Disappeared News

by Larry Geller

There is still disappeared news here—we have yet to learn “the rest of the story” on the anthrax attacks that followed almost immediately after 9/11.

We now know - we knew even before news of Ivins' suicide last night, and know especially in light of it - that the anthrax attacks didn't come from Iraq or any foreign government at all. It came from our own Government's scientist, from the top Army bioweapons research laboratory. More significantly, the false reports linking anthrax to Iraq also came from the U.S. Government - from people with some type of significant links to the same facility responsible for the attacks themselves. . . [Glenn Greenwald: Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News, salon.com, 8/1/2008]

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact. From the beginning, there was a clear intent on the part of the anthrax attacker to create a link between the anthrax attacks and both Islamic radicals and the 9/11 attacks. This was the letter sent to Brokaw:

…
By design, those attacks put the American population into a state of intense fear of Islamic terrorism, far more than the 9/11 attacks alone could have accomplished.

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.

This is what happens when media go beyond reporting on the news to becoming active participants in it.

There’s much more in Glenn Greenwald’s article. I recommend it.

Permalink posted by Larry @ 8/03/2008 02:16:00 PM