001 on September 26 where she talks about how panicky everyone she knew in Washington was as a result of these anthrax attacks.
This is all about the anthrax attacks, not about 9-11.
After all these finicky years of fighting everyday germs and inevitable mortality with fancy products, Americans are now confronted with the specter of terrorists and crop dusters and hazardous waste trucks spreading really terrifying deadly toxins like plagues, smallpox, blister agents, nerve gas, and botulism.
Women I know in New York and Washington debate whether to order Israeli vs. Marine Corps gas masks, and half-hour lightweight gas masks vs. $400 8-hour gas masks, baby gas masks, and pet gas masks, with the same meticulous attention they gave to ordering no-foam, no-fat, no-whip lattes in more innocent days.
They share information on which pharmacies still have Cipro, the antidote to anthrax.
Zithromax and doxycycline, all antibiotics that can be used for anthrax, the way they once traded tips on designer shoe bargains.
They talk more now about real botulism than the trendy cosmetic derivative Botox.
Judy Miller, a Times reporter who was one of the authors of the surprise new bestseller, Germs, Biological Weapons in America's Secret War, said she had been deluged with calls from people asking how they can protect themselves.
Quote, it's the ultimate freakout, she said.
So here you have a real-time article in 2001 about the intense level of mania and panic these anthrax attacks generated.
And you can only imagine the effects of linking those attacks to Saddam Hussein in Iraq based on absolute lies when in fact they came from the US government itself.
While you had people in the US government Very aggressively and effectively exploiting these anthrax attacks for their own ends, namely to advance their long-stated goal of invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam Hussein.
Here is a similar article from the Washington Post longtime columnist, liberal columnist, Richard Cohen.
He wrote a column in 2004 entitled Our Forgotten Panic, where he tries to justify why he supported the war in Iraq.
And he's trying to say, it's 2004.
Let's go back to 2001 and remember how scary everything was.
And just to do that, he focused not on the 9/11 attacks, but on the anthrax attacks.
This is what he said.
At the time, Stephen's death, that was the first anthrax death, and those that followed appeared somehow linked to the terrorist attacks of September 11.
That seemed to make sense because the first letters containing anthrax spores were mailed around the time, and maybe more to the point, the authorities at first said so.
Quote, there is a suspicion that this is connected to international terrorists, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said.
House Minority Leader Dick Capard echoed him, quote, I don't think there's a way to prove that, but I think we all suspect that.
Iraq was among the suspects.
It was thought to have a storehouse of biological weapons.
I mention anthrax for the simple reason that no one does anymore.
It's a curious silence since, along with the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, it all but dominated the news.
Some of us did not get mail deliveries, and when they resumed, we went into secure rooms where we donned latex gloves and face masks before opening letters.
On a tip, I asked my doctor early on to prescribe Cipro for me, only to find out that, insider though I thought I was, nearly everyone had been asking me for the same thing.
People made anthrax safe rooms, and one woman I know of had a mask made for her small dog.
My point is that we were panicked.
Yet that panic never gets mentioned.
Last month the New Republic published a quote special issue in which a bevy of very good writers wondered whether they had been wrong to support the war in Iraq.
Most of them admitted to having erred about this or that detail or in failing to approach appreciate how badly George Bush would administer the war in the occupation.
But none confessed to being seized by the zeitgeist.
I read the magazine cover to cover, and unless I somehow missed it, the word anthrax never appeared.
Imagine, not once, not a single one of these writers admitted to panicking over anthrax.
Well, I did.
I'm not sure if panic is quite the right word, but it is close enough.
Anthrax played a role in my decision to support the Bush administration's desire to take out Saddam Hussein.
I linked him to Anthrax, which I linked to September 11th.
I was not going to stand by and simply wait for another attack, more attacks.
I was going to go to the source, Hussein, and get him before he could get us.
As time went on, I became more and more questioning, but I had a hard time backing down from my initial whoop and holler.
Here you have one of the longest term and most influential liberal columnists in any newspaper in the United States, The Washington Post, acknowledging that the reason he encouraged his liberal readers to support the war in Iraq was in part because of the panic, in large part because of the panic, Spread by these anthrax attacks.
