Okay, when I mocked a crazy lady's view of the 2001 anthrax attacks and manufacture of anthrax vaccine yesterday, I really didn't expect that anyone else - let alone a U.S. congressional representative - would share the view that the anthrax attacks were the reason that the US government went into Iraq. But then again, Rep. Rush Holt (D-NJ) has not been very rational about this particular issue.
The anthrax attacks “made it possible to manufacture the argument that there was WMD in Iraq and links to Al-Qaeda,” Rep. Rush Holt, a leading Congressional critic on the anthrax investigation, tells Danger Room.
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“It was the second and confirming incident that a worldwide network had penetrated the United States, that the country was under widespread attack — and that anything was possible,” Holt says. “The enemy could be anywhere and everywhere and use any means to attack.”
I don't know why Holt thinks this is relevant to the FBI's investigation of Ivins, other than there is this crackpot theory by some who are convinced the anthrax came from Iraq - despite the overwhelming lack of evidence to support that statement - and therefore, the Bush administration must have had a relevant reason to think the anthrax came from overseas, thus supporting the need to invade Iraq.
It may be that Holt got this brilliant idea based on a Newsweek article by Jacob Weisberg who suggests that the anthrax attack had a bigger effect on the Bush administration than previously appreciated, to the point that he believes the Bush administration would not have invaded Iraq had the 2001 anthrax attacks not occurred. I find his theory much less than convincing. Weisberg writes:
In a November 2001 speech to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Cheney offered this definition: "We will hold those who harbor terrorists, those who provide sanctuary to terrorists, responsible for their acts."
But by the time Cheney spoke those words, a second wave of terrorism had already exposed the inadequacy of Doctrine 2.0. The anthrax attacks in New York and Washington created a sense of vulnerability that was in many respects greater than the mass murder at the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Inside the administration, the October bioterror attacks had a larger impact than is generally appreciated—one in many ways bigger than 9/11. Without the anthrax attacks, Bush probably would not have invaded Iraq.
At that point, nearly everyone involved in national security assumed there would be another wave of terrorist attacks. The daily intelligence summary substantiated this panic; "chatter" was at record levels. In an effort to understand the potential threat, Cheney's chief of staff I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby ordered up a briefing on a war game, known as "Dark Winter," which modeled a smallpox outbreak in an American city in much the way "continuity of government" exercises Cheney had participated in during the 1980s simulated nuclear catastrophe.
According to a source close to Bush, Cheney swiftly reported back to the Oval Office with a sobering message: the United States was essentially defenseless against the most likely form of assault, a biological attack. "I sat through the most gruesome briefing in the Oval Office about anthrax, how it could spread, and how we had no defenses," Bush's first press secretary, Ari Fleischer, told me in the summer of 2007. "Dick Cheney was the strongest advocate of the possibility of attack and need to prepare for it."
I don't question that Cheney was really freaked out by the anthrax attack, and in response, he was a strong advocate for Projects BioShield and BioWatch under the proposed "Biodefense for the 21st Century" strategy. He pushed the "one percent doctrine" in that he decided that if there was a one percent chance that a terrorist could get a nuclear bomb into the United States, it was worth taking extraordinary steps to prevent that from occurring. This mentality has not, to date, resulted in any capability within the government to prevent or adequately respond to either bioterrorism or nuclear terrorism in any comprehensive form, but that's beside the point.
The idea that the CheneyBush administration either seriously thought Saddam was the source (or potential source) of anthrax for terrorists or just used the 2001 anthrax attacks as pretext for the invasion has already been debated to death (I thought). IT ISN'T THE CASE. IT WAS NEVER THE CASE. I don't know how many memoirs and analyses of the Iraq invasion we need to understand this simple point. The purpose of the Iraq invasion was to remind the Middle East that they weren't to frak with the United States unless they wanted to be seriously spanked. Oh, and if military power resulted in the export of democracy to an Arab nation, that would be a good thing, too.
The issue of WMDs in Iraq was a fraud. No one with any legitimate background in military analysis believed that Saddam's' chem-bio weapons were a serious enough threat to justify a preventive invasion. If Saddam was building a nuke, that might be different, but we knew he wasn't. The issue of the United States being vulnerable to biological weapons delivered by a terrorist group was a completely different issue that also had the CheneyBush administration's attention at the same time. But anyone who was active during that time could say, again with any degree of seriousness, that the two issues were either linked or of the same importance. They just weren't. And pointing to $50+ billion over a ten year period as "proof" that the US biodefense program is important is laughable - it's peanuts in the big picture and we really don't have much to show for it today. But that's a story for another day.
Wired keeps flogging the conspiratorial anthrax angles because of all the stuff now in the lore from interviewing the variety of pols and scientists involved in the matter.
However, no amount of using word processing on the net as a shovel will exonerate Ivins or, even more wildly, pin the Iraq war on the anthrax mailings. Yep, there was certainly a noticeable bit in the news, at the time, in which people were willing to jump to conclusions because of an alleged ingredient in the spores, one that was never actually there.
Did it start the war? No.
In a lesser publicized matter, Powell and the US government tried to pin castor seeds and a false positive for ricin found in a London flat on a terror poisoning ring that stretched back to Iraq. That wasn't true either.
However, along with other things -- like beating loaded confessions out of detainees and making up stories about mobile germ-making labs, fit the pattern of an administration grabbing at anything it could to support an action which it had already determined to pursue, of fixing the 'dossier' to fit the need, as the Brits put it.
Maybe, at some point, there will new significant news on the anthrax mailings that changes everything. But that news hasn't arrived yet. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. In the meantime, this is just nibbling around the edges for the sake of keeping something alive and controversial. Rush Holt's probably not going to be able to clear Bruce Ivins, no matter how he may stir the pot.
Much of the mainstream media revolted on the anthrax story. Some of it was understandable given the imbroglio with Hatfill. Now it's just abusive for the sake of stretching out the story like toffee.
If you watched or attended the National Academy of Science's conference discussing the nature of the FBI's forensic science on the anthrax case, you saw a taste of it. A lot of the room just couldn't accept that the scientists giving the talk weren't going to impeach the FBI. So a bit of badgering started and the principals still wouldn't budge and give them the answer wanted. And then some of them went off and wrote what they wanted, which was that the scientists had cast a lot of doubt on the government's conclusions. Which wasn't true if you paid attention.
Anyway, it's never going to be over. Ten years from now it will still be the subject of 'exposes' on Discovery or NatGeo for the sake of an hour or two's worth of entertainment.
On the other hand,
these guys thought Ivins was the man and that's not been received without perturbation either.
Posted by: George Smith | 30 March 2011 at 01:59 PM