The media is slowly cranking into gear for the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, but the anthrax scares that followed soon afterwards have largely been forgotten. Five years later, the crime still remains unsolved.
While the strikes on the twin towers turned modern aeronautical technology into weapons, the anthrax attacks used the more old-fashioned nexus of “snail mail”. Four letters, all containing the same Ames strain of anthrax, were sent to the New York Post, the TV channel NBC and two democratic senators.
Both senators survived, but five people did die, including two postal workers. Mass hysteria ensued when 17 more people were hospitalised. In Montana, specks of flour on hotdog buns were reported to the police as evidence of anthrax. Sales of the antibiotic Cipro went through the roof. Capitol Hill was closed for weeks, forcing staffers to set up offices in the back of their cars. The Washington Post branded them “wimps” for abandoning their desks.
The rest of the world endured a huge escalation in anthrax hoaxes. Clean-up costs in the US came to over $1 billion. The FBI launched a huge investigation, called Amerithrax. After ruling out a possible al-Qaida link, it focused on domestic terrorists and then the US biodefence programme. To date, no one has been arrested and only Steven J Hatfill, a physician and bioterrorism expert, has been publicly identified as a “person of interest”. After losing his job in the fallout, Hatfill issued a legal writs against the government and media organisations.
An FBI spokesperson now confirms that “two dedicated squads” are still working full-time on the case. Their profiling, however, appears worryingly vague. The suspect is apparently a “non-confrontational person, at least in his public life”. He is likely to “prefer being by himself more often than not. If he is involved in a personal relationship, it will likely be of a self-serving nature.” Members of the public are helpfully warned not to “open, smell or taste” suspicious packages, especially if “mailed from a foreign country” or containing “protruding wires”.
Gee whiz, Billy Bob. We’re talking about yet another success in the War Against Terror. No one’s died from anthrax attacks in years, now. We must be winning!
Of course, no one’s died from green elephants falling out of the sky either.
Okay. So anthrax envelopes will have protruding wires and be mailed from Iran. I’m pretty sure Brownie Heckuvajob is lead consultant on this one.
Fascinating how the vast funds poured into “Homeland Security” seems to have melted its collective brain. It couldn’t find a peanut butter sandwich in a brown paper bag.
It bears repeating. Especially to the fascist-minded phonies calling themselves neo-conservatives.
Whatever happened to fiscal responsibility?
i would love to comment but i have to look up the amount of deaths by green elephants….
It could be linked to saddam.
we are winning. I dont know what we are winning but we are winning it. So if someone says “hey what are we doing?” you tell them…. we are winning.
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You use that word alot, Facist…
Can you PLZ explain your meaning to the word. As I REALLY dont think anyone else DOES.
I’ve long wondered what the bloody hell happened with the Anthrax investigations. Perhaps it is someone close to Bush or Cheney and the investigation is in a holding pattern until the requisite 75 years have passed. :-/
Actually, ECA, if you track back, you’ll find I rarely use the word “fascist”. We don’t live under a fascist government — yet. I didn’t use the word in this post, for example. Recently, since a few people have pointed out reasonably accurate definitions, I’ve used the term “fascist-minded” and even “neo-fascist”. So do others. Lots of flavors of political definitions fit many situations. Most people are stuck with conservative and liberal — or even worse — republican and democrat. Nothing wrong with trying to be accurate.
English 201 should explain the modifiers.
Mussolini was the fascist ideologue of the 1930’s. Examine his definition in the context of the politics of the time. He spoke eloquently of the state as devoted to corporate interests in his definition — and I think it is as true as ever, nowadays. See here. Although Horthy in Hungary was the first openly fascist head of state.
Even the Wikipedia ain’t bad.
What comes together in an actual fascist state — is racism/ethnic hatred as motivator and distraction for the electorate — corporate governance with politicians in their pocket — and as it progresses, continued diminishing of democratic rights and civil liberties.
So, that’s why I think many of our politicians are fascist-minded. Some practice proto-fascist politics. We live in a time of clear and present danger — as much from our politicians and corporate controllers as any of the religious loonies who focus on what historically has been defined as clerical fascism.
Sorry to be so long and off-topic. And you probably were directing your question to Moss, anyway 🙂 I just noticed that he used the word.
Chuckle.
What he said.
See the anthrax attacks were against 2 democrats and the liberal media, so why would the Feds waste their time with this.
It is peculiar that the only two senators to receive the anthrax were the majority leader, at the time, Daschle, and the chairmen of the Judiciary Committee, Leahy. Just when the Patriot Act was going through the Senate, and both of them, who could have blocked it, had reservations. Conspiracy?
