The New York Times’ fake-anthrax attack

July 15, 2006

Maybe, just maybe, all the virulent and threatening conservative rhetoric about the New York Times lately drove one nut to pull a dangerous stunt.

A mysterious white powder sent to The [tag]New York Times[/tag] [yesterday] was found by a mailroom employee and sparked an evacuation of the building’s eighth floor, while police determined if the substance is dangerous.

One employee, a 54-year-old from Brooklyn, was sent to a hospital for examination, but he appeared unharmed. The [tag]envelope[/tag] also included an editorial with an “X” through it. A Times spokeswoman, Catherine Mathis, told E&P that the editorial was the June 28, 2006 defense of the newspaper deciding to run its controversial “Swift” banking records surveillance story.

Later in the afternoon, the Times announced: “New York City authorities have confirmed that the [tag]powder[/tag]y substance found in a business envelope addressed to The New York Times and opened by a mailroom worker this afternoon has been field tested and determined to be nonthreatening and nonhazardous.” The substance is now believed to be most likely [tag]cornstarch[/tag].

The letter with the powder had a Philadelphia postmark. The editorial included in the envelope was the June 28 piece titled “Patriotism and the Press,” with a red “X” written across it.

As for what might have driven the nut to consider such a radical and dangerous tactic, it’s a mystery. Or maybe it’s not.

As Joe Conason wrote yesterday (via Greg Sargent):

On June 27, following a news item about President Bush’s denunciation of the Times story on financial tracking of suspected terrorists via the SWIFT (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications ) bank consortium, [talk-show host Melanie] Morgan sputtered, “Get ’em! Yes, hang ’em! Yeah!” […]

The hilarity continued on June 30 when Morgan clarified her position. For the sake of listeners who wondered why she kept calling for prosecution of the New York Times but not of the other newspapers that had published stories on the SWIFT tracking, she explained that they’re all traitors in her mind.

“I’m going to say this one more time,” she barked peevishly. “Yes, we’re picking on the New York Times, the poor defenseless New York Times. But I don’t care if it was the New York Times or the L.A. Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. All of you people are equally guilty of treasonous behavior!” […]

“I really do believe that anybody who publishes classified information that results in a charge of treason should be fried! Fry ’em! Trial, conviction, death penalty!” At that point one of her co-hosts cheerfully interjects, “You originally called for the gas chamber … but we kind of like Ole Sparky,” meaning the electric chair. To shrieks of laughter from Morgan, he launched into a gruesome description of execution by electrocution: “Their hair would go up and everything, smoke, electrical jets shooting out of their eyeballs … We’d take Bill Keller, put him in the electric chair — after a trial — and then fire it up.” He then launched into a series of oral sound effects — buzzing, screeching, hissing and blubbering sounds meant to simulate the high-voltage end of the Times editor.

To be clear, I’m not holding right-wing talk-show hosts responsible for the conduct of some nut who enjoys sending fake-anthrax letters. I am saying that the right-wing rhetoric, which includes talk of “executing” journalists and publishing home addresses and telephone numbers of New York Times photographers, has created an incredibly toxic environment that may have pushed one crazy person to do one crazy thing.

“To be clear, I’m not holding right-wing talk-show hosts responsible for the conduct of some nut who enjoys sending fake-anthrax letters.”

Be charitable. It’s your perogative. But I am.

No radio, no Rwanda.

  • It’s just beginning. Note the trademark cowardice in this act. For all their love of guns, when the right wants to hurt someone they mail letters with chemical weapons (or the implied threat of). They’re yellow, and pathetic. That does not make them any less dangerous. Lib bloggers be warned…

  • Sadly, I think Xeroman is right. Actual violence is the logical end of the figurative violence that the hatemongers of the right have been spouting for many years now. I’m actually surprised that there hasn’t been more of this already. But I’m certain that it’s coming–just as I’m certain that when it does, the Coulters and Hannitys will take zero responsibility for the evils of the milieu they’ve done so much to create.

  • To be clear, I’m not holding right-wing talk-show hosts responsible for the conduct of some nut who enjoys sending fake-anthrax letters.

    That’s rather fair and generous. But right-wing talk show hosts and bloggers do bear some responsibility for their nuttier readers and listeners. Eventually these nutcases are going to hurt someone or, even worse, a lot of people like Oklahoma City. It’s what the talk-show hosts and bloggers are hoping for but they’re too scared to do it themselves. If they nudge the unbalanced to commit a crime, it’s their fault.