You see him talking about people obsessed with gas masks, just like Maureen Dowd was talking about.
People petrified they were going to be killed in their own homes.
And the perception that was deliberately cultivated, the false perception, by the same people, the same institutions, the same media outlets that lie to us constantly now, that this came from Iraq.
Now as I mentioned, there was a huge faction in Washington that had long wanted to invade Iraq and take out Saddam Hussein way prior to 9-11.
Years before 9-11.
And while we often talk about neocons as the people who are the ones who wanted that, one of the people who wanted that is named Joe Biden.
Here is a hearing in 1998, so more than three years before the 9-11 attacks, where he is questioning Scott Ritter, who was a weapons inspector on the ground in Iraq.
And Joe Biden talks about, in 1998, how important he thinks it is to take out Saddam.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
to memo on the Committee of Foreign Relations for any opening statement he would like to make.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
Let me begin by saying I think, Major, you have provided and are providing a very, very, very valuable service to your country by coming forward as you have.
Because quite frankly, I think what you've done is you've forced us to come to our milk here, all of us in the United States Congress.
I think you and I believe, and many of us believe here, as long as Saddam's at the helm, there is no reasonable prospect you or any other inspector is ever going to be able to guarantee that we have rooted out, root and branch, the entirety of Saddam's program relative to weapons of mass destruction.
And you and I both know, and all of us here really know, and it's the thing we have to face, that the only way, the only way we're going to get rid of Saddam Hussein is we're going to end up having to start it alone, start it alone, and it's going to require guys like you in uniform to be back on foot in the desert taking Saddam down.
You know it, and I know it.
So I think we should not kid ourselves here.
There's stark, stark choices.
So there you have it.
It was the official position of the Clinton administration, the Clinton administration before 9-11, that the United States should invade Iraq and do everything possible to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
Joe Biden was one of the most vocal advocates of that during the Clinton administration.
We just showed you that 1988 video of him doing exactly that.
And Biden, of course, became probably the key senator in 2002 Generating enough support in the United States Senate as the Democratic head of the Foreign Relations Committee where he became, along with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, very vocal advocates for taking down Saddam.
And the anthrax attacks were a major reason why they were able to convince so much of the public that that needed to be done.
Now, the neoconservatives in Washington Bill Kristol and David Frum, and we'll show you the names on this list, which was called, it was the PNAC, it was the leading neocon think tank, or organization at the time, wrote a letter in January 1998 to President Clinton urging President Clinton to invade Iraq and take out Salam Hussein.
These were exactly the same people who three years later were behind the lies Blaming Iraq for the anthrax attacks.
Here's the letter to Bill Clinton.
Dear Mr. President, We are writing to you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.
In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat.
We urge you to seize that opportunity and to enunciate a new strategy that will secure the interests of the United States and our friends and allies around the world.
That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power.
We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor.
The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction.
In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing.
In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.
That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.
We urge you to articulate this aim and determine your administration's attention and implementing a strategy of removing Saddam's regime from power." And there you see the leading neocons, including Elliott Abrams and William Bennett.
And John Bolton and Robert Kagan, who is the husband of Victoria Newland, Bill Kristol, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, James Woosley, the former CIA director, the standard group in Washington that had been going around essentially
Badgering everybody about regime change in Iraq for many years before 9-11 and then became the leaders of this lie, blaming the anthrax attacks on the exact country that they wanted to invade.
Now, as I mentioned, I had begun reporting on this story well before Or a year before, at least, the FBI announced they had finally captured the real attacker, who they said was a bioweapons researcher at Fort Detrick, Bruce Ivins, as we're about to show you.
And the reason I began reporting on it was because when I went back and began looking at the anthrax attack and realized how aggressive the narrative was that they had the proof linking this to Saddam Hussein's government, And how central ABC News in particular was to spreading that lie.
Honestly, as somebody who was basically starting my journalism career, this was 2007, so a year or so after I began writing about politics, a year and a half, it was, I was indignant about it.
This was kind of part of my awakening about how radically corrupted these institutions really are.
I couldn't believe I hadn't remembered.
