THE PLANK AUGUST 2, 2008
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Concerned citizens: Skip today's news-analytical obits for Dr. Bruce Ivins, the high-level government scientist and accused perpetrator of the fall 2001 anthrax attacks, who reportedly took his own life yesterday.
There's some good stuff there, but the must read: Glenn Greenwald's stunning synthesis of the suspect legal, scientific and journalistic scufflings in the aftermath of the attacks. Based on his previous reporting and currently available evidence, Greenwald explains how and why the anthrax sent to Americans--five of whom died--is now presumed to have come from a maximum security government laboratory. And, what's more, how the goverment-grade anthrax was asserted, repeatedly and without laboratory proof, to be a bentonite-laced strain that was a trademark of Saddam Hussein's biological weaponry. The false connection circulated for weeks afterward, based on the claims of "four well-placed and separate sources" for ABC news--claims, again, since proven to be totally false. Key points:
Much more important than the general attempt to link the anthrax to
Islamic terrorists, there was a specific intent -- indispensably aided
by ABC News -- to link the anthrax attacks to Iraq and Saddam Hussein.
In my view, and I've written about this several times and in great detail
to no avail, the role played by ABC News in this episode is the single
greatest, unresolved media scandal of this decade. News of Ivins'
suicide, which means (presumably) that the anthrax attacks originated
from Ft. Detrick, adds critical new facts and heightens how scandalous
ABC News' conduct continues to be in this matter.
Pressure on ABC to out their sources should be swift and sustained. But
footage of John McCain on October 11, 2001, plumping on Letterman for the Iraq-anthrax connection is certainly the most significant part of this story.
McCain qualifies the assertion as follows:
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.
Video here. I don't believe that anthrax got us into Iraq, but 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.
Finally: The anthrax attacks seem like another universe away (I was only in high school). But they were, in hindsight, perhaps the high-water mark of post-9/11 hysteria. Of course, life changes anyhow--but Americans had no way of knowing then that these envelopes weren't just the beginning. It certainly didn't throw me into a war pant, but Todd Gitlin explains thusly:
The 2001 anthrax attacks were hugely important in stoking up a
War-of-the-Worlds panic. The envelopes of white powder inflamed the
sense that They're Everywhere--Lake Worth, FL; Washington; a mailbox in
Princeton. Without doubt, the anthrax panic muddled brains, promoted an
atmosphere of Bush-knows-best, and was easily convertible to war
fever--in Iraq or, goddammit, somewhere.
That such justified fearfulness could be "easily converted" into war is one fact; that men like McCain, who based the "tough decisions" on prejudices that continue to shame and unravel over time is another. Let's hope we hear that story.
Update:
Ramesh
Ponnuru argues that “[McCain’s] statement itself would, I think, seem appropriately tentative to reasonable observers, because it was.” That depends on how charitable you feel like being to McCain. Ponnuru is quite so; I'm inclined to be less generous. Maybe I overreached in concluding that his "Letterman" linkage of anthrax and Iraq should be politically devastating--but it is true that it would be easy to formulate an attack ad out of his nonchalant asssertion (30 days after 9/11) that "the second phase is Iraq."
--Dayo Olopade
15 comments
Glenn Greenwald's story is a huge story that no one wants to touch. Every now and then a very big story breaks and then disappears, and makes you wonder who really is running this country. Another one is the UnitedHealth Group scandal, the biggest financial disaster in the history of American healthcare. Not a sound. It involved Jim Johnson, Walter Mondale, Donna Shalala and other Washington Insiders.
Everyone writes about Obama's 3-pointer, meanwhile Rome is burning.
Back to Greenwald. Has this been on "Nightline"? How about "Vanity Fair"? "Rolling Stone"? Any coverage in the "New Yorker"? The silence is disheartening.
- fougasseu
August 2, 2008 at 2:55pm
Interesting post, Dayo...although I don't agree with this assertion: "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."
You implicitly overstate the character, intelligence, and critical thinking capability of the American people. Americans had plenty of reasons not to go to war with Iraq. Rather than parse the data, project the consequences, sum the probable costs, see the faces of the civilian and military casualties, and perform all the other heavy mental, emotional, financial, strategic, and moral lifting, Americans instead chose what we thought was the easy way out: bomb and invade.
Falsely positing that the anthrax came from Iraq won't hurt McCain. On the contrary, throwing anthrax against the wall, even if it doesn't stick, establishes McCain as somebody who will shoot first and ask questions later, which is what Americans want in a President. We certainly don't want someone who will ask the "right questions," because doing so might result in the wrong answers.
All McCain did was supply another match (in this case, a trumped-up anthrax charge) to a load of fuel--ignorance, sloth, self-interest, xenophobia, bigotry--that has existed in our society (as it exists in most, if not all others) since our founding.
