Something Scary To Ponder

Glenn Greenwald writes, I summarize:

1. One week after the September 11th attacks, Bruce E. Ivins, a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government's biological weapons research laboratories at Fort Detrick, Maryland, allegedly began mailing out envelopes filled with anthrax, along with notes saying things like "We have anthrax. You die now. Are you afraid? Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great."

2. In order to determine the source of the anthrax, federal investigators sent samples of the anthrax to (where else) Fort Detrick, Maryland, to determine where it came from.

3. According to the results received from that laboratory, as reported by ABC News — results which they said came at first from "three well-placed but separate sources," followed by "four well-placed and separate sources" — the anthrax had the chemical additive bentonite, which "is a trademark of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's biological weapons program" and "only one country, Iraq, has used bentonite to produce biological weapons."

4. Although 7 "well-placed" (i.e. part of the Fort Detrick chain of command) sources claimed that this was what the tests found, this later turned out to be completely false. No bentonite was ever found in the anthrax samples. Fort Detrick scientists not being able recognize their own anthrax is like a baker not being able to recognize his own bread.

5. Shortly after the anthrax attacks (and the immense news coverage reporting that the anthrax came from Saddam Hussein), the case for the war in Iraq was begun by President Bush.

I'll let Glenn sum it up:

Surely the question of who generated those false Iraq-anthrax reports is one of the most significant and explosive stories of the last decade. The motive to fabricate reports of bentonite and a link to Saddam is glaring. Those fabrications played some significant role — I'd argue a very major role — in propagandizing the American public to perceive of Saddam as a threat, and further, propagandized the public to believe that our country was sufficiently threatened by foreign elements that a whole series of radical policies that the neoconservatives both within and outside of the Bush administration wanted to pursue — including an attack an Iraq and a whole array of assaults on our basic constitutional framework — were justified and even necessary in order to survive.

ABC News already knows the answers to these questions. They know who concocted the false bentonite story and who passed it on to them with the specific intent of having them broadcast those false claims to the world, in order to link Saddam to the anthrax attacks and — as importantly — to conceal the real culprit(s) (apparently within the U.S. government) who were behind the attacks. And yet, unbelievably, they are keeping the story to themselves, refusing to disclose who did all of this. They're allegedly a news organization, in possession of one of the most significant news stories of the last decade, and they are concealing it from the public, even years later.

They're not protecting "sources." The people who fed them the bentonite story aren't "sources." They're fabricators and liars who purposely used ABC News to disseminate to the American public an extremely consequential and damaging falsehood. But by protecting the wrongdoers, ABC News has made itself complicit in this fraud perpetrated on the public, rather than a news organization uncovering such frauds. That is why this is one of the most extreme journalistic scandals that exists, and it deserves a lot more debate and attention than it has received thus far.