I really wasn't paying a lot of attention at the time to the details, the granular details of all of this.
I was working as a lawyer.
I wasn't a journalist.
And I couldn't believe how often and definitively ABC News spread this lie.
And in particular, what I couldn't believe is that they weren't willing to tell us who in the government spread this lie, used ABC News to spread this lie.
So here's one of the first stories I ever wrote about it.
It was entitled, The Unresolved Story of ABC News' False Sodom-Anthrax Reports.
And the sub-headline was, in October 2001, ABC News broadcast highly inflammatory and false reports linking Sodom to the anthrax attacks.
Who was behind these claims?
And why has ABC not retracted its stories?
And here you see the article, quote, ABC aggressively promoted as its top story for days on end during that highly provocative period of time that, and these are all quotes, A, quote, the anthrax in the tainted letters sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle was laced with bentonite.
B, bentonite is a, quote, troubling chemical additive that authorities consider their first significant clue yet.
C, only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.
D, bentonite, quote, is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program.
And E, quote, the anthrax found in a letter to Senator Daschle is nearly identical to samples they recovered in Iraq in 1994.
And quote, the anthrax spores found in the letter to Senator Daschle are almost identical in appearance to those they recovered in Iraq in 1994 when viewed under an electronic microscope.
At different times, Ross attributed these claims to, quote, three well-placed but separate sources, and alternatively to, quote, at least four well-placed sources.
All of these factual claims, each and every one of them separately, were completely false, demonstrably and unquestionably so.
Ross claimed at the time, and there is no reason to doubt it, that these false stories, clearly designed to blame Iraq for the anthrax attacks in the eyes of Americans, were fed to him by quote, at least four well-placed sources.
Who were the well-placed multiple sources feeding ABC News completely fictitious claims linking Saddam Hussein to the anthrax attacks, including false claims about the results of government tests?
What possible justification is there for concealing the identity of those who manipulated ABC to disseminate these fictitious claims?
Jennings, Peter Jennings, the highly trusted ABC News anchor, then added at the end of the story, remember this is October 2001, quote, this news about bentonite as the additive is being a trademark of the Iraqi biological weapons program is very significant.
Partly because there's been a lot of pressure on the Bush administration inside and out to go after Saddam Hussein.
And some are going to be quick to pick up on this as a smoking gun.
There's a battle about Iraq that's been raging in the administration.
I just want you to take a step back and think about the fact that all of this time, when this anthrax attack was being used to frighten Americans and put them into a state of panic beyond what 9-11 could accomplish, and that the claim was being circulated at the highest levels of politics and media,
That totally fictitious test had suggested strongly, if not proven that Iraq was behind it, the country they wanted to invade for years before 9-11, that all along, at least according to what the FBI now says, this anthrax actually came from a U.S.
Army lab where it was developed, maintained, and stored, and was sent by a U.S.
Army bioweapons expert, a microbiologist.
Who, unfortunately for everybody, right as the FBI was about to arrest, killed himself.
Alleviating the FBI of ever having to present those claims in a court.
Those are pretty striking events.
And again, I'm not citing at any point any obscure media outlets, any conspiratorial media outlets.
Well, I am citing conspiratorial media outlets, just not ones known for being that.
I'm citing the most mainstream ones.
Again, the highest levels of establishment government and politics are behind all of these lies.
Now here's something that has kind of gotten lost in history that I think is just worth noting.
In 2008, Richard Cohen, the Washington Post columnist, who I quoted earlier as saying that anthrax played a vital role in the panic that led him to support the Iraq War, went to Slate as part of a symposium where a bunch of advocates in the media and government who were advocating for the Iraq War back in 2002 and 2003 went to confront what they got wrong.
Here you see Richard Cohen, How Did I Get Iraq Wrong?
The subtitle is, I Thought We Had a Chance to Stabilize an Unstable Region, and I Admit It, I Wanted to Strike Back.
And here's what Richard Cohen says about why he got Iraq wrong.
Anthrax.
Remember anthrax?
It seems no one does anymore, at least it's never mentioned.
The attacks were not entirely unexpected.
I had been told, listen to this, I had been told soon after September 11th to secure Cipro, the antidote to anthrax.
