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Ivins, anthrax, and the bentonite that wasn’t

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The WaPo reports in a front-page piece today that the FBI investigation into the 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people, may be officially closed tomorrow, sending a “strong signal that the FBI and Justice Department think they got their man — and that he is dead, foreclosing the possibility of a prosecution.” In other words, the FBI must be exceedingly confident that they had their guy, he was government scientist Dr. Bruce Ivins, and Ivins’ suicide wraps up the probe of one of the scariest terrorist incidents ever to occur on U.S. soil.

But before we move on, I hope readers will take a moment to read Glenn Greenwald’s fascinating synthesis of one of the most important, and certainly the most politically salient, angles to this entire story — the bogus notion that the weaponized anthrax included traces of bentonite, which purportedly would have linked the attack to Saddam Hussein’s non-existent biological weapons program.

ABC News, Glenn explained in detail, relied on multiple administration sources to concoct a story that was patently false. Glenn argues it’s “the single greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade.”

During the last week of October, 2001, ABC News, led by Brian Ross, continuously trumpeted the claim as their top news story that government tests conducted on the anthrax — tests conducted at Ft. Detrick — revealed that the anthrax sent to Daschele contained the chemical additive known as bentonite. ABC News, including Peter Jennings, repeatedly claimed that the presence of bentonite in the anthrax was compelling evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks, since — as ABC variously claimed — bentonite “is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein’s biological weapons program” and “only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons.”

ABC News’ claim — which they said came at first from “three well-placed but separate sources,” followed by “four well-placed and separate sources” — was completely false from the beginning. There never was any bentonite detected in the anthrax (a fact ABC News acknowledged for the first time in 2007 only as a result of my badgering them about this issue). It’s critical to note that it isn’t the case that preliminary tests really did detect bentonite and then subsequent tests found there was none. No tests ever found or even suggested the presence of bentonite. The claim was just concocted from the start. It just never happened.

That means that ABC News’ “four well-placed and separate sources” fed them information that was completely false — false information that created a very significant link in the public mind between the anthrax attacks and Saddam Hussein.

Wait, it gets worse.

If the investigation is officially wrapping up, as it appears to be, and the FBI is confident that the perpetrator is now dead, there’s no reason for ABC News to protect sources that deliberately lied as part of a larger initiative to con the public into supporting an unnecessary war in Iraq.

For that matter, those who helped spread the lie should obviously be held accountable. In this instance, that has to include John McCain, who appeared on “Late Night with David Letterman” on Oct. 18, 2001, before ABC ran with its patently false stories linking the anthrax attacks to Iraq.

LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine…. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase — if I could just make one, very quickly — the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may — and I emphasize may — have come from Iraq.

LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that’s when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.

We now know that McCain’s comments and judgment was horrifically wrong. As Dayo Olopade noted, “[T]aken to its logical conclusion, McCain’s statement should be politically devastating. It ties McCain back to the march for war (even before the bentonite claim began to float), establishes his lack of intellectual rigor in asking the right questions before making the “tough decisions,” and, as would only seem fair these days, confirms his own status as a vain and irresponsible celebrity.”

Why did ABC News trumpet a false story? Who were the network’s sources? What led McCain to spread this lie on national television, feeding, in the most irresponsible way possible, into the fear and hysteria that was already prevalent nationwide?

We’ll see if the media presses for any of these answers. In the meantime, read Glenn’s whole piece.

Comments

  • Antonius

    says:

    “Why did ABC News trumpet a false story?”

    Maybe because nearly every “news” outlet in the country is an organ of corporate disinformation? These organizations aren’t interested in news, they’re interested in shaping public opinion to create an environment which profits business and their friends in government.

    A lot of people drained a lot of taxpayer money into their own pockets by laundering it through the Iraq war. Any time the ordinary rules are suspended, a smart operator in the right position can clean up. When government and business wok in conjunction, that’s much, much easier.

