Bush Pressured FBI to Blame al-Qaeda for Anthrax;
McCain fingered Iraq on Letterman;
Can't we Change the Name of Washington National Airport?
One thing I haven't seen mentioned with regard to the attempt to implicate Iraq in the anthrax scare in fall of 2001 is the reason Iraq was hard to rule out as a source. It was that it clearly originated in labs in Ames, Iowa. The Reagan administration had permitted the provision to Iraq of anthrax precursors . . . from Ames, Iowa. That is, the Republican Party was proliferating weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, even though his regime was known to have deployed poison gas against Iran and against Iraqi Kurds. And, because Iraqi anthrax would have shown the Ames ancestry if analyzed, a foreign provenance-- however unlikely-- could not be ruled out by investigators.
In the intelligence world, Iraqi anthrax, given Iraq by Washington, showing up in the US would have been called "blowback"-- the word for a covert operation that goes rogue and ends up harming the original sponsor. But even the inability to rule Iraq out was a form of blowback. Reagan and Rumsfeld muddied the waters for terrorism investigators by giving WMD to terrorist regimes.
The New York Daily News reveals that
'After the Oct. 5, 2001, death from anthrax exposure of Sun photo editor Robert Stevens, [FBI Director Robert] Mueller was "beaten up" during President Bush's morning intelligence briefings for not producing proof the killer spores were the handiwork of terrorist mastermind Osama Bin Laden, according to a former aide. "They really wanted to blame somebody in the Middle East," the retired senior FBI official told The News.'
As usual, when Bush and Cheney could not get what they wanted in the way of propaganda from the FBI or CIA, they just made it up. That fall, McCain piled on:
' 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. '
Hat tip to Think Progress
posted by Juan Cole @ 8/05/2008 12:43:00 AM
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11 Comments:
"2nd phase is going to be Iraq."
September 18, 2001
John McCain
As the late, great, American comedian Bill Hicks noted, if Washington really wanted to know what weapons Iraq once had, it could just check the receipts.
The sales of WMD precursors by the U.S. to Iraq at the height of Saddam's atrocities in the 80's - including anthrax, botulinum, e-coli, West Nile fever, etc, - are well documented by Senator Donald Riegle's report, which is perhaps why this document was virtually absent - totally ignored by BBC for example - from pre-invasion media speculations about Iraq's WMD.
Too embarrassing.
It shares that distinction with the more recent GAO report (pdf) documenting how "thousands possibly millions" of tons of ordnance were looted from Iraqi weapons dumps by insurgents post-invasion, because someone forgot to guard them.
Rumsfeld again.
It still is officially Washington National Airport. It's just the offending prefix that needs to be removed. It will happen, but probably not this decade.
Regarding the anthrax story, Glenn Greenwald is must reading. He's been doing excellent coverage of wider story of fudged intelligence, etc., and especially ABC's complicity in protecting "sources" who were clearly lying about the Iraq connection.
Great post, especially the McCain bit.
My old site carries an essential 2005 white paper on the subject of the assistance Iraq received in becoming a bioweapons proliferator. It was written by contributor Geoffrey Holland and is accessible HERE.
Holland traces strains of anthrax shipped to Iraq through many decades of U.S. and U.K. bioweapons research, concluding "that the anthrax threat from Iraq, a repeatedly cited reason for the 2003 invasion of that country, actually originated from a dead cow in South Oxfordshire" in the U.K. (Times story HERE.)
Holland argues that the "United States breached the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) by supplying warfare-related biological materials to Iraq during the 1980s" and should be sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council. Holland campaigned in the U.K. on this issue for several years, eventually garnering over 100 sponsors for a Parliamentary resolution demanding such a referral.
Our anthrax must have been intended for use against Iranians. Is it any wonder that these people hate and fear us?
Just think how much happier we would all be if the CIA and the other covert agencies had never been established and our intelligence rubes has never has a chance to screw up the world, committing terrorist acts, assassinating world leaders, spreadding weapons of mass destruction, and dealing drugs.
http://dailykos.com/story/2008/8/5/12346/33766/512/562900
when they talk about the surge working, they mean, the walls we have built are working.
victory by encapsulation.
Ron Suskind's new book is generating some heat, and when combined with Greenwald's evidence would bring the downfall of any administration within any "normal" republic, and thus provides us with even more evidence as to just how ABNORMAL the USA is. Unfortunately, this abnormality has existed for decades now and is the fundamental reason we have BushCo, and why Obama and McCain are cut from the same cloth and offer no real cure for our national abnormality.
The United States should be seen as a Banana Republic on steroids. One can only hope the steroids kill it sooner than later.
Actually, Anthrax used in 2001 attacks was a very fine powder which could not come from Iraq.
The only reasonable explanation is inside job, but there is no way that it could be done by a deranged loner.
One minor correction: The Ames strain of anthrax didn't come from Ames, Iowa. It came from the South Texas anthrax outbreak in 1980.
The bacteria was isolated by the Texas Veterinary Medical Diagnostics Laboratory at Texas A&M University and shipped to USAMRIID in May 1981.
The germs were mailed in a special container, a package identical to hundreds of others that the USDA supplies to veterinary labs around the country. The return address on the package: The USDA's Veterinary Services Center, Ames, Iowa.
http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/anthraxamesnotiowa.html
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