The tip had come in a roundabout way from a high government official and I immediately acted on it.
I was carrying Cipro way before most people had ever heard of it.
So, think about that.
This is a long-time columnist in the Washington Post.
He's been around the Washington establishment forever.
He has all sorts of contacts in the highest levels of the U.S.
government because they've used him to disseminate propaganda in the Washington Post for as long as anyone can remember.
And according to him, he was told by a high-level government official as a friendly tip that he should start carrying Cipro The antidote to anthrax way before the anthrax attacks had happened, before anybody had even heard of Cipro.
Who told them that?
And why did they tell them that?
Specifically, not just a range of antibiotics, but the specific one most used for anthrax.
Just kind of a note to history that Richard Cohen himself has said that no one has ever pressured him.
Other than me, that I know of, to tell us who told him that and how they knew to tell him that.
But someone had a strong suspicion in Washington at the highest levels of the US government, according to Richard Cohen, that the anthrax attacks were coming.
Now, for a while, of course, there was still in the air the question of who did this.
It couldn't just be left unsolved forever.
It killed five people.
It severely injured 11 others.
It was, as I said, something that was constantly reported.
No attempt to make it be forgotten could possibly make us be content with the fact that we would never know who did it.
The FBI had to give us some explanation.
For several years, they not only obsessively focused on, but leaked to the media, the fact that an Army bioweapons expert, a physicist named Stephen Hatfill, was the prime suspect.
They leaked it to Nick Kristof, to others at the New York Times.
His reputation was destroyed everywhere he went.
People assumed he was the anthrax attacker.
He sued the FBI and in 2008 they had to pay him close to $6 million and admit he had no role.
So once that happened, once the prime suspect they leaked to the media was removed, was exonerated, the question then became...
Who actually did it?
Here you see from the Los Angeles Times when Stephen Hatfield was paid, quote, anthrax suspect receives payout.
Quote, "The former Army scientist, who was the prime suspect in the deadly 2001 anthrax attack mailings, agreed Friday to take a $5.82 million payment from the government to settle his claim that the Justice Department and the FBI invaded his privacy and ruined his career.
Dr. Steven J. Hatfield, 54, who was called a, quote, "person of interest" in the case by then Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002, said that label and repeated leaks of investigative details to the media damaged his reputation.
For months in the anxious atmosphere after September 11th, Hatfield was subjected to 24-hour surveillance and was widely identified as the leading suspect in the nation's first bioterrorism attack.
However, he was never arrested or charged, and a federal judge presiding over his lawsuit recently said that there is, quote, not a scintilla of evidence leaking him to the mailings.
So the person they tried to feed us for years ended up totally exonerated, leaving the question of who did it.
And it was just about five weeks after that, that the U.S.
government paid Stephen Hatfield, that they came back and they said, this time we really got the real perpetrator.
But unfortunately, he killed himself.
Here from the LA Times, you see the headline, apparent suicide in anthrax case.
This is August 1st, 2008, just five weeks after that last article we showed you about the government paying off Stephen Hatfield for having erroneously accused him for years, quote, a top government scientist Who helped the FBI analyze samples from the 2001 anthrax attacks has died in Maryland from an attempted suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to file criminal charges against him for the attacks, the LA Times has learned.
Who worked for the last 18 years at the government's elite biodefense research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, had been informed of his impending prosecution, said people familiar with Ivins, his suspicious death, and the FBI investigation.
Ivins, whose name had not been publicly disclosed publicly as a suspect in the case, played a central role in research to improve anthrax vaccines by preparing anthrax formulation and use and experiment on animals.
Regarded as a skilled microbiologist, Ivins has helped the FBI analyze the powdery material recovered from one of the anthrax-tainted envelopes sent to a U.S.
Senator's office in Washington.
Ivins died Tuesday at Frederick Memorial Hospital in Maryland after ingesting a massive dose of prescription Tylenol mixed with codeine, said a friend and colleague who declined to be identified out of concern that he would be harassed by the FBI.
Federal investigators moved away from Hatfield for years, the only person identified as a person of interest, and ultimately concluded that Ivins was the culprit after FBI Director Robert S. Mueller changed leadership of the investigation in late 2006.