  • Steve

    says:

    Absolute dynamite, this. It now opens the legitimization of the statement, McCain lied; thousands died. It also justifies ABC being required to open up their notes and identify these “separate sources.”

    Of course, we should also expect the typical Bushylvanian response to all of this, via a flurry of “executive privilege” declarations—and a lengthy addition to the list of pre-printed pardons to be issued on January 19, 2009….

  • Helena Montana

    says:

    Since ABC-Disney is part of the vast right wing conspiracy–the “respectable” Fox equivalent–they, of course, will ignore this. And the rest of the corporate media will follow, sheep-like, in their footsteps. The Congressional Democrats, in their usual supine, submissive belly-up fashion, will do likewise.

  • lou

    says:

    Come on, McCain was “just having some fun” like he is just having some fun with Obama now.

    I have not read the book, ‘The Age of American Unreason’ by Susan Jacoby, but I just read a review of it and how the gist of it lays out a troubling view:
    “Jacoby analyzes the state of our cultural state, looking at our educational system, at our undmindfulness and low level of curiosity, at the dissemination of news and the all-pervasive influence of infotainment… “a powerful mutant strain of intertwined ignorance, anti-rationalism, and anti-intellectualism”.

    This latest revelation coupled with the very cynical campaign being waged by John McCain (“just having some fun”) fits right into this analysis. McCain is campaigning for president of the mutant states of America. This also helps very much to explain how such “group think” spokesmen like McCain can sway the voters with arguments like our leadership was saying the same thing as all the intelligence agencies of the world were saying. Somehow this justifies their monumental fuck up? That my friends, is some more straight talk from the maverick. Unfortunately McCain’s staight talk is not linked to straight thinking or questioning.

  • Davis X. Machina

    says:

    It ties McCain back to the march for war (even before the bentonite claim began to float), establishes his lack of intellectual rigor

    You say that like it’s a bad thing.

    Fifty million voters in this country don’t think of themselves as electing a president, or choosing a commander-in-chief — they’re hiring a contract killer. That’s the heart of a potentially winning coalition.

    The fact that McCain shoots first and asks questions rarely isn’t necessarily a problem for these people. By their lights the very ta tou heneka, the ‘on account of what’ of the country, the reason why states exist, is for them, blowing shit up.

    One can point to polls showing low levels of support for the war in Iraq, or disapproval for Bush’s handling of ‘terrorism’ or ‘national security’, but half of the 60%-70% who ‘disapprove’ are as likely to have wanted more indiscriminate killing, more unilateral adventurism, than less.

    They’re not against the war because it was illegal, immoral, stupid, pointless and futile, or because it’s too expensive, or was badly executed.

    They’re against the war because they’re bored with it, because it has gone on too long, and didn’t finish with a bang, like a a Jean Claude Van Damme movie.

    McCain’s the candidate who’s most up front about more wars, longer wars, deadlier—to all parties — wars. McCain can look at the camera and say “I will kill for you, on scanty or no evidence, to calm your fears, and stroke your ego’—and these people will buy it.

    And there are enough of them to swing an election.

    Down ticket, people are less likely to be choosing a hit-man, and actually acting on the fact that the country is going to Hell, which is why I expect McCain to win with an EC majority, but a minority—actually, the second largest plurality—of the popular vote.

    But he’ll be facing a House that’s 250-185 Democratic, and a Senate that’s 59-41 Dem + Independent.

    The result — rule by veto, filibuster, and executive fiat. All those aggrandized presidential powers in the hands of a old man in a hurry.

  • TomB

    says:

    Here’s my guess as to what happened that led ABC News to falsely report betonite. Their sources probably suggested that betonite was there but I also think they added enough caveats to create deniability. Their sources may been given phony info from the start. The atmosphere of the time was fear and uncertainty and news outlets found it profitable to hype that emotion, so it reports exaggerated the information provided by its sources. ABC News doesn’t want to expose its sources because it came with plenty of caveats that ABC chose to ignore because it wanted a better story. This is not new. The news industry hypes fear more than reporting facts. Caveat emptor, regretably.

