Anthrax doubts

This thread over at Liestoppers is an informative analysis of what we really know. There are some sharp minds at work who honed their skills demolishing the Duke lacrosse hoax.

The lax case is a cautionary tale for journalists. It illustrates how not to cover a criminal investigation. Unfortunately, reporters and pundits are repeating those same errors with Dr. Bruce Ivins. (Hey, that might make a good post some time.

One big mistake the MSM made in Durham was to probe “deeper meanings” before they ascertained “what really happened”. Pundits are now doing this in the anthrax case.

The narrative taking shape runs something like this:

The Bush administration falsely pointed the finger at Iraq after the mailings as part of their irrational drive for war.

There are some big problems with that formulation. Perhaps the gravest error is the implication that the Bush administration ginned up the possible Iraq connection out of whole cloth. The fact is the Clinton administration was worried about Saddam’s anthrax which is why they ordered that all US troops be vaccinated against anthrax back in 1997. (See here.)

When the anthrax letters were sent in October 2001, they seemed to confirm the worst fears of the counter-terrorism community. Those fears were of pre-dated Bush. The Clinton administration had endorsed them and sounded very public warnings.

This article provides a picture of our pre-9/11 thinking:

The Phantom Menace

The anti-terrorism campaign has been led by President Clinton and Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen, who warn that terrorists might unleash a doomsday weapon that could kill hundreds of thousands of Americans.

[snip]

Appearing on ABC's "This Week" in November 1997, Cohen plopped a five-pound bag of sugar on the table and claimed that an equivalent amount of anthrax could kill 300,000 people. Five months later, a team of four experts demonstrated in the Archives of Internal Medicine that it would take more than 100 pounds of anthrax to kill far fewer people.

Doomsday scenarios in the media have been equally sensational. Jessica Stern, a former staffer at the National Security Council, begins her book The Ultimate Terrorists by asking: "What if terrorists exploded a homemade nuclear bomb at the Empire State Building in New York City?" In graphic detail, she describes the devastation that would follow, leaving up to 200,000 people dead. Richard Falkenrath, a terrorism expert at Harvard University and co-author of America's Achilles' Heel, warns that "deadly chemical warfare agents can quite literally be manufactured in a kitchen or basement." Similar warnings have been issued in prestigious journals like Foreign Affairs and Foreign Policy.

Suitcase bombs and anthrax-laced water supplies have become staple fare in Hollywood screenplays and best-selling fiction. A bioterrorist took center stage in Mission: Impossible 2, and fictional descriptions of chemical attacks on New York City in Richard Preston's The Cobra Event helped galvanize President Clinton into demanding action on terrorism. In an interview with the New York Times last year, Clinton called the novel "pretty credible to me," adding that he considered a terrorist attack using chemical or biological weapons "a near certainty" in the next few years.

There is an irony in the attacks on the FBI for speculating about an Iraq connection. On one hand, the Bureau was lambasted for “not connecting the dots” pre-9/11. Now they are castigated for investigating if there was a connection between Iraq and a terror attack.