That's another interesting fact.
This investigation was led by Robert Mueller.
He was, as you may remember, George Bush's FBI Director after 9-11.
He was the one who presided over the FBI when it falsely blamed Stephen Hatfield and then took seven years Seven years to claim to find the real killer, the real attacker, who it just so happens, they say, worked right under their noses in the most sophisticated U.S.
Army lab in Fort Detrick where he was working with anthrax spores and was able to attack the country using them as a result.
Now, As I said, the FBI did not have to present its case in court because the person was dead.
And so the FBI explained how this happened, that it took seven years to find the perpetrator, explained their reasons for believing that he did it through a series of press conferences and leaks to the media.
And right away, right away, there was extraordinary doubt Again, not from people branded conspiracy theorists or from people who are accustomed to doubting the FBI, but from the most mainstream political and scientific sources in the United States, serious doubt about the FBI's case.
Circumstantially, the evidence made little sense, and scientifically, there were gigantic holes in what the FBI was claiming.
Here's an article I wrote in 2009 entitled, Remembering the Anthrax Attack, where I summarized How much doubt had been expressed by the types of institutions rarely willing to question the FBI's veracity?
Quote, remembering the anthrax attack, ideologically diverse sources have expressed serious doubts about the FBI's anthrax case.
That leads a key congressman to demand an independent commission to investigate.
One of the two Senate targets of the attack, Senator Pat Leahy, flatly stated at a Senate hearing last September that he does not believe the FBI's case against Ivins, and emphatically does not believe that Ivins acted alone.
Republican Senator Arlen Specter, at the same hearing, told the FBI they could never obtain a conviction against Ivan in court based on their case, riddled as it is with so much doubt.
And he also demanded an independent evaluation of the FBI's evidence.
Republican Senator Charles Grassley has been a longtime skeptic of the FBI's anthrax investigation and has expressed serious doubt about the case against Ivan.
See, this interview I did with Senator Grassley last year.
I interviewed Senator Grassley in 2008 and he was Emphatically doubtful, skeptical about what the FBI was saying here.
The ultimate establishment organ, the Washington Post editorial page issued numerous editorials expressing serious doubt about the FBI's case against Ivins and called for an independent investigation.
The New York Times editorial page echoed those views.
Even the Wall Street Journal editorial page, citing the FBI's quote, so long and so many missteps, argued that, quote, independent parties need to review all the evidence, especially the scientific forensics, and concluded, quote, this is an opportunity for Congress to conduct legitimate oversight.
In the wake of the FBI's accusations against Ivins, the science journal Nature flatly declared in its editorial headline, quote, case not closed, and demanded an independent investigation into the FBI's case.
After the FBI publicly disclosed some of its evidence against Ivins, the New York Times reported, quote, growing doubts from scientists about the strength of the government's case.
The Baltimore Sun detailed that, quote, scientists and legal experts criticized the strength of the case and cast doubt on whether it could have succeeded.
Dr. Alan Pearson, Director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Control Program at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, representative of numerous experts in the field, expressed many of those same scientific doubts and demanded a full investigation.
So, it took the FBI seven years when they claimed that they found the person who happened to act alone in this extremely political valuable attack on US soil.
And presented their evidence about the person who just happened to kill himself, alleviating them of the need to take it to court, everyone said the same thing.
And I mean by everyone, the institutions that normally revere the FBI and write down whatever they tell them to say.
Here from Nature, the prestigious scientific journal, is the headline.
There you see it.
Case not closed.
That article I just read, you referenced that.
And here's what it said.
Quote, was Bruce Ivins a scientist gone wrong who single-handedly orchestrated the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States?
Or was the 62-year-old anthrax vaccine researcher at Fort Detrick, Maryland an emotionally unstable innocent whose profile made him a convenient fall guy for the FBI?
The jury is still out on those questions, or rather, it would be, if one ever had a chance to hear the evidence.
Ivan's apparent suicide last month means there will not be a trial, which makes it all the more important that the government release the evidence it planned to use to accuse him.
In full.
Now.