  • MsMuddled

    says:

    I never forgot the anthrax attacks. I gave up reminding everyone and that Bush never solved it, let alone find bin Laden.

    We owned a travel company back then. Needless to say, it was a horrible horrible month for us. As if a 4 day total shutdown of commercial aviation wasn’t bad enough, we were then hit with the “nimda” virus shutting down the entire heartbeat of our company for days. Far as I know, we never found that perp either.

    What gnaws at me now is if this were an inside job, doesn’t it mean the killing of Saddam Hussein was murder?

  • PQuincy

    says:

    The whole anthrax story is enough to have me questioning my usual distaste for conspiracy theories — especially since the ‘prime suspect’ has conveniently ended up dead. The whole anthrax scare served as a ‘pile-on’ even to the World Trade Center attack that kept hysteria and fear intense, especially in the exact place that the Bush organization wanted to pressure, namely Congress. After that, the entire story conveniently vanished into endless investigation of someone who was so visibly not the culprit that our government is now giving that ‘person of interest’ nearly $6 million for his trouble. Meanwhile, a real suspect — who happens to be a government employee working at a national weapons laboratory — turns up an ‘apparent suicide’.

    Probably it’s not an “Enemy of the State” style operation, and my common sense and trust in reality (and in human nature, for all of its wild swings) tells me it really probably wasn’t a secret black Pentagon operation who sowed fear and doubt by sending anthrax spores to the Democratic Congressional leaders and to journalists known for being skeptical about Bush organization intentions — but if I wanted to dream up the plot of a ‘evil-government-plot-secret-blackmail-terrorism’ thriller, these events would fit the bill without much modification. Maybe I’d better invest in tinfoil futures and update my survival bunker!

  • plunger

    says:

    Spell SAIC backwards…

    CIA’s

    SAIC was commissioned by G. W. Bush in 2002 to construct a replica of a mobile WMD laboratory of the sort used by Saddam. This mock up, supposedly destined to be used to train teams searching for WMDs in Iraq, was designed by Stephen Hatfill, the WMD expert now being harangued into isolation and thus silence by Bush’s FBI. Last spring, the Bush administration handed SAIC some of the biggest defense contract plums to be had -a billion-dollar chunk of the NexGen business and an unbelievably porky 10-year contract worth over $600 million.”

    http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/msg107176.html

    http://www.warprofiteers.com/article.php?id=7892

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_Applications_International_Corporation

    In January 1999, new SAIC consultant Steven Hatfill and his collaborator, SAIC vice president Joseph Soukup, commissioned William C Patrick (a retired leading figure in the old US bioweapons program) to report on the possibilities of terrorist anthrax mailings in the United States. (There had been a spate of hoax anthrax mailings in the previous two years.) Barbara Hatch Rosenberg said that the report was commissioned “under a CIA contract to SAIC”. However, SAIC said Hatfill and Soukup commissioned it internally — there was no outside client.

    Patrick produced his 28-page report in February 1999. Some subsequently saw it as a “blueprint” for the 2001 anthrax attacks. The report suggested the maximum amount of anthrax powder — 2.5 grams — that could be put in an envelope without producing a suspicious bulge. This was just a little more than the actual amounts — 2 grams each — in the letters sent to Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. But the report also suggested that a terrorist might produce a spore concentration of 50 billion spores per gram. This was only one-twentieth the actual concentration — 1 trillion spores per gram — in the letters sent to the Senators

  • plunger

    says:

    “Most people prefer to believe that their leaders are just and fair, even in the face of evidence to the contrary, because once a citizen acknowledges that the government under which he lives is lying and corrupt, the citizen has to choose what he or she will do about it. To take action in the face of corrupt government entails risks of harm to life and loved ones. To choose to do nothing is to surrender one’s self-image of standing for principles. Most people do not have the courage to face that choice. Hence, most propaganda is not designed to fool the critical thinker but only to give moral cowards an excuse not to think at all.”