Obama needs to understand this if he is to have a hope of winning the election. For some inexplicable reason he's been taking the high road. Forget McCain's foreign policy stance; why isn't Obama leveraging McCain's cancer? Their relative ages? McCain's dumping of one woman for a younger model? His sometimes oafish appearance, his Internet ignorance? His (prior) pandering to Hagee? You know, the stuff that's important to the American public (as opposed to the stuff that we pay lip service to but that in reality bores us to tears: the environment, the deficit, education, diplomacy, Social Security. Throwing $1000 at everybody as Obama suggested he would do yesterday is a good start--voters like it when somebody throw a grand at them--but Obama needs to ratchet up the pandering to the voters and, in particular, the low blows to his opponent.
The problem with a false anthrax statement doesn't stem from John McCain. The problem stems from those who, in my opinion, will elect him (or, for that matter, Barack Obama) the next President of the United States of America.
- williamyard
August 2, 2008 at 3:23pm
The part that just confuses the hell out of me is that McCain thought the David Letterman show was an appropriate venue to advocate a second front in the "GWOT." What in the Wide Wide World Sports was he doing? He has the audacity to talk about the celebrity status of Obama and he's pitching war with erroneous intelligence right before Stupid Pet Tricks? What an asshole.
- mpatrickhendri
August 2, 2008 at 4:15pm
The U.S. supplied Iraq anthrax during the Georgr H.W. Bush administration.
- richardt32
August 2, 2008 at 4:44pm
Yes, Richard, but that was for purely "nonmilitary" applications, just like the components to make nerve gas, the helicopters to spray it and the intellegence to more effectively deploy it.
- mpatrickhendri
August 2, 2008 at 5:13pm
It's raining here very hard, has been all summer and I'm offering anybody who cares this just because I feel like it and because it so the opposite of McCain, Anthrax and Iraq--(I hope the formatting of the poem works here)
The Rain
ROBERT CREELEY
All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quite, persistent rain.
What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it
that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me
something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.
Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out
of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.
- basman
August 2, 2008 at 5:47pm
While I appreciate the insight of Mr Yard and unhappily agree with his assessment of the generic American, I have to disagree with his disagreement. I think that that is one of the biggest takes from this piece: McCain is just another limp minded partisan shill. On the other hand, I think much of what Mr Yard describes of the American people is due largely to a failure of their leaders, people like McCain, to lead the people in the right directions.
- GSpinks
August 2, 2008 at 9:56pm
Spinks, I don't see that you and Yard stand in much disagreement at all. McCain's Letterman performance does indeed show him to be a limp minded partisan shill, nevertheless it is unlikely to be "politically devastating."
As I've been saying repeatedly on this site, I think Obama is going to win, and I'm finding the poll-related fretfulness on display around here increasingly tiresome, but I have no illusions that it isn't going to be close. It has been more than forty years since America has seen any large-scale, positive demonstration of the benefits that an activist government can bestow. For far too many of my countrymen politics is an abstraction without any apparent practical consequences. Political choices then are all to often based on personal, impressionistic factors and inchoate associations--the voters' guts. And like Yard says, for a distressingly large number of voters, their guts tell them that a guy like McCain, who with a touch of macho humor tells us HIS gut feeling on a subject like the supposed anthrax/Iraq nexus is better than some prickly intellectual who measures every word.
Once more, I think OBAMA IS GOING TO WIN. But, Christ, if there isn't a lot at stake in this election. If somehow McCain manages to surprise me and suck this one out, it will not bode well for the health of our democracy. McCain, like Bush before him, stands for the abdication of leadership, the abandonment of any notion of politics as a means to achieve a betterment of the conditions of existence.
- aeromonas
August 3, 2008 at 8:14am
aero, we don't, i'm just debating causation and onus.
"If somehow McCain manages to surprise me and suck this one out, it will not bode well for the health of our democracy. McCain, like Bush before him, stands for the abdication of leadership, the abandonment of any notion of politics as a means to achieve a betterment of the conditions of existence."
If you had said this any time before 1/2008 I would have had a bone to pick. Now, I think you're pretty much dead on.
- GSpinks
August 3, 2008 at 11:49am
Ok I have some anecdotal candy, which I toss in the hat in the hopes of cheering anyone up - it cheered me up:
My stepdaughter is 13 and lives in Alaska where she spends a lot of her time working at her dad's diner in a tiny town. She is visiting me for a week in Seattle and we have never discussed this race - or politics at all, ever - until she sat down and saw my Obama window sign, whereupon she went into this long anti-McCain tirade. She believes that his statement that Obama would rather lose a war than an election actually applies to McCain himself - that his saying it shows it, and that the stuff Ted Stevens is in trouble for now, she suspects McCain would do that kind of thing too. She thinks Obama cares about the country and is a good dad. And she says they both seem confused about the environment. All completely unprompted.