    Look at it another way: If Al Franken was making thinly veiled threats against Republicans or James Dobson, would the right brush it off as “crazy hijinks”? No, they’d be calling for him to be pulled from the air at the very least. We should be doing the same for the right wingers.

  • I was disgusted when Anne Coulter suggested someone should poison Supreme Court Justice Stevens. Although she said it was a joke, it still struck me as beyond the pale.

  • This is what I’ve been talking about in earlier posts—we need to ante up and become total carnivores in order to defeat these people. They’re nothing more than a 21st-century version of the hateful thugs that were roaming the streets of Germany 80 years ago. Appeasement will not work; it’s been tried before, and is a historical failure. “Taking the high road” will not work either—for the exact same reason.

    Put Melanie Morgan’s face on the Internet—along with her address, phone number, license plate, car description, a map of how she drives to work, where she does her grocery shopping, her hair-dresser, restaurant hangouts—every last blasted shred of evidence that tells people where she is, what she does, who she spends time with—all of it. Give these clowns a dose of their own medicine, and then ask—“Give up—or are y’ hungry for more?”

    There comes a time when, once the bully has gained the false sense of power gleaned from the cowering of other, to smash the bully square-on in the face. Because bullies can always dish it out—but they can never take it.

    “Find the range, and fire for effect”

  • What we need to do is grow up and realize that a truly free society involves occasional hate-nuts like this.

    Nietzsche defined health, not by the absence of disease, but rather as a measure of how much disease the body can stand.

    When I was an undergrad at San Francisco State (now University) we had a “Free Speech” Platform. It was the focus of an enormous natural amphitheater in the center of the campus, a lawn where students usually at their lunch (now it’s full of buildings).

    Our Free Speech platform – which the Berkeley students, under Mario Savio, desperately wanted to emulate – was open to anyone who reserved it: from the Wobblies and Communist Party members to the John Birch Society and the American Nazi Party. On stage were also acts from Shakespeare’s play, philosophers, folk singers, nudists and members of the Sexual Freedom League.

    It was a delightful experience, even though some were offended. It even led to physical violence. Most of the latter was brought to campus by the student-hating SFPD, President S.I. Hayakawa and Governor Ronald Reagan.

  • Unfortunately, a truly healthy society can’t allow nutcases to ruin the truly healthy society. As diseased organisms, they need to be isolated and kept from infecting the body politic. If they aren’t, their behavior is seen as acceptable by those who are marginally sane, and the effect cascades as they aggregate and encourage each other. Mass communications have speeded up the rate of infection.

    It is a quandry that sane people need to address and try to answer soon, because the society we are dreaming of is becoming more elusive.

  • I’m going to steal Koreals’ post—at least a link from it—and recommend you all watch this great clip and then maybe buy the book. It’s a Republican analyzing hard data about the 23% of nutso-fascists in this country who would “go over the cliff” if ordered to by the Rove’s of the world. Illuminating, to say the least.

  • If Melanie Morgan’s use of eliminationist rhetoric were an isolated event then it would be easy to dismiss what she said. But when you put it into the larger context of what Coulter, Malkin and other pundits are saying, and then add in what goes on at some of the blogs like Little Green Footballs and FreeRepublic we’re looking at what I think is a very disturbing trend. If anything this type of rhetoric is becoming more acceptable in mainstream discourse among the right.

    I have been listening to my local right-wing radio station lately and it’s standard fare to hear the talking heads pounding on the podium day-after-day and saying that liberals are essentially enemies of the state. And remember in this day and age liberals are anyone who disagrees with Bush. I hope that I’m not becoming hypersensitive on this issue, but when I see pictures like this Liberal Hunting Permit I can’t help but feel a little nervous.

    Steve (#6) I totally disagree with your methodology. I think there are better ways to hold these people to account, hitting them financially with their advertisers comes to mind, resorting to their slime-ball tactics is just going to escalate the situation. There’s one reason that I’m on the liberal side, because I aspire not to devolve to the lowest common denominator.

    Anyway, I’m going to put in a plug for David Neiwert and Glenn Greenwald who have been writing a lot about eliminationist rhetoric coming from the right.