On August 6th, the FBI's parent agency, the U.S.
Department of Justice, released what it described as hundreds of pages of evidence against Ivins and declared it would close the case because it was satisfied it had its man.
But Ivan's attorney, Paul Campton, described those documents as, quote, heaps of innuendo and a staggering lack of real evidence.
He has a point.
For example, many of the documents are just search warrants.
A reminder that despite extensive searches of Ivan's house and cars, the FBI failed to come up with any physical evidence directly implicating him in the attacks.
Similarly, the Bureau has no evidence to place Ivins at the post boxes in Princeton, New Jersey, from which the anthrax-laden letters were sent.
The core of the case against Ivins, as released so far, is contained in just a couple of dozen pages of affidavits, only four paragraphs of which discuss what the FBI says is the smoking gun, the genetic analysis of the anthrax powder from the letters.
The FBI said it found four distinctive genetic mutations in the anthrax used in the attacks.
It tested for those mutations in isolates of the Ames anthrax strain from 16 domestic, government, and university laboratories alongside ones from labs in Canada, Sweden, and the UK.
In all, more than a thousand samples were collected, only eight of which had the four mutations, according to the affidavit.
Each of these isolates, it says, was directly related to the strain branch named RMB1029, which was created in 1997 and held in a flask at the U.S.
Army Research Facility in Fort Detrick.
The affidavit described Ivins as, quote, the sole custodian of that batch.
Many other researchers had access to it.
Turns out over 100 people had access to that flask, but the FBI claims to have eliminated all of them as suspects.
The genetic analysis itself seems quite solid.
The FBI has collaborated with some of the best outside scientists on anthrax, and on August 18, convened many of them to answer journalist questions about the science.
The researchers on the panel explained that none of the analysis techniques used in this case is new, just the application to anthrax forensics.
Several peer-reviewed papers on the forensic work have already been published and another dozen or so anticipated.
Although this openness about the techniques is commendable, neither the conclusions drawn from the scientific analysis nor such crucial legal elements as the veracity of the provenance and handling of the samples have been tested in court.
So far, one side of the story has been heard, that of the prosecution.
The New York Times on August 8th had an editorial that was entitled Identifying the Anthrax Killer, and it expressed very similar doubts.
It's the New York Times, not exactly renowned for questioning the U.S. security state.
Quote, the FBI seems convinced that it has finally solved the long-festering case of who mailed the anthrax letters that killed five people in 2001.
Yet its description of the evidence, evidence pointing to a mentally disturbed army bioweapons expert as the sole culprit leaves us uncertain about whether investigators have pulled off a brilliant coup after a bumbling start or are prematurely declaring victory, despite a lack of hard, incontrovertible proof.
Federal agents relied on sophisticated scientific tests and laborious investigative work to conclude that only Dr. Bruce Ivins, who killed himself last week, could have made and mailed the anthrax using the letters.
They say that recently developed tests enabled them to identify telltale genetic mutations.
Does that phrase sound familiar?
Telltale genetic mutations?
That was used, that phrase, to blame it on a rock?
at the highest levels of median government seven years before.
Now the FBI says they developed tasks that enabled them to identify telltale genetic mutations in the anthrax and to show it came not from Iraq or Al-Qaeda, but from a flask kept by Dr. Ivins at the army laboratories at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland.
More than a hundred people, more than a hundred people might have that access to that deadly substance.
But over a four-year period, investigators gradually eliminated suspects until only Dr. Ivins was left.
None of the investigators' major assertions, however, have been tested in cross-examination or evaluated by outside specialists.
It is imperative that federal officials make public all of their data so independent experts can judge whether the mailed anthrax was indeed identical to Dr. Ivan's supply and only that supply.
It is also critical for officials to explain more fully how they eliminated the many other people with access to the material.
There is no direct evidence of his guilt, no witness who saw him pouring powdered anthrax into envelopes, no anthrax spores in his house or cars, no confession to a colleague or in a suicide note, no physical evidence tying him to the site in Princeton, New Jersey from which the letters are believed to have been mailed.
Because Dr. Ivins killed himself before he could be indicted, there will be no opportunity for an adversarial testing of the FBI's conclusions.