    Michael Rivera

    Read everything posted here to connect ALL the dots:

    http://plungerspeaks.blogspot.com

  • Tom Cleaver

    says:

    Raise your hands, everbody who thinks Fools & Buffoons, Inc. could find the zipper on their fly with both hands on a clear day with a 3-hour advance notice.

    If the other guy had committed suicide two years ago, I am sure they would have closed the investigation then.

    The whole thing reeks of GOVERNMENT COVERUP, and I am resolutely not a “conspiracy theorist/believer”.

    If anything, I now believe more than ever that this whole thing was a Dick Cheney plot to advance the case for war against Iraq.

  • Undigestible

    says:

    What I want to know is how attacks against Democrats are only solved on the eve of an election that may put Democrats in control of the House, Senate and White House. This case was solved supposedly after the FBI got a $10 Million piece of equipment? From what I’ve read anyone who talked to this man’s associates would have known he was a sociopath. I heard he made death threats in grad school? Is this type of investigation beyond this cope of federal law enforcement?
    Whoever is in office after this upcoming election should make firing/retiring the top levels of the FBI their top priority.

  • stormskies

    says:

    Just remember what Scott McClellan said: The ‘media’ was in active collusion with the government to start the war with Iraq. The key words ACTIVE COLLUSION ….

  • joey

    says:

    PQuincy…comment 6…Re-evaluate: Since so much of Pentagon operations are outsourced consider the Blackwater/Cheney connection or why for 45min in a bunker watching an off course plane heading for Washington after two planes had already hit the twin towers and did nothing would find it easy to infiltrate, obtain and mail anthrax to get their war against Sadam and Islam. They just couldn’t quite figure a way to blame Katrina on Sadam. Why, after reading the note accompanying the anthrax, wouldn’t one suspect these “four separate sources” ABC is protecting as being the perps since they made the same claims as the notes did.

    A Grand Jury could find it compelling evidence that these four sources completely made up “evidence” for ABC to spout nationally that would cause people to believe exactly what the anthrax notes wanted them to believe. It is strong enough evidence to suggest that these sources are the perpetrators and ABC is obstructing justice in a murder case. If the FBI closes the case with this still left out there then it demonstrates that the anthrax murders were an inside job. Too much evidence hanging to close the case.

    This is exactly the same thing they did with 9/11…they closed the case in spite of overwhelming evidence left unanswered.

  • plunger

    says:

    The Sunday before the election at 8:30 est, Good Morning America featured a segment with George Stephanopolis pimping his Sunday morning program.

    The segment featured his interview with VP Cheney.

    The question was about the war in Iraq, and as Cheney was responding to the question, the Images on screen were file footage of the smoldering Twin Towers and the Smoldering Pentagon – ON 9/11.

    THE IMAGES CHOSEN BY A PRODUCER AT ABC NEWS TO ILLUSTRATE CHENEY DISCUSSING IRAQ WERE OF 9/11. THIS DESPITE THE FACT THAT NEITHER THE QUESTION – NOR THE ANSWER – HAD ANYTHING WHATSOEVER TO DO WITH THAT ENTIRELY SEPARATE EVENT.

    WHO ORDERED THAT THOSE IMAGES BE USED?

    DEMAND THE TRUTH.

    B O Y C O T T
    A B C
    A N D
    T H E I R
    A D V E R T I S E R S

    MAKE STEPHANOPOLIS EXPLAIN.
    MAKE HIM REVEAL WHO DEMANDED THOSE IMAGES BE USED.

    BUSH: What did Iraq have to do with what?

    QUESTION: The attack on the World Trade Center.

    BUSH: Nothing.

    In 1959 Congress amended the Communications Act of 1934 to enshrine the Fairness Doctrine into law, rewriting Chapter 315(a) to read: “A broadcast licensee shall afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of conflicting views on matters of public importance.”

    http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0212-03.htm

    When Edward Monks, a lawyer in Eugene, Oregon, studied the two commercial talk stations in his town (Eugene Register-Guard, 6/30/02), he found “80 hours per week, more than 4,000 hours per year, programmed for Republican and conservative talk shows, without a single second programmed for a Democratic or liberal perspective.” Observing that Eugene (a generally progressive town) was “fairly representative,” Monks concluded: “Political opinions expressed on talk radio are approaching the level of uniformity that would normally be achieved only in a totalitarian society.”