  • “Unfortunately, a truly healthy society can’t allow nutcases to ruin the truly healthy society. As diseased organisms, they need to be isolated and kept from infecting the body politic. If they aren’t, their behavior is seen as acceptable by those who are marginally sane, and the effect cascades as they aggregate and encourage each other. Mass communications have speeded up the rate of infection.”

    Who decides whom to isolate? Me? You? Him? Her? I think Jefferson had it right: a truly healthy society can overpower anything thrown at it. Damn the torpedoes and full speed ahead. Tolerating those whose behavior is highly offensive isn’t sending a message that the behavior is appropriate – it’s a sign of strength. The tree that bends in the wind is stronger than the one which appears rigid but will snap. There’s such a thing as “innoculative learning” – your immune system practices it all the time. The same mass communications which speed up what you call the “rate of infection” also speed up innoculative learning. Give me a truly free society over an antiseptic one any day.

  • Having been personally a target of these cowardly little scumbags, I would say that anyone who thinks these people should be “given a pass” as our friend the Carpetbagger appears to say, is not in possession of the facts.

    The hatemongers on the radio and the television are absolutely responsible for these acts, because without their encouragement, these fatheaded losers wouldn’t think they had the “right” to carry out something like this.

    It is well known that your (I mean that in the impersonal sense) First Amendment rights end at my nose. No one has the right to yell “fire” in a crowded theater, and that is exactly what these criminal scum are doing.

  • Since Ann Coulter has said her “only problem” with Timothy McVeigh is that he didn’t attack the New York Times building, she must be very disappointed that the substance found wasn’t real anthrax — just like several people who posted on The Huffington Post saying they wished it was anthrax. Conservatives are so selectively “pro-life.”

  • Whatever happened to arguing the merits of one’s position without calling for the death of your adversaries? You know that things have gotten bad when this is advocated not once or twice on the fringes, but as part of the mainstream political discourse, and by friends of the administration against it’s critics. This IS worse than Nixon. He kept his enemies list secret and it was a scandal when revealed. The current crop of republo-fascists seem to revel in this filth.

  • The Ms. Morgan and the right wing noise machine is just doing the biding of BushCo. Let’s recall what Bush said after the Times revealed its tracking of financial records.

    “What we did was fully authorized under the law,” Bush said in an angry tone as he leaned forward in his chair and wagged his finger. “And the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We’re at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America.“

    Then Tony Snow followed up with this.

    [T]he New York Times and other news organizations ought to think long and hard about whether a public’s right to know in some cases might override somebody’s right to live, and whether in fact the publications of these could place in jeopardy the safety of fellow Americans.

    Of course you also had Rep. Peter King (R-BushCo.) who said,

    [N]o one elected the New York Times to do anything. And the New York Times is putting its own arrogant elitest left wing agenda before the interests of the American people, and I’m calling on the Attorney General to begin a criminal investigation and prosecution of the New York Times — its reporters, the editors who worked on this, and the publisher. We’re in a time of war, Chris, and what they’ve done has violated the Espionage Act, the COMINT act.

    Now King was outspoken on the issue but he was not a lone voice. Recall that Congress passed a non-binding resolution condemning the media for reporting on the SWIFT program which states that,

    … media organizations “may have placed the lives of Americans in danger” by revealing details of the classified program. It goes on to say that Congress “expects the cooperation of all news media organizations” in keeping classified programs secret.

    What have others at BushCo.’s Capitol Hill facility had to say on this topic?
    First, House majority leader John A. Boehner (R-BushCo.) said.
    `

    `For the newspapers — The New York Times specifically and others who followed their lead — to have disclosed the existence of this program, I think jeopardizes the safety of the American people,” …. “In doing so, I frankly think that they risked the lives of Americans.”

    Speaker of the House Denny Hastert (R-BushCo.) said, `Basically, loose lips kill American people,”

    In summary, those fine BushCo. folks are telling Americans that the New York Times has committed treason and is going to get them killed. Morgan and the noise machine are just amplifying and taking the BushCo. line about treason to its logical end. We should be focused on Morgan and her ilk. It is BushCo. that should be given the credit for inspiring the faux attack on the New York Times.

  • We should be focused on Morgan and her ilk.
    We shouldn’t be focused on Morgan and her ilk.

    Typing and editing just aren’t for me.

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