The Bureau, unfortunately, has a history of building circumstantial cases that seem compelling at first, but ultimately fall apart.
Now, in response to all of this pressure, the FBI voluntarily, meaning they pick and chose, which scientific evidence to make available to an expert panel that had been convened that was an FBI expert panel, one that they had actually approved of.
And when this expert panel finally got to see the FBI's long-touted scientific evidence, they concluded that it was nowhere near as compelling, let alone conclusive, as the FBI had spent years claiming.
This is from 2011 from the New York Times.
The headline, expert panel is critical of FBI's work in investigating anthrax letters.
Quote, a review of the FBI's scientific work on the investigation of the anthrax letters of 2001 concludes that the Bureau overstated the strength of genetic analysis linking the male anthrax to a supply kept by Bruce Ivins, the Army microbiologist whom the investigators blamed for the attacks.
The review by a panel convened by the National Academy of Sciences said that genetic analysis quote, did not definitively demonstrate that the male anthrax spores were grown from a sample taken by Dr. Ivins' lab at Fort Detrick.
It does add, however, that the evidence is, quote, consistent with and supports an association between Dr. Ivan's flask and the attack anthrax.
The Academy's report faults the FBI as failing to take advantage of scientific methods developed between the mailings in 2001 and its conclusion after Dr. Ivan's suicide in 2008 that he was the sole perpetrator.
Dr. Ivan's guilt has been adamantly denied by many of his colleagues at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where he was seen as an eccentric but popular character.
The Academy's report is likely to renew claims by the FBI's critics that the Bureau merely took advantage of Dr. Ivan's suicide to close the case.
The Washington Post reported as well on this criticism from this expert panel approved by the FBI.
There you see the headline from February of 2011, Anthrax Report Cast Doubt on Scientific Evidence in FBI Case Against Bruce Ivins.
Quote, for the FBI, the case of the anthrax killer is an investigation that never seems to end.
Agents thought they had solved the puzzle last year when they pinned the 2001 attacks on a deceased Fort Detrick scientist.
But yet another new wrinkle emerged Tuesday with a panel of prominent scientists casting doubt on key FBI scientific evidence.
A report from the National Research Council questioned the strength of genetic testing that the government said conclusively linked the anthrax-infested letters that killed five people to a flask of lethal bacteria belonging to Bruce Ivins.
Tuesday's report questioned a critical piece of evidence, the link between the anthrax spores in a flask labeled RMR-1029 stored in Ivan's lab at Fort Dedrick and the anthrax from the attacks.
The Justice Department report concluded that Ivan's collection of anthrax spores, which he had called his, quote, ultimate creation, was the quote, parent material for the anthrax used in the mailings.
Quote, the scientific link between the letter material and the FOS number RMR 1029 is not as conclusive as stated in the DOJ investigative summary, said the $1.1 million report, which was commissioned by the FBI.
The document did add that, quote, genetic evidence is consistent with and supports an association between the flak and the anthrax used in the attack.
The 190-page document by the research arm of the National Academy of Sciences praised the FBI's energetic pursuit of emerging science, but it offered another possible explanation for the apparent link between the letters and the Ivan's flask, namely that some of the mutations identified in the letters could have arisen independently through a process known as parallel evolution.
The report said this possibility, quote, was not rigorously explored by the FBI.
So let's just summarize now what we know after having revisited these extraordinarily important events.
We know that numerous senior officials inside the US government Lied on purpose to media outlets, specifically to ABC News, by falsely claiming that analysis of the anthrax contained bentonite, and falsely claimed that bentonite would only be used by Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program.
Every bit of that is a lie.
Not a mistaken claim, not a misinterpretation of data, an outright fabrication.
There were no government tests that detected bentonite.
And even if there had been, that would be so far from even convincing evidence, let alone just positive evidence that this came from Iraq, that anyone making that claim should be locked out of government and media forever, if not worse.
We know that media outlets spread this lie over and over and over, and that they know who Concocted this lie and yet they refused to report it.
Why?
Why can't we know who inside the government in 2001 went to multiple media outlets with an outright lie that was not only designed to but succeeded in linking Saddam Hussein falsely to the anthrax attacks in the eyes of the American public.