    That’s why we need a Fairness Doctrine. It’s simply a mechanism to address the most extreme kinds of broadcast abuse.

    BOYCOTT ABC.
    TAKE BACK YOUR AIRWAVES

  • MPinHI

    says:

    Just a bit of background here on anthrax and bentonite…anthrax can be relatively easily manufactured from various soil particles, as the compound anthracin is found extensively in many soils where cattle are allowed to graze. Secondly, bentonite is a type of clay that is found in many soils of the US and around the world. Bentonite can be found in some E. Texas soils (I’m not 100% sure of this, but if my college courses serve my memory correctly, this is true), which is where some of the strains of anthrax/anthracin were believed to have come from. Bentonite is found in many area of the Southeastern US, in fact. Bentonite clays are found in relatively old soils, such as those that might be found in a fertile, historical river valley or the fertile plains of East Texas (ultisols and alfisols). Just a little background in soil science for those of you interested…

  • JS

    says:

    Good suggestion tiredofgreed, I think we should boycott the media and it’s sponsors, that is all they care about.

  • Nancy Irving

    says:

    “We’ll see if the media presses for any of these answers” –

    Google “anthrax bentonite Saddam” and you get a page-full of links to lefty blogs.

    The first page of links shows CBS news as the only major outlet running anything–they reprinted Kevin Drum’s blogpost. (Is Political Animal a regular feature on their site? Great, if so.)

    Oh, and I forgot: one hilarious link, to a Laurie Mylroie piece for CNN from 2001.

  • ET

    says:

    I wonder if these separate well placed sources were sort of like the game that Cheney had going that Judy Miller was part of. Was is really 4 sources or was it one source who was lying to ABC as well as the other three “sources” who then forwarded the same data onto ABC.

  • George Shrub

    says:

    Four More Years of Bad Leadership

    from
    http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/16424.html

    Ivins, anthrax, and the bentonite that wasn’t
    Posted August 3rd, 2008

    [fake bentonite claims falsely linking the anthrax to Iraq]

    Wait, it gets worse.

    If the investigation is officially wrapping up, as it appears to be, and the FBI is confident that the perpetrator is now dead, there’s no reason for ABC News to protect sources that deliberately lied as part of a larger initiative to con the public into supporting an unnecessary war in Iraq.

    For that matter, those who helped spread the lie should obviously be held accountable. In this instance, that has to include John McCain, who appeared on Late Night with David Letterman on Oct. 18, 2001, before ABC ran with its patently false stories linking the anthrax attacks to Iraq.

    LETTERMAN: How are things going in Afghanistan now?

    MCCAIN: I think we’re doing fine. I think we’ll do fine. The second phase if I could just make one, very quickly the second phase is Iraq. There is some indication, and I don’t have the conclusions, but some of this anthrax may and I emphasize may have come from Iraq.

    LETTERMAN: Oh is that right?

    MCCAIN: If that should be the case, that’s when some tough decisions are gonna have to be made.

    We now know that McCain’s comments and judgment was horrifically wrong. As Dayo Olopade noted, taken to its logical conclusion, McCain’s statement should be politically devastating. It ties McCain back to the march for war (even before the bentonite claim began to float), establishes his lack of intellectual rigor in asking the right questions before making the tough decisions, and, as would only seem fair these days, confirms his own status as a vain and irresponsible celebrity.

    Why did ABC News trumpet a false story? Who were the network’s sources? What led McCain to spread this lie on national television, feeding, in the most irresponsible way possible, into the fear and hysteria that was already prevalent nationwide?

    [etc.]

    ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
    Also – Tylenol can destroy your liver even if you
    are not trying do yourself in.