Anthrax

For those who didn't read the article by Glenn Greenwald which Michael cut and pasted as a comment to my August 4th post here are the claims:

1) 3 or 4 "well-placed but separate sources" in the government told ABC News that the anthrax used in the 2001 attacks which killed 5 people contained bentonite.

2) Bentonite (a type of clay and the major component in kitty litter) was cited by ABC to be "a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country used bentonite to produce chemical weapons."

3) Bentonite was never found in the anthrax samples. Tests were conducted at Ft. Detrick's U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease. So those three or four sources were, presumably, from the Institute and they lied.

4) The ABC News reports (anthrax with bentonite = Iraqi WMD) caused enough panic among the US public that the tide of opinion turned in favor of war with Iraq and, in fact, it was the anthrax attacks more than the 9/11 attacks that formed American public opinion.

5) Bruce E. Ivins, the top anthrax researcher at the Institute committed suicide because the FBI got too close. According to the FBI, it was Ivins, not the Iraqis, who perpetrated the anthrax attacks in 2001.

6) Bush was all too happy to use the false evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks to condemn Iraq in his famous Axis of Evil speech where he mentioned Iraq, biological weapons and anthrax in the same sentence.

My comments:

1) The President is not The Government. The Constitution doesn't allow it. But even if it did, the Federal Government is such a bloated, self-protective organism that no one man could ever know what's really going on and then, somehow, be directing it all. Every president inherits bureaucrats from former administrations that he can't get rid of. Often these people are political enemies with opposite ideologies. The State Department, for one example, is full of firmly entrenched bureaucrats who "put up with" the President for the four or eight years they have to and obstruct him, as suits their purposes, knowing there'll be another one, who doesn't know anything either, coming soon.

The claim that the Bush administration, knew about the absence of bentonite in the anthrax, instructed the "well-placed sources" to say bentonite was in the samples and instructed the FBI to hold off fingering Ivins for seven years, is not believable.

2) Was Ivins one of those sources? If he was in fact the perp, then he would want to deflect any scrutiny towards the Iraqis. Obviously!

3) Why ABC News? and why only ABC News? That's the only organization Greenwald blames. Was ABC the only organization that was duped? Is Greenwald then claiming that ABC allowed itself to be the dummy for Bush the ventriloquist?

4) I wasn't worried about anthrax during the debate about going to war. I don't know anyone who was. I seriously doubt Greenwald's claim that the American people would have opted to leave Iraq alone if not for the anthrax attacks.

5) And finally: In the words of my favorite idiot Democrat congressman from California, Henry Waxman, who used these words in what was, for him, an eloquent defence of Hillary Clinton during congressional investigations into something the Clintons did whether that was Whitewater or Travelgate or something else: "So what?"

Sadam Hussein was given ample opportunity to prove that he had disposed of the WMD's found by UN inspectors after the first Gulf War. The UN passed resolutions. He farted in the UN's general direction.

The American people, led by George Bush, said something like this: "The UN is impotent. It cannot or will not enforce it's resolutions. That's not OK, but we'll handle it. We know the UN is a sham and has always been so. The United States is reluctant to use its resources to keep the peace in the world but we will fill the power vacuum resulting from the timidity of the UN which results in its inability to force Iraq to be peaceful. The world must certainly know what will happen if Iraq drops a ballistic warhead full of nerve gas on Tel Aviv. The Israelis never take this sort of stuff laying down. So they retaliate and then all hell breaks loose. We know it will be a monstrous waste of time, time Saddam will use to hide his stuff, but George will address the UN in an attempt to embarrass it into taking action. And after a period of time, during which the UN will again prove that it has no courage, we'll do what we must."