A grave crime if ever there was one.
One that played a leading role as Maureen Dowd said and as Richard Cohen said and so many others In leading them to support the war in Iraq, believing that Saddam Hussein had attacked the United States using anthrax.
We know that the FBI itself claims what is almost certainly true, because it was the AIM strain, which is that this anthrax attack and the anthrax that was used did in fact come from the United States government itself.
Not from Iraq, not from Iran.
Not from Russia, not from Al-Qaeda, from the United States.
It was an inside job, by definition.
The United States was attacked by weaponized biological weapons stored at a U.S.
Army facility and then blamed on the country the U.S.
government wanted to attack.
That is all factually indisputable.
And we also know that the FBI took seven years To find what they said was the real killer.
Their evidence never got subjected to judicial scrutiny by virtue of the great stroke of luck that the accused had happened to kill himself shortly before they were about to arrest him, something that is not the first time that's happened.
And when outside experts finally got a peek at some of the FBI's scientific evidence, I could spend an entire week detailing the holes in their circumstantial claims, and I've done that in article after article.
But when outside investigators finally got a look at their scientific evidence...
They said, in the clearest terms possible, this is nowhere near as convincing as what the FBI claimed.
There are huge analytical holes in the FBI's explanation for why this constitutes dispositive scientific proof that it came from this flask.
That even if it had come from this flask in Dr. Ivan's lab, there were over a hundred people Who had access to that flask.
And I'll leave it to you to decide whether it's plausible that the FBI really did rigorously and conclusively eliminate, through some kind of great process of elimination, some great traditional police work, every last one of those more than 100 people who had access to that flask and could have sent the anthrax attacks.
Which is central to the FBI's attempts to blame this person who's now dead.
So, whatever else is true here, There is a serious crime, a series of serious crimes, committed by the highest level political and media institutions in the United States.
One that very likely led to the invasion of Iraq, something that top leaders in both parties wanted for years before 9-11.
And we also know that the U.S.
government does indeed do exactly the kind of bioweapons research, manipulating natural substances to make them more fatal, to make them more dangerous, not just in China funded by Dr. Fauci, but in the U.S.
labs controlled by the U.S.
Army.
Many of the leading scientific elite teams in the United States government, including in the FBI and the Department of Energy, now say, after Dr. Fauci made it taboo to say for almost 18 months, to the point that you got censored from the internet if you said it, that the most likely way that COVID originated, not one way that it possibly may have, but the most likely way, is from
Research on coronaviruses of this kind, carried out in the Wuhan lab, funded by Peter Daszak of the EcoHealth Alliance, funded by Dr. Fauci.
So this is not just a gigantic historical crime that has been not even close to solved.
And you notice how these media outlets, who all said that the evidence was extremely weak, All forgot about it, just never talked about it again, just said, well, I guess we're not going to ever know the truth about that.
But we also know it shed significant light on what arguably, after the 2008 financial collapse and the war on terror spawned by 9-11 and the anthrax attacks, is the other most significant event in our lifetime, which is the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns that it fostered and the damage it did to hundreds of millions of children.
And adults all over the world.
Enduring economic damage.
Damage to the public health.
Damage to the mental health of people.
And whether that actually came from this racist theory that the Chinese are so primitive and filthy in their wet markets that it just naturally evolved from there or whether in fact it came from the kind of highly sophisticated research that since at least 2001 we know the US government has been doing on biological agents.
So, one of the reasons I'm so skeptical when I hear anonymous claims or even non-anonymous claims from these magazines that employ all these career slayers from these government institutions is because I spent so long on this Anthrax case.
And the amount of lies, the way they piled up one after the next, the deliberateness of them, And the brazenness with which they were told on television, in newspapers, by the government, only to have those same people get further empowered because lying of that kind is not just tolerated, but demanded.
It's rewarded.
If you look at that, it can only make you irrevocably skeptical and even cynical about how radically corrupted and really kind of evil Our leading establishment institutions are, and I think very few things illustrate that, like this anthrax attack, and that's the reason we've all been encouraged strongly to forget about it.