The guy who was the primary “person of interest” went on the offensive, blowing apart the government’s case. I don’t know if he did it or not, but some author/investigators believe a LOT of circumstantial evidence points right at him. I’ll probably get sued by him now for saying this.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_anthrax_attacks
Interesting that it was initially assumed to be “home made”, but then discovered to be “weapons grade”.
Not the kind of thing any administration would want to keep playing-up in the press : “It’s ours. We make tons of the stuff!”
Best policy: Lock-down access to the material, and then never mention we have stocks of it.
You don’t hear the Cold War term “NBC warfare” much – in the world of WMDs – do you?
The incinerator in Umatilla, OR is making progress on destroying some of our stockpile of nerve-agent rockets, though.
http://www.cma.army.mil/umatilla.aspx
Creating a Safer Tomorrow cause yesterday was pretty damn scary! 🙂
the standard definition then would be the RICH ruling over the poor, and NO middle class…
I think what is more interesting is that hat there have no other attacks (that I have heard of) since then. There have been plenty of other violent terrorist attacks (using explosives) in the world since Sept 2001.
So… what happened to the person(s) who comitted this crime? Did they get scared off? Did they die? Were they captured? Did they feel that they had made their point?
Is there a connection between the fall of Saddam and the lack of attacks? Could one conclude that Iraqi agents were behind it? Did Iraq have to destroy their producions labs after it became clear that the US was intent on invading using WMD threat as the reason?
Five years later, the crime still remains unsolved.
Oh well, it’s not like we’ve caught Bin Laden either. The gubment obviously has other priorities.
NO more attacks. That hints that it wasn’t a terrorist move. To quote the article, “Sales of the antibiotic Cipro went through the roof.” So, call me a crazy paranoid freak, but has anyone considered the fact that it could be a promotional act?
Also, who has access to dangerous bacteria, if not the company that makes antibiotics?
whatreallyhappened.com has been having his 5 year retrospective on this topic. I don’t believe everything he posts, but his site is rather good in general.
[quote]
Documents from the inquiry show that one unauthorized person who was observed entering the [Fort Detrick] lab building at night was Langford’s predecessor, Lt. Col. Philip Zack, who at the time no longer worked at Fort Detrick. A surveillance camera recorded Zack being let in at 8:40 p.m. on Jan. 23, 1992, apparently by Dr. Marian Rippy, a lab pathologist and close friend of Zack’s, according to a report filed by a security guard. [ctnow]
[end quote]
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/frameup.html
regards
ECA, you’re doing what Eid referred to in his first paragraph – oversimplfying. I agreed with what he said – and that requires most or all of what he said. It ain’t just “us” and “them”. Leave that to the professional patriots.
I’m going off topic on this but Eideard brought up a very good point.
Although Mussolini might have been the originator of the wordfascist, other adopters have put their own flavor on it as well. Most would consider Hitler a fascist, yet fascism never originally included ethnic genocide. The same as communism. What we ended up with differs greatly from the original ideas propounded by Marx and Engels. Or even that close relative to politics, religion. Even the Catholic Church is fragmented into different sects, ie Franciscans, Jesuits, etc.
So how about we call them neo-fascists.
The simple, cynical answer is, the Bush administration (oxymoron, I admit) could not find a way to turn it to political advantage. So it fell off the radar.
The anthrax attacks? Forget that, what happened to all of those terrorists in Miami!??! That was only a few months ago!
The President said that after 9/11, some of the detainees arrested helped them thwart anthrax attacks. From what I see, they weren’t successful at the thwarting.
In the last reports I heard about anthrax, most were tagged.
There was a small microdot inside ANY that was created by the Governments.
Any that was from a Raw, original scource does NOT contain this tag.
The last thing said was they had found a tag…And then it went Silent.
Odds, are some idiot pulled a batch from a Gov. scource and the Gov. didnt want US/we to know that we were still making Bio weapons.
The US Govt waqs probably the original supplier for the anthrax, which is probably why it’s a dead end trail. There were reports in 2001 that one of the hijackers was treated for anthrax in Florida. Maybe they were the source for that attack too.
I’m surprised the Conspiracy Theorists haven’t got much traction with this. Since the case hasn’t been closed, just about any theory is as plausible as the next.
My personal theory is that the guy responsible is some nut case that once had access to anthrax cultures at either a government facility or research lab. He stole samples years ago and kept them in his freezer, never quite daring to use them. But when 9/11 happened, he saw his chance to play Kaczynski. The attacks stopped because he used up all of his samples.
24,
Or DIED using it…
Processing anthrax to a powder isnt that easy OR safe from a RAW scource.