As long as I have known her she has never shown any interest in the news, and I don't know where this came from. Not me. She is smart, but not good at school and tends to be a bit scatterbrained and dreamy, with a short attention span. And this pops out. All I'm saying is, if she's paying this kind of attention to politics, then things are very different this time, Americanpublicwise.
- psantillana
August 3, 2008 at 2:36pm
If McCain's part in this was a qualified statement that he made once on Letterman, then it seems like quite a stretch to say that McCain's role is "certainly the most significant part of this story." In fact, considering what the rest of the story actually says, I'd say that it's one of the *least* significant parts.
- AlanSP
August 3, 2008 at 6:25pm
Today I talked to a low-information voter who always voted Democratic, but it wavering right now, thinks "McCain is kinda cute" and "McCain is likely to pick a moderate for VP" and "if Obama picks Hillary for VP, he'll have...
- Anonymous
August 3, 2008 at 11:12pm
This is a great post, like many of Dayo's; but I have just one nit to pick. "The anthrax attacks seem like another universe away (I was only in high school)"? I always forget how insanely young some of you bloggers are (and I'm just 36!).
I think I can speak for the overwhelming part of the voting-age population that's over 30, that 2001 doesn't feel like "another universe away"; it's pretty much like yesterday. Now Ronald Reagan warning of the Soviet Union as "evil empire", that's the kind of thing that qualifies as "another universe away". :-)
- jobeek2
August 4, 2008 at 7:16am
itzak: thanks.
- williamyard
August 4, 2008 at 1:08pm
I hope the folks here at TNR spend a little time looking at this anthrax story more closely, because this corporate media spoonfed lone nut construct just doesn't wash. I'm pretty sure that anyone who works in one of these bio weapons labs must undergo continuous psychological screenings, polygraph exams, administrative reviews, and a vast array of bureaucratic checks of all their activities along with continuous measurements of all the materials they handle, on a daily basis. It also seems highly unlikely that some unstable person could continue working in such a sensitive area for some 30 years, I find that highly unlikely, if not downright impossible. And I don't care how trusted an employee you are at a military installation, nobody can just walk out with weapons grade anthrax, and certainly not with the quantities that were spread around the country in those letters. Even trace amounts would be detected by sniffer devices that check everyone going in and out, and any person who showed any trace contamination would be searched completely inside and out, and have to undergo days or weeks of decontamination. I highly doubt that anyone could get that anthrax out without the assistance of several people, most specifically with the cooperation of those at the higher levels of command in such a military installation. Something is indeed rotten in Denmark here.
Also it certainly isn't standard FBI or any other law enforcement agency procedure to go around questioning the friends and family of a suspect, and telling them that they're about to make an arrest, and that they should not tell the person who's about to be arrested. The only reason you would do that kind of thing is to intentionally tip off the suspect in the hopes of provoking some kind of incriminating action.
Not long after people started getting sick and dying up in Palm Beach County, my neighborhood in the Las Olas area of Fort Lauderdale was cordoned off when I came home from work one morning, because someone apparently reported a powdery substance in their mail. The hysteria was running high back then in South Florida, which was understandable because that kind of terrorism can hit anyone, like the poster workers who became sick after being exposed to a miniscule amount of the anthrax which had escaped from the letters and become aerosolized. All the local law enforcements in the area had hundreds if not thousands of calls about suspicious mail.
It's far too convenient that this guy mysteriously dies from a supposed Tylenol with codeine overdose, though I must admit that would be a new one for our black ops guys. And the mainstream media doesn't seem interested in investigating this story any more now than they did back then. So how about some real journalists do some real investigative journalism and get to the bottom of this. Though I suspect such an investigation would not be without some measure of risk, perhaps greater risk if our government is involved. When it comes to the Bush administration and corporate control of this country, I have no doubt, no doubt whatsoever that they would slaughter Americans in the tens of thousands, if it would help consolidate their iron grip on our country's government. So if any of you intrepid reporters should choose to accept this mission, I advise you to watch your back, and get your affairs in order before proceeding.
And for the record, should I turn up dead from an overdose of prescription drugs, or should I somehow be accidentally run over by a government licensed tractor trailer while I'm walking by the side of the road, rest assured I did not commit suicide, and that my death was not an accident.
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Hey Itzik
It's been really wet here in Missouri as well, all spring and all through the summer. My tomato vines are unstoppable, taking over everything, and are sure to produce much fruit, if I can keep the rabbits off them. :-)
- AaronBBrown
August 4, 2008 at 5:45pm